T / Trauma

According to Webster’s New World College Dictionary, trauma is defined as: n. a bodily  or mental injury usually caused by an external agent. (Note there is no mention of pain.)

Trauma is subjective, not objective.  What is trauma to you, would not necessarily be trauma to me.  Ergo, trauma is individual and cannot be rated or classified by a table or a number.  Following are examples:

1.  Age 3 child (either gender)—skinned knee—major trauma!  To the 3 year old, this trauma is as extensive and life altering as the father of the child who just lost his job with no hope of moving immediately into another position that will pay the bills.  Tell the little one it will be all right and they will survive and tell the dad the same thing and watch their individual reactions.  Hmmmm.

2.  Death of a loved one—One friend loses a parent/spouse/child/beloved animal/ close friend and strives to remember the good times even as they are in the throes of grief.  Another friend grieves daily for long periods and can never seem to see anything except their loss.  Is one cold-hearted and uncaring?  Is one more sincere in their loss or more suffering from trauma than the other?  Tell the one they don’t seem to care that much and look at their body language, their eyes as the hurt you claim they do not feel becomes apparent.  Tell the one grieving some years later that they should get over it and move on.  Again watch their body language and see the pain in their eyes as they feel alone in their grief.  Can you measure who hurts more or less?  Hmmmmmm.

3.  A car accident takes the home provider’s ability to work as her/his legs are severed and they worked in manual labor.  In another accident, an object flies through the windshield, decapitating the driver whose head lands in the back seat with a sleeping child.  Now that is gross but it happened to my friend’s sister and my friend wound up raising the child in the back seat and securing counseling for “trauma” for her niece.  Degrees of trauma?  I won’t even ask you to measure either.

My truth is, pain/trauma cannot be measured.  When it is YOUR PAIN,  YOUR TRAUMA—being told others suffer more than you does not do any more than put a temporary bandaid on a wound that is gaping.  Yes, the person may stop for a minute, be grateful the situation, the pain, the events were not worse and feel selfish that they are more concerned with their own pain, but it will return.  And—they will usually say little from that point on, being ashamed they hurt when others are so much worse off.  It’s called suffering in silence and guilt.  Can you quantify, judge, advise, condemn their initial response?

YOUR TRAUMA/PAIN is different from anyone else’s—simply by virtue of the fact that it is yours.  Whether you talk about it or not, share it or not, it is still a trauma to you, and that makes it significant.  In all honesty, I am not one to quantify or compare degrees of pain.  Who wants to “one-up” anyone else in regards to suffering and pain?  Not me!  When sharing with another in a heart to heart talk in the wee hours of the morning, I have heard, “Oh, your pain is so much more than I could have handled!”  even as I think to myself I would have most surely crumpled over what this person endured!  See?  How would one’s person pain be greater than another’s?  

Please do not think I do not advocate looking at others’ pain in order to gain perspective on my own.  My heart breaks for the people around the world being subjected to abuse, hunger, bombings, terror/fear every day that they will be harmed or killed!  I need to see these things to realize just how lucky I am that so far I am not subjected to these things.  Therefore, I do what I can to relieve their trauma and pain out of compassion and realizing I am much luckier than others.  But in the same way, I will see my friend’s grief, pain, trauma—and know it is just as great, cuts just as deep, seems just as overwhelming as my own.

My truth—as has been said, and I paraphrase here—we do not know the trauma and pain others carry, so always offer compassion and kindness.  We cannot always avoid trauma, but we can extend compassion and love to those who bear its results—without judging or degree of love warranted.  THEY HURT!  EMPATHY CAN HELP ALLEVIATE THE HURT!