The 2015 earthquake and the conflict years happened to a whole country. That does not mean you were unaffected — or that you have to be over it by now.
Bhatta Psychotherapy6 min read
Share only if you are comfortable — general information, not personal medical advice.
A truck passes and the window rattles, and you are standing before you have decided to stand. You laugh about it. Everyone in the room felt something similar. And because everyone felt it, nobody treats it as worth mentioning — which is exactly how a shared experience becomes invisible.
Nepal has lived through events that touched nearly everyone: the earthquake of 2015, the conflict years and their long aftermath, and for many families the slower losses that follow when someone leaves for work abroad and does not come back the same. When something happens to a whole society, there is no outside to compare against — and that creates a particular difficulty. Distress that is universal starts to look like normal life.
If one person is in a car accident, everyone around them understands that something happened. Support arrives. The event has a name and an aftermath.
When the same thing happens to millions of people simultaneously, three things follow. There is no unaffected group to notice you are struggling. Comparison becomes a way of dismissing yourself — others lost more, so you have no right to this. And the entire society rebuilds at once, so the pressure to be functional arrives immediately and never really lifts.
The result is a population that has agreed, without discussing it, to treat something extraordinary as ordinary.
None of these on their own mean you have a disorder. Together, and persisting, they are worth paying attention to.
That last one matters. Avoidance is what keeps trauma responses alive: each time you steer around the reminder, the nervous system receives confirmation that the danger is still real.
People often assume that if enough time has passed, whatever they are feeling must be something else. Trauma responses do not work on a schedule. They can stay quiet for years and resurface when something changes — a new baby, a bereavement, a move, another disaster on the news, or simply life becoming safe enough that the body finally lowers its guard.
Delayed does not mean invented. It is a recognised pattern, and it is one of the more common reasons adults come to trauma therapy long after the event.
Also read: Chronic trauma versus single-event PTSD →
Children born after 2015 can still carry something from it. Not the memory, but the atmosphere it produced: a parent who cannot tolerate the child being out of sight, a household where money is discussed with an edge of panic, a family that never speaks about a period everyone knows about.
Young people in these families often describe an anxiety they cannot account for. They did not experience the event. They grew up inside its consequences, and the rules of the household were shaped by something nobody explained to them.
Also read: Intergenerational trauma — signs and healing →
The comparison — others lost their homes, others lost people, I only lost sleep — is the single most common reason people never speak about this. Distress is not a competition, and a nervous system does not calibrate itself to how much worse things were elsewhere.
These responses live in a nervous system, not in your reasoning. Knowing intellectually that a truck is not an earthquake does not stop the startle. Approaches that address physical regulation — paced breathing, grounding, gradual and controlled exposure to avoided situations — tend to do more than argument alone.
Not by force, and not alone if it is severe. Trauma work is paced precisely because rushing at it can make things worse. Safety first, then processing — in that order, always.
Families who lived through the same event often protect each other by not discussing it. That silence is well intentioned and it preserves the isolation. Speaking to someone outside the family removes the burden of managing their reaction while you describe your own.
Also read: Trauma therapy in Kathmandu — how it works →
Consider it if this is affecting your sleep, work, studies or relationships; if you are avoiding a widening set of places or conversations; if anniversaries reliably knock you down; if you are drinking or using something to keep it manageable; or if you have started to feel that nothing much matters. Also consider it if you simply want to understand why your reactions do not match what you think you should feel.
That something happened to everyone does not mean it happened to nobody. A shared catastrophe still lands in individual nervous systems, one at a time, and those systems do not care that the news has moved on.
If you recognise yourself in this, you are not being dramatic and you are not late. You can read about how trauma work is done here and decide, without any pressure, whether it seems like something worth trying.
