Now that more people are getting comfortable talking openly about mental health and using psychology terms, we are entering the next inevitable phase of internet interaction: accusations of overuse and hyperbole. For every person out there who posts about their personal trauma there is another who replies THAT DOESN’T COUNT AS TRUAMA YOU IDIOT.
I’ll admit that when I started my master’s program back in 2020, I was a bit desperate for a clear definition. As someone who hates to misrepresent herself (hello, OCD), I thought having clear delineations of what counted and didn’t count would prevent me from claiming something I wasn’t entitled to. Certainly, mental health professionals had some clear bucket system where this type of experience was a big T trauma, this type was a small t trauma, and this thing was hard but not bad enough to be certified as traumatizing. My limited black and white thinking caused me to directly ask one of my professors how she determined if something her client identified as trauma was actually trauma.