To think moving as a teenager was traumatic

[Fizzyducklings]

When I was a young teen we moved from a small town where I’d grown up. It was all I knew, I had lots of great friends I’d grown up with. I lived in an amazing estate where we would call for each other and spend hours playing outside. My best friend lived across the road. I was a very happy, confident child.
One day, I came in from school, my brother had been crying. DM turned to me and said not to make a big deal of it like he had but we were moving to a city, it was devastating.
We moved a few months later. I was bullied in my new school and it took months before I made any friends. My parents never let me visit my friends from home (with no traffic it’s a 30 min drive away!!!) My siblings got to go as they were older and would get the bus - I was not allowed to go with them. I lost touch with all my friends from home over the years except my best friend who I managed to keep in touch with, although we drifted and only see each other once every few years now.

It came up in conversation today and my DM said it wasn’t traumatising and I was fine. I said I wasn’t fine but it’s in the past now so no point in falling out over it now. But looking back through the lens of an adult and a mother myself I could just never imagine going about such a big move like this in such a harsh way. I have social anxiety and used to use alcohol as a means to cope with it and be confident around people, I often wonder how I would have turned out if we didn’t move at such a sensitive time…

I understand that people suffer much worse and it’s very much a first world problem but I think it’s wrong for my mum to just dismiss it and not acknowledge how it would have been difficult. AIBU?

And so many aren’t, but the ultimate impact is the same. No need to be so rude. It adds nothing.

OK well clearly you don’t agree, but if I put it bluntly, that’s not normal language around an event, perhaps you’ve had too much counselling then and just disappeared into your own vortex of affirmed feelings. You are still affected by an event when you were 6? There has to be more going on.

At the end of primary school my parents moved me and my older brother to another country. We were enrolled in a school where no one had ever met an English person before. Many didn't know where England was. Settling in and making friends was hard. I just tried to make the best of it.

12 months later we moved back to our hometown. By then I'd missed the first year of secondary school. The temporary country was not as good educationally so I was behind in maths and science and hadn't learned any French previously. A mean girl in my secondary school targeted me and bullied me for the first term. I just studied to get back to where I needed to be in the subjects I was behind in and tried to keep away from the bully.

As others have said back then parenting wasn't so kidcentric. My mum would probably say a year abroad was a great experience. Not for me it wasn't. But now it's decades ago and I have made the best of life using the lessons I learned then. I think that up to the age of say mid twenties you can blame some of your issues on your parents and upbringing but, later on in life you have to take responsibility for your own actions and not getting the help you need to put the childhood traumas behind you and working to minimise the scars they leave. Good luck with moving forward.

I would have felt exactly the same as you OP. I never moved as a child & my Mum is still in my childhood home (infact, I'm actually there right now, staying over). I moved away as an adult for a few years but am now back only about half an hour away. It's always been incredibly important to me to know my roots & I'm still friends with people from primary & secondary school. For me, I would also have found a move traumatic. I think it's completely subjective to each individual; some can cooe with it better than others. Up until my divorce, I couldn't imagine moving ftom my marital home as I lived it but, actually, I did end up moving out (admittedly only a few miles away) and am far happier in my new house. However, as a person, I hate change & I know I wouldn't have cooed well with an enforced move as a child. What was the reason for your move?

I am still affected, in that I do believe I'd have been a completely different person if that event hadn't have happened. Events develop into the next event, using my case as an example-I didn't want new friends, I was happy with my own=avoided making friends. Was bullied as a result=lowered confidence. Didn't trust the people I thought loved me any longer=going for the wrong relationships.

Roots form growth. Of course we're affected by past events one way or another.

If I had have stayed in my usual school, I wouldn't have turned to food for comfort-wouldn't have had an unhealthy relationship with food ongoing. Wouldn't have had no confidence and gone for the wrong connections-which obviously can result in further trauma and danger and abuse.

I don't believe anyone can have 'too much' counselling unless they have a developed dependency (which I do not have) but I have not had counselling myself for a long time, and the last time was around a totally different, unrelated issue.

Please do be mindful that 'not normal language' can easily mean 'not normal for you' or 'not the language you would personally use'.

Hang on. If the OP feels traumatised by it…then it was. It’s not up to us to measure it or say it couldn’t be. Also, you know, it’s not a race to the bottom.

@Fizzyducklings it’s never to late to look into the past and acknowledge and heal the difficult feelings and situations that you lived through.

That’s exactly my experience too. I am very tough as a result and just got on with making my own life from the age of eighteen onwards.

I agree with those saying that we do not get to tell someone else that they cannot be traumatised.

I have one thing that causes me trauma.

One thing happened, related to someone being really awful to me for a day.

I have been the victim of an attempted murder (and a violent one at that, resulting in a permanent (but thankfully not life-limiting) injury.

It is not the latter that causes me trauma.

Our brains are very primitive when it comes to trauma. It happens, it sometimes doesn't make sense.
We own our trauma. Not someone else.

Do you think you were traumatised when you emigrated as a child? This thread seems to have struck a nerve.

I agree. It was horrible, I did 4 primary schools and 3 high schools over 2 counties and all over the UK
Constantly being the new "odd" kid is rubbish. You always have had a different accent and look due to not being local.

Sometimes moves are unavoidable but I got dumped in new schools mid term. I wouldn't do that to my kids

Our family moved when I was five and it definitely affected me, looking back - I stopped speaking altogether for a while. Of course lots of life events shape a person - moving home is definitely one that can. It sounds like your mum isn't the best person to discuss this with though!

When I had just turned 11 and was half a term into secondary school, I came home from school and was told to sit down at the kitchen table. My step dad told me guess what! You are getting a day off tomorrow! I cheered. Then he said with a smirk 'we are driving you to go and visit a boarding school for the weekend' I laughed and he said no we are actually serious. I went, sat exams and stayed the weekend with strangers, then came home for half term and was told I wasn't going back to my old/new school and was starting boarding school after the half term. It was in the middle of nowhere, and I never saw my friends again. I didn't have months to prepare, or even weeks. I cried for weeks, and never settled in. I was told I could leave if I hated it after a term, but then they said a year, and ultimately I stayed for 5 years hating every minute.

It was traumatising. I am reluctant to say my experience was worse so yours isn't trauma... But the difference is I am not holding any blame as an adult to my mother like you are. She made a mistake because her mental health was poor, and I sympathise with that and never blame her or tell her she caused trauma. No parent is perfect. You need to stop blaming everything on your mother's decisions. Most people have suffered genuine trauma as children and teenagers in some way or another. I think 'trauma' is used to blame others for our own misgivings far too often, it is a buzzword people use when they don't want to take responsibility for their own life course. In my line of work I see people who have really suffered great hardship as children and teenagers, and I don't see them blaming mum and dad.

Honestly, anything that happens in our lives has the potential to be traumatic, even if it seems ridiculous to other people. You feel how you feel OP.

Now the next thing is, to accept that you can move on from that feeling and progress in ways that you can't if you keep dwelling on 'the problem'. As Aldous Huxley said, rolling in the mud is not the best way to get clean (despite the apparent popularity of mud baths)!

It seems that moving did have a significant effect on you, but I'm not sure that you'd really have been a completely different person if it hadn't happened. Most people experience one or more potentially upsetting events during their formative years: bullying, parental divorce, the death of a beloved grandparent or pet, not getting into the same school/class that their friends went to, being dumped by their first boy/girlfriend...or moving house. Most people get over these upsets one way or another but some are a bit less resilient and find these things more difficult. It sounds as though you may be in the latter group. You found your house move traumatising - but even if you hadn't moved, there would still most likely have been other difficult events that occurred in your youth. Perhaps you would have been derailed in a similar way by one of them instead, and in an alternative universe would now be rueing the day you met a particular person who broke your heart and led to you developing an ED, etc?

Yeah trauma is just a memory you haven't processed properly. Can happen with anything. You get people who've been in war zones who are fine but see a nasty car crash and develop PTSD. Sounds like you could use some help processing this event and working out how to incorporate your experience of it into your current and future life.

It could probably have been managed better, in terms of how your parents told you and the not travelling back to see friends.
I was moved around a lot as a child, went to at least 5 primary schools and then we moved suddenly when I was 14 from rural Wales to a town in SE England, huge culture shock and I was also bullied. I stopped going to school, spent most of my time with my boyfriend and cousin getting up to no good and left school with 4 GCSEs! I did blame my parents for quite a while...

We're moving our teens 300+ miles next month. But we've been telling them the plan and involving them for the last few years. One has some misgivings as he has several good friendship groups here, but he will make new ones quickly and it's coinciding with changing college courses which he would have done anyway. He knows the move is in the family's best interests and at least he won't be sharing a bedroom any more!
Eldest is applying for a new career (we thought he'd be off to uni but has changed his plan) and he drives so can come back and see his GF who will be off to uni anyway.
Youngest is going to an independent school for her GCSE years as a compromise because finding a school place was difficult (can't apply until September and have to take whatever place is offered so won't know what to expect) and she is quite introverted so we didn't want to risk her being bullied or just feeling really lost.
I feel we have done the best we can to mitigate the impact the move will have, but am still prepared for some negative feelings and just plan to be really open with them and allow them the space to complain if and when they need to and ask us for any help we can provide to make it easier.

Seems like a lot of people here have an inaccurate view of what trauma actually means. An event in itself is not inherently traumatic. Trauma is the impact that an event has on a person’s nervous system. Whether an individual suffers lasting trauma from an event depends on various factors like their personality, resilience and crucially the presence/lack of support to recover. Just because children in war zones are highly likely to suffer lasting trauma doesn’t somehow negate what OP went through. Children can go through horrendous things and emerge remarkably unscathed if they have adequate support to recover.

I know that for me a lot of my childhood trauma came from being ignored and left to my own devices after what could otherwise seem like fairly innocuous events. For me this was part of a pattern of emotional neglect and perhaps that is what OP experienced too. Research shows that childhood emotional neglect is just as damaging as overt abuse, and often more so because it is invisible and normalised. And it leads to gaslighting yourself that your experience wasn’t “that bad”, compounded by invalidation from other people who insist on reminding you that others had it worse.

It cam affect you, I don’t doubt it. My mum moved several times throughout her childhood (her father was in the armed forces) and vowed never to do that to her own children. I therefore lived in the same village until I left home at 23.

Moved several times as a child/teen, and I mean a distance move. Went to more schools than I have fingers!

Swore I'd never do that to my children, unless I have zero choice

We were moved when I was 14. It was only about 10 minutes away so school was the same. But it was heartbreaking. We moved from a beautiful home to a much smaller place where there wasn't actually enough room for us all. And there was no reason for it except my mum's new boyfriend thought it was a good idea.

I never forgave her for taking my home away. It was the most destabilising and distressing event I experienced as a child.

I was moved homes multiple times from as a baby through to leaving school. I hated being the new girl, hated the bullying, hated being singled out as a potential troublemaker moving from a London suburb to a rural area. If I had kids I wouldn't do this to them. Flip side though as an adult, I am happy to move areas, I settle in easily and make new friends.

This is a bit(to coin a term my Dad would say, 'And if my Auntie had bollocks she'd be me Uncle!'.

The facts are, a thing happened which affected me.

Of course something else MIGHT have happened, that had a similar affect.

But the thing that actually happened, is what had a huge affect on me.

Loss of attachments in formative years can cause difficulties in later life, consequential life events and yes, trauma.

I believe we agree on that.

I moved three times as a child. My Mum a couple of days ago told me they’d planned a fourth move but didn’t do it, I said to her how awful that would’ve been for us, she said that’s why they didn’t do it.

I think it’s badly affected me, I feel really anxious about new places (even holidays) and if something goes wrong say with a friendship I just feel like moving onto the next new person. Although self aware enough to know what’s behind it and don’t go with my impulses on that.

I wouldn’t, and haven’t moved my kids (we had a local move when my eldest was five to our forever home, beyond that no).

What you experienced was very tough for you. Using the word 'traumatic' prompts a lot of dismissive people to jump up and down, so the thread can get derailed.

But what you're saying is you had a stable and happy situation until it was suddenly taken away, your mum made the decision due to mental health issues/conditions, and you were bullied at the new school. Being younger than your siblings you were unable to independently visit old friends.

It sounds like it was shit . These things can have big impacts. I agree with getting therapy to talk it all through.

Being bullied IS traumatising though. If any of the naysayers had kids that were being bullied, I'm sure they'd agree.
Moving is unsettling for kids and it is hard starting new schools.