How Minimising Your Pain Is a Trauma Response

A common phrase I hear from women doing inner work is, but my childhood wasn’t that bad. A statement that often comes just before describing their behaviours of people pleasing, emotional shutdowns, anxiety, or feeling “stuck” in adulthood.

Minimising your pain is a survival strategy especially if, growing up, your feelings were invalidated, compared, or dismissed. Perhaps when you cried, someone told you to stop being so dramatic, or when you were hurting, someone reminded you others had it worse. Over time, you learned to downplay your pain. You convinced yourself it wasn’t serious. You learned to silence your needs.

As adults, this minimisation continues. You stay in toxic relationships believing that it could be worse. You avoid therapy because you don’t have real trauma like others do. You dismiss your exhaustion, your sadness, your resentment and continue telling yourself you are ok or that others have it much worse than you and that you should just be grateful.

EFT shows us that trauma isn’t only about what happened. It’s about how you felt in response to what happened and whether you were able to understand it or had the support to process it. You don’t need a dramatic backstory to carry emotional wounds. Sometimes, it’s the quiet but consistent lack of emotional safety that leaves the deepest marks.

When we tap into these feelings the ones you’ve dismissed or pushed down, we can find that they’ve been waiting to be heard. The parts of you that were dismissed or invalidated are still holding the grief, anger, and confusion because as a child you were unable to understand or process these emotions. Using EFT Tapping these parts can be validated with compassion, gently giving a voice to the pain that was never witnessed. Allowing you to reconnect with your emotional truth.

Minimising your pain might have kept you going but it also kept you disconnected from yourself. Through EFT, you begin to reclaim your right to feel, to matter, and to heal not because your pain is the worst, but because it is yours. And that is enough.