The Myth of Normal 23

each carry our wounds in our own way; there is neither sense nor value in gauging them against those of others. What Trauma Is Not Most of us have heard someone, perhaps ourselves, say something like “Oh my God, that movie last night was so disturbing, I left the theater traumatized.” Or we’ve read a (typically dismissive) news story about university students agitating for “content warnings” lest they be “retraumatized” by what they hear. In all these cases, the usage is understandable but misplaced; what people are actually referring to in these cases is stress, physical and/or emotional. As Peter Levine aptly points out, “Certainly, all traumatic events are stressful, but not all stressful events are traumatic.”[10] An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists. Much in life, including in art and/or social intercourse or politics, may be upsetting, distressing, even very painful without being newly traumatic. That is not to say that old traumatic reactions, having nothing to do with whatever’s going on, cannot be triggered by present-day stresses—see, for example, a certain author arriving home from a speaking gig. That is not the same as being retraumatized, unless over time it leaves us even more constricted than before. Here’s a fairly reliable process-of-elimination checklist. It is not trauma if the following remain true over the long term: It does not limit you, constrict you, diminish your capacity to feel or think or to trust or assert yourself, to experience suffering without succumbing to despair or to witness it with compassion. It does not keep you from holding your pain and sorrow and fear without being overwhelmed and without having to escape habitually into work or compulsive self-soothing or self-stimulating by whatever means.