Why 'Just Forget and Move On' Is Dangerous Advice When Discussing Trauma and Disability

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Chanel Miller says trauma's like a superpower, in that it can allow us to feel all the feelings of a certain time, at a moment's notice.

This is certainly true for me.

People think babies and toddlers don't remember.

But I do.  

SELF-SOOTHING:

I was two years old.  Just awake from my nap.  A blanket on the window, in lieu of curtains.  My sister, still asleep in her crib across the room.  Because no one had yet come to get me, I occupied myself.

Having spent half my life (at that point) in a hospital, I had learned to self-soothe.  My early coping resembled that of kids who spend their early years in orphanages.  (A hospital, like an orphanage, is an institution.  Neither place is a home.)  

I rocked.  

I hung onto the bars of my crib and I rocked my body back and forth, liking that the action brought me closer to my sister - if only for a second.  I liked the motion.  I liked feeling the smoothness of the top of my crib railing.

I rocked harder and harder and harder.

FALLING:

Suddenly, there was no crib.

I was falling headfirst down, down, down until I crashed onto the floor.  I landed with my head in a bowl.  My entire body was stiff - CP activated - but it went beyond that.  Veered into a toddler freeze-response.  I sobbed not from pain - because none registered - but complete terror.

Someone came and picked me up.  Said, "You're okay," and carried me from the room.  Away from my sister who was now awake and scared, having seen me fall.  

All we both wanted was each other.

COPING:

I was in the living room, settled on a lap because CP means I couldn't sit unsupported yet.  My heart was still pounding.  My body still stiff with fear, deep in a freeze response.

[Image: Me, around age 2, on a brown striped couch]

"Here, Toni.  Play with the ball," someone urges.

I usually love my rubber ball with the orange Care Bear on it.  The smell and the smoothness of it. But right now, I don't want it.  Balls won't help.  Balls are nothing.  I know that the time for crying is all done, because we're in another room.  Because I can hear the big people tell each other:

"Just distract her, she'll forget about it.  If we make a big deal it will be worse."

Except it was already worse.  I had just fallen headfirst out of my crib onto my head.  I was hurt and confused.  Why were they trying to act like if I got to play with a ball everything would be okay?  I was mad, but didn't show it. I played with the ball like they told me, eventually slipping into dissociation to cope.

Giving me a ball to play with just felt so...hugely insufficient.  I felt ignored and insignificant.  Aware that they assumed I didn't understand them, and / or that I would not remember this.  Even though I didn't have the verbal ability to express myself, I understood them perfectly.  And I understood the expectation was for me to move on and not think about it anymore.

I slept in a crib until I was nearly four years old, for safety as much as anything else.  

Now, though, when I was awake, I stayed still, still, still lying down and taking comfort in the crib sides high around me.  I coped in other ways, picking up where my cassette tape of nursery rhymes had left off and letting the well-loved songs play inside my head.  I looked around at the Sesame Street poster on my wall.  My Big Bird lamp.

I stopped rocking, the trauma of that fall trapped inside me.

HELPING:

The notion to urge disabled people (kids, teens and adults) to just move on when something traumatizing happens is deeply harmful.  While it often comes from a well-meaning place, it's also ill-informed.  Because it ignores the fact that, if our parents or caregivers are nondisabled, we come from two different worlds.

While falling, for example, may mean temporary fear and pain for a nondisabled child, for a toddler like I was, it no-doubt nudged the lifetime of situations where I was powerless to stop overwhelming pain. 

Similarly, if a disabled child comes home from school and shares that a classmate has been ableist, telling them to 'just forget about it and move on' is only going to alienate them more.  While this advice is possibly helpful for nondisabled people in certain circumstances, it ignores the fact that experiencing ableism is experiencing abuse.  Most visibly disabled people experience ableism whenever we go out in public.  This constant onslaught is traumatic.

So, what can we do to help each other?

I can only speak for myself, but what I needed in the moments after I fell (and beyond them) was comfort.  I needed to be held and soothed and reassured that it was safe to have feelings and safe to talk about them.  I needed words for what I was feeling.  I needed adults around me to talk to me about how I was feeling (yes, even at two!) so I could figure it out.  

I needed to be in control of when I moved from expressing my feelings to playing and processing what had happened at my own speed.  Kids process though play, and repetition.  Often, disabled kids are discouraged from "dwelling" on difficult things.  This ignores the vital step we might need to take in processing what happened to us.  We need to not be rushed into being okay before we are ready.

We can know that trauma does not always exist in the moment a toddler loudly crashes to an uncarpeted floor from their crib, when they are loudly sobbing.  Sometimes, trauma exists in their stillness.  Their compliance.  Their quiet.

While it's definitely not helpful to see our grown-up loved ones in tons of distress over what happens to us, we need you to be a safe place for us to have our feelings.

So we know that feelings are okay to have.

It won't make us feel sorry for ourselves.

It will arm us, and make us even more able to cope as we grow.

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