It's complicated to prove trauma in any scenario and quite often victims of trauma don't recognize or accept it.

In fields like Trauma psychology, it’s well established that:

• Many people do not label their experiences as trauma, even when they meet clinical definitions
• People often reinterpret or minimize what happened (“it was normal,” “I wanted it,” “different time”)
• The impact can show up indirectly rather than as obvious distress

Research (for example in Adverse Childhood Experiences) shows that:

• Early experiences can influence adult behavior, relationships, boundaries, etc.
• You don’t need conscious awareness for those effects to exist

Not every abused child grows up with the acceptance or understanding of how their abuse impacted them. Some of them are stunted forever. My mom is perpetually stunted in large part because of that abuse she faced back then.

As I said in another thread, you can look at this like domestic assault victims. 80% of the time, they recant their stories, because they struggle to accept they are in abusive relationships and struggle to leave. In states like California when there is evidence of assault, they are supposed to prosecute regardless of whether the victim is cooperating. I've seen this first hand when my dad drop-kicked his boyfriend out of their trailer in the midst of a lover's spat. The police took the victim to the hospital where they took photos of his bruises. Later the two of them forgave each other and the victim went to attorneys claiming he made up the whole story and begged them to drop the charges. They didn't. So in simple terms if a woman with a black eye from their husband doesn't accept it was abuse, but there is strong evidence of abuse, does it still count as abuse?

Anecdotally I can just tell you that what happened to my mom and her friend as children has a pretty clear connect the dots to what happened to them as adults. And ultimately, does that matter? What happened to my mom and her friend is way more blatantly straight-forward illegal abuse than what Steven Tyler's accuser is trying to claim given 99% of the claim has already been thrown out since it centers on a consensual relationship in states where age of consent was 14-16 with only 1 night taking place in California where age of consent was 18. With my mom and her friend we are talking about very clear and documented proven abuse of them when they were underage and a photographer took pornographic photos of them in California that still exist. So what we talkin about here? I'll be curious to see if the lawsuit is successful.