I remember the first time I saw a therapist she thought I may have PTSD. I thought she was nuts and never went back. It took me another decade to realize that my mother was deeply mentally ill and physically and emotionally abusive, it’s just that no one ever talked about or recognized these things as abnormal. My dad was a high functioning alcoholic. I’ve talked to other adults who went through much less than I did and left home and lived on the streets rather than deal with their family situation. But talk to my parents, everything was “fine” and “pretty normal”. I had a “good upbringing” because we were not poor or in trouble with the law.

I also had some early sexual encounters that people would jump to classify as child abuse, but they were, from my standpoint, overall positive experiences.

I don’t know where to draw the line on what constitutes trauma for someone else. It’s highly subjective. There are always things in life we must just bear. But it’s good to recognize when things are not working and to make what changes we can, and to recognize when things have long lasting impacts, and when they don’t.

It's a tricky problem. Some people need help. But there are a lot of people for whom "holding it in" and adopting general-purpose stoic principles are enough. For the latter group, the new openness about mental illness and trauma has been a disaster.

Like a lot of things, you can think of this issue in terms of "type 1 and type 2 errors". Ideally we try to minimize both but it seems that we often end up minimizing one and totally ignoring the other.

I think this is too dichotomous. I think it's common for people to just process things and move on over time, which isn't exactly "holding it in". People grow up, mature, learn to get over things, and move on.

But there is something weird happening with a subset of people who approach these now-mainstream psychological concepts not as a way of overcoming, but as a way of moving their traumas and issues front-and-center in their personality. This was one of the more concerning things I saw in the subset of college students I was talking about: People would get diagnosed with depression, anxiety, or ADHD and go on to make it an outward fixture of their personality. With some students I couldn't make it more than 5 minutes into a conversation without them injecting their diagnoses into a mundane conversation about something like a computer science topic. For this subset, it was less about getting over things and more about building a persona. I suspect many of them will grow out of it as they age, but it was very worrying to see it so normalized.

Such people are not helped by well-meant “victim support” saying over and over that what they went through wasn’t easy and was certainly “not nothing”.

Probably depends on de magnitude of the trauma but cutoffs are likely highly personal.

I don't believe this is true - in my experience, the people who fall into this group are more likely to not be able to regulate their emotions properly, usually leading to them perpetuating the abuse. One can't "hold it in" forever - eventually it comes out, usually explosively.

The difference between NPD and normal is, are the reactions and mental view based on reality, or a delusion?

Is the person actually regulating their emotions correctly, or is their internal world view a delusion that they are regulating their emotions correctly?

Are their traumatic events actually as presented and occurred - they were raped, or had someone blown up in front of them - or actually didn’t happen that way, never happened at all, or something else happened and they refuse to remember or see it?

Needless to say, separating delusion from fact can be extremely difficult in the best of circumstances and is prone to biases in the evaluator as well.

I think everyone has experience with someone in an authority position who was ‘not angry’ and took something out on them though, and refused to ever acknowledge the actual reality afterwards. Or was that person.

Why so?

The feeling is there must be truth there - something to learn, and explanations for personal tendencies based on it.

For some people who have been able to work through their own trauma, the processing may have been wordless, barely conceptual, not at all based in logical processing or traditional talk therapy.

Maybe language-izing all that shit just brings the memories up for these people. For them the healing is not about learning or understanding. So so so much pain just can’t be understood. It’s not meant to be. We want to control it by knowing it, but that’s often not how it works. Maybe there is some hubris and cultishness in thinking it can or must be.

That's a good point, and definitely at odds with what OP wrote here:

> But there are a lot of people for whom "holding it in" and adopting general-purpose stoic principles are enough.

In every case I've ever witnessed, "holding it in" meant that someone tried to refrain from showing any signs of distress (spoken or body language) when they are in fact feeling a very negative emotion.

Outside of special cases-- say, someone who might get physically ill if they don't stop crying-- "holding it in" is so close to denial that we might as well call it functionally equivalent.

Alternatively, wordlessly sitting with one's emotions is actively encouraged in any healthy setting I've ever been a part of. Often it is the thing that people try their hardest to avoid doing, using a host of techniques like misdirection, rationalization, even problem solving. And in the cases I've seen, that person isn't trying to hold anything in. You can clearly see the secondary signs of them feeling pain.

Moreover, I'd be concerned about someone who cannot even put a few descriptors to what their pain felt like after the fact. It's a useful thing to do even for a simple check in over time. I have a hard time believing that doing so would actually hinder someone's ability to confront whatever it is they're dealing with.

Finally, just to rankly speculate a bit more-- one who has stoicism as a target would almost certainly advance toward their goal by being open to fully feeling and expressing the deeper pains they struggle with. IIRC, identifying, feeling, accepting, and expressing certain pains oftenmake the impact of that pain decrease over time (if slowly).

So, ironically, the non-stoic person slowly progresses closer to "indifference to pain" than the stoic who is (according to OP) holding it in.

Yes, and unless things have changed, this is a key component of psychiatric diagnosis: Are you able to manage your life traumas in a healthy constructive way or not? If not, you may want to learn new techniques, use medication if there’s a biological component, etc.

For a concrete example, the military’s research showed that some but not all combat veterans develop PTSD, and it seems like some are more able to manage the enormous stress. (Note that nobody goes back to their pre-combat state, all have to “deal” with the experience one way or another.)

That's not what I was suggesting. My point was that many people do have real mental health struggles (I mentioned nothing about physical health at all), but that the trend is to elevate minor struggles into much larger issues.

The book associated with the linked video has drawn heavy criticism among psychologists for this reason. It's an inherent tradeoff in making a book appeal to a mass market and targeting the best-seller list. You don't get there by writing about how extreme trauma is rare and extreme. You get there by trying to normalize the concept and stretch it to apply to as many readers (and therefore, customers) as possible.

> I remember the first time I saw a therapist she thought I may have PTSD. I thought she was nuts and never went back. It took me another decade to realize that ...

I'm sorry for your experience, but I didn't mean to downplay your particular mental health struggles as nothing. I don't think anyone would argue that what you're describing is not deserving of therapy or treatment, and I certainly didn't want to imply that.

What I was trying to describe is a new phenomenon where some people read books and recast their own minor stresses on to the level of what you'd described. For example, some students described merely having lived through COVID or the Trump presidency as severely traumatic experiences for them. At one point a group of them that it was inconceivable that society just expected us to continue operating during a pandemic, which to them was the most traumatic thing they could imagine.

Another famous podcast-circuit psychology influencer (Dr. Gabor Mate) pushes a theory that being born is a traumatic experience that incurs some level of PTSD.

Once the threshold for "trauma" has been lowered to the point that literally everyone who has ever existed qualifies, it starts to lose meaning.

It would explain some things.

If the tools work, why not use them? If they don’t, maybe use something else.

Damn young people. They ruined English!

It might help to think of a trauma reaction more similarly to an allergic reaction.

Anaphylaxis is a real issue, and a real problem. Some people will get it from a single bee sting, or a peanut.

Other people can get stung hundreds of times or work in a peanut factory, and have no issues.

Until they do.

We don’t know why this is the case, but pretending it isn’t happening, or denying anyone an epi pen doesn’t help either - near as we can tell.

The difference is, it’s psychological not physical, so unlike anaphylaxis we can’t see it happening clearly and there isn’t a clear type of medicine we can give someone.

It’s common if someone has had bad issues, but has been told to ‘suck it up, it’s not happening’ to get resentful if someone else’s issues start actually being taken seriously.

For instance, if someone was neglected as a child, and then someone else starts pointing out that they want attention - ‘shut up and sit down’.

The issue here is that some of these reactions are adaptive, some are maladaptive, some can be addressed, and some can’t - and we frankly can’t seem to agree on which ones are which.

Which has probably always been the case. But now we get to navel gaze about it all in public. Yay.

They do shift a lot with geography and time.

It makes all sorts of sense.

Edit: updated my ramble

This is actually the point I was trying to make.

This is one of the problems with books that push trauma as a catch-all term to cover any stressful situation: An unintended consequence is that some people will read this and retroactively elevate stressful situations to the level of lasting traumas under this new framework.

For a concrete example: Dr. Gabor Mate is one of the more famous podcast influencer personalities. One of the concepts he pushes on podcasts is the idea that trauma begins at birth. He tells stories about working with clients where he's unable to uncover any trauma that explains their current depression, anxiety, or other conditions. Eventually he walks so far back in their past that he gets to childbirth, which he defines as a traumatic experience. The conclusion, therefore, is that they have a form of PTSD from being born.

This is an example of where I take issue with the everything-is-trauma narrative: If everyone, by definition, experiences deep lasting trauma by merely existing, then the term starts to become meaningless.

I suspect what's really happening in a lot of these cases is that some psychologists have been trained to treat severe trauma, but they have fewer frameworks for dealing with more common life stresses and mild depression. Now that therapy has become so normalized that it's being pushed as a solution to everything, these psychologists are trying to apply their trauma toolset to everything. By recasting everything as trauma, they can apply the trauma playbook on it.

And if they think it's trauma today and change their mind tomorrow - which one is it?

There is no problem for people to hold their own pesonal views and opinions, it becomes a problem when those are imposed on others.

/s

This sentence gained a clause before I hit 'reply', and I understand why because it addresses the criticism I intended to make, but I'm still not at all sure I agree with you here. Even the edit implies the assumption that no one is responsible for how they choose to respond to the events of their lives, and that is plausible but requires substantiation not evident here.

In particular, I do not think it is necessary for anyone to personally experience 'horrific things' to understand that some things are worse than others, and be glad that what they're dealing with isn't worse - which probably sounds cruel to some, but is in fact quite helpful; maintaining a sense of perspective around the mishaps that attend every human life can in itself go a long way toward responding to them in a way that's well calibrated to their actual severity.

In the meantime, not treating 'trauma' as suitable to describe every unfortunate happenstance - a college breakup! Really... - also avoids vitiating the concept, which strikes me as a worthwhile kindness to those who really have been through hell - or those who haven't yet, and will find it easier to come out the other side for there still being social space to accommodate the existence of those who have to recover from, or just find a way to live with, long experience of the genuinely atrocious.

Edit:

>In particular, I do not think it is necessary for anyone to personally experience 'horrific things' to understand that some things are worse than others,

Unfortunately I do disagree with you here. I've met too many people that seem incapable of proper empathy or otherwise lack the ability to learn from the mistakes of others. I could agree with swapping anyone with everyone.

No, but it does matter if I do. That matters a great deal. If I assume any fear I feel is always justified and act on it accordingly, or if I never even frame the question of whether it might be excessive, then I implicitly concede to that fear the privilege of controlling my actions, invariably to my own detriment and that of others. We have a word for such people, and there's a reason no one likes to be called by it. No one should.

I'm not well acquainted with formal therapy for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, but I believe a central tenet of the cognitive-behavioral school is that emotions are input, not output. No one likes to be told they need therapy, either, but in this case I wonder if we wouldn't do the world a service by abstracting this idea from that context to make it a commonplace.

Edit to your edit: that seems easy to solve! I suspect for most I myself could achieve it in no more than an hour or two, given how much I had to learn I shouldn't talk about for fear of making people cry.

I know there's those out there who speak more freely, because I've read some of their stories. That's hard for me to do, because of how they resonate. I am not especially interested in the pleas of those without the burden of similar experiences that they can't even handle dispassionate-unto-clinical accounts of the same.

I feel you're missing the point entirely with this criticism: trauma is often the result of people being unable to choose how to respond to events of their lives, to such a degree where that sense of un-agency becomes a recurring chorus of subsequent events.

I frankly, fully agree with the grand-comment here: It's trauma if you think it is. This experience is entirely, 100% subjective and isolated to the inner world of every given person. Trauma responses have gradations and degrees of severity certainly, but I don't believe there's a utility in ranking them by severity. Everyone's trauma is equally important and should be addressed with the care and understanding it deserves, end of. "Perspective" is important, sure, unless you're using it to discount the experiences of others in service of your own convenience. That sucks.

> In the meantime, not treating 'trauma' as suitable to describe every unfortunate happenstance - a college breakup! Really...

Exactly like this. This sucks. I can think of dozens of reasons that the end of any relationship, college-based or otherwise, could be traumatic. People do awful things to one another, sometimes on purpose and other times as a result of their own unprocessed trauma.

People are hard, relationships are complicated, and anyone suffering from this stuff does not need to "handle it better," they need to be taught how to process it and do their best to move forward, which is going to be as diverse of a set of experiences as the trauma itself. Moving on is different for different people. Some people never manage it at all. An unfortunate minority do the unthinkable to escape it. Ranking and judging "who's got it worse" solves absolutely none of the actual problems.

I keep seeing this, but then nobody actually ever updates based on this position. The position doesn't jive with the way people actually behave.

If "It's trauma if you think it is" holds, isn't the optimal solution to start trying to convince people it isn't trauma? No expensive therapy required, just convince them it isn't trauma and suddenly you have one fewer person experiencing trauma.

And it seems like the worst thing to do if you believe this position would be to have open discussions about trauma, because you would get a bunch of people re-examining their past experiences and becoming traumatized after the fact. It seems like this can only result in a net increase in people experiencing trauma, which basically nobody wants.

The way people behave is only consistent with trauma being a thing that exists independently of belief status.

I believe it's to help them process the trauma, but if the above position holds, you don't need to do that. Convincing them they never had trauma is just as good. Minimization seems like a much better strategy if you actually believe that.

I mean, that's the unfortunate thing. You have people who have suffered incredible awful events and who feel "invalidated" by the notion that someone who hasn't experienced nearly what they have also receives sympathy and care. It's... a difficult pattern to unwind that exists in a lot of people. My inner amateur sociologist wants to say it's an outgrowth of our increasingly atomized, individualist, and hyper-competitive world that people now, on an instinctual level, internalize that anything of worth including love, support, and care from their community is finite, limited and therefore, important to secure for oneself before the supply runs out; before the people who don't really need it take it all.

And I suppose if that's the case they aren't entirely incorrect, which sucks even more: community resources for people who need them are in short supply in basically every instance. But then that thought seems to carry over to the mere notion of empathy where people want to do this one-ups-man-ship with one another, that "what I dealt with is worse" stuff, or even worse IMO, where "I suffered this horrific shit and I'm fine, you can get over yours." Which frankly... I don't know, if you endured truly horrific things and came out functionally incapable of engaging with empathy with people who haven't, I'm really not certain you came out fine.

> If "It's trauma if you think it is" holds, isn't the optimal solution to start trying to convince people it isn't trauma? No expensive therapy required, just convince them it isn't trauma and suddenly you have one fewer person experiencing trauma.

I mean, sure. And then you can tell ADHD people to just pay attention, then we'll have less ADHD people. If mental illness struggles were this easy, we wouldn't have them.

I just don't see the upside to this. The worst case scenario is that someone receives care they may not strictly need for a brief period of time, until it becomes obvious they don't really need it. If that's our worst outcome, I'm frankly fine with it if it means that everyone gets heard how they need to be.

> The way people behave is only consistent with trauma being a thing that exists independently of belief status.

Well when I say it's isolated to their inner world, I mean it's extremely difficult to get objective, unbiased factual accounts of their trauma. There are things you can do: things like using various medical instruments to measure their physical reactions to stimuli; but that in itself involves the same exposure, if not even more directly than speaking about it. Mental illness is not a broken bone where a doctor may look at the bone and say "yes, that's broken:" It requires a level of subjectivity because the damaged part of the body is invisible and the damage itself is (usually) only observable by the individual whom is injured. It's a uniquely collaborative process between caregiver and patient where the patient must be a part of the diagnostic process.

But that's my exact point. That doesn't work. People with ADHD have it regardless of their belief status.

> I just don't see the upside to this. The worst case scenario is that someone receives care they may not strictly need for a brief period of time

The worst case in the "it's trauma if you think it is" isn't unneeded care, it is that you convince someone that something is trauma that they previously didn't, and they become legitimately traumatized during the intervention. That is to say, that the intervention is capable of a net increase in suffering. That's a serious consequence and not something to brush off.

It feels like you aren't taking your own idea seriously here. I'm saying that if you're right, you need to be way more careful with the way you discuss trauma. Because the way you're doing it, if you're right, seems legitimately dangerous.

That being said, if you want to try and "call me out," let's do it then.

It's fitting that you feel so misrepresented by what I presented as you, largely because it wasn't about you, but about others I've worked with over the years. I don't think you're nearly as far up that particular chain of thought (though it is interwoven through your writing on the subject) but you also seem aware that it's a bad thing, even if you continue doing it.

You denounce trauma olympics, then engage in them:

> You're not wrong that oppression olympics is bullshit, but since you went on to start doing it anyway under the color of performatively claiming not to, this is me telling you to knock it off.

Also somehow construing a denunciation of trauma olympics as somehow me performatively not doing them which is truly profound in it's nonsensicalness: how does one performatively engage in trauma olympics while not doing so? And when I asked that you followed with:

> Asserting everyone deserves the same prize is still handing out prizes. There is nothing to be prized in any of this.

Which is just... what? The "prize" at play here is a right to express your subjective experience?

And then accused me of saying you're psychotic by employing a very well used colloquial term for someone who has become incomprehensible in written communication. And I'm just... not going to engage with that.

Which is ultimately what led me to abandon the thread: I don't engage with people who purposely go out of their way to read every last thing someone says in the absolute worst way possible. I ignored it once with your first post that was in large part just straight hypocrisy, and you followed it, doubling down on it. Trauma olympics is bad, until you need to demonstrate your view on trauma is superior to mine, with, I'd add, zero knowledge about me at all and strictly is in competition with your own imagined adversary's trauma: and, secondly, going on to predict what I'm going to reply with and how shitty it will be, which is classic poisoning the well.

And like, as an aside, I consider myself a pretty well-read individual, and your posts are astonishingly cryptic, and require heavy effort to simply comprehend. I don't know why you do this, but that's also why I stopped talking, because decoding the layers upon layers of 5-dollar-words is just more work than I'm ready to perform, for free, as a part of my leisure time.

And if you'd like to spare yourself from writing another one, do feel secure in the knowledge that I will not be responding further.

If at any point you had attacked the argument rather than the person, we might have had a worthwhile discussion. Instead you opened with arrogant condescension, claiming I set out to minimize others' suffering in favor of my own, and explaining to me how I should do better than your own assumption, rather than attempting to engage with the argument I had actually made. When challenged on this you responded with considerably more of the same.

This has not changed to date, which is a pity. You could instead, for example, have introduced the concept of psychological resilience, with which I was not familiar under that name, and which is a lot of what I was striving to express. That would have made for a more useful discussion, but you weren't here for that.

I responded in accord with what such behavior deserves. If you didn't like that it turned into a fight, why did you do so much from the start to help that happen? If you didn't want to work to make your point, why enter the discussion at all? If you weren't here for a conversation, why did you start a conversation?

As I said, I can't help how you consider yourself. I can only tell you what you've shown me.

Everything from brain scans to double blind tests show that the vast majority (95%+) of what we do, we do before the parts of our rational brain even engage. We’re rationalizing animals more than rational animals.

So perhaps a lot of the actual trauma and PTSD is from trying to force ourselves (and penalize ourselves?) to do things against our nature - and sometimes failing - and from refusing to feel what we feel sometimes because it’s ‘wrong’ and ‘not there’ or even an active threat. And often deluding ourselves about what we even wanted or why we did something in the first place.

If emotions are ‘poop’, and trauma is an opioid induced mega-log, then PTSD is constipation.

And since refusing to see the problem makes it fundamentally impossible to solve the problem, and refusing to feel something makes it impossible to know it is occurring (or learn it's lesson), down the rabbit hole we go……

Especially since society literally can’t work if our answer is everyone ‘pooping’ all the time everywhere (toilet or not) because they felt like it at the moment.

So either some people are going to become ‘terminally constipated’ (severe PTSD?) and we need to learn how to deal with it, figure how not get to shit on ourselves, or figure out how to help them become less so.

Thank you for explaining to me that having been repeatedly raped in childhood, for a start, is in some meaningful sense equivalent to a romantic relationship in adult life ending in less than an ideal way. You're not wrong that oppression olympics is bullshit, but since you went on to start doing it anyway under the color of performatively claiming not to, this is me telling you to knock it off.

> people being unable to choose how to respond to events of their lives, to such a degree where that sense of un-agency becomes a recurring chorus of subsequent events

This is a habit. Form a different one. That's hard, I know. No one promised it would be easy, though it is easier with help. But this is how the actual problems get solved. Making much of your generosity of judgment, while issuing the most ungenerous possible collection of therapy-speak commonplaces at everyone who looks askance at the current fad, solves nothing.

I assume your next play will be to discount everything I have to say as the obvious consequence of 'unprocessed trauma'. This is an error you are of course free to make. This is 'processed trauma'. Part of that process involved understanding that people who minimize real vileness are wrong to do so. You may not have realized you were doing that. You no longer have an excuse not to. It may be enlightening to see how you choose to respond to that constraint.

What in the world are you talking about? I didn't discuss any trauma of mine. How on Earth am I playing oppression (trauma?) olympics by not discussing any of mine?

And like, I am incredibly sorry for what's happened to you, but you are literally engaging the olympics you say are bullshit against a theoretical opponent you made up. I'm not in this race, you're arguing with yourself.

But if it's indeed bullshit, as we seem to agree, stop playing then.

> This is a habit. Form a different one. That's hard, I know. No one promised it would be easy, though it is easier with help. But this is how the actual problems get solved.

This is likely the way you worked through your trauma. It is not a universal experience.

> Making much of your generosity of judgment, while issuing the most ungenerous possible collection of therapy-speak commonplaces at everyone who looks askance at the current fad, solves nothing.

I cannot parse this word salad.

> Part of that process involved understanding that people who minimize real vileness are wrong to do so. You may not have realized you were doing that. You no longer have an excuse not to. It may be enlightening to see how you choose to respond to that constraint.

Stating that trauma is equally disruptive to all who suffer it and that gatekeeping someone else's trauma as "not bad enough" to warrant whatever they're struggling with is not minimization. I'm discussing the trauma itself, not the traumatic/triggering event. In that context: everyone's matters, and everyone who says they have it, has it, because it cannot be measured or quantified any other way. That terrible, awful things happen in this world does not mean those whom suffered less are not worthy of empathy, accommodation, support, etc.

Asserting everyone deserves the same prize is still handing out prizes. There is nothing to be prized in any of this.

> This is likely the way you worked through your trauma. It is not a universal experience.

Neither is forming the habit of assuming no agency that you described. I had that habit. To the extent I broke it, I described how I have done that. It's a bit rich of you to describe an experience of trauma that corresponds with mine, and then claim there is no merit in my description of how I responded to that experience.

> I cannot parse this word salad.

'Word salad' is a psychiatric term of art describing the faulty use of language seen in some undergoing psychotic or schizophrenic episodes. I assume you do not intend to suggest I am either, but in that case one wonders why you resort to the phrase at all.

Unwinding the dependent clause, then: You have implicitly claimed great generosity of perspective in your analysis of all human suffering as equally meaningful and worthy. You have also given the lie to that claim, in responding to my analysis without any evident effort to understand the perspective that informs it. Because your standing to make the argument is built on this claim of generosity, the error impugns the argument as a whole.

> That terrible, awful things happen in this world does not mean those whom suffered less are not worthy of empathy, accommodation, support, etc.

If I have said otherwise at any time here or elsewhere, I would appreciate you quoting where I did so. I should not like to think I could make such an error and fail to notice.

What I have said is that there is merit in keeping a sense of perspective, and where objectively something much worse could have happened than has, then including that fact in one's analysis can be useful. A major purpose of therapy is to provide an outside perspective, isn't it? You give the impression of assuming no other source of such perspective exists. I have twice now described one.

I have likewise at no point discounted the value of empathy, accommodation, or support. I think we define those terms differently, though. It's easy to wallow in misery. It is comfortable to wallow in misery. Of whom in such a state could anything fairly be expected? - even by oneself.

Of course, it also has the problem that nothing ever improves for doing that. And the thing about living through it - for any definition of 'it' - is that you still have the rest of a life to get through the best way you can, after.

In what sense is it supportive to suggest other than that people be about that work, to the absolute extent of their capacities to do so? In what sense accommodative, to suggest that a wound which can be healed or at least closed not be? In what sense empathetic, to suggest that no one need even try to find ways not to suffer?

I grant you not all can achieve this. It's not their situation to which I speak; I would not dare. But many more can than can't, and it seems to me a shocking and frankly culpable insult to all those of us who can to suggest that we need not, or that there can come no point at which we are living in it merely for the sake of living in it.

I would like you to show the generosity you claimed earlier - to really grant us agency, victims or survivors or whatever you care to call us. Encompass the idea that we can, should, and must at least try to overcome, will you? To do otherwise grants much more power to those who have misused us than they ever deserve.

As someone who's edited millions of words in recent years, in a few languages, I'd put what you wrote (and other parts) on the harder to parse end of the spectrum. Understandable, with time, sure, but not written for clarity. A bit like code golf. Logical, operational, but not conducive to a flowing exchange of ideas.

I enjoy your writing, fwiw, it's likely better than most, and you've every reason to be proud of it, but you're not making it easy to follow along for an international audience.

I think you're also missing the point, again fwiw. If a soft snowflake brain (quote unquote) shows being shouted at or barked at by a dog as trauma under fmri, because they haven't been conditioned to tolerate any more, then that might well be classed as trauma. This doesn't undermine anyone else's experience.

It's also potentially indicative of less traumatic lives being lived in general, of the threshold lowering. Which should be a good thing. Or that, if you reject the trauma, the bone you have to pick is not in fact with the definition of trauma, perhaps, but unrecognised privilege.

Whatever it is, I think the benefit of accepting self definitions, despite the fact that they will be abused by hypochondriacs and attention seekers (human condition?), is that someone who needs to be heard will now be heard. Having grown up before all this stuff, can confirm that hasn't always been the case. This can save lives. Despite it being abused. That's the upside I can see. Perhaps it could be done more intelligently. I'm sure it will evolve. But yes, I can see the merit. More talking is a good thing, in general.

I think a lot of these identity issues have roots in modern lifestyles, consumerism etc but as set out above, it's about taking the rough with the smooth, to use an old phrase. Improved quality of life vs first world problems.

Finally, more generally, I'm sure everyone wants less trauma. We should perhaps be training resiliency alongside talking therapy. But resiliency only gets you so far in some cases.

I hope I'm not too guilty of talking too much about too little. Hopefully my 2c contributes something of value.

Peace to all.

> the benefit...someone who needs to be heard will now be heard.

Will they, though? That's what bothers me about this. In a culture suffused with a concept of trauma so vitiated as to apply to seemingly almost anything more noxious than a paper cut, where is there any space for someone to talk about the experience of having suffered something legitimately horrific? If 'trauma' means someone broke it off with me and that sucked and I feel bad about it, how does it also mean what my grandfather did, and my father's girlfriend and later his second wife, and those other men I probably never will know how they got me in that room? If I use 'trauma' to mean those things, and everyone I say it to thinks I'm talking about a bad breakup, then in what sense am I heard?

Too, a culture so suffused offers many opportunities for unnecessary and uncomfortable mishap. I've had this happen, with someone who seemed to approach the concept so lightly as to regard the subject as a sort of shortcut to deepening acquaintanceship, the term that was used being 'trauma bonding' - this in a second conversation, at that.

I was somewhat sharp in dissuading what felt an unwarrantable and startling level of nosiness toward matters which are mine to share or not as I choose. I regret the brusqueness and not the dissuasion, but in her defense I can't imagine it arising at all, as a topic in a professional conversation within a professional setting, were it not a very ordinary aspect of culture in at least some places. Certainly it was nothing more than a clash of cultures, and a mildly inappropriate conversation for work - but the clash and the malaprop are themselves interesting to me, and corroborate a level of normalization and attenuation which, as I say, imperils any useful meaning for the term.

That is a real problem, too. People like to dismiss such arguments as 'merely semantic', as if the sole and only thing that distinguishes us as a species - the thing that stops us killing one another, to the extent anything ever does - were a triviality. But the entire point of having a semiotic framework around such a sensitive and painful topic is to make it possible to discuss in terms which, if not comfortable, are at least no further from it than can be avoided. Remove the framework, and what's left? You can either speak the bald truth, or say nothing. Neither option really serves.

I did the former earlier. It was not entirely without an emotional cost, and that's after about thirty years spent reckoning with this. Not that many years ago I couldn't have done it at all; much of my anger arose in the knowledge that there are people whom my prior interlocutor could successfully have silenced. I don't doubt they have done it before, almost certainly without ever realizing that they had. If I were they, it would bother me to think I might have done that. But, as I said, it is the privilege of youth to be thoughtlessly cruel.

The reason I chose instead to say what I did, and so bluntly, was again because if there is any purpose to such a framework as I describe, it is to be gentle. You're right that this stuff requires to be talked about. It is also extremely difficult to talk about! It is brutal, to say the least, and the cruel thing about it is that it stays that way. The scheme of language around it provides a tool with which to talk about it in a way that hurts less - for everyone.

That's a worthy thing for the same reason that medical anesthesia is a worthy thing. I don't always need it; I have often startled doctors and dentists with my ability to tolerate pain, in one case to a point where I was glad there was a CT scan to prove to an ER doctor I wasn't drug-seeking. Even I, though, do not care to open my soul in this way without something to take the edge off. I may choose to do so when I think it needs doing, but even for me it still hurts. For most people, most who need to do it for reasons like mine, I think it must be much more painful. As with a root canal, it should not be more painful than it absolutely has to be. It should not ever.

The language of trauma is, or was, one of a precious few tools to make that less painful, and certainly the only one available to everyone. Render the tool useless, and in the large majority case you only force a choice between brutality and silence. Most will choose silence. Most do, as you note. I didn't today, but I would still much prefer there continue to be a third and kinder option. The way I see 'trauma' devalued of late cuts directly against that, and if there is an argument to convince me otherwise, it has not been made in this thread today.

After all, it was you who made the point that being heard can save lives. I agree! I absolutely agree with you there. I also want that to keep happening, and I want it to happen more.

> More talking is a good thing, in general.

No. More meaning is a good thing. To speak without meaning, or worse to speak falsely, is a betrayal of what makes us human, and not without instrumental hazard besides - as I believe the state of the US at the moment should suffice on its own to show.

That said, you're quite right that there is a cultural dialogue here. My comments in this thread constitute a contribution to it. They are not perfect, but neither am I.

I had hoped that the like imperfection of others, this being also in the common heritage of humanity, would incline to some degree of charity. Unfortunately, my prior interlocutor was more interested in insisting on their own view, even to condescension and insult, than in hearing anyone else's. Unfortunately, I was not inclined to be very patient in the face of arrogance today. So it goes. Perhaps I'll do better next time. Perhaps they will, too.

That seems bold, do you have any justification for this belief?

Gabor Mate is extremely charismatic, but IMO he's part of the problem.

The last time I listened to a podcast where he was a guest, he pushed the idea that being born could qualify as trauma leading to PTSD in adulthood. He told a story about a patient with mental health issues where he was unable to identify overt trauma until despite going through her life in fine detail. Eventually he concluded that it must have been the experience of being born that was her trauma.

This is what I was talking about when someone pushes the "trauma explains everything" angle: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Some of these pseudo-experts may be good at treating trauma, but they take it too far and start trying to describe everything big or small as a trauma.

My memory is not machine-like in its efficiency. I am open to correction. But I believe GP may not be fully stating the facts for their own reasons.

Some other people lose their favorite toy as an kid and it really does become a deep rumination pattern of traumatic loss for them.

In this case, the "trauma" is virtually irrelevant, though. The issue is the rumination and pattern of overreaction, which should certainly be addressed.

For some, the obsession with "trauma" becomes a way to move the focus to something external, which is therefore out of their control. In your example, too much focus on "trauma" as an explanation for everything could mislead someone into thinking that the loss of the toy is to blame for their situation, whereas they really need to accept that their reaction and pattern of rumination is what needs to be addressed.

Humans are a wide spectrum, all good and bad at unique things - and you "can't judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree".

We've experienced a massive dilution in language over the past decade or so. I'm not sure if it's because we're churning out more black & white thinkers or incentivizing folks with a victim mindset, but all sorts of words like *-phobic, gaslighting, trauma, etc. have become significantly overused given their traditional symptomatic markers.

It's the language equivalent of WebMD - basically implying that a grab bag of cold symptoms are in fact brain cancer. On one hand it's good that the next generation thinks a breakup is "traumatic", because it means people are experiencing less absolute trauma. On the other hand words have meanings so we can accurately describe the world.

The answer I thought was yes and over time came to realize that it's probably no.

Given that, what you perceive as traumatic is not the same for another person

Concern about a priming effect is also valid.

Trauma doesn’t mean the experience will be forever embedded as “baggage”. It means it’s something we’re carrying with us right now. Something we’ve not fully processed or healed from. I’ve found that identifying and recognizing trauma is part of the healing process. Failing to identify trauma can mean carrying it with you longer - snapping at others when you get too irritated, because someone did so to you and you haven’t processed the emotional trauma of the situation, for example. Or high anxiety at work carried over from the trauma of failing a class, because you haven’t recognized that even after that failure things worked out okay and you’re still carrying the fear of failure.

Trauma like many words has degrees. It is similar to the word injury in that sense. Losing your legs in a motorcycle accident is an injury. A sprained wrist is also an injury.

Just remember that with trauma it is hard to see how deep it went. Perhaps someone did experience quite strong trauma from something you would manage easily. That’s due to the different lives you lead, and differences in experience, values, and goals. And remember that situations others might handle well could be things you struggle with. Everyone’s experience is their own.

I agree a lot of people overblow trauma. However it is worth mentioning, all the things that you mention can be traumatizing, though. Like imagine breaking up with a partner of a few years because they've been serially cheating on you and lying about it. Imagine failing a class when you've been pressured by your parents your entire life to do well in school, and you know this is going to set them off the edge. Imagine being yelled at for 20 minutes in front of the whole class as a tiny kid.

Like the question isn't really "is X bad in an objective way" but more "did X create a bunch of problems for so and so that make their life harder in terms of emotions, psychology, etc."

From the book itself, trauma is more closely defined as “what causes the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) to overreact” which then causes the body to have to deal with the excess cortisol released by the overreaction. This can be the accumulation of micro-stressors or individual major events. OP’s dismissal of things due to being “common life events” is simply ridiculous.

Isn’t it a bit cruel to dismiss the ups and downs of college life as unworthy of being called ‘traumatic?’ Who are you to make that judgement?