Every time I try to excavate my childhood memories, especially through a cultural lens, I return to one recurring personal realization: some (not all, some) of what we call “trauma” today is learned behavior. Not manufactured, not imaginary, but learned. As in, shaped by our cultural conditioning. That’s what teaches us what counts as distress, what counts as harm, and what counts as simply life happening.
Amar Chitra Katha comics are what I had in mind when I was thinking about this. Those illustrations of demons being killed by the gods, the one with Shivaji & Aurangazeb, even the Jataka tales ones with talking animals… My parents saw the same visuals I did. They never paused before handing us a book or shielded our eyes from a deity in their fierce form. They didn’t assume their kids were being psychologically scarred. And somehow, we weren’t. We absorbed/accepted these images as part of the story, as part of a moral universe, as a tapestry of right and wrong, fear and awe. There was no fear that a decapitated blood-spouting mythological demon would create an adulthood of nightmares. I guess their expectation was …. not deep: children would understand what they were ready to understand, and the rest would flow over them harmlessly.
Death was grief, not always trauma
For example, when a grandparent died, of course it was distressing. Any child anywhere in the world would feel that loss. But it wasn’t framed as psychological scarring—it was part of the life cycle. Families talked about it in simple terms. Rituals supported the grieving process. Adults didn’t hover anxiously around children to interpret each tear or silence as trauma.
It wasn’t that we didn’t feel; it’s that we weren’t trained to fear our feelings. or being constatly redirected to mental health counseling.
Pragmatic childhoods around the world
What I’m describing wasn’t uniquely Indian. Talking to my friends, parents, whether in Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, or Eastern Europe, seem to have followed a similar emotional logic. Childhood was seen as a phase of participation rather than protection. Kids were brought into the pulse of the household. They absorbed adult conversations, mythologies, rituals, and the emotional weather of the family in real time.
The underlying assumption was the same across these cultures: life itself was the curriculum, and exposure wasn’t dangerous by default. Children were expected to develop robustness by living inside the world as it was, not a softened version of it. And exposure to grief, myth, complexity, and imperfection wasn’t seen as dangerous.
Only in late-stage Western society—where anxiety, safetyism, and hyper-awareness of psychological harm have become dominant narratives—did everyday experience morph into potential trauma.
Reinterpreting our childhood through a modern lens?
This is where memory becomes slippery. When we revisit our childhood experiences now, we’re not doing it from the vantage point of the child who lived them. We know more, think differently and our new normal emphasizes emotional correctness, constant parental engagement, and the surveillance of children’s inner lives.
It’s not that older generations were perfect. There were genuine hardships, and some patterns do deserve critique. But not everything was trauma simply because it was unspoken, un-padded, or un-curated.
In learning to constantly analyze emotional impact, we also lost a bit of faith in human resilience. We lost the idea that children are born with innate psychological sturdiness—that they can handle ambiguity, complexity, fear, uncertainty, and unfiltered life.
We lost the comfort of assuming that a child could be okay without continuous adult interpretation of their internal world.
So…
When I look back now, I want to explore those memories with curiosity, not judgment.
Why did we grow up unafraid of the fierce visual language of our mythologies?
Why did experiences that today might be categorized as “traumatic” simply register as “sad,” “difficult,” or “part of life”?
Why did love feel so secure even without a script?
Why did it seem like children grew up emotionally grounded in cultures that prioritized duty, humility, routine, and acceptance over constant emotional calibration?
These questions are not about nostalgia. They are about understanding the vast landscape of human emotional development outside Western paradigms.