No Scale for Sorrow: Reclaiming Our Souls in Trauma Discourse

Recent years have brought a flood of discourse on trauma: personality disorders, PTSD, and addiction. We cannot escape the battle of validating our experiences online, in our families, or our doctors’ offices.

Society upholds its moral superiority by deciding who deserves to be in pain and who has truly suffered from it.

We fail to see that the human soul is not so easily organized.

Ironically, this is the same black and white thinking that drives diagnosis for labels such as borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and the systemic discarding of individuals who suffer from addiction.

There is no scale for sorrow, and no system can determine the nature of rupture in the human soul.

Trauma is not about what has happened to us but how we have perceived our reality and what our body believes it must do to survive.

The Labels that Divide Us

As a society, we tend to rank trauma through labels. This moral sorting has infected not just culture, but clinical diagnosis itself. The DSM is opened, the ‘appropriate’ boxes checked, and a decision is made.

If you check the boxes of PTSD, you are a survivor of tragedy. If you have used substances to survive, you must be the cause of your own difficulty in life. Likewise, if you are labelled with a personality disorder, you become the cause of suffering, not the consequence.

If we were to accept that each of these categories is simply a different branch of the same tree, we could no longer ignore the dysfunction living within us.

We could not say: “Well, at least I’m not an addict.” Or “He’s a narcissist, it’s just who they are.”

“The most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our inherent worthiness. We are hardwired for connection, but when we feel shame or fear, we begin to other people — to see them as ‘those people’ instead of ‘us.’”

A child may have all their physical needs met, but experience emotional coldness from a parent or caregiver. On the outside, the child is thriving, the family is functional and whole. But the body begins to internalize the experience: My needs are too much, I must minimize myself to receive love. This is the birth of devouring self-hatred. The fuel needed to drive addiction and co-dependency later in life.

The Cost of Cure

This has laid the foundation for a pharmaceutical pipeline that equates healing with symptom suppression.

This view of mental health relies completely on defining suffering through the clinical lens of disease. Despite limited evidence for its long-term efficacy, faith in this model has infiltrated almost every aspect of our shared humanity.

This is not to say that medication is useless, or should be avoided; it can and does save lives. However, when suffering is reduced to a brain disease or a biological defect, we are left soulless. Our pain is pathologized and our stories erased.

“Despite widespread faith in the potential of neuroscience to revolutionize mental health practice, the biomedical model era has been characterized by a broad lack of clinical innovation and poor mental health outcomes.”

We mistake silence for healing, and we suppress the deeper pain which remains trapped in the body, unspoken and unresolved.

When Identity Becomes Diagnosis

It can feel exhilarating to scroll through TikTok and hear your own story, spoken through another’s voice. Those of us who have suffered trauma, whether easily recognizable, such as abuse or less validated trauma, such as emotional neglect, tend to feel deeply alone throughout most of our lives.

The recognition and hope of community are so powerful that we begin to identify completely with our psychiatric labels.

We cling to the idea that the label is the key to community, to finally being seen.

This impulse is deeply human and not something to be ashamed of. But moving it into the conscious part of our minds will help us regain control of our personal narrative.

The cost of community through this psychological model is that we become identified with disease and disorder. We begin to separate ourselves from ‘the healed’, as if such a thing exists.

There is no ‘healed’ human, only flawed people dedicated to growth.

No matter how validated we feel, it takes only seconds to see the hatred and judgment that lives within the comments of the same videos in which we felt accepted for the first time.

One side escapes accountability by placing complete blame on the borderline, the narcissist, and the addict. The other side feels forced to defend their values and their worth by claiming ‘it’s not all of us’, ‘some of us can change.’

Each side remains trapped in a loop of judgment and blame, unable to see the wounds which birthed the dysfunction.

Through our search for connection, we remain separate and stagnant.

Making Room for Our Humanity

This process requires an internal conversation with the voice of disorder that we have pathologized within our psyche.

“Symptoms are not enemies to be destroyed, but messengers to be heard.”

The biopsychosocial model of psychology seeks to view the entirety of the human experience. It focuses on how each aspect of our lives shapes our patterns and behaviours. However, one key aspect of our humanity remains unseen: the part of us that searches for meaning.

Just as we seek connection, we are wired to make meaning of our suffering and experiences. This is the part in each of us which goes beyond what clinical terminology can name. Our essence, our soul.

The biopsychosocial-spiritual model honours:

• The body’s signals (bio)
• The mind’s patterns (psychological)
• The relational, systemic, and cultural contexts we live in (social)
• And the intangible, unmeasurable aspects of being that make us human (spiritual)

The Voice Within the Wound

Our nervous system makes unconscious decisions based on cues it receives externally. Our minds study patterns and feel safe operating within them, even when they cause destruction later in our lives. Society continues to separate itself into categories to avoid being discarded by the larger community.

Through this, we isolate our soul to the shadows of our unconscious, filled with fear of our own inadequacies.

Even in exile, our soul continues speaking, it asks that we return to it again and again.

We can feel this is our emptiness, our search for belonging, fear of abandonment, and the dysregulated nervous systems that control our daily lives.

Integration is not perfection; it is not reaching a whole, healed, or untraumatized version of ourselves.

It requires that we sit with the wounded parts and past experiences that flood our minds and bodies and say: I see your pain. I hear your fear, but I decide who I am and who I become.

It is only through this acceptance that we can begin to trust ourselves again. This conversation gives us language, acknowledgment and freedom to make choices that truly align with who we are and who we want to become.

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

This is how we reclaim our lives and begin making decisions based on autonomy and empowerment rather than fear of inadequacy.

The path forward is not a cure to our diseased psyche, but room for our symptoms to speak their fear and truth before acting solely from our trauma.

 

 

 

 

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Previously Published on substack

 

 

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