It leads to a lot of, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means," at least in my internal dialogue.
- I'm fine, therefore you are also fine (it's not my fault you can't deal with this)
- I'm fine, therefore you are also fine (you exist only as an extension of me, and I'm fine)
It's difficult to understand what you even mean by trauma. I understand it perfectly in a medical context, these are acute and potentially deadly injuries that must be treated immediately. In this thread? I can't make sense of it. Not 10 comments above yours, there was someone suggesting that "abuse" and "trauma" don't even correlate perfectly... which sort of seems insightful, but also confuses things even more. I could at least deal with the idea of some hidden psychiatric illness that originates from physical/sexual abuse, but if even that's the case... then what should I be taking away from this?
I can't speak for the others, but I definitely don't know what you mean. Not even slightly.
Children are SO vulnerable, and their brains understand this on a lizard level. "Those people are huge and I am very small" is obvious, even to an infant. They know, instinctively, that their parents are what stand between them and death.
When a parent abuses a child, violates a child, the child doesn't doubt the parent's goodness or rightness. They can't afford to. It's much too dangerous. If the person standing between you and death isn't safe, nothing and nowhere is safe.
So they doubt themselves, their own goodness, their own rightness. The operating system gets installed with major bugs. It can't trust its own programs, its own judgment, whether it's even real and has a right to keep existing. It's broken on such a deep level that it can't recover on its own.
I think sometimes abuse doesn't lead to trauma if there are strong enough mitigating factors. She's now deceased (death totally unrelated to this) so I can't ask her, but I don't think my sister experienced our abuse as trauma like I did, because she internalized very early on that dad was unreliable and unsafe, so it didn't shake her sense of self and her own judgment. I have theories about why she was able to do that and I wasn't, but there's only so much to be gained by speculating in her absence.
I made my parent comment intentionally vague because I didn't want to cause debate about it, but the context where I normally hear people saying, "My parents did it to me and I turned out fine," is talking about spanking their children. So my response is, essentially, "Are you fine? You're standing here defending the idea of hitting a child. To me that's a very strong indicator of not being fine." I thought it was a common enough conversation for people to know what I meant without spelling it out and opening that can of worms, but that's probably culturally contextual.
Hope this at least clears things up a bit.
It’s finally recognizing that the centuries of generational interpersonal trauma that was normalized has been catastrophic for the world
You have to recognize the problem before you can solve it
I know scarcity would still exist. It's not like better parenting would make things perfect. But I hope all the internal healing work people are trying to do is part of the necessary process to turn the tide on this as a systemic problem.
So we might have an existence problem if we go to find someone who doesn't defend barbaric practices and describe themselves as "fine". Everyone defends some barbaric practices, and some subset of them will be fine.