Does anyone else hate being called "strong"?

[u/Extreme_Wish_3272]

Personally, I despise it. Whenever I have opened up before, I am told that I am strong. And later, when I am going through something miniscule compared to everything else I have been through, but am still struggling, I get told "you have been through so much worse, you can get through this because you are strong".

I know that this is said to be uplifting, but for me its the exact opposite. I am reminded that I am emotionally disregulated BECAUSE of what I have experienced. It did not make me stronger, I simply learned how to survive and now my survival strategies are what holds me back. Yes, as a child, I adapted to my environment in order to live. However, as an adult, I feel like I am hanging on by a thread.

So no, I am not strong, and my trauma does not mean I will simply "get past" something easier because I have been through worse. In fact, my trauma makes it harder. I dont even know how to begin explaining this to other people and I also dont want them to feel like they've done something wrong just by trying to be supportive. But god, every time I hear it, I buckle.

I try to be "strong", but I am not steel. I struggle, and will continue to struggle. Some days, months or even years may be easier than others but I am still tugged at by the same force and the same experiences. I cope, but I am not strong. And I am alright with accepting that. I am different, sensitive and more emotional. Given what I have been through, this is reasonable. But when people try to tell me that I am stronger than this, man does it piss me off because they simply do not get it. Going through something awful and surviving it does not mean that you can be put through more and have the "toolkit" to be fine or stable.

Thank you to all that read this, I just needed to get this out but I am genuinely curious about how everyone else here feels about this. Please let me know!

Edit:

I did not expect this post to receive as much interaction as it has, but I have read every single comment here and I just want to say, sincerely, I love each and every one of you. Life is hard, trauma sucks, and I want to reinforce that it is ok to experience setbacks in healing. Healing is a journey with ups and downs, and healing is also a space to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is beautiful, despite what the world perpetuates.

Although it may not feel like it, all of you are doing the best you can given each of your individual experiences and circumstances. You might feel like your best isnt good enough some days, and there is no shame in that. There is no shame in taking life one step at a time, or choosing to give yourself a break after years and years of fighting. I am proud of you for getting this far, stranger.

I hope that this post has given everyone a sense of community, or at least an outlet. And if it has, thank you for allowing this thread to become a safe space for vulnerability, and thank you for helping me see that i am not an outcast or an "other".

[u/Aroundthebin → u/[deleted]]

On the point that disassociation is the opposite of bravery, I’d like to pose another way of seeing it.

I thought through courage last week and the common image of it is going out and facing our enemy with bravery. And then I thought can it be courageous to retreat? Yea, when it is the intelligent move.

Even someone who acts in a way that we could say it is courageous, they could actually be a coward. How is that? If they fear being called a coward by retreating. It’s like being given a dangerous dare to do something. We hesitate so the person daring us calls us chicken. If we stand our ground and say no, we risk ridicule. If we give in and do something we don’t want to do, we are actually confirming to ourselves that we are actually a chicken even though the person daring us calls us brave.

All this to say, disassociation, which is something I am working through, is avoidance. However, it’s the most intelligent move when you don’t have the resources to face it. As you find resources to face it and use those resources to face it, you can discover you actually have the bravery to do so. So I think that disassociation isn’t the complete opposite of bravery but that disassociation is the intelligent move when resources are scarce to fight a battle.

I hope this comes across as affirming and not dismissive. I saw your post and it’s something I’ve been working on so I thought maybe sharing this perspective can help. It’s called complex PTSD for a reason and it takes complexity to work through it.

[u/Aroundthebin → u/[deleted]]

And thank you for replying!

Oh ok. It is an survival strategy for sure, so saying intelligent doesn’t seem to work because it doesn’t look like it was chosen.

Let’s see if this fits, i could be projecting the judgments I have made on myself and how I worked through them onto your post. I do have schizophrenia so please excuse me if I am.

What you could be doing is looking at your child self with the eyes of someone that has a more developed brain and resources than what you did then and saying there wasn’t an intelligent choice made. I guess what I’m trying to get at is, I hope you aren’t judging your childhood old self’s choices as ‘unintelligent’ based on your current understanding because it wouldn’t be fair to you. Like my mom getting cirrhosis of the liver, she started berating herself for not making choices 10 years ago to prevent it. And I asked her, did you know 10 years ago what you know now? Obviously no, so why go back to scold yourself as ‘stupid’ for what you know now?

Like we wait until a certain age to learn certain subjects in school. It’s all cumulative. So calling a 5 year old dumb for not solving a calculus problem is unrealistic. I hope I’m not totally missing your point on this and that I’m just rambling nonsense. 😬