Latest / Internal Insights / The Hidden Trauma Nobody Tells You Can Rewire Your Nervous System
Transcript
- Ted Thao: Welcome to Internal Insights, a quick, honest conversation about mental health in about five minutes or less. I'm your host Ted Thao, a licensed professional counselor, and the owner of Internal Insights Therapy in San Antonio, Texas. Every episode, we take one idea from therapy, trauma, anxiety, relationships, identity, and talk about it plainly. No jargon, no fluff, just something real. Let's get into it. Someone once told me their trauma wasn't big enough to count. They had never been in an accident, never experienced anything violent. Nothing that would make the news, but something in their childhood still followed them into every relationship they had as an adult. They just didn't have the word for it. Here's the thing when most people hear the word trauma, they picture something big. A car crash, a natural disaster, combat, abuse. And those experiences absolutely are trauma. In the therapy world, we would call these big tea traumas. Often they're a single clearly identifiable event, and most people would agree without hesitation that something awful happened. But there's a category that doesn't get talked about nearly as much. We call it little t trauma. These are experiences that didn't threaten your life, but still overwhelmed your ability to cope at the time. Think about a parent who was emotionally unavailable. Growing up feeling like you constantly had to earn love or approval, being humiliated in front of your class as a kid, like when they ask you to read in front of the class saying you're not the greatest reader. a relationship where you were slowly worn down instead of dramatically hurt. None of these might make a movie pilot, but they do shape your nervous system in a very powerful way. Here's a way to picture it. Big tea trauma is like a single crack in the windshield from a rock. You know exactly when it happened, while little tea trauma is more like years of little pebbles hitting the glass over and over until one day you notice the whole windshield is covered with little fine cracks. Not a single pebble did that on its own, but the accumulation of it. And this is where it gets important. Both types can lead to the same outcome. Anxiety, trouble trusting people, feeling on edge for no clear reason. Struggling to feel safe even when nothing is currently wrong. The nervous system doesn't actually rank these experiences, whether they're big or small, the same way our logical brain wants to. However, the nervous system does remember what it feels to be unsafe and it reacts accordingly. I've been asked something like this in my counseling sessions. What is happening? Like what happened to me, Ted? E like was it even trauma? It's not like anything really bad happened to me. And here's how I answer that question. Trauma isn't defined by how an event would look if someone were to film it. It's defined by how it affected you. If the experience overwhelmed your ability to feel safe or shaped how you see yourself or changed how you move through relationships, That matters. It counts. You don't need permission to call something painful just because someone else might have had it worse. Comparing your pain to someone else's doesn't make yours disappear. It just makes it harder for you to get support for it. Now, knowing whether something falls into a big T or little T category isn't really. Like it really doesn't matter if you are labeling that correctly. What really matters if you're giving yourself permission to take it seriously. A lot of people carry the effects of little tea trauma for years without ever connecting dots because they were taught that their experiences wasn't extreme enough to matter. So if there's one thing I'd want you to sit with after this, it's this. You don't have to justify your pain by comparing it to someone else's. If something shaped you in the way you see yourself or the way you move through the world, it's worth paying attention to, no matter how small it might look like from the outside. And if you're an Asian American listener, I want to gently add this too. A lot of us were raised to minimize what we went through, especially when it came to family. It doesn't mean it didn't leave a mark. That's it for this episode of Internal Insights. If this gave you something to sit with, or just made you feel a little less alone, that's the whole point. This isn't a replacement for therapy, but if you're looking for support, you can find me at Internal Insights Therapy in San Antonio, Texas. Thank you for spending five minutes or less with me. I'll see you next time.