Therapy speak has become our generation’s dialect, even if most of us have never spoken to an actual therapist. We laugh, we exaggerate, we repeat these words without thinking. But somewhere in the middle of the jokes and hyperbole, the word “trauma” starts to lose its edge. Without realizing it, we’re stretching the word so far that it has lost its shape.
Our generation has been told that our struggles aren’t up to par with those who came before us. In our parents’ eyes, we have it easy — we have cell phones, high-speed internet and AI study tools, so why would we be struggling? In a survey of 1,675 10 to 18-year-olds, 29 percent of participants stated that they felt misunderstood by their parents when it came to personal, school or mental health struggles. Additionally, 91 percent of participants stated that they value what their parents think about them.
It’s not our parents’ fault that they were raised in a time that minimized mental health and carried that into their adulthood and, often, parenting styles. But the overwhelming message for us is that we just want to be heard and understood. Now, with the rise of mental health awareness, we’re sprinting in the opposite direction — naming everything, analyzing everything and giving ourselves permission to feel everything.
And that’s not a bad thing. Self-awareness is good. Emotional vocabulary is good. But when everything hurts on the same scale, nothing has any real emotional weight.
Social media algorithms love vulnerability, especially when it’s digestible, aesthetic or explained in 30 seconds by someone with good lighting, whether or not they’re qualified. Creators talk about “trauma responses” and “attachment wounds” like they’re discussing the weather. A video with soft lighting and lo-fi music will tell you that your fear of sending long texts is rooted in childhood emotional neglect. Another will explain that your best friend’s late arrival is “activating your fight or flight response.” Everything feels clinical, diagnosable, symmetrical. Suddenly, regular discomfort becomes pathology.
And the craziest part is that it almost feels comforting. There’s a relief in having language for our inner mess, in hearing someone explain a feeling you didn’t know how to name. We want our emotions to matter, and we want our struggles to be seen. But another part feels a bit like wearing someone else’s sweater — oversized, comforting, but not really ours to claim. If everyone is traumatized, then is anyone?
When trauma becomes a punchline or a placeholder for “this sucked,” it quiets the experiences of people who survived the kind of pain that truly fractures a life. People walk this campus carrying a pain that shapes their body and mind, the type that lingers even when they want so badly to move on. When we casually call a minor inconvenience “trauma,” does it make the word so soft that it fails the people who actually need its weight?
There’s a quiet risk in all this casual labeling — the possibility that we begin to define ourselves more by our wounds than by our strengths. We turn our pain into personality, our struggles into aesthetic and wear “trauma” like a name tag we’re afraid to take off. Negativity becomes this protective little shield — it’s easier to say “I’m traumatized” than to say “I’m scared I’m not good enough.”
This constant exaggeration traps us in the worst version of our own story. Shifting toward positivity doesn’t mean pretending everything’s fine — it means being honest with ourselves. It looks like saying “today was hard, but I handled it” instead of “today destroyed me.” Let yourself celebrate small wins without a sarcastic disclaimer! Optimism isn’t cringe, and wanting better for yourself should never be embarrassing. Sometimes the real courage is dropping the joke, telling the truth and talking about your life as if it will turn out okay.
Still, I don’t think the answer is to police the way people talk. I don’t think any of us try to minimize real trauma or redefine this language that so many people need. I think we’re trying to understand ourselves in a world that doesn’t always give us time to pause and think. We’re struggling to identify our feelings and put them into words after spending years pretending we didn’t have any.
Trauma is real. Trauma is heavy. Trauma changes people. And using it for everything, every disappointment, every discomfort, makes it harder to see the difference between the things that shape us and the things that simply sting for a little while.
Personally, I’m trying to be more intentional now. When something bothers me, I try to ask myself how I’m truly feeling. Is this a deep wound, or is this just life being inconvenient? Sometimes I’m hurt or overwhelmed. Sometimes I’m just having a bad day. And, yes, sometimes, something genuinely shakes me, leaving a mark. But labeling every bruise doesn’t help me heal — it just makes me feel more fragile than I actually am.
There’s power in naming your pain, but there’s also power in distinguishing it. Not everything that hurts has to be catastrophic to matter. Not every struggle has to sit under the umbrella of trauma to be real. Maybe that’s what our generation has to learn next — not just how to feel, not just how to talk about our feelings, but how to understand them with nuance. To give ourselves space to hurt without assigning our experiences the heaviest possible label. To let language help us and to hold our pain with honesty, not exaggeration.
Clarity isn’t cold — it’s compassionate. It’s the difference between telling yourself “I’m never going to get my life together” and realizing you’re just exhausted, stressed and probably need a break. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for ourselves is admit that we are not broken, but just human.
Mia Kirisits is a sophomore majoring in psychology.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the staff editorial.