By Jennifer Finch, M.A., LPC, NCC, SEP

October 6, 2024

If we had a crystal ball, maybe we’d inform our traumas ahead of time. Lay out a nice plush red carpet to detour around them. No broken hearts, no embarrassing moments at the office, no grief so thick it steals the air out of your lungs. But where’s the growth in that?

 

Real spirituality — I’m not referring to religion, especially the kind choked down your throat at birth that guilts you into a weekly show-up or else you’re burning for eternity — I mean spirituality (not in conflict or competition with religion), the kind that’s born out of real soul work, real shadow work, taking a deep, hard look at the depths of your inner core, often comes out of trauma. Trauma, in many, births and ignites a deeper soul quest within, setting us on the Fool’s Journey, seeking answers to life’s biggest, most profound, unexplainable, and existential mysteries. The kind of trauma that leaves you raw, vulnerable, and asking the bigger questions: “Why me?” “What’s the point?” “How can I go on?” “What is life and my purpose in it?”

 

The truth is, without suffering, we don’t open. No mud, no lotus. It’s tattooed on the psyche. This is an unavoidable truth. Life is suffering, according to the wisdom of the Buddha. Without the hard stuff, the painful words, the profound and gut-wrenching losses, we stay stuck—like a murky pond with stagnant water that starts to stink. We cling to our ego like a toddler clings to a tattered security blanket. If left unchecked, the ego would have us all stuck in the terrible twos—locked in the “me, me, me” phase of Eriksonian development, forever demanding that the world cater to our whims.

 

Enter today’s “trauma-bragging” culture, where suffering itself seems to have become a kind of currency, flaunted like an exclusive badge of honor. It’s as if we’ve collectively leaned into our pain, not to transcend it, but to wear it as a crown. Wound collecting status symbols reaching influencer heights. And if I sound like your cranky Gen-X aunt, well, that might be partially true. But before you scroll away in search of the next shiny thing to avoid facing your soul, stay with me. There’s a more nuanced middle path that isn’t as painful (or frankly as exhausting) as what I see happening in the world right now.

 

As a psychotherapist with over 20 years of experience working with trauma in the body, I have witnessed the depths of human suffering. The kind of trauma that knocks the wind out of your soul, leaving you wondering how anyone ever finds the strength to go on. The kind that shakes your reality so violently that no one would blame you for wanting to retreat from the world and live off-grid for the rest of your days. People are hard, life is hard—this is undeniable. But even more of the truth, is that these strikingly brave individuals don’t care if the path for healing is hard, they just want it to work. If they fall down seven times, they get up eight. They are not bothered by sweating the small stuff. And their lives, over all become simpler, more manageable, and easy with every step forward they take. They absolutely want to be free of trauma and find forgiveness in their heart. And they will climb rugged, steep, and untraversed mountains for this vaccine without needing to tell anyone about their arduous journey. They are untold soldiers. Persisting, seeking no glory, and filled to the brim with quiet strength and resilience. You might recognize these brave soldiers by the way they move—graceful and gliding through life like they’re carried by air itself. Smiling, cracking jokes, never losing sight of daily laughter, rich and magnetic. They radiate a joy that is so deep and infectious. But, this kind of joy doesn’t open that fully; it wouldn’t stretch so wide without its polarity—without the hard stuff—joy’s opposite—pain. It’s the pain they’ve walked through that allows them to feel this alive.

What I’m seeing in our current culture isn’t exactly the noble facing of hardship that leads to growth. No, it’s more like a select but popular group has taken the idea of overcoming difficulty and flipped it on its head—making life even harder for themselves in the process. It’s as if, instead of rising above the victim mentality, they’ve perfected the art of ridiculing it, all while becoming bigger victims themselves. There’s this odd irony in the air: a “see, I told you so!” tantrum that swells up every time life doesn’t cooperate, as if the universe should align itself to their hive mind or their Instagram posts and hashtags.

These are grown adults, or young adults, fully capable and no longer the vulnerable children they once were, yet still crying out, feeling abandoned. They forget that they have the strength to help themselves, the power to walk away from what no longer serves them. It’s not that life hasn’t been hard, but staying in the story of helplessness only prolongs their suffering. The real path lies in remembering their own innate ability to stand up, to take that next step. No one can do it for them. The most mature adult will recognize the hard truth that there is no calvary coming to save them. And the world isn’t here to coddle them either, but it’s also not as merciless as they imagine. The key is in seeing they already have what they need to move forward—if only they’d trust it. And stop demanding it.

Even Marshall Rosenberg, in his magnificent and brilliant nonviolent communication model, emphasizes that demands alienate and create resistance in those you want to connect with or from. He would suggest making requests with empathy, which would invite connection and understanding. He also poignantly does not believe “abandonment” is an emotion, as he states it automatically places a demand on someone else, other than themselves. This is not maturity, and this is not non-violent.

It gets to the existential root real quick when you ask someone, “Who are you without your pain?” And let me tell you, the silence that follows is deafening. Because, for some, the pain is their entire identity. They claim they’re walking a spiritual path, shouting it to the heavens—or at least to their social media followers. Yet the minute you strip away the pain, the struggle, the hardship… they’re at a loss. They’ve built a Self around suffering, and without it, they have no idea who they are.

And herein lies the real trap. Spirituality isn’t about wearing your suffering like a badge of honor or leaning into victimhood so deeply that it becomes your home address. It’s about transcending that pain. Sure, feel it—own it, even—but don’t become it. Because once you let your pain define your whole Self, you’re no longer walking the spiritual path. You’re just stuck, circling around the same loop, clutching your wounds like they’re the only thing holding you together. If you’re going to let your pain define you, then at least let it be the kind that fuels your rise—a sort of ashes-to-phoenix situation, where instead of just sitting in the wreckage, you use it to launch yourself into something better.

But my aim here isn’t to diminish the real, life-altering impact of trauma. Quite the opposite—I want to elevate our collective understanding of it so we can deepen our healing. What I’m pointing to is the way we’ve started using the word “trauma” for every bump in the road. The small humiliations, the moments when we’re called out on our nonsense, those everyday challenges that are part of being human. There’s a big difference between trauma that fundamentally shifts your existence and the discomfort of being told you’re wrong or that you need to do better. We must normalize the reality that not everything is trauma, that we all put our pants on one leg at a time, and that, sometimes, getting called out is just part of growing up.

 

According to Erik Erikson’s psychological theory, this “me-first” mentality takes shape in the second stage of development, age 18 months to 3 years: Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt.  It denotes that if the child is allowed to operate without any boundaries or guidance, their ego can become over-inflated. Children begin to assert their independence—strongly and often forcefully. Essentially, until a parent cannot tolerate it. The child has found a breaking point that works every time. Ideally, with guidance, children learn both self-reliance and respect for others’ boundaries. But without that guidance? Well, we get something that looks like the psychological equivalent of the “everyone gets a trophy” movement…leading to the “Can you stop saying that word? It’s triggering me” movement.

 

Without boundaries, children (and later adults) develop an unchecked sense of personal importance. They start seeing themselves as the center of the universe, which expands to a belief that they are the main character in everyone’s story, not just in their own. They may expect the world to cater to their needs and can become stuck in a self-centered mindset, where the focus remains on “me, me, me” well beyond the appropriate developmental phase. This unchecked autonomy happens in repeated benign ways over time, like a mother becoming a short-order cook at dinner time or offering lavish choices, like the entire Starbucks menu opus, to a two-year-old.

 

This can manifest in behavior that resembles an exaggerated form of egocentrism, where the individual struggles to consider others’ perspectives or needs. Empathy and cooperation are distant second thoughts if considered at all. In this way, they can become trapped in a kind of arrested development, where the desires for independence and autonomy become warped into a sense of entitlement and an inability to manage frustration when things don’t go their way.

 

If this is beginning to sound like a horoscope reading for Millennials, Gen-Z-ers, or Gen Alphas, I promise I am not singling anyone out. But I would encourage you to reflect on the psychological rift that’s becoming increasingly obvious across generations. There’s a tendency for younger generations, in particular, to mistake hyper-individualism, for empowerment. But, hyper-individualism is not a mature adult or differentiated state of being. What started as a much-needed focus on personal well-being has, at times, spiraled into a world where empathy for others is an afterthought, and personal growth is centered entirely around one’s own triggers and traumas.

 

When unresolved, it can creep into later developmental stages—affecting how we build relationships, make decisions, and navigate life’s inevitable messes. It leaves us emotionally under-equipped, stuck in a fragility where any pushback feels like an assault. Cue the inability to tolerate frustration, boredom, or loneliness (all part of a normal human experience walking a spiritual path) when the world doesn’t bend to meet every need.

 

We seem to have become so obsessed with padding our lives against discomfort that we’ve forgotten one of the core tenets of growth: discomfort is the catalyst.

 

But real change—meaningful, sustainable, societal change—requires something more than just self-care and the illusory avoidance of discomfort. It demands empathy, cooperation, and, dare I say it, a willingness to look beyond our personal experiences to connect with the broader human condition. Shutting down all past methods or canceling the old ways of being without understanding them doesn’t create the space for progress—it simply swings the pendulum in the opposite direction.

 

True growth, both personal and societal, doesn’t come from shouting down those who disagree or from silencing voices that don’t align perfectly with our own. It comes from creating space for complexity, for the hard conversations, for the humility that comes with recognizing that none of us have it all figured out.

 

And if we keep clinging to this notion that the world must shift to accommodate our every discomfort, and shape itself around our sensitivities, we miss the entire point of growth. The mud is here, but the lotus can be, too.

Reverse Psychology, Words, Triggers, and the Modern Dilemma

 

So, let’s talk about words. I get it. Words can be harsh. They can make us flinch, and they can even sting for a very long time—if we let them. But isn’t our growth, our expansion, found not in constantly being triggered by them but in transcending that reaction? Instead of silencing every word that triggers discomfort, why not lean into it, understand it and why it has a grip on us, and expand beyond it? We cannot carve up the English language into little pieces, delusionally avoiding every offense, and expect it to still function. We would end up with a hollowed-out husk of communication, reduced to something closer to grunting like Neanderthals than actually exchanging ideas.

 

This is the trap of fragility. The point of being “trauma-informed” is not to soften the world to the point of complete fragility. We cannot cocoon ourselves in illusory “safety.” The world, in all its messy, unpredictable, wild glory, is anti-fragile. And yes, it is unsafe, even though research has depicted that we live in the safest time in human history. I mean, seatbelts alone have saved countless individuals and made us safer on a day-to-day level. If you use your car daily, appreciate this significant and maybe understated safety.

 

I am advocating for the path of spirituality to also incorporate anti-fragility. We must rise to meet the anti-fragile occasion. Spirituality isn’t here to coddle us—it’s here to stretch us, to build resilience, to train us to hold both suffering and joy in the same breath. It is not about avoiding triggers; it’s about unhooking ourselves from them, walking through the world unshaken, unfazed, and, dare I say it, lighthearted.

 

Let’s take a look backward here to move forward. We all experienced firsthand the rupturing of our lives in 2020. The world felt like it was on fire. Between the pandemic, political unrest, and the Black Lives Matter movement, we were collectively holding a massive load of fear, hope, anger, confusion, grief, and a maelstrom of other things. I was teaching a compassion course online, and my students were so triggered by everything I said; every slide I carefully considered and chose to display, even images and videos of animals frolicking in a field, set someone off. It was as if the world had become too heavy for us to carry, and we were all rupturing under the weight.

 

And maybe we needed to rupture. Because in those breaks, in that discomfort, we have a choice: shrink or stretch. It’s like a forest fire clearing the way for new growth. It can hurt like hell, but it is necessary for our spiritual development. Without those moments, we don’t build the capacity to hold the hard stuff. We don’t grow. And if there is no growth, life is not spiritually meaningful.

 

At one point, early in 2020, it became so incredibly difficult to teach without a disruption, lessons in compassion were somehow causing harm, so, I stopped teaching the curriculum entirely and got down on a very human level. With reverse psychology in mind, I asked my class, “Let’s make a list of every single word that triggers you, or could potentially trigger you.” Within minutes, we filled the board with everything from ‘toilet paper’ and ‘vaccine’ appropriately contexed for the distorted time we were currently existing in. But then other words were being voiced and displayed on the board. Words like, ‘white roses,’ and ‘lemons.” Then I asked, “Can we respectfully hold space for everyone here, and we agree not to use any of these words for the remaining eight weeks of this course?” The Zoom room shifted as if a lightbulb went off. I sometimes just want to say, “Booyah!,” when reverse psychology techniques land.

 

One student said, “That’s impossible.” Another said, “It’s ridiculous, how would I know everyone’s personal words?” Exactly. You can’t control the world to that degree. But until our ego pops, somehow, we think we can. Or, more preposterously, we expect others to.

 

This ridiculousness has gotten increasingly….well, ridiculous.

 

Since then, I’ve attended numerous workshops, retreats, trainings—you name it—where participants correct the teacher mid-sentence. “Excuse me, could you not use that word? It triggers me.” Words like ‘pervasive’ and, recently, just this week, ‘bulleted points' triggered participants in a class. This type of demanding interruption brings the momentum of the class to a direct halt. As teachers and others participating, we must hold everyone’s potential trigger words, knowingly or unknowingly. This is a ridiculous expectation.

 

My sarcastic and instigating encouragement wanted to add in the scrolling chat ticker taping up the Zoom page; good luck in trying to get corporate America to respond to that request. Who is going to march up to Microsoft’s headquarters, go all the way to the top, and ask them to abolish the bullet point tab? In the meantime, we can all struggle with what we mean when we use those, you know, tiny circles or dots that list agenda items. I mean, come on, ya’ll, can’t we do better than this on a self-sufficiency level of healing our own selves? Can’t we tolerate on a mundane level that this is just what it is called—can’t a bullet point just be a bullet point? Life is complex and full of suffering, but we don’t have to add unnecessary suffering to it.

 

Eventually, we will squeeze ourselves right out of being able to live our lives and express ourselves freely. If one chooses to make everything a trigger or a tragedy, then everything will trigger them or be a tragedy. There is no spirituality in that. That is just self-sabotage.

 

Instead of wagging the finger at the outside world, attempting to control how others express themselves, let me suggest something a bit more radical: turn that gaze inward. When something triggers you, pause and ask, “Why?” Instead of bending the world to your sensitivities, what if you unhooked yourself from the trigger? Imagine the freedom in that. Pause. And maybe not interrupt a very benevolent teacher who is sharing a world of wisdom with you.

 

The truth is, the easier path isn’t to try and change everything out there—it’s to shift the things in here. Welcome the discomfort, the irritation, all of it, as opportunities for growth.

 

Now, let’s be clear. I’m not advocating for aggressiveness or ignorance. We should all be moving forward with more equanimity, less bullying, less patriarchal nonsense, and certainly abolish racist, sexist, or otherwise harmful remarks. We can halt any class without permission to stop bigotry, insolence, and willful ignorance. But there’s a slippery slope here. If we were to sit down and list out every single word that might trigger someone, we’d fill up a legal pad before lunch. Hell, we’d fill a ream of them before we even got through the appetizers.

Look, the world is not going to bend and soften for us. It never has, and it never will. Mother Nature is fierce, unpredictable, and frankly indifferent. The only thing we can control is our own resilience, our own conscientiousness, and taking the next right-action move. We can control our ability to bounce back, to let words pass through without clutching at them or swatting them desperately to go away.

 

Remember that old grade school rhyme? “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Well, it turns out there’s wisdom in that. It’s not the world’s job to cater to our fragility. Our spiritual paths shouldn’t either. We need to learn to stretch beyond our pain and discomfort and be big enough to hold everything — the good, the bad, and the incomprehensible. We need to train in becoming anti-fragile.

 

True spirituality is experienced through our growth, and our growth comes when we stop expecting the world to bend to our will or for people to follow our scripts exactly and start cultivating the strength to walk through it with grace. If we are a space that is so vast and grand, then triggers simply dissolve in that enormous immensity. And when that happens, you’re free. Free from the knee-jerk reactions, free from the fear of being destabilized by a single word, free from the demands we place on our teachers, our friends, and the world around us. This undemanding embracement and wide-open acceptance and tolerance of others open the doors for others to authentically want to connect to you.

 

In the words of Shantideva, “Instead of trying to cover the earth with leather, I simply wear leather sandals.” The world won’t bend to accommodate us, but we can cultivate the resilience to walk freely, no matter what thorns lie before us, whether in the form of words or wounds that arise on our path. Instead of demanding that everything be padded and cushioned for us, instead of asking the world to put leather under our feet, let’s reverse this as Krissy Pozetek suggests, “let’s put on our leather moccasins” so we can walk anywhere in the world. We do this hard spiritual work to walk the earth and hold life in all its beautiful, rugged, unapologizing complexity without being triggered by any of it. We can begin by seeing every discomfort is an opportunity for our growth.

 

In the end, true spiritual growth comes not from clinging to our wounds or desperately trying to trauma-inform everything to cushion our steps forward but from learning to live beyond our discomforts, suffering, and hardships—finding who we are not in spite of our pain but in the freedom of finally letting it all go.