To further this person’s sentiment, thick skin does not mean protection from damage. Put a couple of drinking glasses in a leather satchel and as hard as you can hit it with a baseball bat a few times. I would wager the satchel will be fine (at least on the outside), but the glasses will be shattered on the inside. If anything, trauma makes you really good at hiding the damage; not protecting you from it.

Having thick skin isn’t a superpower. It just makes you less sensitive to both positive and negative emotions. Either way there is damage that needs to be healed.

What doesn't kill you just rewires your brain to go into overdrive with panic at the slightest thought of anything even remotely resembling it.

Makes you stronger.

It's also survivorship bias, like a lot of the people that didn't develop thick skins didn't make it.

And the ones that did usually had people around them providing some love and support while they rebuilt their damaged self-esteem.

What doesn't kill you will make you wish it had.

I saw someone trying to pep talk a misanthrope (lmao) recently pull out the 'ol survivorship bias stank and blah blah many paragraphs, but what stood out to me was a common saying:

they fall down, they break, they get up

Makes my skin crawl, disgusts me. "They get up" fucking hell, so many do not at all ever again. Or if they do it's with permanent damage. I don't just mean humans either, all life. Extinction rates back me up.

I haven't experienced what I would describe as "trauma" but I definitely feel like I've become more fragile as I've gone through life.

Who downvotes this?

Who is trauma

"Under pressure, you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training" -Bruce Lee or some Greek nerd or some shit

Yah, the thick skin may be armor, but it shuts you off from so much. Some, some, of the bad stuff is easier to survive, but all the good out there has just as much trouble getting in.

I don't think any given trauma recovery paradigm is without a lopsided benefit/drawback ratio. You're left with scars, period.

Thnx.

Didn't kill me.

Didn't make me stronger.