Photo by Caleb George on Unsplash
Women and girls who struggle with anxiety often have a history of underlying trauma and oppression. Here are some definitions to help you understand what that means:
- Trauma occurs whenever you experience a deeply distressing or disturbing event that impacts you emotionally, physically, or psychologically. It can be a one-time event, a prolonged event, or a series of events, and it can occur at any time in your life. Underlying trauma occurs when the disturbing experience isn’t fully processed or worked through, or when your mind tries to block it out and pretend it didn’t happen. In other words, underlying trauma is continuously carried around inside you without being cared for, or integrated, in a healthy way, and it’s often what lies beneath other mental health issues and disorders, including anxiety, depression, and stress.
- Oppression occurs whenever authority or power is exercised over you in a cruel, unfair, or damaging way. Anyone who tries to control or dismiss your feelings, thoughts, or experiences is practicing a form of oppression.
Can you see the connection between oppression and underlying trauma? If a girl or woman experiences physical, sexual, or emotional abuse in her home, school, community, workplace, or place of worship, but the social code says “forgive, forget, move on,” or even worse – gaslighting and invalidation happen – then where is the space for her to process these experiences and receive the care she needs in order to create healthy, safe boundaries? The oppressive culture teaches her to bury her trauma, ignore abuse, blame herself, and become a “good girl” or “good woman” by numbing her emotional pain. When someone tells you to concentrate on the good things in your life and be grateful for what you have despite the abuse you’ve suffered, please remember you can’t erase trauma, oppression, and hurt feelings by skipping to “what’s good in my life.” You can talk about your pain from hurtful, traumatic experiences in order to process your hurt feelings and at the same time be grateful for good things in your life – you don’t have to choose one or the other.
Family, religious, employment, or community directives that tell you to stuff your hurt feelings because “you have it really good here, concentrate on what’s good” are false narratives about what goodness really means. It’s a way to control you so you don’t rock the boat by upsetting the established power positions. Before long, you hear these directives or commands so often that you end up fighting yourself and feeling guilty whenever you try to name the problem and say, “You hurt me, and that’s not okay.” Anxiety, depression, and poor mental health are almost inevitable the longer you endure oppression and underlying trauma.
Oppression and underlying trauma are central to the types of anxiety discussed in Part 2. In Part 5 coming out tomorrow, July 1st, I’ll talk about trauma and oppression hidden in the lives of mothers and non-mothers alike.
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