Why I Minimize My Childhood

"It wasn't that bad" is something people say when they're about to describe something that was actually pretty bad.

I've worked in psychiatric emergency settings long enough to hear people describe genuinely frightening things and immediately follow it with "but it wasn't that bad" — before I've responded at all.

This isn't a criticism. Minimizing what happened to you is something you learned, probably early, and it made sense at the time. When you're a kid, you need the adults around you to be okay — more than you need to accurately assess whether your experience is painful. So you adapted. You found ways to make it smaller, more manageable, less threatening to the people you depended on.

You became good at it. Maybe so good that you minimized things without even realizing you were doing it.

There are a few patterns that tend to show up here. The comparison trap: whatever happened to you, someone had it worse, which means what happened to you doesn't count. The intent loophole: they didn't mean to hurt you, they were doing their best, so it's not fair to call it what it was. The time collapse: that was so long ago, you've moved on, it would be strange to still be affected by something from childhood.

All of these are logical. None of them are quite accurate.

Your nervous system doesn't care about your parents' intentions. It doesn't care that someone else's experience was harder, or that decades have passed. It cares about what was actually experienced, and it keeps the record whether you consciously access it or not.

Minimizing often co-exists with a vague but persistent sense that something isn't right. Anxiety you can't trace. A difficulty trusting people. Relationships that follow the same painful arc. A feeling of not quite deserving things. You've maybe gotten good at functioning — showing up, managing, performing fine — while something underneath has been quietly running the show.

One of the most disorienting parts of unpacking childhood experience is realizing that you can understand why something happened, forgive the people involved, see their humanity, and still acknowledge that it hurt you. Those things aren't in conflict. Understanding doesn't cancel impact.

You're allowed to look at it clearly.

If you've been wondering whether your experience is "enough" to warrant taking seriously, nothing happened, but I'm still struggling covers the other side of this — what the absence of something looks like as a source of real impact.

— Angela DeGiaimo, LCSW | NY State of Mind Therapy Telehealth therapy for childhood trauma | New York State