Call It What You Want, Babe

If you’ve ever tried to name what you went through out loud, you’ve probably been met with some version of: “Well, that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?” Or “I mean, everyone has a rough childhood.” Or “Really? That seems extreme.”

People love to police that word.

They’ll let you say you had a “difficult” relationship or a “complicated” family dynamic. But the second you call it what it actually was, suddenly you’re being dramatic. Divisive. Unforgiving.

It’s easier for them if you keep it vague.

Vague is comfortable. Vague keeps the peace. But vague doesn’t help your nervous system understand what happened.

Yes, we’re talking about Trauma.

You probably don’t think you’ve experienced trauma. At least, not the ‘real kind’.

We hear the word and immediately jump to worst-case scenarios. War. Car crashes. Assault. Childhoods straight out of a Netflix documentary. The kind of suffering that leaves visible wreckage. Castles crumbling overnight.

And then there’s everything else. Emotional neglect. Chronic criticism. Relational instability. Walking on eggshells. Living with someone whose moods dictated the temperature of your entire household.

We call those “little t” traumas, like they’re trauma-lite. Trauma for beginners. But repetition can do more damage than impact. A single catastrophic event leaves a mark. Years of low-grade threat rewires your entire operating system.

So when your life looks mostly normal on paper, it’s easy to think: “Well, I’m not one of those people.” Or “Other people have it worse.” Or my personal favorite: “Maybe I’m just being dramatic.”

All the liars are calling you one. Including yourself.

Trauma isn’t defined by how “big” the event was. It’s defined by what your nervous system had to do to survive it.

The adaptations it made quietly. Intelligently. At your expense.

Trauma doesn’t always feel like trauma. It feels like stress that never goes away. Emotional whiplash that you explain away. Constant bracing. Quiet resentment. Pretending you’re fine. Chronic overthinking.

Walking around with a knot in your stomach. Losing pieces of yourself without realizing you’re losing them.

The number one defensive line we use is “Well, that’s just life,” or the backup, “Everyone goes through that.”

That’s not truth talking. That’s your trauma response, still keeping you functional. Still keeping you contained.

Not everyone feels this way.

This isn’t just life.

We do the same thing with the word “safety.”

People hear safety, and their brain goes straight to physical harm. “Am I safe?” becomes “Is someone hitting me? Am I in immediate physical danger?” And if the answer is no, we’re supposed to feel safe. Case closed.

I went to a pastor once, during my marriage, trying to find the words for what was happening. I told him about the eggshells. The volatility. The way I’d learned to make myself small just to keep the peace. The way my flowers had grown back as thorns.

He listened. Nodded. And then said, “Well, he’s not hitting you, so…”

And he just let that “so” hang in the air. Like the sentence completed itself. Like the absence of a fist meant the presence of safety. Like everything I’d just described faded to nothing because there were no bruises to show for it.

I left that conversation more confused than when I walked in. If what I was experiencing wasn’t “bad enough” to name, then maybe the problem really was me.

But your body doesn’t just respond to the threat of physical violence. It responds to emotional volatility. To unpredictability. To having your reality questioned until you can’t trust your own perception. To hypervigilance. To relentless judgment. To the feeling that one wrong word could detonate the entire room.

Those aren’t minor stressors your body can brush off. They’re survival-level threats. Your nervous system treats them exactly the same way it would treat a predator in the room, because functionally, that’s what they are.

You can be completely physically safe and still be living in a state of chronic threat. You can have a roof over your head, food in the fridge, no bruises on your body, and still be in fight-or-flight every single day.

Safety isn’t just about whether someone can hurt you. It’s about whether you can exist in a world where your nervous system gets to rest.

And if it doesn’t, you’re not safe. You just look safe from the outside.

This is why people feel insane.

They’re told “but you’re not in danger” while their body is screaming otherwise. And when your external reality doesn’t match your internal experience, you start to think the problem is you. That you’re overreacting. That you’re too sensitive. That you should be grateful because “at least he’s not hitting you.”

But your body knows the truth. A nervous system that never gets to come down from hypervigilance is a traumatized nervous system. The threat doesn’t have to be physical to be real.

Nothing rewires a nervous system faster than learning, over and over, that your needs are inconvenient and your voice is the problem.

We live in a culture that treats trauma like a competition and coping like a personality trait.

You get praised for powering through. For staying positive. For being responsible, being the strong one, being the flexible one, being the one who “always understands.” Meanwhile, your nervous system is in the background trying to whisper: “Hey… something isn’t right.” Trying to spark up your darkest night. But you can’t hear it over the noise of you being the one who holds everything together.

For the longest time, I didn’t think I had trauma either. I had a perfectly normal childhood. A “fine” life. I wasn’t a walking Lifetime movie. So every time I felt overwhelmed or exhausted or like I was slowly dissolving, I assumed the problem was me. Maybe I was too sensitive. Maybe I needed to get it together. Maybe this was just the price of being capable.

I was wrong.

Sometimes it’s not the moment you fell apart. It’s all the moments you stayed strong when you shouldn’t have had to. All the times you boarded up your windows after the storm and called it resilience.

Call it what you want.

But I’m going to call it what it is.

Not for drama. Not for sympathy. For accuracy.

Because your nervous system already knows the truth. It’s just waiting for you to catch up.