5 ms·

> 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

by 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.

by slibhb 3y ago

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.