Is Everything a Trauma Response?

Perhaps contrary to what you’re told every day on social media, everything isn’t a trauma response. ⁣⁣⁣
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Immense good has been done by improving the awareness and understanding around post-traumatic stress (something which wasn’t even recognized until the 80’s; terrible as that is), but I’m not convinced saying everyone has some form of ptsd is helpful. ⁣⁣⁣
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I think it undermines resilience to say we are all traumatized and that everything that overwhelms our nervous system is trauma. Everything that overwhelms our nervous system is DISTRESS, not necessarily trauma, and humans are often adaptable and capable of handling distress. ⁣⁣⁣
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It’s also ok to call it distress. Negative experiences don’t have to be traumatic in order to be valid sources of difficulty worth talking about. For some of the people I’ve worked with, it was incredibly helpful to say “I’m really stressed” instead of “I’m so traumatized.” ⁣⁣⁣
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This isn’t only semantics, we are starting to see research showing the expanded definition of trauma correlated with lowered resilience to stress (PMID: 34197173), which is the opposite of what we are trying to foster with progressive ptsd care.⁣⁣⁣
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We absolutely need to be more open and aware that wider ranges of experience can cause long term traumatic stress. At the same time, we have to be careful not to infantilize ourselves via our difficult experiences. It’s not always an easy spectrum to navigate, but the balance is worth finding.