Every person has experienced some kind of trauma in their life. But when people experience trauma, the vast majority of people cope with it. Coping is very different from healing. But these coping mechanisms give people the illusion that they are ok. This is compounded by the fact that society itself not only condones and supports coping, but also has a real blindness to trauma. The result is that we live in a society full of people who are traumatized, but whom don’t see that they have experienced trauma. A society full of people who need healing, but who don’t know that they need healing. Let’s take an in depth look at the main reasons why most people don’t see and recognize their traumas and in this same vein, why they don’t know they need healing.         

Let’s start with why people don’t see or recognize their traumas. It may seem strange that we don’t see or recognize our traumas, given that traumas are such a stand out part of our lives. But there are several key reasons why this is the case. 

1. This first big issue begins with the faulty definition people have of trauma. When most people think of trauma, they are thinking only of the things they judge as really big. Things like being sex trafficked or experiencing a high-speed car accident in which you lost someone you love. But the reality is, trauma is any situation that causes you distress, which is not resolved. This means that trauma is not only these things we judge as big and classically associate with the word trauma. It is also things like a baby being weaned and having no way to know why he was suddenly cut off from his source of contact comfort, nourishment and abundance. It is the chronic experiences over the course of a person’s childhood where they were made to feel they don’t fit in and are not welcome. It is the pattern of a person not having their individuality and authenticity recognized because they were expected to be exactly what their parents wanted them to be. It is the loss of the family cat. It is the emotional intimacy that was never given. It is every experience where we went into distress and that distress was never resolved, we simply adapted to it. Most people have no conscious awareness of the dramatic effect that every trauma had on their life, including the ones that they judge as “little” or don’t even recognize as traumatic. When a trauma happens, we make that painful thing that we have experienced mean something. And that in turn alters the way we think, the choices we make and the things we do; our very life.  
2. Normalization. There is a reason why in cultures which practiced ritual sacrifice, no one was mortified at the sight of a person being killed in a ritual ceremony. There is a reason that no one thought anything was out of order when in the 11th century, no one used forks because they were seen as blasphemous. There is a reason that no one thought anything of a pregnant woman smoking and drinking alcohol in the 1950s. The reason for all this is that it was “normal”. Human beings tend to acclimatize to, and then accept, whatever situation we find ourselves in. This is even more true when we are children.  Whatever we experience as common in our environment, becomes our idea of normal. What is normal?  Normal is whatever conforms to a standard, is usual, typical or expected. The thing is, normal is not a measure of health. This is why the famous quote by Krishnamurti “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” is so important.  Normal can become a blinder through which we see the world.  It can be a way of staying in denial, remaining unconscious and never being able to heal or progress. Many of the things that had a profound negative or even positive effect on you, you may not even recognize because you saw them as “normal”. If you see something as normal, it will not stand out to you as anything of interest or anything notable. You may completely overlook it.  
   But this tendency can go much further than the human tendency to not realize that something is out of alignment when it is ‘the norm’.  It can in fact serve as a negative coping mechanism.  When we normalize something, we can avoid the pain that might be involved with seeing something as not right and not good. For example, imagine that in our childhood it was common and typical for both parents to be away from home all day working. Because it was normal, we don’t see the emotional neglect we suffered. By normalizing it, we don’t see that emotional neglect had a profound effect on our psyche. For example, we don’t see how it has led to the pattern of selecting unavailable partners as an adult and ending up so depressed and lonely that we are on psychiatric meds. Because it was ‘normal’, we don’t see how unhealthy our societal structure is, so we do nothing to change it. We don’t have to see that our parents hurt us, so we don’t have to acknowledge any rupture between ourselves and them. We can follow in their footsteps, thus validating what they did with us (which establishes closeness). But the problem is, the effect is still there.  We just can’t attribute it to a cause, much less the correct cause.  
   In this same vein, something that goes hand in hand with normalization is minimization.  To minimize something is to downplay the significance of it.  When you use minimization against yourself, it is a form of self-deception. You do it to avoid acknowledging and dealing with negative emotions and painful beliefs associated with them by reducing the severity and negative impact and importance of the events that gave rise to those emotions and beliefs. You also do it to avoid interpersonal conflict. It allows us to rationalize and justify and negate. When it comes to normalization, our favorite way to minimize is through comparisons.  Things like “I went through the usual stuff… unlike those other kids who came from alcoholic homes or those kids in other countries working in sweat shops”.  
   Normalization makes the process of becoming aware of, acknowledging and changing a pattern impossible.  There is an expectation that if something is normal, if ‘everyone is doing it’ or if ‘that’s just the way things are done’ then it must be right or good. This tendency to equate what is normal with what is good or right can be very, very dangerous.  There is also an expectation that if something is normal, it will not have a negative effect on someone. Just because something is normal does not make it right or good.  And just because something was or is the norm, does not mean the negative impact of it somehow doesn’t exist. The things you experienced absolutely effected the trajectory of your life regardless of whether they were common practice or normal or not. The things you would at face value write off as insignificant can be the very traumas that are ruining your life today. 
3. We learn to frame things in our own awareness the way that other people tell us we should or demonstrate that we should. If other people don’t say that what we are experiencing is trauma and don’t behave as if what we are experiencing is trauma; and even worse if they outright invalidate that what we are experiencing is traumatic, we tend to adopt their way of seeing it. This can range all the way from a person adopting the constant narrative of “We have the best family” and therefore tuning out any experiences that are incongruent with that narrative. All the way to full blown gaslighting and mind control abuse. We’ve already talked about normalization. Well, normalization can also be used as a social control tactic that a person uses to desensitize another person to something that might cause distress in order to get them to accept it or agree to it. This is how the normalization of deviance can come about. It might be tempting to think that normalization as a control tactic is something only sociopaths or deviants or abusers use with victims. It isn’t. In fact, parents love to use this tactic to justify their own behavior. Many people confront their parents about certain things that occurred, only to hear their parents retort, “Every parent did that. In fact, you got it so much better than most kids”. When we experience something as a trauma, but the way someone else behaves invalidates that estimation, it causes us to doubt our estimation of reality. And many of us cope by simply adopting whatever external narrative is demonstrated to us. This is why you will hear so many people who grew up with their distress being met with the response “well, that’s just the way it is!” be the ones to respond to their own distress and other people’s with “that’s just the way it is!” 
4. It can be scary to acknowledge trauma because of what acknowledging trauma can mean for us and for our lives. We live in a world where needing healing is still stigmatized. Society still puts pressure on everyone to be put together if not perfect. It is tragic, but for most people, seeing themselves as someone who needs healing means acknowledging that they are not perfect. They are not put together. They are not good or right. This makes people feel bad about themselves, fear other people’s judgement and feel like they are exposing themselves as weak and inferior. People also hate feeling powerless. And to admit that we need to heal means admitting we can be hurt by something or someone else and that we were. 
   On top of this, most of us build the stability of our lives on a narrative and on beliefs about ourselves, other people and about the world. Acknowledging trauma can completely destroy that narrative as well as those beliefs, throwing us into the feeling of unsafety and instability. Of course, it can easily be argued that if a person’s narratives were not built on something real, the stability they perceived was actually false. We may have to face and accept things that are so painful and scary that we doubt our ability to do so. Denying trauma can be a powerful way to put distance between yourself and an overwhelming experience. Thus, an attempt to avoid a reality collapse or system overload. 
   Acknowledging trauma can also disrupt our relationships. For example, if we acknowledge trauma that occurred within our family of origin, we may find ourselves running right into the experience that family systems are very resistant to change. We may end up being ostracized by our own family, having a really hard time having a normal Christmas dinner with everyone. We can face a whole host of social consequences as a result of acknowledging trauma. Or, we may go down the road of acknowledging trauma only to discover as a result of that process that the current relationships we have are not actually authentic to us or good for us. And so, we may face a deep sense of aloneness and also fear that our entire social sphere must change. And this is extremely difficult for a social species, which human beings are. We are terrified of losing connection and coherence with the people in our lives. 
   Acknowledging trauma has an uncanny way of changing things about our life. If we start to heal our trauma, it goes without saying that those things that stem from our trauma, will also change. And people are terrified of and therefore very resistant to change.
5. Memory of traumatic experiences are often suppressed. The subconscious mind takes over control of anything that interferes with the conscious mind.  But there are times when the subconscious mind takes over things for the sake of survival, and this mechanism that benefits us in the short-term can harm us immensely in the long-term. For example, if your parents got a divorced when you were young, you might have suppressed the memory of hiding under the porch listening to them scream and throw things at each other, leading to one of your parents being gone in the morning, as well suppressed the memory of having decided at that minute that it’s dangerous to love anyone because you’ll lose them. If the pain you felt about this matter interfered with your life enough, the subconscious mind might own that memory and belief. You would then have no conscious awareness of your original experience and the belief associated with it. You would simply observe that the minute you get too close or intimate with someone, you pull away and end the relationship. As a grown person, you’re only aware of the symptom; the root cause of that symptom remains deeply buried in your subconscious mind. In this way, your subconscious mind takes over your thoughts and emotions, and when situations are extreme, it can take over entire memories that are a threat to your conscious mind.
   This is especially true when children grow up with attachment figures who are harmful to them. The cognitive dissonance associated with “living with the monster” is so great that you actually could not go on living in the atmosphere of that much terror. So, by suppressing the memory of the abuse, you maintain your attachment to the adult who is harming you and thus ensure your survival. All this being said, the mechanism of suppression when it comes to memories, is a big reason that we don’t see or recognize our traumas. 
6. A lot of traumas are about what isn’t there, rather than what is there. When we think of traumas, we think of bad things happening. We rarely ever think of things not happening that we needed to have happen. We rarely think about things like unmet needs, trauma that involves what wasn’t done, rather than what was done. But trauma that involves what isn’t there, rather than what is, accounts for so much trauma in today’s world. It’s the understanding that you didn’t get. It’s the protection that wasn’t provided. It’s the presence and togetherness that you didn’t experience, so you were alone. It’s the way you were not valued. It’s the unseen dysfunctional social dynamics that caused you to suffer as a child. This is often why you may have no memory of anything that could cause you to be so “not ok”. And may even tell yourself that you must be mentally ill. If a person has never experienced something, they don’t even know what they are missing. This is especially the case when it comes to emotional neglect. And a person can have everything they would ever need on a physical level. They could be born to the richest family on earth and be completely neglected, deprived, abused and damaged on an emotional level. People have a hard time imagining that what isn’t there could be a huge source of trauma. But it works the same way that it does on the physical. If you take a little sapling tree and deprive it of enough sunlight, fail to give it adequate water and put it in poor soil, what you will see detrimental changes happen to it and it will die, all because of what wasn’t there. The same is true for people. But there are a great many factors that determine whether a physical human will thrive or not than just food and water and shelter. And without those things, a person will be traumatized and will fail to thrive. 
7. People’s coping mechanisms mask the need for healing. This is easy to see with classic coping mechanisms. For example, if a person uses denial to cope, they will walk around quite functional but in a state of denial. But this denial will mask the reality of what has happened from their own mind and from onlookers. Or for example, say that a person uses workaholism to cope. If this person lives in a society that values career success, this person can simply absorb themselves in work, which will feel better than confronting the feelings that they escape through work. And no one will notice this dysfunction. Rather, they will commend this person for it. 
   Coping mechanism and adaptations mask the need for healing even better when they are related to personality. People create adaptations to their personality to cope with trauma. These adaptations are designed to make a person safer. As a result, they give people the impression of improvement. People mistake this for healing. When it is not healing. For example, let’s imagine that a trauma a little girl experienced was the trauma of her femininity being rejected because her parents wanted a boy. She may cope with this by becoming a tom boy. Dressing in boy clothes, playing with boy’s toys and playing sports, acting strong. Basically, acting like a boy. We can’t say that this is healing. What would be healing is for her femininity to be embraced. Instead, her tom boy behavior is a coping mechanism she adopted to deal with the distress of her femininity being rejected. But coping in this way will give her the sensation of improvement and decrease the pain a bit because she is likely to get a better reaction from her parents by trying to become more like what they wanted her to be. This little girl is also going to identify as a tom boy. We confuse ourselves with our coping mechanisms and adaptive behavior. This girl is likely to grow up seeing herself as masculine. She won’t see a need to heal from it because she will think that how she is, is just a reflection of who she really is… when who she really is, is much different. In this same vein, people really think that their coping mechanisms and adaptations work for them, even when they don’t. We see no need to change or heal what we think is working for us. Think of the boy who grew up in a society that values independence and shames people for dependence. In order to avoid the social consequences, he may become hyper-independent. He will think this independence is a good thing and go on to profess the importance of independence and shame other people for dependency. He sees no need to heal from this trauma around dependency because he thinks hyper-independence is a good thing. And he lives in a society that taught him this and therefore agrees. There is no need to heal what a person thinks is good and is right and is working for them. 
8. People, as well as society at large confuse healthy with functioning. Most people don’t see the need to heal if they are able to function. Ie: Able to maintain a job, able to be in social environments and act normal, able to complete tasks, able to maintain self-care routines etc. The reality is, there is plenty of dysfunction that is still considered functional. And there are plenty of people who are able to function, who are deeply traumatized and who need healing very, very badly. We cannot and should not use functionality as the barometer for whether someone is ok or not. We should never use functionality as the barometer for whether someone is mentally and emotionally healthy. We should never use functionality as the barometer for whether a person needs healing or not. Alas, people do and society does.
9. I shouldn’t have to tell you this but to generalize, people are really, really unaware and really, really unconscious. Most people have not dedicated themselves to the path of awakening, awareness, self-awareness, seeking truth and seeing reality. It just isn’t a priority for them. As a result, they tend to be closed minded. They don’t really think through things. They don’t stop to consider cause and effect, much less ripple effects. They stay stuck in their subjective perspective to the degree that they don’t consciously observe things, including themselves and consciously analyze things. They don’t question enough nor do they question deeply enough. A lot of people prioritize feeling good over knowing the truth. Many people don’t expose themselves to different thoughts, different experiences and ways of doing things, which would put the things they have normalized into question. And even when someone does commit themselves to the path of awakening and awareness, it is a path of progression. It is a skill that one hones over time. Anyone on the path of awareness can tell you there is so much they become aware that they were ignorant to, no matter how many years they have been at it. But when a person is not dedicated to awareness, there is so much dysfunction and so much pain that is not even seen. There is so much that a person is totally ignorant to.       

It's time to de-stigmatize healing. Especially given that all people need it and given that unwanted experiences (including traumas) provide the fertile ground for personal expansion and are therefore part of every person’s life. And hopefully now you understand why most people don’t know they need healing, even though they do… they really, really do.