We all know the stories. People who have lived through the worst that can happen to you. Death. Rejection. Abandonment. The unlucky know exactly how it feels. But what we don’t often consider is that the worst thing that can happen to you isn’t always something that happens to you at all. It’s not a tangible event. It’s doing it alone. Therapists see it every day. The pain that doesn’t heal because someone is forced to navigate it alone, until it festers into trauma. But what if the deepest wound isn’t the event itself. It’s being left alone with it. Pushing forward through pain you may even feel responsible for. On the flip side, a person can experience the exact same event and come out of it stronger. They call it growth. Don’t get me wrong. It was still hard. Growth is hard. But on the other side of it, a hesitant appreciation for who they have become begins to develop. On the other hand, others find themselves face down, yet again. I’ve sat across from people with PTSD who are up all night with nightmares, and during the day are constantly tense, scanning every room for danger. They often think they are the problem. Shame tells them they should be stronger. They “should” all over themselves as they look at others who seem to heal while they are exhausted from the effort of simply surviving without blowing everything up. Shame tells them they must be weak. Or sensitive. Or dramatic. Different. Wrong. Alone. But what if there is nothing weak about them? What if they are actually stronger than most? What no one tells them is that what they went through likely wasn’t what traumatized them. It was going through it alone. The funeral everyone else went home from. The assault no one believed. The divorce you were blamed for. The coming out experience that cost you your people. The very real process of pain and healing that follows every hard event is magnified when we do it alone. When researchers studied people after crisis events, they found that support at six months strongly predicted lower PTSD symptoms at twelve months (Kaniasty & Norris, 2019). Findings that powerful are rare in research, yet the same pattern appears over and over again. When a child comes out as LGBTQ+, just one supportive adult reduces the likelihood of a suicide attempt by 40% (Green et al., 2023). Support changes outcomes. Sometimes one person is enough. For those who don’t have support. For those who have to do it alone: the burden of trauma is exponentially heavier. The mountain is higher. The pain is deeper. It’s not them. The recovery is longer, if it happens at all. See, the shame of feeling like the mountain is higher for you… The shame of believing the problem is you: buries the survivor even deeper in the pain. Ironically, the lack of support created the larger wound, which then breeds the shame that isolates the trauma survivor even further. And feeling more alone buries them deeper still. But this is where the hope is. Trauma is inherently lonely, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. When you find people who have experienced similar pain, whether online or in person, it opens the door to healing. Online communities, support groups, therapy groups, or the confidentiality of a skilled therapist can help carry the burden with you. They can support you. And that support alone can change everything. Add a trauma treatment proven to reduce PTSD symptoms, and suddenly your chances of feeling safe, grounded, and fully yourself again increase dramatically. It turns out science has been saying it all along. It was never you. You just needed someone to walk through it with you.
