Even though I had a master’s degree in counseling psychology for six years and had worked solely with trauma survivors for five years, I had no clue that I myself was a trauma survivor. How was this possible? It’s simple: it was my “normal.” My type of trauma (little-t) did not result from a singular, unusual event or situation but developed gradually from a consistent, everyday set of adverse and abusive circumstances—circumstances that, given their consistency and predictability, I experienced as “normal” or as “just the way things are.”
