You Are Not Your Trauma

THE RIGHT PERSPECTIVE ON PAST HURTS

It was a Saturday. I decided to clean the gas stove in the kitchen, where dozens had made their meals before me over the years. The baking soda and vinegar concoction I made to cut the grease oozed brown from my fingers to my elbows. And then the phone rang.

“Dad is receiving CPR. You need to get here now.”

I grabbed a roll of paper towels, suds dropping to the floor. My dad had collapsed while biking, training for one of his races. He was an hour and a half away. I didn’t make it far before my mom called and uttered the words I’d been dreading: “Honey, I need you to pull over.” He was 56 years old.

Grief is a funny thing. It hits you when you least expect it, like when you’re eating a blue cheese salad or pulling on a pair of wool socks. Death is traumatic whether you’ve been anticipating it for years or whether it comes as quick as a phone call. But this article isn’t about death. It’s about trauma, in all its terrible forms.

Have you ever felt like horrible things always happen to you, things out of your control? Like the odds were stacked against you? Ever wanted more sympathy from the people around you, held grudges, or blamed others? If so, welcome to humanity, where we’re all tempted to adopt a victim mentality. 

The months that followed my dad’s death are a blur. Some days were unbearable. I kept going to church, but I had more questions than my faith could give me answers to. In a twisted way, my situation made me feel special. Finally, I wasn’t like everyone else. I had a story to share and, man, did it feel good to tell it. I relished the pity of strangers, friends, and classmates. I had been through so much and it felt good for people to know it.

Traumatic events in our lives certainly shape us, but they do not define who we are.

Our tendency toward a victim mentality stems from a dependence on others for validation. We want people to feel bad for us (or at least notice us). While we all need people around us who care, the victim mentality brings it to a new level. Those under its grip display a nasty little thing smart people call moral elitism, a defense mechanism in the midst of deeply painful emotions. The victim denies their own aggressiveness and projects it on others. Everyone around them is the threat, and the victim is of no fault and morally superior. And it’s become generally acceptable behavior. Take all the villain backstories movies, for example.  The villain’s evil actions are seen with more understanding when their former traumas are brought to light.

It’s been proven that those with a high tendency to see themselves as a victim are less willing to forgive others, show more desire for revenge than simple avoidance, and are statistically more likely to behave in a revengeful way.¹  For some, their trauma is who they are, and they won’t hear from anyone that isn’t true.

Let’s be clear that there’s a difference between being a victim of something tragic and adopting a victim mentality. The Bible gives examples of God condemning people who have oppressed innocent victims (Zechariah 7:9-10), not to mention Jesus’ own suffering despite having never sinned. If anyone has license to a victim mentality, it’s Him.

In the months that followed, lunches after church taught me everyone had a story to tell. I ate soup with those who had lost babies, gotten divorced, and been abandoned by parents. I sipped coffee with those who had illnesses, cancer, and no family to call. Trauma wasn’t just my story anymore; it had touched us all. They reminded me of God’s presence when I did not feel Him and of His goodness when I couldn’t believe it. They didn’t fight for whose story was worse. They comforted me like God had comforted them (2 Corinthians 1: 3-5). It was God, time, and these people that healed me. They were all victims of evil in the world and they still found joy and purpose in God. There was no time to mope. There was work to be done. And while I still miss my dad greatly, I wholeheartedly agree.

If you don’t have a relationship with God, it’s understandable that your trauma might define you. No bigger thing in your life has changed you as much as whatever you went through. But if you know God, you know peace despite your circumstances (Isaiah 26:3, John 14:27, John 16:31-33, Philippians 4:6-7, Romans 5:1, Galatians 5:22-23, Ephesians 2:14-16). It might take time to heal, but you’re not dominated by sorrows or owned by anything but Him. It won’t be easy to let the past hurts go (and we can expect more to come), but in time you’ll trust that God has a plan for your life, and you’ll want to figure out what it is.

Traumatic events in our lives certainly shape us, but they do not define who we are. Christians should give themselves no license to a victim mentality. God doesn’t want us to stay miserable and angry, and we can’t expect Him to do all the work. Healing is a choice. We need to step toward Him and participate. We have to want to get better.

If we are the people He’s going to use to show the world what He is really like, we should be motivated to let Him heal us. Just like we can choose to heal, we can choose to embrace the life God created us for, but it will require us to get up and move.