[smeej]

This is...so oblivious to trauma that it's hard to respond.

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.

[dartharva]

You are perhaps describing prolonged abuse, but we were talking about typical one-shot tragedies or losses one has to endure. They don't maim you for life unless you choose to hold on to the pain extensively. Though it is true that "moving on" by itself does involve you adapting to the new normal, which can concur to the notion of "integrating it to your story".

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.

[smeej]

> You are perhaps describing prolonged abuse, but we were talking about typical one-shot tragedies or losses one has to endure. They don't maim you for life unless you choose to hold on to the pain extensively.

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.