Max Pemberton: Don’t blame parents for everything

We hear a lot about ‘trauma’ these days; in fact, contemporary psychology seems obsessed with it.

Until a few years ago it wasn’t something doctors heard much about at all, outside of people who had experienced some catastrophic tragedy, accident or life-changing event that resulted in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Today it’s a different story. At times it feels as though everyone is claiming to be traumatised now, no matter how apparently normal and humdrum their life is.

Increasingly I hear patients talk about having experienced ‘trauma’, often in relation to their childhood.

After digging a little deeper I generally find that they weren’t abused, bereaved or gravely ill, and didn’t necessarily witness something we might consider ‘traumatic.’

Similarly, social media is awash with people talking about trauma. It feels as though it has become fashionable.

In many cases what they’re referring to is ‘struggle’ — something we all come up against at some stage, and not the same thing at all.

In my opinion, it’s not helpful to re-frame every minor mishap, setback or stumble as ‘trauma’.

It’s become such a buzzword that a few patients who have experienced genuine and severe trauma, such as sexual assault or rape, have spoken about being quite resentful of the way the word has been appropriated by armchair psychologists on social media to relate to anything vaguely upsetting.

Should we really be categorising the sadness that someone experiences when their dad misses their sports day in the same way as the person whose dad abused them?

I’m in no way belittling not having your emotional needs met as a child, something that can have long-lasting repercussions into adulthood.

Children need to feel nurtured and loved in many different ways. Some need freedom, others thrive on order and routine. When parents don’t get it right, it can be hugely difficult and shape who we are as adults.

Someone who doesn’t feel loved in the right way for them might grow up to believe that they are unlovable and need to try extra hard to make people like them. They might become desperate people-pleasers for example, constantly seeking the approval of those around them.

It’s not that they weren’t loved when they were young — rather they weren’t loved in the way that they craved.

This isn’t to criticise parents, who, after all, aren’t given a manual on what their child needs. Mostly it’s guesswork.

But if your parents were imperfect, dwelling on an emotionally unfulfilling childhood and wearing it as some kind of label is only going to lead to more problems. It keeps you in a permanent state of victimhood and stops you from being able to understand and move on from your upset.

One of the world experts on trauma, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, whose book The Body Keeps The Score has stayed on the bestseller list for several years, said in a recent interview that “when trauma becomes your identity, that’s a dangerous thing”.

I think this is very true. When we declare common struggles to be ‘trauma’ it keeps us looking back and prevents us from accepting that, while our needs might not have been met in quite the way we wanted, we were still loved and cared for.

Realising this helps us to accept who we are — both the positive and the negative parts.

It’s a good thing that it’s far more straightforward to process these kinds of difficulties as opposed to overcoming the trauma of being in a house fire, watching a family member die, or being the victim of abuse.

We don’t need to evoke the language of trauma to understand that life can be challenging at times, but our difficulties don’t have to define us and we can change, put them behind us and move forward into a happier life.