5 ms·

As someone who grew up in the 80s, this type of minimization of personal suffering was the norm. “You don’t know how good you have it” despite real mental and p

As someone who grew up in the 80s, this type of minimization of personal suffering was the norm. “You don’t know how good you have it” despite real mental and physical health struggles. You either made it to adulthood, cynical and damaged, transformed your suffering into growth on your own, or ended up in some marginalized place like a mental ward. Sometimes a mix of all of the above. I think we can do better. 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.

slibhb 3y ago
> As someone who grew up in the 80s, this type of minimization of personal suffering was the norm. 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.
- bjornsing 3y ago
  > For the latter group, the new openness about mental illness and trauma has been a disaster. Why so?
  - squigz 3y ago
    It might be because it throws into question whether they really had to adapt the way they did
  - notnaut 3y ago
    There is a sort of consensus that there is an inherent good to talking about, actively processing, analyzing trauma. 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.
    - jancsika 3y ago
      > 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. 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.
- squigz 3y ago
  > But there are a lot of people for whom "holding it in" and adopting general-purpose stoic principles are enough. 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.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    If someone can in fact regulate their emotions properly, would you even know they’ve been traumatised at some point?
    - lazide 3y ago
      Like NPD, the only way is a proper comparison of reality to facts. 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.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > Some people need help. But there are a lot of people for whom "holding it in" and adopting general-purpose stoic principles are enough. 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.
  - teekert 3y ago
    I believe some people need to talk about trauma (ie a cop that gets shot on), but some people wrap it up in their head and place it on a mental shelf. 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.
  - tgaj 3y ago
    I think it's because "getting over" is a really long process for someone with severe trauma. And it's often better to inform people around you about the problems you are having and the source of them. Like I have problems with particular task not because I do not respect you or I don't care about it but I am still fighting with me demons. Sure you can not care about that but it's still better that you know about it.
sorokod 3y ago
normal and abnormal are adjectives that attempt to quantify an ill defined distance from an ill defined center of what society considers acceptable. They do shift a lot with geography and time.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Aurornis 3y ago
> As someone who grew up in the 80s, this type of minimization of personal suffering was the norm. “You don’t know how good you have it” despite real mental and physical health struggles. 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.
- lazide 3y ago
  The weird thing is, what if sometimes they aren’t wrong? It would explain some things. If the tools work, why not use them? If they don’t, maybe use something else.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    I personally would argue that the issue happens to coincide with a language shift. While 'trauma' was indeed adopted to mean 'I stubbed my toe yesterday' ( and not without help from media, which popularized it ), similar to word 'mid', I am sure a new word exists that encompasses absolutely brutal treshold for PTSD. Damn young people. They ruined English!
jt2190 3y ago
> I don’t know where to draw the line on what constitutes trauma for someone else. It’s highly subjective. 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.)
- graphe 3y ago
  Did they take the explosive damage to the braincase versus shot someone they didn't mean to? https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/blast-shock-tbi-ptsd-ied-shell-shock-world-war-one https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/blast-sho...

slibhb 3y ago

> As someone who grew up in the 80s, this type of minimization of personal suffering was the norm. 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.

bjornsing 3y ago
> For the latter group, the new openness about mental illness and trauma has been a disaster. Why so?
- squigz 3y ago
  It might be because it throws into question whether they really had to adapt the way they did
- notnaut 3y ago
  There is a sort of consensus that there is an inherent good to talking about, actively processing, analyzing trauma. 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.
  - jancsika 3y ago
    > 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. 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.
squigz 3y ago
> But there are a lot of people for whom "holding it in" and adopting general-purpose stoic principles are enough. 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.
- Filligree 3y ago
  If someone can in fact regulate their emotions properly, would you even know they’ve been traumatised at some point?
  - lazide 3y ago
    Like NPD, the only way is a proper comparison of reality to facts. 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.
Aurornis 3y ago
> Some people need help. But there are a lot of people for whom "holding it in" and adopting general-purpose stoic principles are enough. 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.
- teekert 3y ago
  I believe some people need to talk about trauma (ie a cop that gets shot on), but some people wrap it up in their head and place it on a mental shelf. 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.
- tgaj 3y ago
  I think it's because "getting over" is a really long process for someone with severe trauma. And it's often better to inform people around you about the problems you are having and the source of them. Like I have problems with particular task not because I do not respect you or I don't care about it but I am still fighting with me demons. Sure you can not care about that but it's still better that you know about it.

sorokod 3y ago

normal and abnormal are adjectives that attempt to quantify an ill defined distance from an ill defined center of what society considers acceptable. They do shift a lot with geography and time.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Aurornis 3y ago

> As someone who grew up in the 80s, this type of minimization of personal suffering was the norm. “You don’t know how good you have it” despite real mental and physical health struggles. 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.

lazide 3y ago
The weird thing is, what if sometimes they aren’t wrong? It would explain some things. If the tools work, why not use them? If they don’t, maybe use something else.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  I personally would argue that the issue happens to coincide with a language shift. While 'trauma' was indeed adopted to mean 'I stubbed my toe yesterday' ( and not without help from media, which popularized it ), similar to word 'mid', I am sure a new word exists that encompasses absolutely brutal treshold for PTSD. Damn young people. They ruined English!

jt2190 3y ago

> I don’t know where to draw the line on what constitutes trauma for someone else. It’s highly subjective. 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.)

graphe 3y ago
Did they take the explosive damage to the braincase versus shot someone they didn't mean to? https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/blast-shock-tbi-ptsd-ied-shell-shock-world-war-one https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/blast-sho...