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@Jeroen said:
Well, there is trauma and Trauma. Some traumas are so strong they shape people’s lives and intrude into the present. What most people have are background traumas, also important because they represent the most traumatic experiences of your youth but not intrusive. Both can be worked with.

I guess I think a different term for the small traumas of life would help. Like discomfort or anxiety, etc. Using the same term for meaningfully different things waters down the more severe traumas, it also elevates the stories we tell ourselves about the degree of hurt we experience.

I dislike the term ‘power’ because it’s actually not that, it just feeds the ego. I think presence is a better word, or perhaps groundedness.

In my metta practice I added a phrase, may all beings be confident, grounded and resilient in the face of life's hardships. I hadn't thought to use the word power, but all of those imply a sort of personal capacity. Though perhaps like the word trauma, power has different connotations depending on how its used and a different word would be better. How do you feel about empower? Or is that too close? Strength? Some connotation of having confidence that one has the internal resources to engage and overcome difficulty.

Well, there is trauma and Trauma. Some traumas are so strong they shape people’s lives and intrude into the present. What most people have are background traumas, also important because they represent the most traumatic experiences of your youth but not intrusive. Both can be worked with.

I dislike the term ‘power’ because it’s actually not that, it just feeds the ego. I think presence is a better word, or perhaps groundedness.

For a while I've had a sort of instinctive reaction against some of the ways trauma is being used and talked about today. This 5 minute segment of The Psychology Podcast gets to the heart of my objection. Its not that trauma doesn't exist, its that it gets presented in a way that traps people in a victim narrative, rather than teaching them to grow and learn.

...By going deep into that (trauma) as a victim, they're disempowering themselves and that's a problem, you know. Because then they're not accessing their inner core strength and belief in themselves...

In addition to that a quote of the day on the Insight Timer app came up that related to this.

By telling yourself the story that you've been traumatized rather than you've overcome or grown creates a narrative in your mind of what the world is like. A specific example that sticks in my mind was in the Dan Harris interview with Gabor Mate, where he talks about the trauma of his youth leading him to strive and become a therapist. Its a true story, but is that story he tells himself more true than a story of gratitude about your success in life and a desire to let go of the suffering that striving causes any less true? And which story in the present lends itself to a happier more meaningful state of mind?