We live in a time when talking about mental health, relationship advice, and attachment styles has become popular. There is an element of privilege in being able to approach the topic of therapy with ease.
Nonetheless, the abundance of mainstream content has made the discussions around these themes feel vague and redundant. Concerns once relegated to the margins to be met with discomfort and shame, have now become a new way to monetise attention, primarily through social media.
On the one hand, we have qualified therapists such as Annie Zimmerman and Jeff Guenther on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. On the other, we find popular speakers like Mel Robbins who share diluted mental health advice to keep the public engaged. Both her ‘let them’ theory and her article on family relationships promote emotional repression and reduce the complex ecosystem of the mind to a quick-fix solution for all.
The trivialisation of trauma
In a society where big corporations hope to substitute real therapists with AI, there is a sense of saturation in talking about trauma. The use of the word ‘trauma’ to refer to any human experience has trivialised its core psychological aspect. Trauma’ has now become trendy, as a commodity to have that shows you are not missing out in your life. This creates cognitive dissonance for individuals caught between mainstream narratives about trauma and their own lived experiences.
In this crowded landscape, some authors (such as the trauma expert, Gabor Maté, also David Kessler and Annie Zimmerman) are contributing meaningfully to cultural understanding by defining the psychological elements that shape our experience.
Defining trauma
Until recently, ‘trauma’ referred mainly to events like war and abuse. Now the mental health community uses it as a term to address anything that has shaped a person into who they are, with a special emphasis on childhood. As Gabor Maté explains, trauma is a psychological wound.
He makes a distinction between what he calls big-t trauma (abuse or significant loss) and little-t trauma (for example, emotional neglect) the application of which depends on the gravity of the event. According to Maté, whatever we experience in childhood impacts who we become as adults, shaping everything from our attachment styles to our coping mechanisms. For example, one’s attachment style (avoidant vs anxious) and addictions like alcoholism both stem from the same wounds – survival mechanisms adopted in childhood and maintained ever since.
As Maté explains, the child has two fundamental needs: on the one hand, for attachment (belonging, acceptance, and support) and, on the other, for authenticity (being connected to one’s own emotions and gut feelings).
As the brain is a social product interacting with the environment, specific behaviours begin as adaptations. Sometimes the child gives up authenticity in the name of acceptance. To maintain attachment and save their relationship with the caregiver, the child learns to disconnect from themselves. For instance, if the child feels that their parents are annoyed by their emotions, they will unconsciously learn to switch their feelings off and detach from themselves.
From childhood to adulthood
When the child’s needs are not met by the caregiver, the behaviours they unconsciously develop to help them survive persist into adulthood, even when they become outdated. Psychologically speaking, everything we do serves a function.
Maté and Zimmerman use this functional view to explain addictions. Through this lens, addictions are viewed, not as character flaws but as maladaptive behaviours. As Zimmerman explains, “trauma is defined as anything that shatters our sense of security in both our internal and external worlds”. When we talk about little-t traumas, we mean all those instances in which the child’s needs were not met. What is traumatic, then, is not the event per se, but how that event was processed and stored within the psyche.
The moral defence, as explained by the psychiatrist Ronald Fairbairn in 1943, suggests that children tend to blame themselves to maintain their bond with their parents. If met with rejection, instead of seeing their parents as flawed or incapable, children see themselves as awful. In blaming themselves, children unconsciously teach themselves to be unlovable. This survival mechanism protects the bond with their parents.
Attachment and addiction
In another explanatory framework, John Bowlby’s attachment theory shows how our early relationships with our caregivers create our expectations for other relationships.
Addiction, then, and attachment style, are two sides of the same coin. Everything that gets activated in us needs to be listened to, as “it is pointing to a story from our past that requires attention“.
How do we heal?
The process of healing the trauma involves making sense of what happened to you, but can be done only in retrospect. It means rewriting the narrative by giving new meaning to old experiences.
After all, it is the stories that we (unconsciously) told ourselves that originally led us to maladaptive behaviours. If we learnt that we are unlovable, we will keep pursuing the attention of emotionally unavailable people; if we learnt that it would be selfish to assert our needs, we will not be authentic with ourselves but instead fall back into people-pleasing patterns.
Because our brains prioritise survival over happiness, we are primed to survive, not connect. Reparenting means reconnecting with our inner child to provide the safety and care they missed when these wounds (and the maladaptive story with them) first formed.
As Zimmerman says, healing is daring to face our triggers. We need to get curious about ourselves, and instead of judging, ask: “What is this telling me? Is this mechanism that is being activated now a way of protecting me?”
Trauma points us toward what needs tending: “Healing doesn’t mean that the loss didn’t happen. It means that it no longer controls us”.
True psychological healing requires authentic self-love, which is not the commodified version plastered across social media.
Self-love and personal narratives
Self-love means acknowledging one’s desires and needs and acting on them, but this cannot be done successfully without dismantling the wound – the negative narrative of hatred, guilt and shame we internalised in the first place.
A complication is that we also have to recognise the role we play in our own suffering. “Remember, the disaster that you are desperately trying to avoid — your childhood abandonment trauma — has already happened decades ago. It’s done. You will never be a child again, and you will never be abandoned like that again” (Anonymous).
Your past explains you but you cannot change it. You can change your relationship to it though. It does not define you.
Rewriting our narratives
We were all born with circumstances that we did not choose, which set our lives on paths we are rarely aware of.
According to the psychological theory of narrative identity, we internalise a life story, built to give meaning to our lives. However, we were given a narrative even before being born, as we were already something in someone’s imagination. We existed as an idea even before existing as a person. Our carers thought of what name to give us, how we might look, how we would be, and, most importantly, how they wanted us to be. Maybe we were the desperately wanted child; or perhaps the unwanted child, the mistake. All of this shapes us. We did not choose many of the pieces that form our biography.
Human beings need stories: we think of ourselves in narratives that cast us as protagonists in the stories we are living. Sometimes we see ourselves as the victims of these narratives – and when that happens, we need to rewrite them.
Our responsibility as adults is to reclaim authorship of our stories. Some things cannot be changed; they are part of us. However, we can choose what meaning to give to them and how to integrate them, and we do this knowing that every experience has its own dignity. Our society treats healing as a destination when, in reality, it is a journey.
As Kessler, Maté and Zimmerman claim in their work, trauma never disappears. You learn to meet your triggers and wounds with kindness and gentle strength, walking round them as you would the roots of a tree. You teach yourself love instead of hatred. And, with work and time, you learn to tell your story in new ways.
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