Hurtful Liberations

by Sopho Kharazi

Throughout one of my sleepless nights, I came across Anna Akana’s video You’re Not Traumatized You’re Just Hurt. I really saw myself in her video and that made me cringe to my bones. According to her, nowadays the line between being hurt and traumatized becomes very blurry as there is a Tendency among people to say that they are traumatized rather than hurt. She criticizes this new culture of Instagram psychologists who preach prioritization of our needs over other people’s needs to the extent that our actions become over-the-border selfish, and we justify this selfishness by saying “I do not want to be traumatized again.” As a result, any time we are being triggered by someone or something, instead of working on it, we shut down, keep that person away, and label them “toxic”. This looking-for-toxicity-in-everything mindset facilitates pushing people away rather than letting them in. In this video, Anna says that being triggered is rather beautiful as it allows us to think and reflect because we should set boundaries to allow relationships to prosper and not end. Finally, she concludes that the misuse of the word “trauma” assists this unhealthy pattern of self-therapy – we have a tendency to avoid saying “I am hurt” because we are frightened that by admitting that we will look too vulnerable and weak. But in reality, we are not traumatized, we are just hurt.

This video reminded me of my own conversation with a friend in a local bar on Pennisland. We were sitting on plastic chairs in front of the water full of traditional boats. My friend who is 4 years older than me was telling me how she does not believe in therapy because she does not approve of the tendency to overanalyze emotions. According to her, nowadays the majority of people try to shove their emotions into each other’s faces which is very selfish. In her own words, she shared that younger generations are always acting upon their own needs and this is becoming exhausting because everybody has emotions and heartbreaks but there is no need to bother each other with that and overthink them. At that moment, I absolutely disagreed with her mainly because I am a huge supporter of therapy and I love talking about emotions. But the more I think about it now, the more I start to agree that maybe we are paying too much attention to our negative feelings received from unpleasant experiences which we identify as traumas but in reality, they are just hurtful events of our lives. Just to be clear, I am talking about events such as being ghosted or cheated on and not about actual traumatic events that unfortunately, some people go through.

I spent many years focusing on painful feelings that I collected throughout my relationships – meditating, journaling, doing yoga, and overanalyzing just to falsely conclude that I am traumatized rather than hurt. I always mentioned my hurt feelings as traumas during conversations because subconsciously, it allowed me to justify my unhealthy patterns of actions in relationships. This contributed to me unconsciously victimizing myself while in reality, all I was striving for was to look strong and put together – a woman who always knows what she is doing. At one point, my friend told me that the expiration date of my argument “I am acting this way because I was traumatized by this person a few years ago” has passed so it is time for me to put my shit together. Mind you, she told me this two years ago. And only now, I can proudly say that when I was ghosted, cheated on, and told to be not enough, I was not traumatized, I was just hurt. And realizing this makes it way easier to let it go.

This is why I am thinking now, maybe if I spent less time perceiving my hurt feelings as something so harsh as traumas, I would learn to let go faster and would not be so confused at 27?