Trauma is a very personal thing and I would find it intrusive to ask anyone what his or hers has been. I am not interested in the T's history of mental health or treatment and I also think it is intrusive to ask. If they choose to share trauma-- 2 of the 3 I have seen have-- I have found it helpful, although I don't think I could judge whether it is "similar" or not to mine.

I think that believing people can only understand your experience if they have gone through something similar is an issue to work on. In my experience that is orthogonal to understanding someone else. It's not the "what," it's the effect-- emotional, physical, spiritual, etc. Relating to someone else's experience seems to me more a product of connecting with the underlying stuff than "knowing what it's like." Haven't been sexually abused by a close family member? Then perhaps you understand the feeling of being betrayed by someone you love, perhaps an authority figure.

Someone else's experience per se is always going to be different than mine; very few people have been through the tick-the-boxes that I have, and the severity and chronicity. And as I've developed in terms of how I make sense of my past, and understand it better myself, I feel like others understand me better. The reality, I suspect, is that nothing has changed in the external world, and people either got it or didn't. Fortunately I feel my T's always have. What has changed is my own understanding of what happened and how it affected me.

It was like this after my spouse died, and some of the unique circumstances of his death and our family life made my grief feel "unusual." Because he was in his 40's, because our child was in middle school, because his disease was rare and terrible, etc etc. I needed to talk to people who had lost spouses to cancer, who had school age children, and so on. I felt that nobody could understand all the particular horrors of what had happened. This began to change when I got a bit of distance from my grief and allowed myself to feel the connection between people who had lost others and the pain of that, which was pretty much everybody.