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.
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).
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.
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.
Research shows that suggestibility is actually moderately correlated with trauma.
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.
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.
Often the best cure is for your friends and family to treat you just like normal, except maybe demand a bit less and give space.
It sounds like you're advocating for repressing traumatic experiences hoping to not cause inconveniences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] might be implying what you claim but, whilst I'm no expert, I'm reasonably sure "dissociative states"[2] isn't a simple "becoming miserable".
[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/2/37 "Our results show that PTSD increases the levels of immediate and delayed suggestibility"
[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 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're not telling kids to be terrified of something that the kid has already dealt with.
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.
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.
If you tell people gluten intolerance is a thing, you will cause some people will feel real pain. https://theconversation.com/your-gluten-sensitivity-might-be...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes we do. Psychologists are asked to make these assessments all the time. There are checklists of symptoms.
> Which of these is genuinely traumatic? My point is that this is very individual to the kid.
Every psychologist would agree with you. Trauma is not a categorization of the event, rather a categorization of the response.
> I further posit that many kids will make things more traumatic if you ask them to do so.
This is a strange take and I don't know where you're getting it from. Maybe you're confusing it with the whole "recovered memories" scandal?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
If you tell prople guten intolerance is a thing, you will cause some people will feel real pain. https://theconversation.com/your-gluten-sensitivity-might-be...
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?
A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you expand on that? When you say that they get shamed, who or what is causing it?
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).
> 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.
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.
Not my experience.
> I don't know many women who want to date a guy who's unable to be vulnerable.
Indeed, at least in theory. Unfortunately they also don't want to date a guy who's shown actual vulnerability to them.
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.
I'm no expert either, but for sure there are psychology and sociology studies about generational differences, openness, and things like that.
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.
> 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.