The Value Gap

What trauma reveals about who we truly value.

When I was sailing around the world, people wanted to know me.

Some wanted to follow the journey. Others wanted to collaborate. Some wanted to share the adventure from a safe distance, and others spoke about how inspired they felt watching someone take such a bold step into the unknown. And a good few wanted the reflective glory of being my friend, the strangers who’d share my content on social media and talk of their ‘friend’ who was sailing the world writing books.

There were invitations to speak, opportunities to work together, messages of encouragement and promises that one day our paths would cross somewhere around the world.

At the time, I assumed those relationships were built upon something more than the voyage itself. What I have come to understand on a much deeper level in recent years is that success, adventure and achievement often attract people in ways that suffering does not.

As I began speaking more openly about sexual violence, trauma, institutional failures, medical dismissal and the hidden realities that so many of us survivors navigate long after the event itself, something else became visible.

Few people stayed, some watched from the sidelines, and many disappeared. It wasn’t done dramatically or maliciously. They simply drifted away.

The messages became less frequent, invitations stopped arriving, and enthusiasm and celebration of my success quietly faded like shadows at dusk.

And whilst it would be easy to frame this as a story about trauma, I increasingly believe it is a story about value. Because one of the most uncomfortable questions trauma asks is not what happened to us, but what happened to those surrounding us.

Many of us like to believe that we value people for who they are. We tell ourselves that friendship is unconditional, that families stand together, that organisations care about their employees and that communities rally around those who need support. And yes, on occasion they do, mostly when there is something to gain or a mass movement to belong to.

Yet life’s most difficult moments often expose a gap between the values we claim to hold and the values we put into practise.

When someone is successful, productive, confident and inspiring, it is relatively easy to support them. It costs us very little.

The real test begins when someone becomes inconvenient, when their recovery takes longer than we expected, when they are no longer able to perform at the same level, and most commonly when they need support rather than being the one to provide it.

It also happens when their story reminds us of realities we would rather not confront, whether those realities are ‘too close to home’ or remind us that the world we live in is not all glitter and rainbows.

This is where the value gap begins to emerge.

This happens, not because people are necessarily cruel, but because discomfort has a remarkable way of exposing our priorities.

Many survivors discover that the support offered during the initial crisis slowly evaporates as time passes. Friends become uncomfortable, colleagues become impatient, family members grow frustrated, and organisations begin focusing on performance rather than recovery.

The unspoken expectation is clear: You are allowed to be traumatised, but you are not supposed to remain affected by it.

Yet trauma does not operate according to the timelines of other people’s comfort or expectations. Perhaps that is because not all suffering occupies the same place in our collective imagination. Some forms of pain invite people to move closer, whilst others cause them to step quietly away like a ninja in the night.

The Stories We Know How to Support

One of the things I’ve found myself observing over recent years is that society appears to have developed a hierarchy of suffering.

The woman who documents chemotherapy, shaves her head and shares the reality of living with cancer is rightly surrounded by compassion and encouragement. Communities rally around her because cancer is a story people understand. There is a diagnosis, a treatment pathway and, hopefully, a recovery that everyone wants to celebrate.

The man who is told he must lose weight or risk an early death and who publicly documents his journey is often applauded for his determination. Every milestone becomes something others can support because the challenge and the solution appear visible, measurable and socially acceptable. At some point in our lives, we have all had weight issues, whether that is putting it on or releasing it.

Even stories of redundancy, divorce or career reinvention frequently follow a narrative that social media has become comfortable celebrating. We watch people rebuild businesses, transform their lives and emerge stronger than before. The photographs become brighter, confidence gradually returns, and success itself becomes part of the story people want to share.

Sexual violence rarely follows any carefully curated script.

There is no public finish line, no graduation, no before-and-after photograph that captures what healing looks like, nor is there a moment when the nervous system announces that it has finally stopped living as though danger remains just around the corner.

Most significantly, recovery itself often requires disappearing from public view rather than becoming more visible within it.

Confidence is much easier to project when your greatest concern is whether a post performs well, and you have a strong support network around you.

It is something altogether different when you are considering whether your rapist and those surrounding him might see your photograph, discover your location or interpret your visibility as an invitation to return to your life.

For some survivors, rebuilding quietly is not a lack of courage; It is a strategy for survival.

Perhaps that also explains why social media has become such an unreliable measure of recovery. We celebrate the journeys that can be photographed, filmed and shared, yet some of the most courageous recoveries happen almost entirely out of sight.

And let me reassure you that this is not because the survivor lacks resilience, far from it. It is because visibility itself can carry risks that others never have to consider – even though ask a vast majority of women if they walk home alone at night without pretending to be on the phone, keys well placed between fingers ready to strike or someone close to them tracking them via a location finder ‘just in case’.

The nervous system does not heal because somebody else has become tired of hearing about the problem. Heck, we’re tired of it ourselves!

Our bodies do not recover because a workplace or our client needs improved productivity figures or progress reports. Impatience does not accelerate our recovery.

The nervous system does not heal because somebody else has become tired of hearing about the problem. Trust us, we are tired of the movie loops in our minds that strike at any given moment without notice.

What makes this particularly difficult is that many of the same people who withdraw their support would hope for something very different if the roles were reversed.

Most of us were raised with some version of the same principle: treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.

It is one of the simplest moral lessons we learn as children and one of the most widely recognised ethical principles across cultures, faiths and philosophies. Yet trauma has a remarkable way of exposing the distance between that principle and our chosen behaviour – because our behaviours are chosen whether we like to acknowledge it or not.

If we found ourselves unable to sleep, struggling to concentrate, navigating endless appointments, gathering evidence, needing to repeat what happened repeatedly as we’re question about our health, leading to us questioning our health, whilst watching relationships shift around us and trying to rebuild a life interrupted by circumstances we never chose, how would we hope others responded?

Would we want people to become impatient?

Would we want them to avoid us because our situation made them uncomfortable?

Would we want them to disappear because our recovery was taking longer than expected?

Would we want to be reduced to our productivity, our diagnosis, our usefulness or our ability to entertain and inspire others?

Or would we hope for understanding, patience, curiosity, and compassion?

Would we hope that people remembered our value had not diminished simply because we were struggling?

The uncomfortable reality is that the answers to those questions reveal a gap in how we are not only wanting to be treated, but how we should be – and are often – treating others.

Trauma often reveals two things simultaneously: It reveals who people are when life becomes difficult, and it also reveals who we are.

It asks whether our compassion extends only to suffering we understand, whether our loyalty survives inconvenience and whether our commitment to human dignity remains intact when there is no social reward for demonstrating it. Calls and visits in private carry a deeper ‘I’m here for you’ than a publicly declared ‘always here for you’ comment on our posts.

These questions extend far beyond the trauma of sexual violence. They apply equally to illness, disability, grief, ageing, redundancy, caring responsibilities and every other circumstance in which a human being becomes temporarily unable to perform at the level society expects.

Every one of us is only one diagnosis, one accident, one bereavement, one redundancy notice or one traumatic event away from becoming the person who needs support rather than providing it. And when that day comes, most of us will not be asking whether we remain productive; we will be asking whether we still matter.

So, perhaps this is why the most important question is not whether we value human beings because most of us would answer yes.

The more revealing question is whether we continue valuing them when doing so becomes costly, inconvenient, emotionally demanding or requires sustained commitment. This is where values stop being words and become conscious choices.

Our success attracts attention, our achievements attract admiration and celebration, but our struggle reveals everyone’s character. Not simply the character of the person experiencing hardship, but the character of the individuals, organisations and communities surrounding them.

The greatest, most surprising lesson my trauma has taught me is that the people who remained were never my loudest supporters. They were the people who understood human value is not measured by achievement, status, productivity or usefulness; it is measured by humanity. It was also not based on a physical location. It came from those I’d met randomly online, briefly in person or from those who were acquaintances, those who didn’t make excuses of ‘being busy’ because they understood we are all busy. Some of them became my ‘ride or die’, were the ones who would ‘meet on route’ to somewhere else, and invite me to become part of their lives and friendship groups. There was no embarrassment, no fear of me going ‘too deep’ or refusing to follow the crowd.

One of the quieter changes trauma can bring is that it gradually alters our understanding of value itself.

In the beginning, many survivors continue investing extraordinary amounts of energy trying to preserve relationships, explain themselves, justify their behaviour and hold on to people who have already begun quietly letting go. There is often a hope that, if only we explain our symptoms more clearly, recover more quickly or become easier to be around, the relationship might return to what it once appeared to be.

But recovery has a remarkable way of clarifying who was already misaligned or falling away.

Eventually there comes a point when something shifts, and the survivor stops asking, “Why aren’t they there for me?” and begins asking a much more important question we should all be asking ourselves:

“Why am I continuing to give access to people who have repeatedly demonstrated that my value depends upon what I can offer them?”

This question changes everything, in every area of life.

Healing isn’t simply about repairing the nervous system; it is also about rebuilding boundaries and about recognising that access to your life is not an entitlement, but a privilege. And that privilege belongs with people who remained present when life became uncomfortable, not only those who return once the rebuilding begins.

One of the more curious patterns I’ve observed is that boundaries are often welcomed in theory until they exclude someone who previously enjoyed unrestricted access. People who had little time whilst life was difficult can suddenly become confused, hurt, or critical when they discover the journey has continued without them. Sometimes the language changes. The survivor is described as having changed, become distant, become guarded or difficult. Yet from another perspective, what has actually changed is not the survivor’s character but their understanding of their own value.

This for me has been a great lesson that trauma teaches. I knew it before, but now I KNOW it, FEEL it, and EMBODY it.

Human value is discovered when you finally stop measuring yourself by the willingness of others to remain, and begin measuring your life by the people who stayed, the boundaries you now honour and the quiet certainty that your worth never depended upon somebody else’s ability to recognise it.