Most people, when they come to see me, minimise their trauma. They’ll say things like, “It wasn’t that bad,” or “Other people have had it worse,” or “I should be over it by now.” This is incredibly common, especially when the trauma happened in childhood or in close relationships.
People are often surprised when I gently slow them down around these statements. They might assume they’re being mature, or maybe resilient, because they are not wallowing in their pain or playing a victim. But minimising doesn’t usually come from logic. It comes from survival.
For a lot of people, minimising what they experienced was a survival skill.
Children often don’t have the safety to fully feel what is happening. Feeling the pain of what was going on might have been too overwhelming, or even dangerous. When caregivers cause harm, it can feel safer for a child to believe they are the problem. Blaming themselves (“I’m bad” or “this is my fault”) is less frightening than blaming the caregiver, because doing so might place the child in the impossible position of wanting to escape when there is nowhere to go.
So instead, children learn to tell themselves it’s “fine” or “normal” or “not that bad”. Children learn to get on with their lives, with school, and to keep on functioning. When you are a child, this adaptation is crucial, and it worked; it helped you survive.
The hard part is that when children become adults, your nervous system doesn’t automatically register that the danger has passed, that you are safe now, that you don’t need those adaptations anymore. So many people continue to believe the same childhood narratives: “it wasn’t that bad”, etc.
Healing requires feelings to be felt and transformed.
Often underneath the protective minimising, there are fears like: If I really let myself feel this, I might fall apart. Or they worry that once the door is opened, they will get overwhelmed or will never stop crying. The feelings might feel too big, or too much or too dangerous.
Therapy is not about forcing yourself to relive everything or dragging up memories before you’re ready. It’s not about “going there” all at once, or breaking yourself open.
Good trauma therapy goes slowly.
It works with parts of you—the parts that learned to cope, the parts that hold fear, the parts that carry unprocessed emotion, and the parts that are still watching carefully to make sure you don’t get overwhelmed again. Rather than trying to bypass or overpower these parts, therapy helps them feel heard.
Often, there are parts of you that have been holding feelings that were never allowed to be felt at the time. These feelings won’t come back all at once. In therapy, they usually arrive in small, manageable pieces. When these feelings and experiences are approached gently, the brain can process them differently than it did before. Instead of being overwhelmed by them, the feelings can be felt, survived and integrated into your nervous system.
Once the feeling has been properly registered and allowed to move through, it no longer needs to get big or come up unexpectedly. Its intensity decreases because it doesn’t have to fight to be noticed anymore.
Over time, people often find that they are less reactive, less flooded, or less numb. They may still remember what happened, but it doesn’t carry the same charge. It becomes something that happened, not something that is still happening inside them.
People often worry that going toward their feelings will make them worse. But more often, what’s exhausting isn’t the feeling itself—it’s the effort it takes to keep it inside.
Therapy isn’t about telling yourself your trauma was worse than anyone else’s. It isn’t about comparison or labels. It’s about acknowledging what your system went through, and why it responded the way it did.
Minimising made sense once.
Therapy creates the conditions where, bit by bit, different parts of you get a chance to be heard. And once they are, they can finally rest.