Consider why you want to give your character a terrible or horrific history. No, trauma does not empower. Consider how much sorrow and pain your character requires in order for your story to function. The focus of your tale on the character's misfortune or pain must be kept in proportion to everything else. Don't make your reader feel sorry for your character, when really they should be feeling sorry for your character. A tragedy involves a person, thing, or event that is considered a great loss, especially one that causes great suffering. Tragedies often result in death, but not always. Some examples of tragedies include: the Trojan War, the Hundred Years' War, the Vietnam War. To write a tragedy, you need to understand what makes people suffer and why they might go through such an experience. You also need to understand what prevents them from suffering further pain; sometimes forgiveness is needed. Finally, you need to know how to show rather than tell about these events because readers want to learn about them firsthand rather than via secondhand sources like books or movies. The best tragedies are those where the protagonist has some control over their own fate. This doesn't mean that they have to win every time, but it does mean that they shouldn't suffer hand-over-fist without any hope of recovery either. Sometimes our heroes fail to live up to our expectations of them and we are forced to accept this and move on with our lives.