39 ms·

This article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-skeptic, which doesn't seem to agree with mainstream science (setting aside Body Keeps the Score) >

• taeric 1y ago
  I think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them? That is, yes, some trauma sticks with you. History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't devastated when we ultimately do lose some family. Would be like saying you should hammer people on how much grieve they must be feeling because they lost a dog. Now, nor should you also scold people for feeling said grief. It is very personal and hard to really know what experience someone will have until they have it.
  • marcelr 1y ago
    more information is better if it’s also provided with the context of how to heal. > History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma i’m extremely skeptical that people move on they suppress, they survive, but without deep understanding its impossible to say move on you can be ignorant and survive, or face reality and climb the deeply uphill battle of real growth. of course you can be paralyzed by it, but no one is advocating for that as treatment
    • taeric 1y ago
      I mean... depends on the trauma? Do you consider it traumatic to lose a pet? What is the difference between survival and moving on? What sort of growth would you expect there?
    • zdragnar 1y ago
      It really depends on the person. I know someone who grew up in rough neighborhoods, has been in fights, been stabbed, divorced alcoholic father and drug using mother, and yet got a master's degree, a fulfilling career, marriage and family. I know someone else who happened to be in a bank when it was robbed, and has spent years struggling to hold a steady job because the anxiety developed from the experience has persisted. Later divorced and become a poster child for making bad decisions. The latter has gone to therapy, the former didn't. Small sample size, don't draw any conclusions other than everyone is different, and beware anyone proclaiming universal truths in psychology.
      • tonyarkles 1y ago
        The extra confounding factor here is that not all therapy is created equal. Some of my life has parallels with your first example. I did my first therapy session in grad school and it helped me out tremendously. Again, anecdotal, but one of the things he did very well was to not allow me to continually re-traumatize myself by rehashing the potential sources of my (maladaptive, dysfunctional, pathological, whatever word you want) thoughts and behaviours. He would listen for a bit and then steer the conversation back to: what’s the delta you’re trying to achieve? I can help you find a route from here to there without needing to go back to the beginning. As it turned out, getting myself to a better mental state helped me let go of a lot of resentment and blame that I held about the people responsible for my childhood. It wasn’t explicit, it just kind of happened as I tweaked my thinking. There is also an element of… it’s easier to get out of a shitty headspace if you’re not already stuck in a shitty present. I moved out of my home town when I turned 18 and went to university 3 hours away. Close enough that I stayed in touch with my family but far enough away that the day-to-day chaos didn’t affect me. Cell phones weren’t a thing yet so there were plenty of viable excuses for not answering the phone. In your second example, unlike mine, the person spirals downwards instead of escaping. They start out as anxious from the robbery, then end up anxious and unemployed. Then anxious, unemployed, and divorced. It’s pretty tough to think clearly about addressing and processing the robbery when you’re not sure if you’re going to have enough money for groceries and rent.
  • crazygringo 1y ago
    > History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. That's the "classical" mindset that modern empirical studies are refuting. Actually, no, people are often not very resilient at all in moving on from trauma. They suffer greatly, they traumatize others, and it affects their health.
    • taeric 1y ago
      On this, then, I would generally have a hard time agreeing. I'd be comfortable with the idea that not everyone is very resilient. I'd expect that. If the claim, then, is that there is an absurdly high variance there, I'd agree. But I'm also growingly sympathetic to the idea that telling people they are, in fact, traumatized, is not healthy. People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are told. Especially from authority.
      • Schmerika 1y ago
        > People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are told. Research shows that suggestibility is actually moderately correlated with trauma.
        • Jensson 1y ago
          If so then its true, telling traumatized people that they are traumatized makes it worse for them.
          • paulryanrogers 1y ago
            Correlation is ~not~ [actually] causation?
            • Xelbair 1y ago
              how do you determine causation from correlation in experiment where you are unable to separate all the factors? you can't. not agreeing with one side or other - because i frankly don't know enough about it to form an opinion, but using "correlation != causation" is basically a discussion stopper.
  • chermi 1y ago
    Ehh, kind of. But at the same time, EMDR works. So revisiting it in a very particular way can help. However, I concede that there's kind of a hammer and nail problem in therapy. They learn about how much trauma and childhood experience effects a person and tend to laser focus on that because they feel confident doing so. I think there's a certain unhealthines to spending too much time dwelling on the past. Up to some level it's ok, but there should be at least equal focus on the present, future, and agency+self-confidence+self-discovery. Whereas a typical client would not be unreasonable to feel more like a victim given the focus on past experiences and traumas, which naturally reinforces a past-oriented victim mindset. Meanwhile, what most people need is a sense of being able to make things better now and work toward a better future, and practical tools to do so (agency). Of course, for severe cases, you should probably focus on dealing with the trauma and get the client to a more stable state before taking off the coddling gloves.
    • taeric 1y ago
      I would have to take more time to read up on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The wikipedia intro to it isn't fully favorable, sadly. And agreed that "severe" cases are almost certainly special cases that should be treated as such. PTSD would almost certainly always qualify as severe? But the idea that people have "in the womb" trauma just feels patently silly.
      • 47282847 1y ago
        For an extensive critical review on research on prenatal trauma (“in the womb”) and theories around it, see Philipp Ployés “The Prenatal Theme in Psychotherapy”, available on libgen. Especially in the past 20 years with improved ultrasound, you can view a lot of what is going on inside, and reason about it. Of course there is no way to fully prove it, but the scientific consensus definitely is that factors like stress of the mother or substance abuse have a long-lasting and measurable negative effect on the child.
        • taeric 1y ago
          Stress of mother and substance abuse is very different from things like "cord wrapped around you." Similarly, some people have the cord literally cut off circulation and such. That is different, as well. Thanks for the link!
  • RajT88 1y ago
    > pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them I have known a few people who had they not dwelled so much on events, I wonder if their trauma would have been middling instead of major. Hard to say for sure, but I am not the only person to observe these folks seemed to be making their trauma more traumatic.
  • Nursie 1y ago
    > I think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them? There was certainly a fairly prominent British psychologist (IIRC) a handful of years ago who disparaged some of the anxiety and depression awareness campaigns on the grounds that being more aware of psychological ailments like that, when they were on the minor end of the scale and not actually debilitating, was probably unhelpful. That actually in his opinion "suck it up and get on with your life" might be the best advice sometimes, because such conditions can become self-fulfilling, and getting on with your life, doing stuff and achieving things might be the best remedy. Rather than dwelling on the problem and giving yourself the excuse "I am depressed/anxious" I don't know how/if that maps to trauma, and there was a lot of backlash...
    • lynx97 1y ago
      In my experience, he is right.
    • array_key_first 1y ago
      The problem with "suck it up and get on with it" is that it works, but it's not optimal a lot of the time. You can be successful and absolutely miserable. You can push yourself to do anything, and be abusing substances at the same time. Being functional or meeting arbitrary goals of capitalism and patriachy does not make you happy or good.
      • Nursie 1y ago
        I think you missed the point. The point is not pretending to be functional for the sake of it, putting on a facade and calling everything great. It's that being functional often works to help in and of itself. Getting out of the house, socialising, exercising and working towards your own goals in life, cutting down on booze and drugs, getting proper sleep etc, can and does have an effect and can alleviate the problem. It's not a mask, it's a remedy in many minor cases. Compared to medicalising minor bouts of depression or anxiety (which may well really just be part of the human experience), calling them a 'condition', which may render people more helpless and encourage wallowing in it which is likely to make things worse. Sometimes picking yourself up and getting on with it is what you actually need. If that doesn't work for you, seek help, sure, nobody's saying you shouldn't.
  • lynx97 1y ago
    This. Totally resonates with me, from personal experience. I had radiation therapy and 2 years of chemo starting from the age of 1.5 years. During that time, my mother left me alone for a MONTH in the hospital. I've been told the chemo was so bad that at the end, they had to search for veins on my head, since all the veins in my body were already retracted... I neither am afraid of needles, nor have I ever had therapy in my life. Simply because I didn't need it. I have no PTSD, nor any other aftereffects. The only thing that is obvious now, is that the bond to my mother broke, and I basically feel no "love" towards here, nor do I want to give her any slack for her past and current failings. This is not intended as a "I am so cool" post. It is simply how my life turned out. Later on, when I learned about PTSD and Trauma, I asked myself several times why I haven't got anything like that. However, the more I think about it, the more it feels like I could unearth something if I really tried.
  • motorest 1y ago
    > That is, yes, some trauma sticks with you. History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't devastated when we ultimately do lose some family. This is textbook survivorship bias. If you try hard enough you'll eventually discover a never-ending list of examples where people never recovered from trauma and even outright died directly or indirectly die to it.
    • taeric 1y ago
      This is just taking my point to be maximal that people always recovered from these things. I don't think that. But nor do I take what seems to be the near maximal other side, where everyone is fighting some hidden trauma from their childhood.
      • motorest 1y ago
        > But nor do I take what seems to be the near maximal other side, where everyone is fighting some hidden trauma from their childhood. I think you're trying too hard to downplay a problem by questioning the extent it exists. Perhaps a more productive approach is to try to learn about the topic, starting by learning about the definition of psychological and emotional problem. It's quite possible that your denial is founded on a misplaced sense of what trauma is or isn't.
        • taeric 1y ago
          I think you are still taking my point to a maximal position that I don't hold. People need help all the time. It shouldn't take trauma to get people to agree on that point. Good help will be goal oriented, though. And the goal is not to maximize your focus on the trauma to make sure you have experienced it all. The goal is to grow for whatever you need, now. This is true of physical trauma. You don't sit with people and teach them all of the ways that their body has been broken when they get a physical injury. You identify the goals and exercises that they will need to do to achieve them. In many cases, you have to reset realistic goals. I'm sympathetic to the idea that sometimes you have to tease out what the actual blockage is. In that search, you may be helped by discussing the underlying trauma. But that is firmly in the land of probabilistic approaches where we explicitly don't know a lot.
• jasonfarnon 1y ago
  None of these seems to be making a causal claim, did I miss something? The linked article is saying causation runs in the opposite direction.
  • softwaredoug 1y ago
    The only studies we have are long term longitudinal. IE this one: > After adjustment for confounding, there were statistically significant positive associations for people reporting four or more ACEs relative to those reporting no ACEs, and this was true for all chronic diseases except hypertension. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8462987 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8462987 A twin study would be about as close as we could get to a randomized control trial: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2815834 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/... I'm willing to use the term "cause" here, given the copious amount of studies controlling for other confounders. That's the best we can do given there's no ethical way to run a randomized control trial.
• alwa 1y ago
  It seems like all of those things can be true independently of whether or not a traumatic experience, in and of itself, effects permanent neurological/endocrine changes, though, right? It sounded to me like his issue was with the claim that there are direct, systematic physical effects directly consequent to the psychological experience. It didn’t sound like an argument against claims like “a rough childhood reverberates into adulthood,” or “traumatic experiences have profound consequences for people.” If anything, it would seem to me that, to effectively treat people struggling with post-traumatic consequences, it would be useful to understand whether or not your efforts would be usefully invested in physical interventions to address these supposed physical changes. Or if the best treatments are not medical but psychological, or social, or spiritual, or whatever. It also has that tone scientists use when they speak of Malcolm Gladwell: annoyed that he misrepresents careful experimental findings in service of a good accessible narrative. Even if what he’s saying could turn out to be true—taking issue with the claim that it’s been scientifically demonstrated to be so. Which I’m sympathetic to.
• jact 1y ago
  [flagged]
• underlipton 1y ago
  Every serviceman reading this should be hopping mad. He's basically calling anyone suffering from PTS "weak". These are people who enter the service at physical peak (not just personally, globally) and sometimes exit with serious, lifelong, compounding damage. These people aren't weak, they're traumatized. Trauma is real. It can fuck you up.
  • duskdozer 1y ago
    Well, has anyone ever even tried to tell the veterans to man up, stop dwelling, and get over it? Didn't think so.
• casey2 1y ago
  None of that controls for socioeconomic status which is likely the most common factor in poor health outcomes. In particular some of these try to put a measure on "family dysfunction"... yeah, good luck with that. Trauma is a very politically charged topic anyhow with at least a few modern political movements tying themselves to it, it would be very inconvenient for it to not be an all encompassing problem.
  • whattheheckheck 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • kaitai 1y ago
    Adverse childhood experiences definitely correlate with socioeconomic status. It's possible to disentangle their separate effects on some statistical level, but very difficult on a practical level. For instance, losing your home and living with your mom in a car when you're 6 is a socioeconomic ACE. Someone else in the discussion here made a comment that service members should be mad at this blog post, as it is essentially saying that people cause their own adverse experiences. Well, again, the US armed services tend to draw disproportionately from lower socioeconomic groups, who tend to have higher numbers of adverse experiences. It's very hard to disentangle these correlated variables when it comes to outcomes for real people. And it's a total copout to then blame servicemembers for their PTSD. We have the language of a cycle of abuse, a cycle of poverty, a cycle of violence. People have recognized the cyclicality of this for millennia. It's good the blogpost brings that out. The thing that disappoints me about the discussion here (and in the blog post) is that there is this relentless focus on the psychology of things. Being homeless as a child, having a parent die, having family die violently, etc all do correlate with higher rates of cardiac disease, diabetes, etc. Again, can't disentangle from the socioeconomic aspects, but you also can't blame a kid for their family member dying. The idea that "unhealthy people may be more susceptible to trauma" has some veins of validity, but is also just deeply unkind, inhuman, and inaccurate taken to an absolute. Kids in foster care, kids who experienced a school shooting, kids who had a parent die of cancer, etc -- it is immorally self-serving to say it's their own fault. You know it's not. The blog post itself cherry-picks by focusing on PTSD and the brain, ignoring correlations between ACEs and cardiac problems and diabetes. By focusing on the brain, the author can easily imply it's made up weakness (no lab results to confront) and then move on to "just get over it", which is adjacent to "it's not my problem". I'm not a fan of over-therapizing and I don't think therapy or crystals will fix your diabetes. But don't throw the baby out with Bessel van der Kolk's bathwater.
• jalapenos 1y ago
  Indeed, and it's an odd position to take, even if one simply approaches it from common sense. Someone with psychological trauma is obviously going to spend more time in a state of stress, which in turn is unhealthy by itself, even before secondary effects like use of drugs and alcohol to try self-regulate psychological state. Makes me wonder if it's motivated by some kind of denial
• aidenn0 1y ago
  I've read the book, and it's, IMO, mediocre. However, I don't think anybody who has (for example) worked with foster children could possibly deny that trauma leads to dysfunction.
• davidgerard 1y ago
  I glanced at the article links at the bottom: * The shady Story behind why we think Veganism is healthy - Paid off scientists, swayed politicians, and hidden studies helped us be afraid of meat *The $200 Billion Industry shrinking our brains - How a completely new food ingredient could be de-evolving our brains * Men Need more Testosterone, not more Therapy - Focusing too much on emotions is a feminine solution to a masculine problem yyyeah, hope this guy has fun with whatever's up with him
  • AlexeyBelov 1y ago
    Alt-right pipeline. Starts with talking about femininity and masculinity in a certain way, then incel talking points, meat being great and vegans being evil. Then undoubtedly something about big pharma and finally about people of certain heritage wearing certain hats. This may sound far-fetched, but look at youtube comments under videos about carnivore diets or some other right-leaning fad.
• everdrive 1y ago
  I think trauma-skepticism is responding to a very strong case for trauma. "Everyone must find their trauma." "I just started going to therapy, and I _had no idea_ I had so much unresolved childhood trauma." "My parents weren't emotionally fulfilling 100% of the time and that counts as trauma." etc. I'm being a bit flippant, but this view is pushed a LOT. I think it's correct to push back against the hard case for the "past trauma construction of personality," however it's also ridiculous to suggest that real trauma does not exist and does not really leave a mark on people. In the general sense, this is a problem that nearly every ideological movement faces: in correctly noting the problems with the old view, they overcorrect and assume the old view must be full expunged rather than modified.
  • freejazz 1y ago
    >I'm being a bit flippant, but this view is pushed a LOT. Really? That seems like a big stretch.
    • achierius 1y ago
      No, this is definitely a thing in certain crowds. Not everyone, definitely not everywhere, but some circles really love this stuff.
      • freejazz 1y ago
        That's a bit different from the view being pushed "A LOT"
  • softwaredoug 1y ago
    ACEs are a specific events during childhood. Like 10-15 very specific things like abuse, divorce, etc. I'm sure in the same way "triggered" has been hijacked, people now call everything "trauma" when its not so.
  • _cenw 1y ago
    This sounds like a problem with learned definitions. Like how the word racism is misunderstood between different participants in culture war clashes - for some it needs to be intentional and malicious, for others it's an expression of systemic structural issues that's not even always an individuals fault. Sometimes such distinctions are made larger than they have to be in an attempt to legitimize one as more important. This is pretty common among some people who have Autism/MPD/DID/ADHD or are trans - where out of fear of being seen as less legitimate (or being denied medical care) facing widening diagnostic criteria, higher incidence (or general visibility; trans people are still rare - they are just a great culture war target) or depathologization a "true, legacy criteria diagnosed" and "fashionable self-dx on tiktok" (I'm really exaggerating to set the max bounds here) group are constructed. Often that really isn't needed. These groups shouldn't be competing for space with each other. But sometimes they're made to - speaking from experience, people who don't believe trans people are "real" love to use the existence of nonbinary people to also attack those who fit into the "classical" strictly binary diagnostic criteria.