There’s a sentence I have heard hundreds of times now, and I have said it more times than I can count myself.
It wasn’t that bad.
She says it with a small laugh, usually. A little self-deprecating shrug, like she’s apologizing for taking up the airtime. She’ll list off, almost defensively, the things that didn’t happen. She wasn’t hit. She wasn’t assaulted. Nobody died young. Her parents stayed together. Her childhood, if you saw it from the outside, was fine.
So why is her body acting like a war zone? Why can’t she sleep? Why is she crying in her car at 2pm on a Tuesday for no reason she can name?
She has all the symptoms of a woman whose nervous system has been pushed past what it could carry. But she does not have what she thinks should be the resume for those symptoms.
So she dismisses herself.
I did this for the better part of a decade. I would sit in a therapist’s office, list out what was going on in my body, the hypervigilance, the numbness, the inability to sleep without a TV running so my own thoughts couldn’t catch up to me, and then I would immediately follow it up with but I mean it’s not that bad. As if my symptoms were embarrassed of themselves and wanted to apologize for taking up space.
I had all kinds of names for what I was living through. I’m just a worrier. I run hot. I’ve always been intense. I’m an empath. I have a high-strung personality. I genuinely believed the diagnosis was my temperament. Like I’d just been born wired wrong and the rest of my life was going to be figuring out how to manage the wiring. The word trauma never came up.
They have a name for this category, by the way. Little-t trauma. As if it’s baby trauma. Trauma Lite. As if a nervous system only breaks when something explodes.
This is a move the whole wellness and mental-health industrial complex has gotten away with for over thirty years and almost nobody calls it out.
The category itself is the gaslight.
The phrase little-t trauma tells the woman who lived through years of chronic emotional volatility that what she survived was, technically, a smaller thing. The phrase implies that her nervous system’s response should be smaller too. The phrase implies that if her response is not smaller, then her response is the real problem. She is the problem.
Honestly? I’m not sure there is anything that makes me madder than this.
Because, check this out, the body, scientifically, biologically, physically, doesn’t know the difference between a single cataclysmic event and a thousand small ones that taught it to stay braced for years.
There’s an image in the book I keep coming back to because it’s the cleanest version of this I have. Imagine cutting a piece of paper. If you slice it cleanly in half, the damage is obvious. There’s a moment. A visible before and after. Anyone can point to it and say yes, that was the cut.
Now imagine taking the same piece of paper and trimming it. A tiny centimeter at a time. Carefully. Consistently. Over years. Each cut seems small. Reasonable. Almost nothing. You adjust. You adapt. The paper still mostly looks like paper.
Eventually you’re left holding a fragment that technically still exists but no longer resembles what you started with. The damage didn’t arrive all at once. It arrived through continuity.
Erosion is not gentler than collapse. Erosion is just quieter.
Now see, I’m a huge nerd and love the science behind all of this, so you’ll have to bear with me now and again when I take a moment to geek out. So, the fancy science people have a name for what the body does under chronic low-grade stress. Allostatic load. The ongoing wear and tear from a system that never gets to reset. Studies out of Rockefeller showed that chronic stress causes more long-term physiological damage than acute events. The body keeps adapting, keeps compensating, keeps running on fumes, and one day the debt comes due. The collapse looks like it came out of nowhere, but it didn’t.
So when a woman tells me it wasn’t that bad or it’s cousin but nothing big happened, what I hear is: nobody ever taught me that the thousand small cuts also count.
Because guess what? Our body doesn’t care what the DSM thinks. It doesn’t care what your family thinks. It doesn’t care what the wellness influencer with the ring light thinks. It doesn’t care what Aunt Sally at Thanksgiving thinks when she tells you to count your blessings because other people have it worse. (And yes, other people do. But that’s not the metric. That’s never been the metric.)
Your nervous system has never once, in the history of nervous systems, polled the room before responding.
Your body responds to what it actually experiences. It responds to the thing that happened. Whatever it was. Whatever it kept being.
If it exceeded your capacity to process it, and it changed how you live, your body has already filed the verdict. There’s nothing left to argue about. There’s no external authority that gets to overrule the system that did the actual surviving. There’s no committee that meets after the fact to decide if your symptoms were appropriately scaled.
It counts.
The body counted it. That’s the whole story. That is the only mechanism that has ever mattered.
I want to say one more thing, because I know how my industry (and I use both my and industry lightly) talks.
This isn’t a piece or a place that’s going to tell you to be grateful for what your suffering taught you. Your suffering didn’t teach you anything you needed to know. You would have been fine without learning it, and frankly you probably would have been a better-rested human. Anyone who tells you your pain was your portal is selling you a way to feel grateful for what hurt you, which is not the same thing as being free of it.
What I will tell you is that once you know that your nervous system is the qualifier, full stop, a lot of other things begin to stop. The dismissing stops. The am I being dramatic loop stops. You stop using other people’s traumas as the ruler for your own. You stop running yourself through the wellness-industrial-complex’s audit every time you have a bad day.
You start treating your own body as the source of truth instead of as an unreliable narrator.
That is the entire shift. It sounds simple. It is not.
We’re going to keep circling the question of what counts and what doesn’t, because you have likely spent your life being told that your body was wrong about its own experience.
You’re not crazy. You’re not overreacting. You’re not the rare exception who feels too much.
You are exactly what a human nervous system looks like when it has counted what happened to it.