By acknowledging that you have been traumatized, you are already confronting it. Sometimes, that’s all the confronting we can handle, and that’s ok.
Cowardice is something else. My parents, for example, were probably cowards. I will never know if my parents were truly bad people, or if they themselves had been traumatized to the point of no return, but either way, they did not confront their relationships with themselves and others at any point, nor did they try to change them.
Cowardice is refusing to accept that your interpretation of circumstances might be different than others. It’s taking your anger and sadness out on the people you have power over, and moving through the world in a way that makes you comfortable, rather than seeking to improve life generally, for everyone including yourself.
Being afraid doesn’t make you a coward, refusing to acknowledge or move to overcome that fear does. You’re acknowledging your trauma, and you’re working to be in a place where you can overcome it.
Our brains protect us by trying to ignore things that are too horrible to comprehend. We’re not machines that can just process data, we are complicated living things, and our emotions are paramount to our whole system. Dealing with those horrible things takes tools that we may or may not have.
You’ll be ready when you have the tools to deconstruct the trauma and reconstruct your internal response to it, and you have to take it slow because you have no idea what your brain has lovingly hidden from you.
It helps to think of it like stretching. When your muscles are super tight and sore, you have to stretch them slowly, and carefully, to find the places that hurt. If you go straight into deep lunges or exercise, you can hurt yourself and make whatever was wrong even worse. With regular, patient stretching (I really recommend yoga by the way), our muscles relax, our bodies lengthen, and even just walking around feels a little better.
When working through trauma, you have to be slow and consistent, even if all you’re doing is reaching down to touch your toes, and not even managing to touch them yet, the equivalent in this metaphor to acknowledging the trauma, tomorrow you’ll be able to reach a little further, and eventually your palms will be on the ground.
You can do this, and it will take time. There’s no weakness in that. It’s just how this goes.
Our modern generation is more aware of trauma than any before, and I think it can be especially frustrating to be some of the first people to have to do this work. There aren’t consistent timelines or public acknowledgement like there are with broken bones, but there’s still healing that has to happen.
It helps me, sometimes, to remember that I’m already better off than my grandfather who suffered from ptsd from the war. We share an issue - a pain that can hardly be comprehended and is even harder to express to the people who love us. He didn’t have the knowledge that I have, though. He didn’t have the internet, or therapy, or the mental scope of the world that we have now. All he had was silence and liquor. This knowledge is our biggest tool. We know that we’re not imagining it, that others are struggling too, and that we can heal, even if it takes a while.