I think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them? That is, yes, some trauma sticks with you. History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't devastated when we ultimately do lose some family.
Would be like saying you should hammer people on how much grieve they must be feeling because they lost a dog. Now, nor should you also scold people for feeling said grief. It is very personal and hard to really know what experience someone will have until they have it.
> History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma.
That's the "classical" mindset that modern empirical studies are refuting.
Actually, no, people are often not very resilient at all in moving on from trauma. They suffer greatly, they traumatize others, and it affects their health.
I think you're both right, but you're talking about different things. People (as in mankind, the human species) do have the ability to bounce back from severely traumatic circumstances. But people (as in most individuals) don't often have the kind of coping skills that would let them tap into this capability. Fortunately, they can be learned and applied even in adulthood.
To heal trauma, you have to actually feel your feelings, without getting sucked into them. If you continually repress/avoid/try to control them, you won't get better. If you wallow in them, you also won't get better.
I think this latter point is what causes some people to think that it's harmful to tell people that they are trauma victims, because they might develop a victim mindset. But people who subscribe to this view often go to the opposite extreme and try to deny that trauma exists, which is just as harmful (and useless).
If you listen to the people who have bounced back - they’ll not tell you that their being traumatized is good. The truth is there is very little support for survivors, and a hell of a lot of support for perpetrators, who often abuse from a position of safety and authority. Of course very few are publicly against survivors, but an entire political structure is arrayed to cast doubt on any accusation, especially if a traumatized person acts traumatized, or the powerful person acts cool and rational.
Indeed, in the end it comes down to the skill of the therapist.
It's unfortunate both that more people don't succeed in getting the therapy they need. A skilled therapist can make an absolutely transformative difference, but only if they decide to find them.
On this, then, I would generally have a hard time agreeing. I'd be comfortable with the idea that not everyone is very resilient. I'd expect that. If the claim, then, is that there is an absurdly high variance there, I'd agree.
But I'm also growingly sympathetic to the idea that telling people they are, in fact, traumatized, is not healthy. People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are told. Especially from authority.
> But I'm also growingly sympathetic to the idea that telling people they are, in fact, traumatized, is not healthy
If the message is, "you are traumatized and therefore permanently damaged", you're right - that's not healthy and also not true. But if the message is "you are traumatized and need to process your trauma", then it's more like telling someone that they have a treatable injury. I think this a pretty critical distinction that rarely gets addressed in these kinds of discussions.
Discovering you have trauma is a kind of diagnosis, so now you can figure out the kind of professional help you need.
I don't think there's really an epidemic of trauma hypochondriacs. It's not an excuse to play victim or anything. It's simply important to recognize that trauma means you're probably not going to get better on your own, and you should find help.
> It's simply important to recognize that trauma means you're probably not going to get better on your own, and you should find help.
There is no evidence for this, and it is exactly the harmful mindset being criticized. Developing PTSD from traumatic events is the exception, not the rule. The majority of people do get better on their own.
No, you seem to be confused about the definition of trauma. This is important.
By definition, people who undergo traumatic events do not generally get better on their own. If they get over it easily, it's not classified as trauma.
Trauma is not defined by the event itself, but by the person's reaction to it. When you say the majority of people overcome trauma on their own, that is by definition false.
If you have a bad reaction to an event but it goes away within a week or too, it's classified as an acute stress reaction. Not trauma.
> But if the message is "you are traumatized and need to process your trauma", then it's more like telling someone that they have a treatable injury.
There is a problem of diagnosis, trauma is not as objectively diagnosable as physical injury. If somebody falls out of a tree and stands back up, nobody tells them they probably have broken legs because that obviously isn't true in this instance even if it might usually be true for somebody in their circumstance. But if somebody experiences something that might usually traumatize a person, it is harder to objectively determine if that specific individual is actually traumatized. If somebody is, against apparent odds, basically fine, it is at least conceivable that trusted authorities could gaslight that person into believing they are actually traumatized, in a way that causes that person to become in fact traumatized.
> it is at least conceivable that trusted authorities could gaslight that person into believing they are actually traumatized, in a way that causes that person to become in fact traumatized.
Where are you getting this idea from? That's not a thing.
If someone is so resilient they aren't traumatized by an event that would be traumatic to many others, you think they'll then be genuinely traumatized by someone... telling them they're traumatized?
At worst, being told you're traumatized when you're not, is going to result in a couple of visits with a therapist who will then assess that you seem fine.
> Where are you getting this idea from? That's not a thing.
It absolutely happens with kids who fall on the playground and similar minor traumas. If the parent freaks out the kid will cry and cry. If the parent laughs, the kid will shake it off and laugh. I don't think it's completely outlandish to speculate that this kind of effect might come into play in more serious situations than falling off the monkey bars.
I've seen similar with kids? Indeed, it is easily seen as one of the reasons they form fears to many bugs. Parents freak out over the bug that wasn't bothering a kid enough times, and the kid will eventually build a fear of bugs. (Or snakes/spiders/etc.)
Ok, but that's not what social workers etc. do. They don't tell kids how they should be reacting to an adverse event. They observe how a kid is already acting in response, to determine if something was traumatic, and then if therapy will help.
They're not telling kids to be terrified of something that the kid has already dealt with.
Uh, maybe we've met different social workers? Because I've absolutely seen that happen before.
Which, fair that you can easily catch yourself in a 'no true social worker' scenario. But it definitely happens. Especially with how little training we dedicate to camp counselors and such.
In my case, that reassurance finally gave me a foundation to work on.
I finally knew that it wasn't my fault. I understood thst I didn't deserve what happened. I didn't need to chastise myself for breaking down during flashbacks. For the first time in my life my emotions got a concrete basis of "Yes, that is trauma. It's fucked up. You can work on it." and not "Why are you still worrying about stuff from 20 years ago" or "Well that happens to everyone, and they don't break down like you".
Doesn't matter, suggestibility was correlated with trauma, which means they are likely to be suggestible to becoming miserable if you tell them they are.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30987544/ "These results suggest that high suggestibility confers vulnerability to dissociative states in individuals exposed to trauma and displaying an anxious attachment style."
> I had a look and I found one[0] (cw: child abuse) which agrees but the direction is wrong - they discovered trauma leads to suggestibility.
I never said that trauma comes from suggestibility. Even for traumatized people you can make things worse by using their suggestibility and saying they are miserable, they get more miserable, what you said agree with that.
That requires someone to tell them they are miserable rather than observing them to be miserable.
There’s a lot of historic terms to describe people suffering from traumatic experiences like shell shocked (WWI), soldier’s hart (US civil war), lost/bewildered (US Revolutionary War), etc going back literally thousands of years.
You need to separate physical trauma from psychological trauma. There's no debate that getting hit in the head or having explosives go off nearby can cause physical brain damage. That's empirically proven (at least in animal models) and so obvious that it's hard to argue against.
What I'm unclear on is the details: is physical trauma a necessary factor in shell shock as it was understood a century or more ago? Is that shell shock the same thing as the combat stress reaction and/or post-traumatic stress disorder? Is PTSD an amalgamation of two different things that aren't the same? To what extent does suggestion worsen the physical vs psychological sides of PTSD? Is suggestion the only thing that causes shell shock, the CSR, and/or PTSD in the absence of physical damage? Etc.
> Is suggestion the only thing that causes shell shock, the CSR, and/or PTSD in the absence of physical damage? Etc.
I think you're venturing into denialism territory. There is a mountain of evidence supporting the fact that traumatic experiences have a negative impact on health. See for example the impact of stress on, say, cardiac issues, and even growing grey hair and/or going bald altogether.
I'm less saying "it definitely isn't" and more trying to show the complexity of understanding this and the paucity of evidence. Is long-term stress different from a one-off traumatic incident? How much stress does trauma cause? Is therapy effective at preventing stress caused by trauma? What part of therapy is effective: can you stick someone in a room with a nice doctor and no therapeutic plan and achieve a result? Does therapy make things worse for some patients? Which patients are those, and how do you tell?
My personal opinion is that trauma probably has an effect, it's a lot worse in sustained cases, many of the symptoms are mixed up with other conditions, treatment for it is effective (in that it hits statistical significance) but not particularly effective (in that the effect size is small), treating healthy people can make them worse, some traumatised patients probably also get worse after treatment, and the symptoms of e.g. ASR/CSR are so vague that some of them apply to most of the people who read them.
War is a useful lens because of the number of people in similar roles gives good data to work with and there’s institutions interested in how well people function.
People in long term overwhelmingly stressful situations suffered severe issues in WWII without any kind of physical trauma. Shipping across the Atlantic for example was horribly dangerous in terms of percentage of lives lost, but very binary with many ships surviving without ever being shot at. The language used to describe what’s going on isn’t necessarily sufficient for a modern diagnosis, but it’s clear something was wrong.
The constant treat of severe consequences was on its own damaging. Militaries cycle people out of war zones not just the front lines because they become less effective over time. Children growing up in traumatic environments rarely get that kind of reprieve.
That’s a common response by friends and family but it’s simply not the best cure. Often it makes things worse and can lead to suicide through feelings of alienation.
how do you determine causation from correlation in experiment where you are unable to separate all the factors? you can't.
not agreeing with one side or other - because i frankly don't know enough about it to form an opinion, but using "correlation != causation" is basically a discussion stopper.
My point is their claim assumes causation despite the fact that we may never be able to prove it. I.e. a strong claim with no evidence besides a correlation.
I would take any scientific claims touted on HN with a grain of salt - there are plenty claims associated with overlapping orthodoxies and heterodoxies being presented all the time.
A lot of people are simply in denial about the world we live in. They hold strong beliefs that are based on just their own intuition, and when social sciences challenge that, they double down. And then, they refuse to listen to the actual people said topic is about.
A LOT of people think they have it all figured out about homosexuals and transgender people... having never talked and listened to either. The same things act different in different circumstances.
I’d posit that the people on hacker news are often very far away from even a yeoman understanding of social sciences, except in a few profitable niches like attention, personalization and motivation.
And when it comes to stuff that's all in your head anyway, what's the difference between a real disorder and a psychogenic one?
If you tell people trauma is probably no big deal in most cases but to seek help in the unlikely event that it does cause more issues then maybe that's better? It's like they say on the legal disclaimer on Tylenol in Australia - if pain persists see a doctor.
And while I'm couching my words a lot because I don't want to play fake internet doctor, the other side of the argument is also likely not too competent medical opinion.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - maybe sometimes if you're an adult. But not childhood trauma...that makes you weaker almost every time, and you take that weakness with you and spread it around.
I didn't say that, though? Some things that don't kill you can, obviously, make you really really weak. Isn't hard to find examples on that front. Polio is the poster case.
But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.
I suspect we would largely align on the idea that growth is the important part. We would also largely agree that trauma is real. Question is how do you combine those ideas?
From what I've seen in my direct circle, childhood trauma leaves deep deep traces, and not in a good way. The idea that childhood trauma encourages growth to me sounds like pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of rhetoric.
It’s attitudinal. Some people just don’t want to stay stuck in their childhood forever because there are too many things they want in life. Is it better to just carry your childhood around and relive it all the time? Some of that is probably fine but do it to the exclusion of your present moments and it’s probably maladaptive.
It sounds like you're trying to argue against a trauma model, but you're basically just describing the state of someone having PTSD and a typical end goal state of therapeutic treatment for it.
And where did I say that? You seem to be purposely misreading my posts.
I said growth is the important part. If you are focusing people on identifying themselves as traumatized, you are doing it wrong. You want to focus them on how to grow. Be that be letting go, coming to terms, whatever. Really depends on the trauma.
jaybrendansmith is talking specifically about childhood trauma not any trauma that happens in childhood.
> But not childhood trauma...that makes you weaker
I have only seen "childhood trauma" defined and used as something that has lasting impact. That definition likely comes from studies that study trauma that happens in childhood and how it can have a lasting impact.
Regardless of where it comes from that is how the phrase is typically used.
It would be nice if the field came up with better terms or a better scale that separated out the different traumas by lasting impact, but my assumption is that if it was easy to come up with that kind of scale it probably would have already happened, here is hoping it is easy and it is low hanging from some soon to come along phd student though.
The hazard I'm pointing at, though, is that this will be very individual. And what is a difficult thing to overcome for some kids, will be trivial for others. And seemingly flat out impossible for others, still.
Sure that is true of any trauma physical or otherwise. It is always some part genetic and some part environment. I assume just like for other areas we have a clear picture of a narrow subset of factors that is clearly genetic and some is clearly environment, but we do not have a clear picture on the majority of factors yet.
> But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.
Huh? No, that's the whole point, how important and useful it is.
It's to separate out the non-traumatic experiences where you recover just fine... from the genuinely traumatic experiences that do harm you, and for which professional help is really useful in recovering from.
But you haven't separated these things out. You have definitionally stated that some things exist. But you have no method to separate the genuinely traumatic from the potentially traumatic.
Broken bones. Death in the family. Death of the family. Moving. Friends changing. Attacks from coyotes. Loss of pets through unknown reasons. Loss of neighborhood friends to suicide? Which of these is genuinely traumatic?
My point is that this is very individual to the kid. I further posit that many kids will make things more traumatic if you ask them to do so.
Worse, I have seen "was rude to me at camp two years ago" be a significant source of grievance to kids. The whole elevator scene of "I hate you" versus "I never even think of you" is very very real.
Had to post as anon well because feels safer that way.
I don't think you really understand the difference between traumatic events and traumatic disorders. There are 2 fundamental aspects of trauma that without removing will yield worsening mental and physical states.
1. Cause of trauma must be stopped
2. Feeling of the loss of control
As someone whose experienced both childhood neglect and mental abuse, The Body Keeps Score and was able to help me unravel and recover very from incredibly complex childhood and then adulthood trauma.
What you have listed are traumatic events they create a shock and body's sympathetic nervous system recovers. Now say you are in a constant state of shock everyday for your entire life how is the nervous system going to adapt to that? That's right it changes and has to create maladaptive protective mechanisms, socially this doesn't make sense but biologically it does.
It takes digging through this massive book(1000+ pages), to find triggers, possible treatments and improvements 10+ years to get comfortable. But if you ever talk to people with PTSD they are never really healed, mostly scarred but have recurring physiological issues they must cope with.
Similar to what I said in the sibling post, this is classic talking past each other. The word "disorder" doesn't appear in the thread until here. If you are speaking to a definition that distinguishes traumatic events and disorders, you are having a different conversation than I was having. And, as I said in sibling, I think that is a good conversation and one worth having. Just wasn't the one I was in.
So then this is just classic talking past each other? The point of the discussion, to me, was some people have defined it such that everyone is battling childhood trauma. The book literally has the example of the trauma of the umbilical cord wrapping around your neck in the womb.
My main post at the start was only pointing out that I have started seeing people, largely in the mainstream, start saying "maybe we shouldn't definitionally say all of these people were traumatized." Where I take "traumatized" to be "had an event that potentially lead to a particular categorized response."
The take at the end is almost certainly inline with talking past each other. If you are taking the super precise (and, to be clear, I think there are good arguments for doing so) definition of trauma, I'm not pushing that. People, and kids in particular, have a strong sense of wanting to make things fit the patterns they are learning. If they think their sibling is not respectful enough of the pet that just died, they will escalate as much as they can on that view.
Maybe we are, ha. It is absolutely not the case that everyone is battling childhood trauma -- I don't know of any serious thinker who argues that. It seems like quite the strawman. And the umbilical cord thing seems like a pretty unhelpful example, precisely because it's so difficult to verify -- it seems pretty definite that you can be impacted by trauma from before you can remember things, but at the same time it seems hard to say anything definitive about any particular event precisely because you can't remember it.
I think that trauma has been denied and ignored for so many centuries/millenia that we're only now as a society starting to accept that it exists and requires the kind of treatment that a spouse, friends and the church are not equipped to provide. And I don't even think we've gone far enough -- it's still extremely common to hear people insist nobody needs therapy, shrinks are all quacks, they don't believe in therapy, all you need is a good friend to talk to. So it feels strange to me to see this kind of "backlash" against recognition of trauma, which to me seems extremely premature. It's better to err on the side of helping people and pay for a few therapy sessions that turn out not to be needed, than to tell people after something horrific happens to just grin and bear it and you'll forget about it soon enough, because people are naturally resilient and bounce back from anything. Because very frequently, they don't.
Largely agreed. It doesn't take a lot of looking through these threads, though, to find people basically saying everyone in the past merely coped with trauma. Some going so far as to basically assert that the only reason people drank in the past, was as a coping thing. Which, frankly, feels off to me.
Not that you can't cope through drinking. Nor that nobody ever did things wrong. I just don't see any reason to think that would have been the norm.
If you tell people trauma is probably no big deal in most cases but to seek help in the unlikely event that it does cause more issues then maybe that's better?
No expert, and fully expect to be flamed, but we are now living in a society that has discouraged "sucking it up" or "burying your emotions" for 30 years. It not really possible to study, at macro level, the impact of that thinking.
A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.
> A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.
I dunno, in my experience, not really a lot of people?
And the people that did - and yes, they absolutely exist - seem to have some kind of disorder. They all probably would have benefited from therapy and/or medication. They probably do need sympathy (maybe not the way they wanted), may or may not have been victims, and are sort of special cases.
Most people just want to be normal, to have a job, to go see movies, to play games, to spend time with friends, partners, lovers, family.
This is just my life's experience though. Maybe I'm the weird one.
I think you might look harder, it's not necessarily overt. I'd bet it underpins a lot of peculiar political behaviors. I'd also say not always sympathy but sometimes revenge.
It's not about wanting sympathy. In peace and prosperity times, people has more time to reach adulthood and explore themselves, they don't have to suppress pain in order to survive. Not saying everyone, but many.
I'm no expert either, but for sure there are psychology and sociology studies about generational differences, openness, and things like that.
who has discouraged "sucking it up"? what systemic policies have changed to accommodate this? as far as I can tell, someone can explain how they're the victim to anyone and everyone they come across and no one will care. I can't see how anyone emotionally or materially benefits from saying they're a victim. they may want sympathy but they will not get it.
that said, I don't live in a coastal city where there might be more accommodations for such things. where I live, people are generally on their own to find the means to survive. but, in line with the theme of the post, I'm fairly certain people here have a lower life expectancy and generally lower health than people in places where there is a more robust support network. in which case, the body must, in fact, keep the score.
> who has discouraged "sucking it up"? what systemic policies have changed to accommodate this?
When I reported being assaulted, I was vigorously encouraged to attend counselling, and it was suggested to me that if I felt fine I should allow myself to be persuaded otherwise.
I have heard anecdotes of e.g. rape victims not being believed because they don't seem to be traumatised enough.
This is part of the "persecution of conservatives", where they "can't say a thing anymore". They obviously can, and still do, but feel their voices are being suppressed. The reality is that their opinion isn't popular anymore, and they're used to being listened to unconditionally, and can't stand that people don't agree with them anymore.
The annoying thing here is that it's simply not true, especially in regards to men. It's still the norm to be told to suck it up, or you're not a real man. It's toxic masculinity, and it's obvious that's taken on a massive rise in popularity, thanks to folks like Joe Rogan and the like.
> The annoying thing here is that it's simply not true, especially in regards to men. It's still the norm to be told to suck it up, or you're not a real man.
It's also the norm to be told that you need to be vulnerable and share your trauma and you're lesser if you don't. Men get shamed for both not being enough of a victim and being too much of a victim, and have no winning move.
> It's also the norm to be told that you need to be vulnerable and share your trauma and you're lesser if you don't.
I think the norm now is that you should share your trauma with a therapist, to help heal. I can't imagine telling anyone to share their trauma, regardless of gender.
> and have no winning move.
This is a common incel talking point, and to be honest I don't think it has basis in reality. It's totally fine to share with a therapist and I don't know who would criticize someone for it. If a friend criticizes you for going to therapy, they aren't a friend.
Should you be able to also share with your friend? Yeah, but there's also the concept of trauma dumping, where you use your friends as a therapist, and that has its own problems. Sometimes folks aren't in the right mental space to hear your problems, especially depending on the context (like, were you abused as a child? maybe they were too).
> This is a common incel talking point, and to be honest I don't think it has basis in reality. It's totally fine to share with a therapist and I don't know who would criticize someone for it. If a friend criticizes you for going to therapy, they aren't a friend.
> Should you be able to also share with your friend?
Why did you leap from talking about incels to talking about friends? It's not friends that are the problem, it's partners, for whom it really does seem to be normal to both expect and demand that you share your weaknesses with them, and then get the ick when you do.
> Why did you leap from talking about incels to talking about friends? It's not friends that are the problem, it's partners
Because most of the people saying this kind of stuff tend to be incels, who famously don't have partners.
But my point about friends also applies to partners. Some stuff you need to work out in therapy. Your partner isn't your therapist, and treating them that way gives them the ick, especially early in a relationship.
You're forcing them to bear your trauma. You can expect people really far into a relationship to do this to a point (like nearing engagement, already engaged, or married), but even then it's more fair to share your trauma after you've learned how to bear it yourself, with the help of a professional. Partners should know about your past, especially as it may affect your behavior, but they shouldn't be forced to help you resolve your emotional issues.
That pressure is largely coming from other men. I don't know many women who want to date a guy who's unable to be vulnerable. I think if men made more space for each other to be something other than angry y'all would find life a lot more pleasant.
> as far as I can tell, someone can explain how they're the victim to anyone and everyone they come across and no one will care. I can't see how anyone emotionally or materially benefits from saying they're a victim. they may want sympathy but they will not get it.
This is true for a man, not true for a woman. Women in general get a lot of sympathy and things for saying they are a victim. Men just benefit from hiding it as you say though, there is no reason for men to show this.
> No expert, and fully expect to be flamed, but we are now living in a society that has discouraged "sucking it up" or "burying your emotions" for 30 years. It not really possible to study, at macro level, the impact of that thinking.
> A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.
It doesn't really seem like claiming victimhood is a broadly-repeatable way to make a living for the masses more than 30 years ago... many things that were intended in the 60s and 70s to try to make up for historic victimization have been rolled back in recent decades. But I suppose this could apply to Rush Limbaugh and such - beating the "white males are the persecuted ones, actually!" drum of anger leading to the much-aggrieved whiny MAGA brigade.
This. Totally resonates with me, from personal experience.
I had radiation therapy and 2 years of chemo starting from the age of 1.5 years. During that time, my mother left me alone for a MONTH in the hospital. I've been told the chemo was so bad that at the end, they had to search for veins on my head, since all the veins in my body were already retracted...
I neither am afraid of needles, nor have I ever had therapy in my life. Simply because I didn't need it. I have no PTSD, nor any other aftereffects. The only thing that is obvious now, is that the bond to my mother broke, and I basically feel no "love" towards here, nor do I want to give her any slack for her past and current failings.
This is not intended as a "I am so cool" post. It is simply how my life turned out. Later on, when I learned about PTSD and Trauma, I asked myself several times why I haven't got anything like that. However, the more I think about it, the more it feels like I could unearth something if I really tried.
> pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them
I have known a few people who had they not dwelled so much on events, I wonder if their trauma would have been middling instead of major. Hard to say for sure, but I am not the only person to observe these folks seemed to be making their trauma more traumatic.
> I think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them?
There was certainly a fairly prominent British psychologist (IIRC) a handful of years ago who disparaged some of the anxiety and depression awareness campaigns on the grounds that being more aware of psychological ailments like that, when they were on the minor end of the scale and not actually debilitating, was probably unhelpful. That actually in his opinion "suck it up and get on with your life" might be the best advice sometimes, because such conditions can become self-fulfilling, and getting on with your life, doing stuff and achieving things might be the best remedy. Rather than dwelling on the problem and giving yourself the excuse "I am depressed/anxious"
I don't know how/if that maps to trauma, and there was a lot of backlash...
The point is not pretending to be functional for the sake of it, putting on a facade and calling everything great. It's that being functional often works to help in and of itself.
Getting out of the house, socialising, exercising and working towards your own goals in life, cutting down on booze and drugs, getting proper sleep etc, can and does have an effect and can alleviate the problem. It's not a mask, it's a remedy in many minor cases. Compared to medicalising minor bouts of depression or anxiety (which may well really just be part of the human experience), calling them a 'condition', which may render people more helpless and encourage wallowing in it which is likely to make things worse. Sometimes picking yourself up and getting on with it is what you actually need.
If that doesn't work for you, seek help, sure, nobody's saying you shouldn't.
I agree generally, it's just that this isn't a cure all solution and it's also quite deceiving. Meaning, someone doing well does not mean they are actually doing well. People who are very successful and loved people kill themselves often. Had we asked them if they needed help, they might not have died.
Undoubtedly, the facade of good mental health is a strategy to be successful in a patriarchal capitalist society. That makes it tricky.
I know someone who grew up in rough neighborhoods, has been in fights, been stabbed, divorced alcoholic father and drug using mother, and yet got a master's degree, a fulfilling career, marriage and family.
I know someone else who happened to be in a bank when it was robbed, and has spent years struggling to hold a steady job because the anxiety developed from the experience has persisted. Later divorced and become a poster child for making bad decisions.
The latter has gone to therapy, the former didn't. Small sample size, don't draw any conclusions other than everyone is different, and beware anyone proclaiming universal truths in psychology.
The extra confounding factor here is that not all therapy is created equal. Some of my life has parallels with your first example. I did my first therapy session in grad school and it helped me out tremendously. Again, anecdotal, but one of the things he did very well was to not allow me to continually re-traumatize myself by rehashing the potential sources of my (maladaptive, dysfunctional, pathological, whatever word you want) thoughts and behaviours. He would listen for a bit and then steer the conversation back to: what’s the delta you’re trying to achieve? I can help you find a route from here to there without needing to go back to the beginning. As it turned out, getting myself to a better mental state helped me let go of a lot of resentment and blame that I held about the people responsible for my childhood. It wasn’t explicit, it just kind of happened as I tweaked my thinking.
There is also an element of… it’s easier to get out of a shitty headspace if you’re not already stuck in a shitty present. I moved out of my home town when I turned 18 and went to university 3 hours away. Close enough that I stayed in touch with my family but far enough away that the day-to-day chaos didn’t affect me. Cell phones weren’t a thing yet so there were plenty of viable excuses for not answering the phone.
In your second example, unlike mine, the person spirals downwards instead of escaping. They start out as anxious from the robbery, then end up anxious and unemployed. Then anxious, unemployed, and divorced. It’s pretty tough to think clearly about addressing and processing the robbery when you’re not sure if you’re going to have enough money for groceries and rent.
I don't know your relationship with the former person, but as for drawing general conclusions, I—as a reader of your comment—can't assume that you have assessed accurately whether their case is better. You might not be aware of subtle abuse in the home, masked depression, overt narcissism, suicidality, etc.
Years in the trenches have taught me that many people who seem successful, put-together, and happy are deeply struggling or causing harm to the people closest to them.
You are free to be as skeptical as you like. You might even imagine I made up both of those people. For all you know, I'm actually one of your split personalities who made that comment just to troll you, and this one too.
I spoke in generalities because the specifics of their stories aren't really mine to tell.
You are right that people are more than the facade they present to the public world. Objectively, though, it's clear that they had very different reactions to traumatic experiences, and healed (or didn't) very differently.
If you can at least assume I didn't make both stories up, then we can at least agree that drawing universal generalizations about trauma, recovery, and what is "best" for people (or what they are "good at") is a fruitless endeavor.
Yea, this seems to be an issue with this entire thread. Lots of people making lots of assumption about others.
As a kid into my teens I had plenty of my own trama, but was quiet and generally didn't interact with many other people my age, generally having friendships with people much older than I was. Once I got into my late twenties this turned around and I ended up being the person who many other people my age and younger would come and talk to about their lives. In general I'm just quiet and let them talk. Listening to a lot people talk about their lives has let me see one thing.
A lot of people are really screwed up from their childhood and bring it into their adulthood
The number of women that have been sexually assaulted or raped that disclose it is downright depressing, especially in their childhood. More depressing is the number of 'high status' people that cover it up.
The number of men that have some kind of depression coping mechanism such as alcoholism or hidden drug use is disturbing too. And a lot of these people are the ones you can't tell. They have successful jobs and make good money, have a wife and kids. All the checkboxes of supposed happiness. But so often these are things they had to do at some point after being driven by narcissistic parents for years. Trama driven workaholics with no at home coping mechanisms are common too.
I have no idea how much people that have had trauma can be fixed. What I'd really like to see is the signs if it taught younger so kids and learn how to avoid it and call it out.
People who face reality and climb towards real growth are also suppressing their negative emotions, surviving, and moving on. Children are specifically different from adults because they don't have any emotional regulation. They just live fully in whatever emotion smacks them in the gut.
Just because you've got a scar doesn't mean it's bad, nor does it mean you haven't moved on if you haven't spent 6 months staring at the healing process. Some people heal quicker, some heal better, some heal slower, some heal worse. Like pretty much everything in biology, it's something of a spectrum.
Grieving heals trauma. Death of a child is traumatic but we allow room for this in society. We provide instinctive support to others going through this.
Death in general is an inevitable part of life that can be dealt with in a healthy way. It's still individual but generally there are outlets.
Traumatic disorders are specifically where the symptoms caused by trauma interfere with daily life and are measured in severity and longevity.
We should actively grieve traumatic experiences by paying attention to them where necessary.
When an animal is attacked, e.g., by a lion, it will sometimes completely freeze (which often causes the predator to lose interest). Many different species and families of animals do this, but according to Peter Levine writing a few decades ago, in no species except human is there any evidence that having undergone this freezing response has long-term consequences. There seems to be something about the human mind (or the human lifestyle in modern times) that makes the freezing response tend to have very persistent effects.
I would like to call this freezing response psychological trauma. I think many experts use the phrase that way. Certainly the OP is using the term this way. But if people are going to use "traumatic experience" to refer to any very aversive experience or any experience that makes the person very sad, like you just did, then that is kind of a drag because most very aversive experiences, e.g., death of one's child, do not cause the freezing response or do so only rarely. Must those of us who wish to discuss the human version of this freezing response come up with a different term?
This is a big point that really blows my mind in the discussion. It is basically indisputable that we are exposed to less trauma than people in the past. To a laughable degree.
And it wasn't just children. Before the advent of antiseptics, a prick from a briar could basically kill you. Before modern supply chains, you almost certainly had parasites. Before modern vaccines... The list is remarkably large.
I suppose there is an argument that it is the reduction of traumatic events that makes them more traumatic? Feels like a shaky reason to think "focus more and make sure you fully grappled with how traumatic it was" is the default correct approach.
I think it’s exactly why we can now look at and face trauma because some of us are not as severely traumatized and in denial like previous generations. We can decide to work on it, rather than just passing it on by mistreating those around us and redirecting our rage towards imagined enemies and threats. Well, some us.
But not everyone reacted to trauma by going into denial? Some people had really crappy things happen to them. They did not deny this, necessarily. They just found a way to move to the next things.
And note, that it wasn't everyone. Some people did not find a way to move on. Worse, some people likely perpetuated their trauma on to others.
"Denial" typically refers not to the denial that something bad happened to you, but to not see how you act it out on others (or yourself). It is exactly those in denial that would claim that they "have moved on", and try hard to make it look like they did also to those around them. It then shows up in violent tendencies, lashing out against kids, enemy images, patterns of avoidance, psychosomatic symptoms, burnout, addictions, obesity, sports injuries due to overdoing it, inability to sit still and listen, etc. - not necessarily PTSD symptoms.
> It is basically indisputable that we are exposed to less trauma than people in the past. To a laughable degree.
And standards of living and life expediencies have gone up and to the right.
That 100 years ago people managed to cope with the traumatics of daily life doesn't translate to their coping being healthy or their lives being better (consider the massive drinking culture of the mid 1800s that ultimately led to prohibition)
True that standards of living have gone up. I'm... not clear where you were going with this, though?
You are using the word "cope" in a way that implies people did not grow after their trauma in the past. I do think I've been sloppy and said grown from trauma a few times. I meant that to be a time marker, not a cause of growth.
Do I think some people did not manage healthy growth after some events? Absolutely! But I also think many people did find ways to continue to grow.
I think, in the past, yes - most people did not grow, they just coped. They merely distracted themselves with working 12 hour days, drinking their lives away, and beating their wife and children.
Think about it this way - how many passion projects did people have back then? When they weren't working, what were they doing?
I mean... depends on the trauma? Do you consider it traumatic to lose a pet? What is the difference between survival and moving on? What sort of growth would you expect there?
> That is, yes, some trauma sticks with you. History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't devastated when we ultimately do lose some family.
This is textbook survivorship bias. If you try hard enough you'll eventually discover a never-ending list of examples where people never recovered from trauma and even outright died directly or indirectly die to it.
This is just taking my point to be maximal that people always recovered from these things. I don't think that. But nor do I take what seems to be the near maximal other side, where everyone is fighting some hidden trauma from their childhood.
> But nor do I take what seems to be the near maximal other side, where everyone is fighting some hidden trauma from their childhood.
I think you're trying too hard to downplay a problem by questioning the extent it exists. Perhaps a more productive approach is to try to learn about the topic, starting by learning about the definition of psychological and emotional problem. It's quite possible that your denial is founded on a misplaced sense of what trauma is or isn't.
I think you are still taking my point to a maximal position that I don't hold. People need help all the time. It shouldn't take trauma to get people to agree on that point.
Good help will be goal oriented, though. And the goal is not to maximize your focus on the trauma to make sure you have experienced it all. The goal is to grow for whatever you need, now.
This is true of physical trauma. You don't sit with people and teach them all of the ways that their body has been broken when they get a physical injury. You identify the goals and exercises that they will need to do to achieve them. In many cases, you have to reset realistic goals.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that sometimes you have to tease out what the actual blockage is. In that search, you may be helped by discussing the underlying trauma. But that is firmly in the land of probabilistic approaches where we explicitly don't know a lot.
Ehh, kind of. But at the same time, EMDR works. So revisiting it in a very particular way can help.
However, I concede that there's kind of a hammer and nail problem in therapy. They learn about how much trauma and childhood experience effects a person and tend to laser focus on that because they feel confident doing so. I think there's a certain unhealthines to spending too much time dwelling on the past. Up to some level it's ok, but there should be at least equal focus on the present, future, and agency+self-confidence+self-discovery. Whereas a typical client would not be unreasonable to feel more like a victim given the focus on past experiences and traumas, which naturally reinforces a past-oriented victim mindset. Meanwhile, what most people need is a sense of being able to make things better now and work toward a better future, and practical tools to do so (agency).
Of course, for severe cases, you should probably focus on dealing with the trauma and get the client to a more stable state before taking off the coddling gloves.
I would have to take more time to read up on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The wikipedia intro to it isn't fully favorable, sadly.
And agreed that "severe" cases are almost certainly special cases that should be treated as such. PTSD would almost certainly always qualify as severe?
But the idea that people have "in the womb" trauma just feels patently silly.
For an extensive critical review on research on prenatal trauma (“in the womb”) and theories around it, see Philipp Ployés “The Prenatal Theme in Psychotherapy”, available on libgen. Especially in the past 20 years with improved ultrasound, you can view a lot of what is going on inside, and reason about it. Of course there is no way to fully prove it, but the scientific consensus definitely is that factors like stress of the mother or substance abuse have a long-lasting and measurable negative effect on the child.
Stress of mother and substance abuse is very different from things like "cord wrapped around you." Similarly, some people have the cord literally cut off circulation and such. That is different, as well.
“Cord wrapped around you” can be seen in ultrasound and you can deduce level of stress from amount of movement/lack of movement of fetus. They can be seen to react to outside stimuli from very early on. Agree that it sounds questionable at first to come from symptoms 30 years later to some prebirth trauma situation but it’s a large field of study and not unheard of that in treatment symptoms find relief once a plausible story has been identified. The goal of therapy is not to hunt for historical facts but to find relief. Maybe it’s a made up story, but if it works, who cares? That being said it’s a large and interesting field of serious study, and “trauma from cord wrapped around neck” a real thing that ideally receives treatment closely after birth.
Would be like saying you should hammer people on how much grieve they must be feeling because they lost a dog. Now, nor should you also scold people for feeling said grief. It is very personal and hard to really know what experience someone will have until they have it.