Comment by AndrewKemendo

People overuse and overgeneralize the term "trauma" for sure. But it might be helpful to see real actual trauma as only one item in the larger set of "stuff from your past that impacts/has influence on you today, that you mostly aren't aware of, but that if you were aware/more aware of you'd be able to handle better."

The way our primary caregivers relate and respond to us when we're a) in our most rapid periods of development and b) completely dependent on them for everything absolutely has an influence on the way we turn out. How could it not?

So there's no such thing as Neutral/No Influence, there is only identifying what effects there are and learning how to lean either into or out of those influences on a situational basis. All of this definitely applies to childhood trauma, but it doesn't HAVE to be trauma for that logic to apply. Figuring that stuff out is a helpful part of maturing, and it doesn't have to be a critical or negative thing.

In many ways I've come to appreciate and love my parents even more as I've worked through the ways they raised me the best they could, given the resources they had, but in ways that I can now see preferable alternatives to.

I think it's the biggest "I Love You" in the world to self-consciously seek to grow beyond the limitations that were passed on to me, just like I want my little girl to outgrow the ones I consciously or unconsciously hand down to her.

In college we hit that age where classmates started losing grandparents. I was one of the oldest grandchildren so I had a few years yet.

Some of these people absolutely fell apart. It was the first time they’d ever lost anyone and they couldn’t process it. When gently pressed, we would find out they had no pets growing up. They had not lost so much as a goldfish.

A painless life can set you up for failure when real adversity comes. You lack the resilience, and in some cases the empathy, to navigate these situations. That’s not trauma, but it is loss.

Those experiences gave me a whole new perspective on peers whose parents got them goldfish or hamsters at a young age. Some of these parents were setting up object lessons. Basically the chicken pox party of loss.

At that point I had lost a dog, and as a sensitive kid it wrecked me. And the worst part of it was every time I caught my breath some new asshole would offer his condolences. Thanks, I wasn’t thinking about my dog for ten minutes and now I’m thinking about her again. Can we just stop talking about it please?

I learned to offer sympathy without an agenda. Engaging them is trying to make them process on your timeline. It’s thoughtless, even a little cruel. Definitely selfish. A good friend will step in and push if weeks later you have not mourned. But the next day? Give them space, Jesus.

I really appreciated, in that moment, the northern midwestern trope of bringing the bereaved food and just sitting with them. Let them talk, or not. I almost pulled a muscle watching Lars and the Real Girl. The little old ladies sitting in his living room, knitting, surrounded by casseroles and hot dishes. Just talking to each other and watching him out of the corner of their eyes. Talking about anything else. Yep that’s about it. Here if you need us, not holding our breath for you to say so.

> I have had people (including the friend from the first paragraph) suggest I need to "work on my childhood trauma" but really and honestly I can't think of a single thing that was legitimately traumatic.

Let me just copy/paste an older comment of mine:

---

Imagine you've lived in the same house your entire life. There's a big couch taking up half the living room, but one of the legs is broken. When you were really little, it tipped over when you sat in it, so you just learned to walk around the couch over to the not-very-comfortable armchair and sit there instead.

This was so long ago that you don't even remember learning not to sit in the couch. You don't think about how much room that couch is wasting or how much time you spend walking around the couch to get to the chair. Sometmies you stub your toe on the way around, but everyone trips every now and then. You've been doing this so long that it is completely unconscious. Hell, you can and do navigate the room in the dark.

Friends ask you about your living room furniture and you—completely honestly as far as you know—say it's all fine. You describe your chair in detail. It's not perfect, but it's serviceable. Certainly lots of other people have furniture that's in worse shape. At least you don't have any of those problems.

Then you sit down with a therapist for a few hours and they say, "Hey, what's up with that couch?"

It doesn't have to be a Big Thing though; the problem is that the word "trauma" sounds / feels very serious, but it can be trivial things, or things you shrugged off like "well those things just happen".

Personal example, I had a good (girl) friend when I was like six, I was very lonely / isolated before she came around and we played together and the like. But then her parents moved and I never saw her again.

And for many years, that was it, it happened, couldn't do anything about it, nothing abnormal about it. But then because of Reasons I ended up going to therapy, and that event (plus others) are probably linked to a fear of abandonment / commitment, of a pessimism when it comes to relationships (as in, don't get too close, it'll end and there's nothing you can do about it).

But also there's a factor of "My 'trauma' isn't that bad because others have had it worse". Doesn't mean you aren't valid either.

I think the key is to inspect the childhood trauma, however small, BUT don't try and make it your identity. You are just making some things conscious, understanding yourself. The moment it becomes a crutch, it is just an excuse for not taking agency over your own life.

In a way it is the perfect excuse, a childhood determinism of sorts. Blame everything just to avoid ANY change of the self.

FWIW the data agrees with you, for milder cases of anxiety and depression, which often correlate with interpersonal issues, talk therapy (e.g. dissecting childhood trauma) is much less effective than cognitive behavioral therapy (analyzing behavioral and emotional patterns, trying to catch and redirect cycles of thought and action that lead to negative outcomes).

> and he can't shut up about "trauma"

The worst thing that's every happened to someone is still the worst thing that's ever happened to them. Though it might not be something like mental/physical abuse, it's still their bottom even if it pales in comparison to someone else's. Also, lots of families have secrets and can portray a healthy image when in reality we generally see people at their "best" in social settings. I think the key here is self-awareness without diminishment, which can be difficult.

Also, at least with my algorithms, there is just so much bombardment from social media about things like trauma, mental illness, and neurodivergence where one can get lost in what they're being presented and be convinced that just because they read the dictionary for fun when they were younger that they're neurodivergent instead of possibly just being a curious child. If one is in a vulnerable state or just worn down from seeing all this, it almost incites a FOMO response of "hey, I was traumatized too!"

I do think that normalizing and acting to remove the stigma from discussing these things is a net positive overall but it can be damaging for sure

I sometimes like to say the facts out loud and challenge people so here it goes.

We live in the safest, least racist, least sexist, least antisemitic generation in history. At the same time, automation and productivity has reduced demand for human labor, and people increasingly can’t afford the rent. Perhaps the answer to many disparities isn’t systemic sexism, racism etc. but economic factors. Whatever you are worried about, your grandparents had it much worse.

Also, let’s improve our systems to stop polluting the environment and destroying ecosystems for corporate profit at the expense of future generations. That’s the major issue of our day, far bigger than climate change.

What you have is a healthy and emotionally normal relationship with your past negative experiences. That’s good! It doesn’t mean that you’re perfect or that your interpersonal issues aren’t real; it just means that a monocausal theory of psychology that blames everything on “trauma” or, worse yet, “childhood trauma” doesn’t apply to you.

People by and large don’t understand how their brains work, but if they’re suffering or struggling psychologically, they seem to want some sort of explanatory model to make sense of it. So it’s easy for people to buy into these models. The trauma model is one of the more fashionable ones these days. The problems with this model, especially the more pop-psychology version, are (a) it doesn’t fit what we know about actual, serious trauma anyway and (b) it seems to encourage people to catastrophize their past experiences in order to try and make their life story fit the model. This is also counterproductive because catastophization is itself a cognitive distortion that should be corrected rather than indulged. Focusing on childhood trauma in particular also sounds suspiciously Freudian to me.

Another thing to point out is that even serious traumatic experiences don’t necessarily lead to psychological issues in the future. Most people have a natural resiliency to them. But if people believe that any unpleasant or negative experience is going to give them full blown PTSD, it’s more likely to happen. There are cases of this happening cross-culturally when well meaning western aid workers offer to counsel people in third world countries who experienced natural disasters.

I think it's relative to our own experiences. If you drive on a perfect road, even a small bump is noticeable. But I don't think that means people's perception of problems is not legitimate. There's always someone worse off, especially if you compare now to historical times.

If there's a sure-fire way to create a mental health problem, it's to tell yourself you don't deserve to have a problem because other people have worse problems.

My hot take, that I eventually want to really dig into from a neuroscience perspective: trauma is almost entirely relative. It's phenomenological.

If you're an average American of today, you're living a life of comfort and abundance that could not have been imagined 100 years ago, and yet you'll have about the same trauma as did your equivalent back then, even though they would have dealt with things that would have killed you, figuratively or even literally.

Kind of related to Durkheim's "Society of Saints" idea [1].

This suggests a therapeutic vector: increase the variance in your own life. It probably won't be technically hard, though it would be psychologically very difficult. If the theory is right, many of your minor traumas should quickly dissolve.

It would take some amount of will to pull this off, of course. Though probably less suffering than the aggregated suffering conferred by the traumas.

[1] https://www.tutor2u.net/sociology/reference/durkheim-on-devi...

idk

I also had Good ChildhoodTM by your definition.

Still I’m pretty sure I have been traumatized by the two big moves of my childhood, loosing my childhood friendships twice.

It doesn’t look big, I am ok at socializing so I have friends but I know that when shit hits the fan, it happens that I dream of my first childhood friend and I’m pretty convinced that this is why I sometimes feel alone even when I’m well surrounded.

The point wasn’t to tell my life but to say that you can’t really judge other’s "traumas". It’s highly personal how you feel about something and when someone doesn’t have something you have (in my case childhood friends) it’s easy to feel like it’s not important (maybe you can’t understand because your own childhood friendship eroded normally and you don’t feel like it’s an issue)

One way to view it is dealing with childhood trauma is necessary but not sufficient to fixing interpersonal issues. The problem is there are at least three opportunities for common errors of reasoning.

if you have unresolved childhood trauma (people forget this is conditional) then resolving it is one of (not all) the requirements for fixing chronic interpersonal issues you may have (not everyone does).

If someones make all those mistakes at once, you get they tell you to heal your childhood trauma to fix your relationship disasters and it's like "My childhood was fine. And I had one argument with one person. I'm just gonna go talk to him about it..."

Schema is the better word here. Look into "schema therapy".

Schemas are just your set of inbuilt, instantaneous responses to common situations or thoughts.

You don't need trauma to have maladaptive schemas.

I just want to say I appreciate your humorous use of the trademark symbol. I love it, but not everyone does. There's dozens of us! Dozens!

I am reminded of the tweet from long-banned Twitter poster Hakan Rotmwrt:

"One of the strangest fixations of AFWL metaphysics is on a substance called 'trauma' that they believe is 'stored in the body' in small saclike organs where it constantly threatens to be 'triggered' and erupt out of its ducts. They assert life itself is about 'processing trauma'"

That’s also definitely true!

Some people are lucky to not have significant childhood trauma which means it was never needing to be resolved

Wow that’s a pile-on.

“What works for you only works for you, so you might not have discovered that it works for anything else, but only if you were really paying attention.”

I think a lot of people would benefit from getting some counceling in their earlier adult years, although on the other hand they may not be ready yet / not see any issues yet.

I'm late 30's and same btw.

Yeah I’m 39 and just learned it last year.