The Traumatic Path to Realism

A look at building the darker side of character backgrounds

DISCLAIMER: I will be writing about trauma and its effect in an academic and clinical way. This is not to diminish, dismiss or in any way disregard the traumas experienced by any real person. This is simply to provide a perspective on the manner in which these things play out in the fictional world. Also, as pretentious as i may be, I am in no way a qualified professional, these are merely observations and opinion. Feel free to lambast any content herein in the comments.
Whenever I set about creating a character's background, I do so with the most tenuous of caution. As I have written about before, there is a popular adage that promotes 'being mean' to your characters, luring the reader in with identifiable obstacles and abundant foes. This no less true when creating a character background, albeit with more danger.
Although there are far too many real-world people who have lead lives that seem to be little more than patches of rocky path between episodes of chaos, when these stories come to the attention of the general populace, there is a inherent mental reaction that if there wasn't an abundance of proof, this is the type of thing that is only ever written about. Perhaps in an attempt to protect itself, the mind can't seem to fathom a life marred by more than a limited trauma capacity. Just as there is an instinct of 'too good to be true¹', there is an instinct of 'too terrible to be true²'.
This is a delicate line to walk when designing a character - the urge to throw death, abuse, abandonment, poverty, and every other conceivable ill in their way - as one to many traumas might just pull the reader from a fantastical setting containing real, dimensional characters into a fantastical realm about equally fantastical characters.
I will add the caveat that this is not always the case - somehow Leigh Bardugo manages to pull this off with multiple characters, while the author of the book I was reading when this rant was conceived (and possibly other rants that will follow) applied the same amount of traumatic force and somehow sent his book reeling into fancy³. The difference between the two effects is, I suspect, a virtue of the quality of writing.
So. How to avoid this? I have a few ideas - which are by no means an al-inclusive list - but it's somewhere to start,

The Traumatic Path to Realism

Do not underestimate the effect of trauma

The effect that a single trauma can have is, quite frankly, terrifying. To use a much employed trope: Abandonment by a single important figure in one's life could be enough to trigger lasting emotional distress that exhibiting in attachment, isolating, dependency, emotional connective issues. It doesn't take a series of assaults to alter brain chemistry and neural fear pathways, it might just be a single encounter. People tend to think in extremes when comes to experiences, but at times, simply looking at a series of events you instinctively want to put in play, boiling it down to its essential elements may give a simpler and equally effective past to contend with. Additionally, boiling down an event spanning years to a a condensed, identifiable moment allows you to convey a raw vulnerability and emotion otherwise not accessible.

See what You're Looking For

It is fascinating to observe that how some traumas have a recurring pattern. Not in those perpetuated by others, but in the way life events that may seem mundane or moderately painful to one may shatter another. Take Abandonment again - a far too useful example. Over a fraction of a lifetime, there are a myriad of people that enter and exit our lives without any significant event to mark their passage. A kindergarten friend might only stick around a few years, a work colleague fade out of memory with weeks of retirement. While the loss of a friend or acquaintance at any stage of life will trigger an emotional response, this pales in comparison to what is experienced by someone dealing with abandonment trauma. The sense of panic, betrayal, and outright despair become a new trauma in and of itself - instead of the initial cataclysm petering out into a existent but largely inconsequential background noise, it reamplifies, possible even surpassing the initial trauma in magnitude. 
While most traumas do not have a direct corollary (with the initial being mirrored throughout life), the effect that that trauma had will give rise to consequent traumas. Missing a meal may mean nothing to you, but it may mean everything to someone who has experienced poverty, famine, or deprivation. To harken back to the academic intent of this article, piling unrelated traumas on a character can seem like a mosaic of tragedy with nothing really connecting them to each other so that they remain isolated event instead of life-time narrative. Understanding the inter-connectedness of experience not only create a cohesive character, but one on whom the effects of their life can be seen. They're not just a pawn with a story tacked on, they're a person forged from experience and growth.

Growth and Degeneration

It can be very tempting to reserve al of a character's growth and degeneration for your story. You went to all the effort of giving them a backstory, shouldn't you get to utilise every bit of it?
In reality, life is marked by change - we learn from every experience (consciously and unconsciously, and at different rates as we process events) and adapt to survive. Not every character will come to the table (or page) still saturated with trauma, it is more likely that they have developed some techniques to help survive. Take Brandon Sanderson's Kelsier, for example. By the time we meet him in The Final Empire, he is a mentor figure imbued with intent and purpose. His experiences have given greater depth of emotion and feeling. Whereas had we met just a couple year prior, he was a crumbled, distraught version of himself. We meet him at a place where he is able to fulfil his purpose as a character without every single bit of character development being laid bare before us.

   

No One Cries Over Spilt Milk

I have yet to meet a person to cry over spilt milk. have I met people who've cried when they spilt milk? Sure. Not everyone encounters vast amounts of trauma in their everyday lives. Some are able to meander along without any jaw-dropping encounters and experiences and are yet complex and layers individuals. I like to call these Tipping-Point Traumas, traumas that pile up oh so quietly as mild inconveniences, unaddressed realities and emotions, and personally defined failures until a minor inconvenience (like spilling milk (or the more familiar 'straw that broke the camel's back'), spills over into a disproportionate maelstrom of emotions. Your character doesn't not need to experience dramatic trauma to have room for growth, or even to have personal demons to contend with.  

1. Which people pretend usually turns out to be the case, but in reality, if you look at any 'too good to be true' over a long enough time span, normal life will happen and create the illusion of disaster.
2. Which actually does turn out to be true on a myriad of occasions.
3. A specially applaudable accomplishment given that the book is true crime fiction and not even fantasy to begin with.

This article was a nightmare to write. It's hard to approach trauma and its effects purely academically without feeling like and emotionless monster. I tried my best to treat this topic with sensitivity, but would really appreciate any feedback on how to improve this article.

A note on collective Trauma: The same way that the accumulation of trauma for a single character may be off putting, this goes for an entire cast of characters. Everyone having bucketloads of trauma just becomes an indistinguishable flood.