Why Unconventional Trauma Responses Are Not Silly 

Trauma responses that are a little outside of the “norm” often get made fun of or dismissed. What might feel silly to someone else might be your body remembering how it had to survive in a tense or dangerous situation.

People might brush off your unusual actions with a roll of their eyes or even a chuckle, but those quirky little things you do might be more than just unique personality traits. They might be signs that you have unresolved trauma in your life and that your body is fighting desperately to protect you from perceived threats.

Our bodies respond to trauma in different ways that show up uniquely to us. Maybe your hands sweat every time you hear your phone ding with a notification. While that might seem odd and a gross overreaction to those around you, it might be a learned response because your boss only texts when they are angry.

Your friends might giggle a little when you get visibly angry at them for using your full name, but to you, it serves as a reminder of parents who spewed it out just before a verbal storm.

The World’s View on “Silly” Trauma Responses

The people around you might be critical or cruel about behavior they consider to be odd or different. Society as a whole can be harsh to those who suffer from trauma they do not understand and in ways they do not view as normal.

If you did not grow up in a war zone or with obvious signs of abuse, people tend to assume you should be just fine to act in a way that fits their definition of normal. But what if you suffered years of emotional neglect, chronic bullying, or having to be the adult kid taking care of younger siblings? These experiences do not leave bruises or visible scars, but can completely reshape the way you respond to life.

Even modern media pokes fun at unconventional trauma responses. Pam, a character from the hit TV series The Office, rarely speaks up, even when mistreated. Her passivity is sometimes joked about. However, for those real-world viewers who have learned to keep the peace to avoid emotional conflict, like Pam, being mislabeled as weak or indecisive is no laughing matter.

Countless examples in society turn trauma responses into punchlines. Take Chandler from Friends. He cracks jokes in almost every emotional moment. While it became a humorous part of the show, it can also represent a sad reality. Many real-life Chandlers use humor as a shield to protect themselves from childhood pain.

Even movies marketed to children, like Pixar’s Inside Out, can often dismiss natural emotional responses. In the film, Sadness is treated like a problem that needs fixing at the beginning of the movie.

The real-life sadness that we carry represents grief and emotional depth, but because our modern society values positivity and moving on, the need to process difficult feelings, or in other words, trauma responses, gets dismissed, until the end of the show, when Sadness is finally acknowledged as essential to healing.

Shows like My Secret Obsession and Hoarders turn trauma responses into spectacles. These popular programs showcase not only trauma responses, but also how society treats certain coping mechanisms, especially the ones that seem “strange” or “gross.”

The people featured in these documentary-type programs are often pitied by their loved ones and can be watched with judgment, curiosity, and even mockery by those around them, rather than the compassion they deserve.

How People Treat You

Just like you see in popular culture messaging, the people in your life may be treating you with impatience or judgment for the things that trigger you and the way you react. Why would people who love you treat you this way?

Well, people often treat what they do not understand or that makes them uncomfortable with distance or even mockery. If your trauma does not fit the mold of what they believe to be significant or if your response does not look like what they have seen before, they might assume you’re overreacting, being dramatic, or simply need to “get over it.”

While this reaction sounds harsh, most of the people in your life don’t mean to be hurtful, and some are even trying to be helpful to you by attempting to “snap you out” of your trauma, trigger, and response cycle.

The sad truth is that even when people do not mean to be hurtful or dismissive, they can still damage not just you as a person, but your relationship with them. They can still make you feel that your trauma was insignificant and that your response is invalid, even if their intentions are pure.

Their careless or misguided reactions might cause you to hide parts of yourself from them or the world. Your panic in crowds or people-pleasing habits might become commonplace in your life until they begin to appear as personality traits rather than learned responses they really are. The longer these unhealthy responses go unchecked, the more ingrained they will become.

God sees you and therapy, too

Though others might dismiss you, snicker, or roll their eyes, God sees you. He does not dismiss your pain or think you are odd when you flinch at a loud noise or panic over riding an elevator. The Psalms are filled with raw, emotional outbursts like cries of confusion, sadness, and fear. And not once did God say, “That’s silly” or giggle over trauma responses. Instead, He listened and intervened.

Your unchanging Heavenly Father still listens and intervenes. And sometimes He uses people to help you heal. In Christian therapy, you can learn to identify and label the trauma you have experienced. You can learn to look at your trauma responses, as unconventional as they may be, as your brain trying to protect you from potential danger.

You may learn that your trauma response is influenced by something like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or another underlying condition. That inner critic you have learned to loathe? She innocently thought she was keeping you safe from others’ painful criticism.

The part of you that shuts down in stressful situations is your brain’s way of preventing you from getting overloaded. All these responses, those seemingly involuntary reactions that you have developed, all served a positive purpose once. But left unchecked and unbridled, those same responses that your brain intended for protection and safety can become toxic and limiting.

But the good news is that God does not want you to stay stuck. He does not want you to keep reacting to those events in your past that are already covered by His almighty blood. He wants you to learn to cope with your life, even the ugly parts, in productive ways. He wants you to feel peace and to build a life where your nervous system does not always have to be on high alert. And therapy can help you do all that.

You’re not silly

If you find yourself diminishing your trauma or judging your trauma response, just because it doesn’t look like someone else’s, it is common but not necessary. However, just because your trauma response shows up in quirky ways does not mean that your body and mind do not have good intentions. And it certainly does not mean that your emotions were not deeply affected by something significant, even when others may not understand its impact.

However quirky or unconventional your trauma response looks to the outside world, it is not silly. Even if your trauma doesn’t seem dramatic and your response typical, realize that these are not benchmarks for normality, but are indicators that something has happened to you that was significant in your own experience.

God sees the whole picture. He knows the “why” behind every reaction (even if you are not quite sure yourself). He loves you through every triple-checked light switch and every sudden flinch. And He wants better things for you. He wants healing and wholeness, and restoration.

To learn more and to schedule an appointment with one of the Christian counselors in our network, contact our office today.