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Thanks for this. I’m a trauma therapist, I work with many people who have PTSD. Reading this article all I could think was: Trauma is a sophisticated concept.

Thanks for this. I’m a trauma therapist, I work with many people who have PTSD. Reading this article all I could think was: Trauma is a sophisticated concept. As a society and species, we are pretty “trauma naive” in that we have just recently come to this understanding of the very complex web of psychological, somatic, emotional, sociological, intergenerational, and cultural aspects of this experience. Because of this, we are refining the therapeutic modalities that are most efficacious for treating trauma. See all the latest literature by Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté. So I wouldn’t really expect these societies to know what to look for - in fact, it could have been so ubiquitous that the symptoms (and/or suppression of them e.g. regular intoxication) were normalized. Given how warlike they were as he described in the article, it could be like asking a fish to describe water. We know for a fact that mammals get PTSD after being in highly stressful experiences that they are unable to metabolize. I can’t see why humans would be any different. Also, many different cultures have historically had taboos around the expression and natural resolution of PTSD. I don’t know about the culture of society around the age he is speaking of in this regard, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a normal aspect of life back then, too.

Cederfjard 6y ago
Stupid question here, but isn't it possible that experiencing violence and death isn't as highly stressful/traumatic if it's to you like water is to a fish, to borrow your phrase? Especially if you have some sort of belief in an afterlife to console you. Just a question from someone who knows very little about this.
- palimpsests 6y ago
  It's not a stupid question at all. Death nor violence does not have to be inherently traumatic. I would be very surprised if 100% of people back then had degrees of PTSD (and that's not what my comment was meant to imply). A working definition of trauma: "trauma can be defined as any unresolved autonomic nervous system response. It’s about the nervous system’s response to an event, not necessarily the event itself. Events can affect each of us very differently." The context in which these events happen plays a huge role in whether or not someone develops symptoms of PTSD afterwards. Spiritual beliefs can play an important role in acceptance of death and therefore it not being a terrifying experience.
  - sharkweek 6y ago
    My (limited, so please correct me if I’m saying something dumb) understanding here too is some people are just wired different and can handle more traumatic situations than others. My therapist had me read a book called The Highly Sensitive Person by Dr. Elaine Aron after I told him I was struggling with things I felt a “normal” person should be able to handle just fine. The book made a lot of interesting points about what it means to be sensitive (broad sense of the word) to the world around us.
    - palimpsests 6y ago
      This is definitely correct! Everybody is equipped differently to cope with life. The environments we grow up in make a huge difference in this. And they vary tremendously.
    - derefr 6y ago
      > some people are just wired different and can handle more traumatic situations than others. I've heard it hypothesized that ADHD is adaptive/selected for in some contexts, because people with it are more resilient to stress, i.e. it takes more to make them scared/shocked/traumatized, just like it takes more to excite/motivate them. And so such people can respond "normally" to stressful situations where the other people around them tend to freeze up, thus potentially saving the rest of the group.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - coffeeling 6y ago
      You might be interested in a book called Personality: What makes you the way you are by Newcastle professor Daniel Nettle. It's a very readable intro to the system of categorizing personality used by academic researchers and that probably has more resolution than thinking in terms of HSP.
  - mLuby 6y ago
    I like that definition, but is the response "unresolved," or just "unhelpful?" Maybe "unresolved" has a different meaning in your specialty though. I thought when someone experiences trauma, it makes their brain sensitize to preceding stimuli and unconsciously produce a strong response, in an attempt to avoid similar trauma. This would increase survival odds in life-threatening environments. The problem being that heightened sensitivity to similar stimuli and automatic strong responses are usually detrimental to living a safe, modern life.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  My suspicion is that it's more about puncturing a worldview -- having your sense of natural order invalidated -- or a feeling of utter lack of agency or control, quite possibly both. Overwhelming sensory inputs quite possibly as well, especially painful or disturbing ones, though it may be a component of both the previous. The grief response seems mostly about an upset world-model. Loss of agency seems to be more strongly associated with PTSD. It's possible that if you grew up in an environment in which death was commonplace, but you experienced, or even just believed in, a sense of agency, you'd experience fewer manifestations of grief or PTSD than we'd consider typical now. Though perhaps not. I suspect many older psychological disturbances -- nervous exhaustion, mental breakdowns, melancholia and nostalgia (in their original senses) would map strongly to present notions of PTSD and depresion.
papeda 6y ago
Does your username come from your interest in trauma? A palimpsest is a pretty elegant physical representation of human memory.
acituan 6y ago
I disagree about being trauma naive as a society. Having a scientific understanding of trauma is separate from having phenomenological understanding of trauma, and I believe we have a large amount of knowledge and wisdom about the latter. I also believe there is a large repertoire of psychotechnologies that helped people to be trauma resistant or helped them if they had PTSD. We just lost contact with many of them and psychotherapy is perhaps the only dominant vessel for us in rediscovering those. Peter Levine's most famous example is a polar bear that shakes a potentially traumatic stimulus off after being shot with tranquilizer. He argues even non-human mammals have the instinctive know-how to deal with trauma. Why humans would be lagging behind other than undue suppression of their instincts on how to deal with it? If anything, our modern society that puts so much stake at "being in control" is a hindrance to post-traumatic resolution than historical societies would be. A crucial requirement for traumatic retention is a sense of loss of control that accompanies hyperarousal. No perceived lack of control = no trauma. In the context of combat PTSD, there is a large difference between modern warfare technologies and historical warfare in terms of the loss of control it induces (both for soldiers and civillians). At the very least, I would argue historic wars had more contextual meaning with them, fighting for one's land, nation, loved ones were more immediate and connected to the action, as opposed to being flown to a foreign country for less-than-well understood purposes. Even for complex-PTSD, nuclear and even single parent households being a recent state of affairs, I would argue historically having multiple adult figures in one's childhood context prevented a problematic relationship with a single adult dominating the development experience of the child. Also those children had more access to natural world early on (unsupervised play time), developed competencies (e.g. working in the farm with parents) and afforded many other developmental freedoms, therefore likely to have developed trauma resilience. What was a rite-of-passage ritual supervised by the elders if not a training program for developing trauma resilience? I would say it might as well be our current world that is more trauma-naive, trauma-generating and trauma-retaining than historical ones. We have the collective wisdom on how to deal with it, but insurance doesn't pay for it and you gotta show up at the office the next day.
- palimpsests 6y ago
  Great points on being raised by more adults, rites of passage, and the context in which combat PTSD occurred. I don't disagree - these were definitely (sometimes powerfully) mediating factors. And yes, it's an open question as to the degree of suppression of PTSD and natural traumatic resolution in pre-industrial societies. I do also agree that there has been a deep phenomenological understanding of trauma for many, many generations of humanity. It most likely wasn't called "trauma" (until perhaps recently). I also believe that our current understanding of this phenomenon has reached a level of sophistication that we've never had before, and this is bolstered by various advances in culture, science, and policy. For example, the legal use of entheogens as a medically prescribed treatment for PTSD (of course, these could be used to treat PTSD hundreds of years ago, and there were and are beautiful traditions around this -- the models were just different, though). We may have been less trauma-naive and less trauma-generating at some point in our collective history; I wonder about the level of holism of the models of trauma at that time.
clairity 6y ago
> "We know for a fact that mammals get PTSD after being in highly stressful experiences that they are unable to metabolize." my otherwise wonderful dog, adopted from a rescue org when she was ~3 years old, plainly has PTSD from prior trauma. she spent the first 3 months with me going through frequent cycles of fear diarrhea, usually in the very early morning hours. i can only guess that she was treated badly by a very overbearing/masculine person in tight quarters, based on her uncontrollable fear reactions, which almost always happen at home. outside, she's generally friendly toward women, mildly curious/cautious of kids, and fearful/cautious of men. we've largely worked through the diarrhea, though sometimes it triggers if she thinks i'm mad at her for any period of time, even if i get angry for reasons totally unrelated to her. she still sometimes exhibits extended bouts of panting, scratching, and self-nibbling as she tries to regulate the autonomous fear reaction. distraction, petting, hugging, and other countermeasures sometimes but often don't work in calming her down. it still breaks my heart every time, even 2 years on.
- kristiandupont 6y ago
  >fearful/cautious of men My ex neighbor rescued a wonderful dog that had been tied somewhere and left to die, in Spain. He brought her to Denmark and she has mostly recovered with the weird caveat that she is now racist. Southern-european looking people (black hair/beards) make her really angry or nervous.
  - clairity 6y ago
    glad she found a much better home! i worry about my dog being slightly racist too, as she tends to react more to black/brown folks relative to white/asian folks, but i may just be projecting my own implicit/latent racism there.
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      It’s very common. Growing up I had a dog that absolutely hated Mexicans because we had a Mexican gardener and the dog was very territorial. As you could imagine, it was difficult to get enough exposure to extinguish the reaction.
areoform 6y ago
Hey palimpsest, I can’t see an email on your profile, is there a way to get in touch?
- palimpsests 6y ago
  sure! atomato at gmail

Cederfjard 6y ago

Stupid question here, but isn't it possible that experiencing violence and death isn't as highly stressful/traumatic if it's to you like water is to a fish, to borrow your phrase? Especially if you have some sort of belief in an afterlife to console you. Just a question from someone who knows very little about this.

palimpsests 6y ago
It's not a stupid question at all. Death nor violence does not have to be inherently traumatic. I would be very surprised if 100% of people back then had degrees of PTSD (and that's not what my comment was meant to imply). A working definition of trauma: "trauma can be defined as any unresolved autonomic nervous system response. It’s about the nervous system’s response to an event, not necessarily the event itself. Events can affect each of us very differently." The context in which these events happen plays a huge role in whether or not someone develops symptoms of PTSD afterwards. Spiritual beliefs can play an important role in acceptance of death and therefore it not being a terrifying experience.
- sharkweek 6y ago
  My (limited, so please correct me if I’m saying something dumb) understanding here too is some people are just wired different and can handle more traumatic situations than others. My therapist had me read a book called The Highly Sensitive Person by Dr. Elaine Aron after I told him I was struggling with things I felt a “normal” person should be able to handle just fine. The book made a lot of interesting points about what it means to be sensitive (broad sense of the word) to the world around us.
  - palimpsests 6y ago
    This is definitely correct! Everybody is equipped differently to cope with life. The environments we grow up in make a huge difference in this. And they vary tremendously.
  - derefr 6y ago
    > some people are just wired different and can handle more traumatic situations than others. I've heard it hypothesized that ADHD is adaptive/selected for in some contexts, because people with it are more resilient to stress, i.e. it takes more to make them scared/shocked/traumatized, just like it takes more to excite/motivate them. And so such people can respond "normally" to stressful situations where the other people around them tend to freeze up, thus potentially saving the rest of the group.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - coffeeling 6y ago
    You might be interested in a book called Personality: What makes you the way you are by Newcastle professor Daniel Nettle. It's a very readable intro to the system of categorizing personality used by academic researchers and that probably has more resolution than thinking in terms of HSP.
- mLuby 6y ago
  I like that definition, but is the response "unresolved," or just "unhelpful?" Maybe "unresolved" has a different meaning in your specialty though. I thought when someone experiences trauma, it makes their brain sensitize to preceding stimuli and unconsciously produce a strong response, in an attempt to avoid similar trauma. This would increase survival odds in life-threatening environments. The problem being that heightened sensitivity to similar stimuli and automatic strong responses are usually detrimental to living a safe, modern life.
dredmorbius 6y ago
My suspicion is that it's more about puncturing a worldview -- having your sense of natural order invalidated -- or a feeling of utter lack of agency or control, quite possibly both. Overwhelming sensory inputs quite possibly as well, especially painful or disturbing ones, though it may be a component of both the previous. The grief response seems mostly about an upset world-model. Loss of agency seems to be more strongly associated with PTSD. It's possible that if you grew up in an environment in which death was commonplace, but you experienced, or even just believed in, a sense of agency, you'd experience fewer manifestations of grief or PTSD than we'd consider typical now. Though perhaps not. I suspect many older psychological disturbances -- nervous exhaustion, mental breakdowns, melancholia and nostalgia (in their original senses) would map strongly to present notions of PTSD and depresion.

papeda 6y ago

Does your username come from your interest in trauma? A palimpsest is a pretty elegant physical representation of human memory.

acituan 6y ago

I disagree about being trauma naive as a society. Having a scientific understanding of trauma is separate from having phenomenological understanding of trauma, and I believe we have a large amount of knowledge and wisdom about the latter. I also believe there is a large repertoire of psychotechnologies that helped people to be trauma resistant or helped them if they had PTSD. We just lost contact with many of them and psychotherapy is perhaps the only dominant vessel for us in rediscovering those. Peter Levine's most famous example is a polar bear that shakes a potentially traumatic stimulus off after being shot with tranquilizer. He argues even non-human mammals have the instinctive know-how to deal with trauma. Why humans would be lagging behind other than undue suppression of their instincts on how to deal with it? If anything, our modern society that puts so much stake at "being in control" is a hindrance to post-traumatic resolution than historical societies would be. A crucial requirement for traumatic retention is a sense of loss of control that accompanies hyperarousal. No perceived lack of control = no trauma. In the context of combat PTSD, there is a large difference between modern warfare technologies and historical warfare in terms of the loss of control it induces (both for soldiers and civillians). At the very least, I would argue historic wars had more contextual meaning with them, fighting for one's land, nation, loved ones were more immediate and connected to the action, as opposed to being flown to a foreign country for less-than-well understood purposes. Even for complex-PTSD, nuclear and even single parent households being a recent state of affairs, I would argue historically having multiple adult figures in one's childhood context prevented a problematic relationship with a single adult dominating the development experience of the child. Also those children had more access to natural world early on (unsupervised play time), developed competencies (e.g. working in the farm with parents) and afforded many other developmental freedoms, therefore likely to have developed trauma resilience. What was a rite-of-passage ritual supervised by the elders if not a training program for developing trauma resilience? I would say it might as well be our current world that is more trauma-naive, trauma-generating and trauma-retaining than historical ones. We have the collective wisdom on how to deal with it, but insurance doesn't pay for it and you gotta show up at the office the next day.

palimpsests 6y ago
Great points on being raised by more adults, rites of passage, and the context in which combat PTSD occurred. I don't disagree - these were definitely (sometimes powerfully) mediating factors. And yes, it's an open question as to the degree of suppression of PTSD and natural traumatic resolution in pre-industrial societies. I do also agree that there has been a deep phenomenological understanding of trauma for many, many generations of humanity. It most likely wasn't called "trauma" (until perhaps recently). I also believe that our current understanding of this phenomenon has reached a level of sophistication that we've never had before, and this is bolstered by various advances in culture, science, and policy. For example, the legal use of entheogens as a medically prescribed treatment for PTSD (of course, these could be used to treat PTSD hundreds of years ago, and there were and are beautiful traditions around this -- the models were just different, though). We may have been less trauma-naive and less trauma-generating at some point in our collective history; I wonder about the level of holism of the models of trauma at that time.

clairity 6y ago

> "We know for a fact that mammals get PTSD after being in highly stressful experiences that they are unable to metabolize." my otherwise wonderful dog, adopted from a rescue org when she was ~3 years old, plainly has PTSD from prior trauma. she spent the first 3 months with me going through frequent cycles of fear diarrhea, usually in the very early morning hours. i can only guess that she was treated badly by a very overbearing/masculine person in tight quarters, based on her uncontrollable fear reactions, which almost always happen at home. outside, she's generally friendly toward women, mildly curious/cautious of kids, and fearful/cautious of men. we've largely worked through the diarrhea, though sometimes it triggers if she thinks i'm mad at her for any period of time, even if i get angry for reasons totally unrelated to her. she still sometimes exhibits extended bouts of panting, scratching, and self-nibbling as she tries to regulate the autonomous fear reaction. distraction, petting, hugging, and other countermeasures sometimes but often don't work in calming her down. it still breaks my heart every time, even 2 years on.

kristiandupont 6y ago
>fearful/cautious of men My ex neighbor rescued a wonderful dog that had been tied somewhere and left to die, in Spain. He brought her to Denmark and she has mostly recovered with the weird caveat that she is now racist. Southern-european looking people (black hair/beards) make her really angry or nervous.
- clairity 6y ago
  glad she found a much better home! i worry about my dog being slightly racist too, as she tends to react more to black/brown folks relative to white/asian folks, but i may just be projecting my own implicit/latent racism there.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    It’s very common. Growing up I had a dog that absolutely hated Mexicans because we had a Mexican gardener and the dog was very territorial. As you could imagine, it was difficult to get enough exposure to extinguish the reaction.

areoform 6y ago

Hey palimpsest, I can’t see an email on your profile, is there a way to get in touch?

palimpsests 6y ago
sure! atomato at gmail