Trauma or Drama?

Trauma and drama are two very different things.

Trauma is the violent, terrifying things that happen to you that you had no direct control over. Trauma’s impact is profoundly real and can’t be ignored. Trauma is pathological — meaning it must be treated as an injury.

Drama is how we react to things — especially situations or conditions that we created or attracted. Drama is psychological — meaning it is mostly in your head.

Here’s the great biological practical joke … our primal brain can’t tell the difference. Once fight/flight/freeze is triggered, its all treated as a threat response by our ancient mind. This mechanism is designed to protect us. But it also gives us a bias for seeing problems where they don’t exist.

It takes an intervention of wisdom and awareness to discern between the two. So here’s a helpful metaphor for that …

Drama is a mosquito in the tent. It captures all of your attention but contains essentially zero actual threat. We are flooded with how we feel about that *@#* mosquito! And that feeling determines our behavior. Pretty soon we’re swatting, flailing, swearing and the “problem” rarely gets solved. Because the real issue is our reaction, not the mosquito.

Trauma is a grizzly bear trying to get into the tent. This is a real and present danger! The very thing that our primal mind was designed to handle. Do I fight? Do I run? Do I freeze? What’s interesting is that you don’t feel fear — at least the kind of fear that you’re used to. Trauma survivors report being intensely aware and calm during an attack (the fear came later in the form of PTSD). Again, this is by design to clear space for the most effective survival response.

So try this …

The next time something feels like a problem, threat or otherwise negative disruption of your life, ask yourself if its a mosquito or a grizzly bear. Unless you are dealing with some heavy shit, 99 % of “problems” are mosquitos. In that case, re-train your mind by giving it some action to take (thinking and fretting is not action) — belly breathing, take a walk, do some push ups. If you do this, you will be much more capable of handling the grizzly bears that inevitably show up in life.