4 ms·

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

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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - coffeeling 7y 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 7y 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.

palimpsests 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    [deleted]
- coffeeling 7y 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 7y 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.