The Myth of Normal 22

pediatrician D. W. Winnicott referred to as “nothing happening when something might profitably have happened”—a subject we will return to when we consider human development. “The traumas of everyday life can easily make us feel like a motherless child,” writes the psychiatrist Mark Epstein. [8] If, despite decades of evidence, “big-T trauma” has barely registered on the medical radar screen, small-t trauma does not even cause a blip. Even as we make this distinction between big-T and small-t traumas, given the continuum and broad spectrum of human experience, let’s keep in mind that in real life the lines are fluid, are not easily drawn, and should not be rigidly maintained. What the two types share is succinctly summarized by Bessel van der Kolk: “Trauma is when we are not seen and known.” Although there are dramatic differences in the way the two forms of trauma can affect people’s lives and functioning—the big-T variety, in general, being far more distressing and disabling—there is also much overlap. They both represent a fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world. That fracturing is the essence of trauma. As Peter Levine writes, trauma “is about a loss of connection—to ourselves, our families, and the world around us. This loss is hard to recognize, because it happens slowly, over time. We adapt to these subtle changes; sometimes without noticing them.”[9] As the lost connection gets internalized, it forges our view of reality: we come to believe in the world we see through its cracked lens. It is sobering to realize that who we take ourselves to be and the ways we habitually act, including many of our seeming “strengths”—the least and the most functional aspects of our “normal” selves—are often, in part, the wages of traumatic loss. It may also be disconcerting for many of us to consider that, as happy and well adjusted as we think ourselves to be, we may fall somewhere on the trauma spectrum, even if far from the capital-T pole. Ultimately, comparisons fail. It doesn’t matter whether we can point to other people who seem more traumatized than we are, for there is no comparing suffering. Nor is it appropriate to use our own trauma as a way of placing ourselves above others—“You haven’t suffered like I have”—or as a cudgel to beat back others’ legitimate grievances when we behave destructively. We