Trauma

The Oxford Languages dictionary defines trauma as a “deeply distressing or disturbing experience.”  Ironically, in the modern world, we live such relative safe and secure lives, that most of the trauma we experience is emotional and often due to social rejection.  Furthermore, because we do not get good teaching in how to process and regulate our emotions, we tend to shame ourselves for feeling traumatized by emotion.

Maybe this is because our story hasn’t caught up with reality.  Back in the “Stone Age”, rejection by the group was a real physical danger to us.  If the group didn’t like you and stopped sharing food with you, you ran a real chance of suffering physical consequences, such as death.  Conversely, when the dangers you ran away from were slavering sharp toothed tigers, your friends gathered around you and cheered when you survived and genuinely mourned your loss when you didn’t make it.

Today, if you vent to a friend about your unreasonable boss, she may “helpfully” ask if you’ve considered that your thoughts create your feelings and have you really tried developing your empathy for what your boss may be going through.  Or if your boss gives you a performance review and you burst into tears, or become angry, you will likely shame yourself for not being able to control your response to this threat.  Nobody shamed you if you burst into tears after running away from a tiger or suggested that your thoughts create your feelings of fear about tiger teeth.

Repeated Stressors

Unfortunately, repeated stressors which your nervous system perceives as dangerous and your well-meaning internal critic berates you for overreacting to, create a perfect situation for the development of post-traumatic stress disorder in which you become ever more sensitized to threat.  This is in part because criticism from yourself is in fact a very powerful threat.  If you don’t even love/like yourself, how can you expect others to do so.

From an evolutionary sense, this makes sense.  Impala who run away at the slight impression of sharp teeth are reproductively more successful than those who wait until sharp teeth make connection with their leg.  We can probably appreciate that having the same approach to a bit of an impatient tone in your boss’s email will likely not give the same result.

Rewiring our brains to contextualize danger signals appropriately WITHOUT invalidating our emotional experience is how to prevent further accumulation of trauma and reduce its effects on our actions and reactions.

TL;DR

We are wired to perceive social rejection as a threat.  Learning how to process and contextualize rejection without self hatred is the key to reducing the accumulation of trauma.