"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.
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.