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.