12/20/2025
Unpopular opinion incoming 👀🌈
Guys… not everything is trauma.
Trauma is real, serious, and life-altering. It’s the kind of experience that overwhelms the nervous system and fundamentally disrupts a person’s sense of safety and meaning. Think war, domestic violence, r**e, abortion, s*x trafficking, or the death of a loved one. These are experiences that can fracture someone’s internal world and leave lasting psychological and physiological imprints.
What I’m noticing more and more, though, is that many experiences being labeled as “trauma” are actually something else.
Often, what I’m hearing sounds a lot like unmet expectations and loss. Loss of a relationship. Loss of what you thought your life would look like. Loss of safety, identity, dreams, certainty, or control.
That’s grief.
Grief isn’t just about death. Grief is the emotional response to loss, and it can show up with anxiety, irritability, numbness, hypervigilance, sadness, anger, or withdrawal. Sound familiar? Those reactions can look like trauma, feel intense, and absolutely deserve care and compassion… but they come from a different place.
When we call everything trauma, we flatten important distinctions. We risk minimizing true trauma while also missing the chance to name and work through grief properly.
Grief needs space, meaning-making, and time. Trauma often needs stabilization, safety, and nervous-system repair.
Different wounds. Different treatment. Same humanity.
Words matter. 🧠✨
