Someone asks how things have been, and you hear yourself say, “It’s fine.” Sometimes that’s simply true. But sometimes it’s a sentence you’ve said so many times that you’ve stopped hearing it, and underneath it is a quieter one: it wasn’t that bad. After twenty years of working with people on the things that still disrupt their lives, I’ve come to think that sentence deserves some attention. It is one of the most common ways we avoid our own pain, and it is also one of the most understandable.
The framework I use with clients is called iZen, the internal Zone of Empathetic Navigation, and one of its first ideas is a deliberately simple one. In iZen, trauma is an event that is deeply distressing or disturbing to you. Not to a panel of experts, and not to the person at the next kitchen table. Each of us has our own threshold, and we don’t measure ours against anyone else’s. If an event negatively affected you, it counts. Later in the process, when I ask people to rate how distressing something is, the rating is based on your ability to manage it, and no one else’s. So when you tell yourself “other people had it worse,” you may be right, and it still isn’t the question. The only question is what happened to your system.
What actually happens in the body
It helps to know what the brain is doing while all of this unfolds. Information from the world comes in through the amygdala, the part of us that handles first-line reactions, including fight or flight. Most of the time the signal passes straight through to the prefrontal cortex, where we think, sort, and make sense of things. Sometimes the amygdala steps in before that happens and makes the call for us, which is wonderful when you need to jump out of the way of a car. The hippocampus stores the memory, though not like a hard drive. Memory is flexible and gets reshaped by new information every time we revisit it, which is the whole reason healing is possible.
Seen this way, a lot of things we dismiss as “not really trauma” start to make sense. Think about the trauma that has no villain: a car accident, an illness, something you only witnessed. Nobody meant to hurt you, so you assume there’s nothing to be hurt by. But trauma was never about fault. It’s about whether your system was overwhelmed, and a system can be overwhelmed by a stranger’s careless driving as surely as by a cruel person. In some ways it’s harder, because there is no one to be angry at and nowhere for that anger to land.
The same logic applies to the trauma of what didn’t happen. Maybe you had food, clothes, and a roof. In iZen we use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to find the source of a wound, and it’s a useful reminder that physical needs are only the bottom of the pyramid. Children also need to feel safe, to belong, and to be seen. When those needs go unmet, there’s nothing to point to, no event and no villain, and so people grow into adults who struggle to name what they feel or who quietly believe their feelings don’t matter. Hunger is easy to recognize. Being unseen is not.
The part of you that says “it’s fine”
Here is where iZen asks for a shift in how we think about minimizing. We call the frozen impression a memory leaves behind a Peace of you, a snapshot of who you were at that moment, still living inside it and unaware that time has passed. Each Peace has a job. The one that learned to say “it was fine” probably learned it at a time when saying anything else would have cost too much. Maybe it would have meant admitting that someone you love could not be counted on. Maybe it would have meant feeling something you had no room to feel. Minimizing kept you going. That deserves respect before it deserves any challenge.
This is also why siblings can leave the same house with entirely different childhoods. You were different ages, with different temperaments, and you were handed different roles. One of you kept the peace while another took the blame. One escaped into school and one sat alone in a bedroom. When a brother or sister says “it wasn’t like that,” they may be telling their truth honestly, and it still doesn’t cancel yours. The Peace holding your memory is a snapshot of you in that house, not a record of theirs.
The doubt gets heavier when the person telling you it wasn’t that bad is the one hurting you. Abuse isn’t only physical. It can be someone checking your phone every night, controlling the money, punishing you with silence, or insisting events happened differently than you remember until you start to wonder whether you can trust your own mind. Those patterns shrink a person slowly, and they teach you to minimize before anyone else has to. If you feel like you’re walking on eggshells in your own home, trust that feeling. If you are in that situation and need to talk to someone, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
People who live this way are often asked, “Why didn’t you just leave?” Leaving can mean children, money, housing, and real danger, since the period around leaving a volatile relationship can be among the most dangerous. It also means walking away from love, hope, and years of building a future together. iZen offers an image I find helpful here, the Trolley Problem. Five people are tied to one track and one person to another, and you hold the lever. Whichever choice you make, you can probably understand why someone else might have chosen differently, and you would never call them stupid for it. The Peace that stayed, or the one that left, made a choice with the knowledge and beliefs you had then. Those can change. The choice deserves the same empathy you’d offer anyone standing at that lever.
That empathy matters even after you’ve gotten out. When harm and affection come from the same person in cycles, the brain gets hooked on the relief of the good moments, a response to fear mixed with reward rather than a sign of real love. It’s called a trauma bond. Missing someone you left doesn’t mean you should go back, and it doesn’t mean you were weak. It means you’re healing from something that got its hooks in deep.
Asking the question gently
If any of this sounds familiar, the invitation is not to decide right now how bad it was. It’s much smaller than that. One of the foundational directives of iZen is that we stop keeping secrets from ourselves about why we react, and it asks us to do that from loving curiosity rather than judgment. So just notice whether “it was fine” is your default, and then ask yourself, quietly, whether it really was. You don’t need to answer. You only need to stop treating the question as off limits.
If you want to go further, iZen starts with preparation, not plunging in. The first step is learning a handful of coping tools, some that help when emotions are overwhelming and some for when you feel numb, so that you can enter this work from a calm place and carry that calm into your day. From there, you map the people in your life with a family tree, the events with a timeline, and the feelings with an emotion wheel, because many of us simply haven’t been given the words. Each issue gets a rating for how disturbing it feels, and we work from the lowest up. No one has to start with the hardest thing, and iZen is a process, not an outcome.
You also don’t have to do it alone. I offer telehealth therapy in several states, and you can reach me through In One Peace. If I’m not licensed where you live, that’s okay. I’m happy to help you find a trauma-informed therapist close to home, because whatever you’ve been calling “fine,” you deserve that kind of support.