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> 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 require

> 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.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    > How on Earth am I playing oppression (trauma?) olympics by not discussing any of mine? 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.
Kamq 3y ago
> 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. 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.
- tgaj 3y ago
  I believe that's what therapy is. Trying to convince someone that he is able to process his trauma and continue his life without this burden. And we just know that's not easy. It's a process that can take years. I think you could compare that somehow to trying to convince religious person that the god does not exists.
  - Kamq 3y ago
    > Trying to convince someone that he is able to process his trauma and continue his life without this burden. 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.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > The position doesn't jive with the way people actually behave. 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.
lazide 3y ago
The challenge here is that we don’t get to choose, rationally, who we are - except in some very, very limited circumstances, with a lot of expensive work. It requires re-training ourselves and our internal animal. The initial training was a combination of genetics and early childhood experiences which are going to be nearly impossible to truly understand in a clear way, for many reasons - including delusions on the part of all parties. 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.

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.

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> 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. 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.
- throwanem 3y ago
  > How on Earth am I playing oppression (trauma?) olympics by not discussing any of mine? 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.

Kamq 3y ago

> 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. 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.

tgaj 3y ago
I believe that's what therapy is. Trying to convince someone that he is able to process his trauma and continue his life without this burden. And we just know that's not easy. It's a process that can take years. I think you could compare that somehow to trying to convince religious person that the god does not exists.
- Kamq 3y ago
  > Trying to convince someone that he is able to process his trauma and continue his life without this burden. 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.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> The position doesn't jive with the way people actually behave. 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.

lazide 3y ago

The challenge here is that we don’t get to choose, rationally, who we are - except in some very, very limited circumstances, with a lot of expensive work. It requires re-training ourselves and our internal animal. The initial training was a combination of genetics and early childhood experiences which are going to be nearly impossible to truly understand in a clear way, for many reasons - including delusions on the part of all parties. 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.