Dismissing And Diminishing Your Past Keeps You From Healing.
Dismissing And Diminishing Your Past Keeps You From Healing.
Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • January 9, 2022
SUMMARY
You might find yourself quietly dismissing or minimizing painful childhood experiences by telling yourself ‘it could have been worse’ or ‘I turned out fine,’ even as those unprocessed wounds continue to shape your nervous system and sense of safety. Dismissing and diminishing your past is a psychological defense that keeps your nervous system stuck in survival mode by refusing to give your true feelings the attention and space they need to be processed and integrated.
Dismissing and diminishing are defense mechanisms where you downplay or minimize the significance of your painful experiences to avoid emotional overwhelm. This is not the same as practicing healthy self-compassion or choosing to focus on the present moment; it’s a subtle but powerful way your nervous system stays stuck in survival mode. For driven women like you, telling yourself ‘others had it worse’ or ‘I turned out fine’ might feel like strength or perspective, but it actually blocks healing by denying your true feelings the attention and respect they need. This pattern keeps your nervous system carrying unprocessed pain, even when you don’t consciously realize it. The first step to healing is learning to hold your past with honesty and compassion — both the difficult truths and your resilience — so you can finally move beyond survival.
You might find yourself quietly dismissing or minimizing painful childhood experiences by telling yourself ‘it could have been worse’ or ‘I turned out fine,’ even as those unprocessed wounds continue to shape your nervous system and sense of safety.
Dismissing and diminishing your past is a psychological defense that keeps your nervous system stuck in survival mode by refusing to give your true feelings the attention and space they need to be processed and integrated.
Healing begins when you allow yourself to hold the full truth of your experience with honesty and compassion, creating space to reclaim your worthiness beyond survival and step into a more embodied, authentic relationship with your history.
I sat with her, across from her in my therapy room, the coffee table between us, the box of tissues in reach.
DEFINITION RELATIONAL TRAUMA
Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.
Relational Trauma Recovery
Relational trauma recovery is the ongoing process of healing from psychological wounds sustained within close relationships — typically in childhood, but sometimes in adult partnerships or other significant bonds. Recovery is not linear, nor does it mean forgetting or excusing what happened. It means developing a different relationship with your history, expanding your nervous system’s capacity for safety, and gradually reclaiming the sense of worthiness and connection that early wounding took from you.
She told me what her mother had done to her when she came home with anything less than A’s.
SUMMARY
Dismissing or minimizing your difficult past is one of the most common ways that healing gets blocked. For driven, ambitious women, there’s often a powerful inner voice that says ‘other people had it worse’ or ‘I turned out fine’ — but comparison and dismissal keep the nervous system carrying what it never got to process. Your past matters, and naming it honestly is where real recovery begins.
How her mother would scream at her, telling her she’s a stupid cow and a failure.
She told me about the way her mother would make her – a 9-year-old – walk over to the canister in the kitchen and choose the wooden spoon for her spanking (she would try to choose the smallest spoon, it tended to bruise her less).
She told me about how, when the beating was over, she would go hide in her closet for hours. Standing because she couldn’t sit on the bruises. Until she knew it was safe to come out again. When she knew her mother would have had enough wine to make her nicer, easier to be around. Less enraged about her B’s. She told me how this happened every single month when the report cards were released. She told me all of this, without emotion, looking out the window towards the UC Berkeley campus, a few blocks away from my offices. Unknowingly dismissing her past.
“I am so, so sorry that happened to you.” I said, tears welling up in my eyes and a pit in my stomach. “That was not okay. No child deserves to be treated that way by their mother, not by anyone.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” she said, cooly, “That’s just the way things were. It could have been worse.”
“It’s not okay,” I said again emphatically. “You didn’t deserve that. That was abuse.”
“No, abuse is when parents molest their kids. At least that didn’t happen to me. She just wanted me to succeed. It made me work harder in school. It’s probably why I’m professionally successful now. It’s not that big of a deal.”
Still, she looked out the window, not meeting my eyes, speaking with some distance, some detachment from her story. As if she were reciting the grocery list she had plugged into Instacart that morning.
This conversation isn’t a real conversation that happened.
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Details have been changed. But it is an accurate amalgamation of countless conversations I’ve had over the years.
It’s a kind of conversation where, when finally ready to go back in time and speak about details of their pasts, my therapy clients dismiss and diminish their own childhood trauma histories, their own abuse, the suffering they endured as they recount their past.
It’s a conversation that slowly but inevitably allows us – as therapist and client – to talk about the way they dismiss and diminish their past, and why this is so important to recognize and to change.
If you – if any part of you – can relate to this experience of excusing, dismissing, minimizing, explaining away the abuse you endured, today’s essay is for you.
Please join me to keep reading about why you may dismiss and diminish your past, why it’s important to stop doing this, and how we can support you in changing this.
Why is dismissing or diminishing your childhood trauma actually a psychological defense mechanism?
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ― William Faulkner
Why do we dismiss and diminish our pasts?
Simply put, the acts of dismissing and diminishing our past are psychological defense mechanisms.
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All psychological defense mechanisms are, ultimately, unconscious attempts and strategies used by an individual to help protect themselves from what can feel like intolerable feelings and thoughts should they face their reality.
Excusing, dismissing, minimizing, explaining away, diminishing, rationalizing, justifying… however and whatever descriptor you wish to give these attempts, all of them are ways in which we attempt – albeit poorly – to protect ourselves from pain.
Like with all psychological defense mechanisms and other ways we organize ourselves to cope with and survive traumatic experiences, doing this, at some level, is very wise.
Why?
Because as children, we’re objectively quite powerless. Really at the mercy of our caregivers and circumstances.
How do children learn to dismiss their own pain as a survival strategy?
And children will do whatever it takes to organize themselves (their feelings, thoughts, behaviors, personalities, needs, and wants) to be what they need to be in order to protect themselves in their circumstances.
And one way that can help children and adolescents cope is to dismiss and diminish what happens (and happened) to them.
Rationalizing, justifying, dismissing, and diminishing the pain they are suffering (and the emotional pain they have about it) helps mentally and emotionally protect them so that they can get through the rest of the time they have to endure living with their abuser.
To fully acknowledge how terrible and hard their circumstances are while they are still trapped inside of the situation, with five, eight, ten years to go before they can get the hell out and leave… it would be too much.
And so they learn to explain away, to dismiss and diminish, to do whatever it takes to avoid feeling the enormity of feelings about their circumstances.
But, inevitably, after the child grows and leaves the home of their abuser, those same psychological defense mechanisms may no longer serve them as adults; instead, they may harm versus help them.
What’s the real harm in dismissing or minimizing your past trauma?
“My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.” ― William Golding
It keeps us from feeling our pain and grief and anger about our past.
And in order to truly heal, to process our experiences, make sense of them, and work towards psychological integration, we must feel our feelings about our past.
There’s a famous (albeit cliché) saying in therapy: We cannot heal what we cannot feel.
The longer we continue to use dismissal and diminishment (or any other psychological defense mechanism) to guard ourselves from feeling the feelings that are inevitably inside ourselves, the longer we will delay and deny our healing process.
But, of course, I understand personally and professionally how incredibly scary and painful it can feel to imagine actually allowing yourself to really feel your feelings about the past.
Why is it natural to want to avoid pain — and why does it ultimately keep you stuck?
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Plus there’s often a strong and common belief that if we actually do start to allow ourselves to feel our feelings about the past, it will feel like a proverbial Tsunami, that we won’t survive the full strength of our feelings, and/or that once we start to feel our sadness and anger, it will never end.
And yes, sometimes when we start to feel our feelings about the past, the force of our feelings may be overwhelming.
But a good trauma-informed therapist will help you to titrate your feelings so that they don’t overwhelm and re-traumatize you so that they feel tolerable.
And what’s also true is that our grief about our pasts – our sadness, anger, rage, regret, confusion, despair – may take some time to fully process.
But it’s still necessary to appropriately feel our feelings about our past and to begin the grieving process – for the childhood we had, for the childhood we did not have and will sadly never have – in order to help ourselves, as adults, have a beautiful adulthood despite our adverse early experiences.
How do you start to stop dismissing and diminishing your past trauma?
“But pain’s like water. It finds a way to push through any seal. There’s no way to stop it. Sometimes you have to let yourself sink inside of it before you can learn how to swim to the surface.” ― Katie Kacvinsky
I want to circle back to the top of this essay when I described the vignette of my client in my office.
And I want to be clear about something. I do not believe it’s helpful at all to force someone to confront their past. Or their feelings about their past. Before they are psychologically ready to do so.
I personally work from a phased, titrated, trauma-informed approach that necessitates stabilizing clients. Psychologically and logistically preparing them for their grief and processing work. Before we start to help them fully feel their feelings about their past.
Only when and if a client feels ready to feel their feelings about their past, will I gently confront them in the way I did in the above vignette.
And when and if a client can acknowledge that she is ready to start to feel her feelings about her past, only then will I design interventions to support her in doing so.
What therapeutic tool helps people move from dismissal toward honest acknowledgment?
The interventions and therapeutic tools I use are numerous and beyond the scope of this essay to detail. (Plus I customize therapy and attendant interventions differently for every client.) But I will leave you with one tool I use. Just in case, after reading today’s essay, any part of you feels ready and able to challenge any dismissal or diminishment you may do of your own past.
To practice this tool, I want you to place your hand on your heart (really – this part is important). And I want you to say to yourself, out loud, the following:
“What happened to me wasn’t okay. What happened to me wasn’t normal. What happened to me should never happen to a child. I have a right to feel sad and angry about what happened to me.”
Notice what happens in your body as you make contact with yourself in this way. Hand on your heart. And as you verbally acknowledge your past and how it was not okay.
Track your somatic sensations. Notice your thoughts. And if – at all – you quickly want to jump away from the exercise or explain it away as being ridiculous. Pathetic. And useless.
Stay just a little bit longer, hand on heart, breathing deeply, stilling yourself to track your experience.
And if feelings start to rise up, allow yourself to feel them in tolerable amounts. In allowing yourself to feel what surfaces for you, you will support your healing process.
This is one tool of many I use with my therapy clients to help them begin to reduce their dismissal and diminishment of their past so that they can begin to more fully feel their feelings and finally move into the grieving, processing, and sense-making that’s required to support them to fully heal.
Breaking Through Dismissal in Trauma-Focused Therapy
When you tell your therapist about childhood beatings while staring out the window, voice flat as if reciting a shopping list, insisting “it wasn’t that bad, at least I wasn’t molested,” you’re demonstrating how brilliantly your psyche protected you from unbearable truth—but therapy helps you explore the question was my childhood really that bad and understand that minimizing keeps you from healing that’s only possible when you finally feel what couldn’t be felt then.
Your trauma-informed therapist recognizes these defense mechanisms as survival strategies, not resistance. They understand that as a nine-year-old choosing the smallest wooden spoon for your beating, you had to minimize the horror to survive. Acknowledging your mother’s cruelty while trapped for eight more years would have shattered you completely.
The therapeutic work involves gently challenging these protective narratives when you’re psychologically ready. Your therapist won’t force confrontation but will note when you say “she just wanted me to succeed” about abuse that left you bruised and hiding. They’ll hold space for the contradiction between your words and the tears you don’t realize are falling.
Through titrated processing, you learn to feel in manageable doses. Perhaps starting with placing your hand on your heart, saying “what happened wasn’t okay” and noticing the surge of protest, the urge to retract, the fear that acknowledging pain might destroy you.
Most powerfully, trauma-focused therapy teaches that feeling your long-defended feelings won’t annihilate you but will finally free you. Every time you stop explaining away abuse and start honoring your truth, you reclaim parts of yourself that learned to disappear for survival.
Wrapping up.
And now I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:
Did you relate at all to today’s essay? Are you prone to dismissing or diminishing your past? What’s one tool, thought, behavior or practice that has helped you to stop doing this so that you can feel your feelings and heal?
If you feel so inclined, please leave a comment below. Our community of 20,000+ monthly blog readers can benefit from your wisdom.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
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). Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers. American Journal of Psychiatry.Perry, B. D., &#
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). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.van der Kolk, B. A. (
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I’ve always been told to ‘just get over it’ or ‘look on the bright side.’ Why is it so hard for me to acknowledge my past hurts, even when I know they affect me?
It’s common for driven, ambitious women to internalize messages that encourage minimizing pain. This can lead to a habit of dismissing your own past experiences, believing they aren’t ‘bad enough’ to warrant attention. However, true healing begins when you give yourself permission to acknowledge the full impact of your history, no matter how subtle it may seem.
I feel like I’m constantly striving for perfection and still feel empty. How could my past be influencing this, even if I don’t consciously think about it?
When past emotional wounds or neglect aren’t fully processed, they often manifest in present-day patterns. Your drive for perfection might be a way to compensate for old feelings of inadequacy or a subconscious attempt to earn the love and validation you missed. These unaddressed experiences can create a persistent sense of emptiness, regardless of external achievements.
I consider myself self-aware, but sometimes I wonder if I’m missing something. What are some subtle signs that I might be dismissing or diminishing my past trauma without realizing it?
Subtle signs can include chronic people-pleasing, difficulty setting boundaries, persistent anxiety, or a tendency to intellectualize emotions rather than feeling them. You might also find yourself downplaying significant events, rationalizing difficult relationships, or feeling disconnected from your own emotional responses. These are often protective mechanisms that, ironically, prevent deeper healing.
I want to heal, but revisiting painful memories feels overwhelming and scary. How can I start to acknowledge my past without getting completely stuck in it?
Starting small is key. Begin by gently noticing how past experiences might show up in your current reactions or beliefs, without judgment. Consider journaling, mindfulness practices, or seeking support from a trusted therapist who can guide you through processing these memories in a safe and contained way. The goal isn’t to dwell, but to integrate.
Is it possible to truly heal from childhood emotional neglect or relational trauma, even if it wasn’t ‘severe’ compared to others?
Absolutely. Healing isn’t reserved only for those with ‘severe’ trauma. Emotional neglect and relational wounds, even if subtle, can deeply impact your sense of self-worth, attachment style, and ability to form healthy relationships. Acknowledging and working through these experiences is crucial for your emotional well-being and can lead to profound shifts in how you experience life and connect with others.
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Dismissing and diminishing trauma are psychological defense mechanisms that helped you survive childhood. When you're powerless and trapped with an abuser, fully acknowledging the horror would be unbearable. These strategies protected your psyche by making the intolerable seem tolerable enough to endure.
This comparison keeps you from feeling necessary emotions about your own experience. Trauma isn't a competition—your pain is valid regardless of others' suffering. Minimizing prevents the grief work essential for healing and keeps you stuck in protective patterns that no longer serve you.
While fear of emotional "tsunamis" is valid, a trauma-informed therapist helps titrate feelings into manageable doses. You won't be forced to feel everything at once. The work involves gradual, supported processing that doesn't re-traumatize but allows healing integration.
Try this practice: Hand on heart, say aloud "What happened to me wasn't okay, wasn't normal, should never happen to a child." Notice what rises—somatic sensations, thoughts, urges to dismiss the exercise. Stay present with whatever surfaces in tolerable amounts.
Because unprocessed trauma continues affecting your present through defense mechanisms, relationship patterns, and nervous system responses. Dismissing your past doesn't make it disappear—it keeps you from integrating experiences and developing the self-compassion necessary for healing.
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