I Don't Want to Find Positivity in Trauma

i don't want to grow or cultivate resilience or learn from anything yet

It’s been almost two years since the pandemic started and it’s not over, it’s not going anywhere, we’re still knee deep in the shit and trying to find our way out. Yet there are people out there who are talking about recovery and moving on.

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles like this one, about “cultivating resilience” in the face of adversity and trauma. I get mad at each one, and they make me feel like I am going crazy. The idea that one should put into practice self-help routines and engage in a form of toxic positivity while undergoing trauma is absurd. It is the equivalent of telling someone who is undergoing a stressful event that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” when the specific event is damn near killing them.

It’s not just the pandemic, not just the specter of covid hanging over every one of us; it’s the culmination of all the problems that exist now because of covid. People who are still trying to recover from being locked down and isolated, people who have lost loved ones, lost jobs and homes because of the pandemic. The fear, the anxiety that took hold of us is still here, still thriving amongst us, and we as a country are reeling. We are in a mental health crisis and “experts” are out here telling us to buckle up, think positive, develop healthy attitudes, learn from our experience, grow from our trauma. But it’s hard to do those things when the trauma is ongoing.

I’ve had a lot of people over the last year tell me that what I was going through - a collapse of my marriage on top of the pandemic - was actually a chance to grow as a person, that I could take this experience and be better for it, become strong and resilient and a better version of myself. Most people offered these words without offering the groundwork for such self improvement; they just spouted out platitudes and well known phrases and said what they thought they were supposed to say at a time like this. It’s easy to tell someone to grow. It’s hard when you’re the person who is supposed to be doing that growing while being close to a damn mental breakdown. Some people offered self-care routines, things I had no time for as I was mourning full time. They gave me books to read, books that would surely change my life and help me become a new person (what, you didn’t like the pre-trauma me?), help me grow and change. I just did not have the capacity for all this. I wanted to grieve, I wanted to be allowed to feel my feelings and be sad and wallow for a bit.

And so it goes with the pandemic. Being shut in for months at a time takes it toll on people. Being shut in with the tv on and blasting news of death and illness and fear at you all the time is traumatizing. Worrying about your job, your kids, your finances, your health all while navigating what is a new covid-based world is enough to make anyone feel insane. This is on ongoing thing! We are still experiencing all this and to tell people who are going through something so dramatic and harmful that they can turn their frown upside down and use their time to find ways to grow and learn and become miraculously well in just a few steps is bullshit, to put it frankly. Being forced to better yourself while a hurricane swirls around you is not going to work. You have to wait until the hurricane is over, until you can assess the damage and sift through the debris before you can calculate how you are going to recover. You don’t start recovery while the wind is still blowing.

Don’t ask me to find a silver lining in adversity. Don’t force me to be resilient. Don’t expect me to be move on from something that is still happening or find happiness in the midst of my sadness. Don’t talk about '‘post traumatic growth” when my world is still being shaken every day. We are in the middle of a national crisis. Covid is far from over. So many people are experiencing upheaval in their lives. You want to help? Tell us how to navigate our existing trauma. Tell us how to get through the coming months without losing our minds. But do not ask us to grow, to cultivate positivity, to be stronger than we can be. Recognize that someone going through a bad experience needs to go through all the stages of emotions their mind and body are pushing on them. Telling someone to stop feeling sorry for themselves, to move on to the recovery stage while they are still grappling with their feelings is toxic.

We are experiencing a mental health crisis in this nation unlike anything we’ve seen before. We need more help than “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” We need more than platitudes. I don’t know what the answer is, I just know it’s not in forcing people to move on from something that is still happening. Whether this applies to you pandemic wise, or in your personal life doesn’t matter.

Be kind to people. Offer to listen to them. Let a friend cry on your shoulder. Acknowledge their fears and anxiety. But don’t tell them to get over it, which is what all these self-help phrases amount to. Don’t tell them to move on. Kindness and validation go a long way, much longer than throwing a book or article at a problem.

We have a long way to go. Let’s be here for each other, even if that means just watching each other cry as we try to get through this.