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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, y

• 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.
    • tern 1y ago
      I don't know your relationship with the former person, but as for drawing general conclusions, I—as a reader of your comment—can't assume that you have assessed accurately whether their case is better. You might not be aware of subtle abuse in the home, masked depression, overt narcissism, suicidality, etc. Years in the trenches have taught me that many people who seem successful, put-together, and happy are deeply struggling or causing harm to the people closest to them.
      • pixl97 1y ago
        Yea, this seems to be an issue with this entire thread. Lots of people making lots of assumption about others. As a kid into my teens I had plenty of my own trama, but was quiet and generally didn't interact with many other people my age, generally having friendships with people much older than I was. Once I got into my late twenties this turned around and I ended up being the person who many other people my age and younger would come and talk to about their lives. In general I'm just quiet and let them talk. Listening to a lot people talk about their lives has let me see one thing. A lot of people are really screwed up from their childhood and bring it into their adulthood The number of women that have been sexually assaulted or raped that disclose it is downright depressing, especially in their childhood. More depressing is the number of 'high status' people that cover it up. The number of men that have some kind of depression coping mechanism such as alcoholism or hidden drug use is disturbing too. And a lot of these people are the ones you can't tell. They have successful jobs and make good money, have a wife and kids. All the checkboxes of supposed happiness. But so often these are things they had to do at some point after being driven by narcissistic parents for years. Trama driven workaholics with no at home coping mechanisms are common too. I have no idea how much people that have had trauma can be fixed. What I'd really like to see is the signs if it taught younger so kids and learn how to avoid it and call it out.
  • panloss125 1y ago
    [dead]
  • kulahan 1y ago
    People who face reality and climb towards real growth are also suppressing their negative emotions, surviving, and moving on. Children are specifically different from adults because they don't have any emotional regulation. They just live fully in whatever emotion smacks them in the gut. Just because you've got a scar doesn't mean it's bad, nor does it mean you haven't moved on if you haven't spent 6 months staring at the healing process. Some people heal quicker, some heal better, some heal slower, some heal worse. Like pretty much everything in biology, it's something of a spectrum.
  • lmm 1y ago
    > 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 Nominally yes. But in practice what are the effects of the treatments that people advocate for? Do people end up better or worse off?
  • davidgay 1y ago
    > > History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma > i’m extremely skeptical that people move on Historically, essentially everyone who lived long enough to have children had some of those children die [1]. So either: - that wasn't traumatic - they managed to deal with that trauma - or they didn't move on, and everyone was somewhat traumatised You can take your choice from the above, but on the whole this was the normal state of affairs for most of human history and prehistory. [1]: from https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an..., 50% of children died by age ~5
    • taeric 1y ago
      This is a big point that really blows my mind in the discussion. It is basically indisputable that we are exposed to less trauma than people in the past. To a laughable degree. And it wasn't just children. Before the advent of antiseptics, a prick from a briar could basically kill you. Before modern supply chains, you almost certainly had parasites. Before modern vaccines... The list is remarkably large. I suppose there is an argument that it is the reduction of traumatic events that makes them more traumatic? Feels like a shaky reason to think "focus more and make sure you fully grappled with how traumatic it was" is the default correct approach.
      • joshuamorton 1y ago
        > It is basically indisputable that we are exposed to less trauma than people in the past. To a laughable degree. And standards of living and life expediencies have gone up and to the right. That 100 years ago people managed to cope with the traumatics of daily life doesn't translate to their coping being healthy or their lives being better (consider the massive drinking culture of the mid 1800s that ultimately led to prohibition)
        • taeric 1y ago
          True that standards of living have gone up. I'm... not clear where you were going with this, though? You are using the word "cope" in a way that implies people did not grow after their trauma in the past. I do think I've been sloppy and said grown from trauma a few times. I meant that to be a time marker, not a cause of growth. Do I think some people did not manage healthy growth after some events? Absolutely! But I also think many people did find ways to continue to grow.
• 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.