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I agree that words have meanings. Words like trauma and abuse shouldn’t be used casually or we won't have the language to describe horrific things. However-- ha

I agree that words have meanings. Words like trauma and abuse shouldn’t be used casually or we won't have the language to describe horrific things. However-- having experienced some early childhood difficulties, I have had to make an intentional effort not to downgrade people's experiences and fall into a no true Scotsman trap. I try to remind myself that things like trauma and abuse are experiences that filter through people's minds. It's trauma if they think it is. I do also think though that some people have never experienced the same types of trauma as others so they may not really understand it. If and when they do, they may choose to rank the experiences differently. Edit: updated my ramble

throwanem 3y ago
> It's trauma if they think it is and it impacts them as trauma. 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.
- batch12 3y ago
  Yeah, I've waffled on that because I don't know how to say it how I mean it. I'll try to generalize it but I'm sure I won't get it right. If something has you afraid, it doesnt matter if I think your fear is justified. Me disregarding your emotion doesn't make you lose the fear. I don't disagree with the idea that we are responsible for how we respond to events in our lives. I tell my kids the same thing- nobody can control you unless you let them. You have the power to control how you respond to things. Sometimes it's the only power you have. I don't have to agree that a college breakup is trauma, but it isn't helpful in most cases to point that out when someone thinks it is. Instead, maybe I can just listen the way I would if it were something I thought was more important. Maybe they'll get through it the same way I did given enough time. 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.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    > If something has you afraid, it doesnt matter if I think your fear is justified. 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.
    - batch12 3y ago
      Good discussion, thanks!
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    > Everyone's trauma is equally important 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.
Aurornis 3y ago
> It's trauma if they think it is. 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.
sorokod 3y ago
> It's trauma if they think it is. 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.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  This is a (the?) use case for room-temperature superconductors: cheap fMRI scanners. It's trauma if the brain scans match trauma responses.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    Even in a dead fish? https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf
    - Filligree 3y ago
      Dying does sound traumatic. /s
bowsamic 3y ago
> I agree that words have meanings. That seems bold, do you have any justification for this belief?
- batch12 3y ago
  Yes

throwanem 3y ago

> It's trauma if they think it is and it impacts them as trauma. 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.

batch12 3y ago
Yeah, I've waffled on that because I don't know how to say it how I mean it. I'll try to generalize it but I'm sure I won't get it right. If something has you afraid, it doesnt matter if I think your fear is justified. Me disregarding your emotion doesn't make you lose the fear. I don't disagree with the idea that we are responsible for how we respond to events in our lives. I tell my kids the same thing- nobody can control you unless you let them. You have the power to control how you respond to things. Sometimes it's the only power you have. I don't have to agree that a college breakup is trauma, but it isn't helpful in most cases to point that out when someone thinks it is. Instead, maybe I can just listen the way I would if it were something I thought was more important. Maybe they'll get through it the same way I did given enough time. 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.
- throwanem 3y ago
  > If something has you afraid, it doesnt matter if I think your fear is justified. 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.
  - batch12 3y ago
    Good discussion, thanks!
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> 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. 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.
- throwanem 3y ago
  > Everyone's trauma is equally important 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.

Aurornis 3y ago

> It's trauma if they think it is. 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.

sorokod 3y ago

> It's trauma if they think it is. 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.

tuatoru 3y ago
This is a (the?) use case for room-temperature superconductors: cheap fMRI scanners. It's trauma if the brain scans match trauma responses.
- throwanem 3y ago
  Even in a dead fish? https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf
  - Filligree 3y ago
    Dying does sound traumatic. /s

bowsamic 3y ago

> I agree that words have meanings. That seems bold, do you have any justification for this belief?

batch12 3y ago
Yes