Would my Life be Better if I hadn't been Traumatized?

Probably not

It is easy, natural and useful to forge the belief that our life would be better if the traumatic events of our younger years hadn’t happened.

It’s easy because it puts the responsibility for change outside of our present day reality.

It’s natural because we all do it, at first.

It’s useful because it can mobilise repressed anger towards those who we perceive as having traumatized us.

When I was doing years of group therapy, to make my life less shit, I understood that it was a vital part of the process to utterly and vocally blame my parents for at least one year. Then I had to forgive them.

But the belief that trauma is the “big problem,” and that our lives would just naturally be better without it, I regard as pretty dubious. And frankly kinda childlike.

Trauma happens. It’s a reality of life.

But blaming trauma for how we are now only creates victimhood.

And believing that, without trauma, our life would be better is just pure laziness.

Rather than get up and deal with our issues, we can blame the past.

Rather than deal with our issues, we can fantasise about a world where there is no more trauma.

On coming to understand how we were traumatized in our early lives, some people expend a lot of energy trying to make the childhoods of the next generation less traumatic. They push for social change. I find this human and understandable.

For some, it is also a way to direct their nervous energy in a positive manner, rather than risk becoming dragged down by it.

For some, it is a way that they can project their own need for healing away from themselves and onto the world - a strategy to avoid identifying with and thus having to feel their own personal pain.

If you’re going to go down the road of trying to make the world a less traumatizing place, you need to go down it with your eyes open. You need to understand that, simply making our childhoods less traumatic, will not necessarily lead to a better world. In fact, it’s possible that the opposite is the case.

This is not because trauma is a “good” thing. It’s because it’s not the real issue.

What humans lack is a sense of meaning, and a sense of depth. When we don’t have these, we tend to become compliant, manipulable and addicted to stuff we don’t need. A sense of deep meaning, in our lives, does not come from having a lack of trauma. It comes from us developing self-awareness and the capacity to be truly, deeply present with ourselves and one another.

Having an untraumatized childhood might make this easier on a superficial level. We might hold the gaze of a loved-one and feel their pain, up to a certain, slight depth. But if we have had no incentive to travel into the deeper waters of our being, it will still be a relatively shallow experience. It will not provide much meaning.

As a therapist, I am these days frequently encountering clients who are struggling with a strong absence of meaning and feeling in their lives. They have little severe trauma. They had good childhoods. On the surface, perhaps a government survey would conclude that they are ideal citizens. But they are travelling from therapist to therapist, desperate to try and find the thing that they feel implicitly is missing in their lives. Their emotional responses are shallow and their lives feel the same way.

Traumatizing the young is suboptimal, to say the absolute least. But uncovering trauma to improve social functioning - the route most people have into therapy - does create people who have depth. Having to dig deeply into our wounded psyche, in order to uproot the issues that have left us socially dysfunctional, does more than simply heal us of trauma. It gives our lives a depth of meaning likely absent from many of those who were not traumatised.

Of course, not everyone opts for therapy. Of course, many of those who have been traumatised go on to traumatise others.

But it is nevertheless important to appreciate that simply making childhoods less traumatic, of itself, achieves little. And that any energy that we might direct into such a pursuit may be misguided. Or it may be just a means of avoiding feeling what happened in our own childhood.

Life can never be of much value without a significant inner journey. To me, that is a simple fact and there’s no way around it. For a few people, trauma provides the spur for them to take that journey.

In the absence of a culture that pushes us to take the inner journey, detraumatising society will likely create only a race of superficial beings, plagued by a sense of inner desperation.