Telling victims of trauma that they are "allowing something external to defeat you daily" comes perilously close to blaming the victim, doesn't it?
> What else can you even say?
Try: nothing.
You haven’t asked why so many people get stuck. Why is it so hard to move on? Why do some people manage and others don’t?
You have to genuinely want to know these things, not just ask to check a box or make people convince you with some kind of evidence.
"Letting it go" lands the same as "excise it from your life," which isn't possible. Your body and your mind were shaped by it whether you wanted them to be or not. You have to find a way to integrate it or you'll just keep fighting a losing battle for the rest of your life.
The perpetrator (or the situation, in cases of unforeseeable accidents) makes you a victim. You do not.
Many, many wounds are debilitating for life. Body parts don't grow back, and the fact that the scar doesn't hurt as much as the gaping wound when your arm came off doesn't give you the ability to use the arm. You have to learn how to function in a world designed around two-armed people even though you can't have yours back.
Neural pathways that didn't form correctly because your childhood lacked safety similarly aren't replaceable. There is no amount of thinking about it differently that undoes what happened.
You can never be a person these things didn't happen to. You can become someone who understands that they did happen in the past, that they changed you, but that they are not happening now.
You will always have to approach reality as someone who went through what you went through, but that isn't the same as living your whole life as though it's still happening in the present.
I apologize if my replies sounded unnecessarily oblivious or insensitive; it is true that each trauma and pain is unique and we can't possibly know what other people are going through.
No, I'm even very literally talking about things like an industrial accident that yanks your arm off, or a problem that arises in surgery that leaves someone you love without any of their previous mental faculties (see original post). I'm talking about major tragedies, major losses, major grief.
If you're talking about the death of your childhood hamster or something, fine, maybe we're talking past each other, but I'm talking about the kinds of losses where you are not the same afterward as you were before, and you have to do the hard work of learning how to be your new self in the world.
Wow. Now I know why there is so much resentment towards beneficial growth outwards from trauma.... dang is insane.
Serious question. I'm genuinely wondering if there's a number.
Now I know why you're enabling the other person at least.
The truth. That there is and never will be any solution.