There is no truth to people saying that trauma makes you stronger. The fact is, it doesn’t.

Trauma breaks you. It eats you alive and spits you back out in tiny pieces that you no longer recognize, and what is left are complex problems that you spend the next how many years trying to work through and heal from. That’s if you recognize that you need to heal and put in the work. Not everyone does.

I was only 5 years old when my abuse began. How can someone so young see the trauma they endured and grow strong from it? They can’t. I couldn’t. I was too young to understand anything. What happened to me changed how I viewed the world. How I viewed myself. I developed coping mechanisms that helped me survive. Those coping mechanisms were helpful, until they weren’t. Trauma doesn’t make you anything other than traumatized. It creates wounds that you never see on the surface. These wounds don’t bleed. But they certainly leave a scar.

It took my childhood and left a void that I have spent years trying to fill

Trauma didn’t make me stronger. It gave me trust issues. It gave me cPTSD. It gave me nightmares and flashbacks, and it gave me depression. It took my childhood and left a void that I have spent years trying to fill. It left me with very little understanding of how to regulate emotions. To be able to accept myself, I spent years putting on Band-Aid after Band-Aid, hoping for some kind of fix, never to find one until the fragile life I had built came crashing down all around me. My relationships were being affected by the trauma I was carrying around. I was self sabotaging. For me, the very light that you are born with was extinguished, so there were pieces of me that were lost and wandering in the dark looking for something—anything that would help me.

Trauma prevented me from leading a full, healthy life for far too long. I built so many walls and guard rails to keep people out and stop them from seeing who I was as a person that I felt suffocated inside the cell I had created. That didn’t make me stronger. It was making me weak. The strength came when one day I decided enough was enough, pulled myself out of the hole I had fallen into, and made it my priority to begin to heal. It was taking that first step and every step that followed, which has been a long journey of self-healing, that has made me stronger.

I’ve been on this self-healing journey for 10 years now, and I am still stumbling along my path, but I am making up ground and changing myself for the better. Trauma doesn’t make you stronger. It’s knowing you need help and then working on yourself to heal that makes you stronger. It’s not easy, and there are days that feel harder than others, but on the days that you see real progress, it adds another building block to becoming the best version of yourself that you can be.