"There are people who have it worse than me."
"I should be grateful nothing else happened."
"My childhood was good enough, I shouldn't complain."
One of the biggest obstacles to healing and moving forward is not giving ourselves permission to view traumatic experiences as such: traumatic.
This is an attempt to keep ourselves safe from experiencing our emotional pain, so we get it: if an experience wasn't traumatic, then the feelings and triggers associated don't have permission to exist. This means you can continue to avoid your emotional pain associated with the event.
The catch?
Your emotional response to this event STILL exists, but instead of being acknowledged and processed intentionally, it wreaks havoc under the surface.
When we don't give ourselves permission to validate our own, emotional reactions to an event then we keep ourselves in a loop of unconscious, trauma patterns.
In this episode, hosts Dani and Casey discuss the wounding that comes from comparing your trauma to others and the emotional freedom on the other side of naming your trauma and validating your emotional reactions.
*Trigger Warning: This episode speaks to Sexual Assault.