Maybe we are, ha. It is absolutely not the case that everyone is battling childhood trauma -- I don't know of any serious thinker who argues that. It seems like

Maybe we are, ha. It is absolutely not the case that everyone is battling childhood trauma -- I don't know of any serious thinker who argues that. It seems like quite the strawman. And the umbilical cord thing seems like a pretty unhelpful example, precisely because it's so difficult to verify -- it seems pretty definite that you can be impacted by trauma from before you can remember things, but at the same time it seems hard to say anything definitive about any particular event precisely because you can't remember it. I think that trauma has been denied and ignored for so many centuries/millenia that we're only now as a society starting to accept that it exists and requires the kind of treatment that a spouse, friends and the church are not equipped to provide. And I don't even think we've gone far enough -- it's still extremely common to hear people insist nobody needs therapy, shrinks are all quacks, they don't believe in therapy, all you need is a good friend to talk to. So it feels strange to me to see this kind of "backlash" against recognition of trauma, which to me seems extremely premature. It's better to err on the side of helping people and pay for a few therapy sessions that turn out not to be needed, than to tell people after something horrific happens to just grin and bear it and you'll forget about it soon enough, because people are naturally resilient and bounce back from anything. Because very frequently, they don't.