@avant-garde
It's a very interesting discussion. I probably would have agreed that it's very invalidating to hear about those 'little t's' when you're dealing with a big T. The past couple of years though I've found myself in the middle of little t's, big T's and t's somewhere in between.
It's all very relative and as a little t can make the person with a big T feel invalidated, it works the other way around as well. From my own life and as an adoptee, I always knew it affected me and was more than likely the reason I had such low self-esteem and confidence growing up which made life extremely lonely and difficult. I never saw it as trauma though and saw it as just my own weakness and failure and basically being too sensitive to dealing with the thought that my biological family rejected me.
Last year I finally decided to dig into this a bit more, discovered insecure attachment styles and talked to other adoptees for the first time in my life. I suddenly discovered that those feelings and thoughts I had had for the past 53 years were very common among other adoptees. I started to see it as not a weakness in myself, but that there was trauma there. Digging in to it further i discovered there has been quite a bit of research on the subject and what they call separation trauma. I had always thought of it as I was a newborn baby, how could I be traumatised? But the more I looked into it the more I understood just how much damage it had done, not only to me, but to a lot of other adoptees. Learning more about insecure attachment styles (also very common with adoptees) I discovered that so much of what I had put down to just being too scared in life with forming any connections with other people, was not fear, but trauma responses. So many adoptees I have spoken to have talked about how they have given up trying to explain this to other people as it's just to hard to explain. They talk about being told they should be grateful they were adopted, and how they had a family who loved them as a child so what's the issue?
It made me think about my own past couple of years dealing with a serious physical health issue. I remember sitting in a waiting room in March 2023 waiting for one of 39 of my daily treatments. There was a guy sitting a couple of metres from me who was upset. Long story short, he was going through a similar battle to mine, but much more advanced. He had been messed around waiting for doctors for hours and had had enough. A doctor had come out to talk to him and i'll never forget what he told the doctor. He said he was there for an appointment that was supposed to be in the morning and as it was now mid afternoon he was still waiting. He said how his wife was pregnant with their first child and all that was keeping him going was to fight his disease long enough to still be around to see the birth of his child in about 3 months and he was wasting what little time he had left, sitting there waiting and waiting.
As I listened to this, I thought here I am feeling sorry for myself and this guy has it so much worse! I then though about what a terrible situation he was in, but realised it doesn't mean I didn't have a right to feel bad about my own situation. That it was pointless trying to compare, because there's always someone worse off.
A few months later I started a support group for guys going through the same disease I was. Some of them were more advanced and some of them had a diagnosis of less aggressive disease, some of which may never actually require any treatment at all. As someone who was at the opposite end of that aggressiveness scale I know that these guys had a right to as stressed and anxious and upset as I was. Part of supporting these people made me realise that that comparing what is worse than what is a very slippery slope that doesn't help anyone.
So it changed my thinking quite a bit. I now look at is as the effect of the trauma it has on a person rather than the trauma itself. Things that seem so simple to deal with for us, may feel extremely difficult to someone else and cause quite a lot of stress.
It reminded me of an experience back in year 10 in high school where we were given a book of raffle tickets to sell to raise funds for a new school bus. Back then my social anxiety and self confidence was very bad still and the thought of knocking on peoples doors to ask if they wanted to buy a ticket terrified the hell out of me! So much so I was even struggling to sleep. As the date drew closer to when the raffle book was due to be handed back with the money we had collected I somehow forced myself to do it as I know how embarrassing it would be to turn up to school and have to say i hadn't sold any. The first house, no one was home and i thought this wasn't so bad. The 2nd someone answered and I don't even remembered what i babbled about. I didn't sell a ticket and I went straight back home as it had become too much to deal with!
When it got to our home room at school and each persons name was called to bring out their book, my name was called and I had to walk up in from of the class to hand in my book, and very empty money container. The teacher took it, looked at it and proceeded to give me a bollocking in front of the class about having no school spirit, being lazy, and hoping that I felt guilty every time I sat on the new bus! I remember standing there thinking what am I supposed to do. No one in that room understood how traumatic this whole thing had been for me and so I decided that I had to stand there and take it because the only alternative was to admit the truth but that would only be worse as everyone would discover how weak and broken I was. I mean by this stage in my childhood, I was more than used to letting people believe what they wanted about me... no matter what they thought, it was better than letting anyone discover the truth. The ironic part of the raffle story was that until the day I finished year 12 at that school, i never once got to ride on that bus! 😁
I'm not saying that these days there are something that are really hard to see as traumatic. The example you use as saying no to a child for example. I see it as probably more traumatic to say yes to them all the time, because they will grow up not reading for the real world where sometimes you get told no. Even in this case though, maybe a child has been brought up by abusive parents who said no to even the most basic necessities. This child has then had to be put in to foster care and maybe saying no to them needs to be done with a lot of care because it probably does bring up some trauma for them.
I know that's is a really extreme example, but it just shows that i think it's important to find out why someone feels something is traumatic before we judge. Sometimes that judgement may still be its not even really a t at all.
I didn't mean to bang on for so long, but let's face it... i usually do. 😁
