This is pretty frustrating as 90s-kid who had a Good Childhood™ and struggles with interpersonal issues. I have a close friend from childhood who also had quite a Good Childhood™ and he can't shut up about "trauma" and it seems like every two years he has this big epiphany about how he addressed some "trauma" he was previously repressing and how now that he's done so he's All Better Now™. His behavior and overall life outcomes do not have any correlation with these epiphanies. Both of our lives absolutely pale in comparison to the lives of average children in previous generations in terms of 'trauma'. Minimal bullying, no fights, always plenty of toys and food, loving parents, etc.
I know some people with real, legitimate trauma (verbal and physical abuse) and they said that visiting a therapist really helped them to feel a lot better. In such cases of legitimate trauma, I agree that one should do something about it if it's making you feel bad. However, many of those people were already. interpersonally excellent before and after 'addressing' their trauma.
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. I could take my worst experiences, which I have moved on from and don't feel any need[0] to think about, and inflate them, but I'm pretty sure that would be creating a new psychological problem.
[0]I don't feel any hesitance to thinking about them either. I can sit and ponder them for a whole afternoon if I like, without emotional fluctuation. They're just memories.
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 went to a Waldorf school and now my daughter does.
At around age 10-11 children learn about death and practices around it (Norse, Egyptian, local practices) and what it means. The Waldorf philosophy holds that children start to understand that death is a permanent loss at about that age, and aims to teach them about it.
Having a kid lose a pet at that age is a major thing for them to process.
I love the school, but the disorganised over-parenting libertarian hippies can be overbearing at times.
Is it true what they say that Waldorf is based in irrational teachings about the supernatural, and let's children go several courses without learning basic rational stuff like reading well and doing math?
I'm all for growing children with creative teaching and avoiding rote memorization, but I'd be horrified if that was at the cost of missing the best years for setting the pillars of rational thought.
There was a little bit of the loopy stuff early on, but vastly less than friends who went to religious schools got. For my daughter she has been exposed to less of that crap that when she was in a state funded school.
Reading is taught later in a Steiner school than at most schools, but not to any detriment measurable later in schooling.
I’m not sure how one would accurately quantify the final outcome as demographics etc come into it. From my time at school there are surgeons, physicists, engineers (or various types), lawyers, mathematicians, accountants, tv producers, teachers etc. We had our share of dropouts too.
I also don’t believe that the early years are the most important for what is learned, and that they are more important for learning how to learn and how to enjoy the process.
> 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:
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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?"
And then others can read your own comment history about the 'minor' traumas and the impacts that has had on relationships in your own life.
At least from your writing I believe you're a very introspective person. The trouble with introspection is that it is an imperfect mirror. We tend to self find solutions for our problems, but we do so at the risk of completely missing the blind spots in our life.
Coming back at the previous person with the term condescending is concerning. At least my observation is you believe you have covered all of your bases, but this gets problematic in cases of omission. Yea, your parents did not hit you, but that does not mean they taught you how to have healthy relationships, for example, something that leads to a lifetime of trauma in some people due omissive ignorance.
The last paragraph is a really good insight. We tend to view a "good" upbringing as purely the absence of trauma, but it requires the active presence of teaching important skills and modeling healthy relationships.
Simply never being in a car accident while growing up doesn't mean you spontaneously know how to drive a car.
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.
Yeah I feel like a lot of this obsession over "trauma" is just looking for excuses for why one won't get up off one's ass and take responsibility for one's life.
Not discounting that some people have terrible childhoods that are legitimately damaging, but losing a pet or a friend moving away or a grandparent dying is not that unusual and well within the scope of "normal things that happen" that normal people can (or should be expected to) handle.
Conversely things like not being taught how to have proper relationships, being taught how to ask for help, or things (for men) toxic masculinity are potentially trauma inducing in social creatures as humans are.
The 'taking responsibility for ones own life' has a perverse failure mode where an individual is genuinely incapable of doing something, yet at the same time incapable of seeking help for the issue. These tend to lead to harmful downward spirals in those peoples lives.
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).
CBT is designed around outcomes that can be easily measured. It can also be actually harmful in cases where there’s actual trauma or neglect underlying the behavior or thought patterns. It has a tendency to paper over them.
It helps a lot of people, but it’t also a trap for those who have more deep things to work through, having spend 6 years stalled out in CBT before coming to grips with the deep trauma and neglect, and the dissociation that was so prevalent in my life that CBT therapists never even bothered screening for. Ask anyone with an emotionally neglectful or abusive upbringing what CBT did for them and you’ll get quite a few nasty answers.
Yeah. That's one of the dangers the book I had talked about. CBT is a tool for rewiring the brain. If you have deep things to work out and don't recognize it, CBT will do exactly what it says on the tin and rewire around things that need to be explored.
That's very not good.
I'm bipolar and use CBT a lot. Identifying if the problem is logic-based is key to its application. Logic cannot override depression or mania, which means CBT doesn't work and alternative strategies are needed. Usually I switch to some variant of DBT techniques. (It's so automatic at this point it's hard to identify all of what I'm doing.)
In my experience, learning when to apply CBT is much harder than learning CBT.
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.
> At the same time, automation and productivity has reduced demand for human labor, and people increasingly can’t afford the rent
Given the juxtaposition of the claims above, I think it is useful to note that demand for labor is still relatively high (unemployment rate at ~3.5% in the US). The reason for unaffordable rents is driven more by the supply of housing not growing along with demand IMO.
And demand being artifically inflated by investors (ranging from boomers / gen-X ers who have extra money to Saudi oil barons) who buy up houses with the intent to rent them out or whatever.
It doesn’t count the people who have opted out of the workforce.
It doesn’t count the job insecuroty of the gig economy. Or the people with terrible conditions.
It actually underscores the fact that both sexes flooded the labor pool in the last few decades, automation increased and wages got depressed due to all these factors.
USSR also had near-total employment, for men and women, way earlier than USA did. And ironically, the rent cost a ton less. But people overall couldn’t afford that much.
Your grandfather could have supported an entire family on one man’s paycheck, and paid for an entire house. Today, millennials onwards can’t afford any of that. The generation of adults with the least savings in probably a century.
But, as I said, we still have it amaing. Medical advances, technology like air conditioning, electricity and so on. The Internet spreads so much knowledge around the world. I’m just saying that the remaining problems are often rooted in economic issues, more than a rise in “systemic X ism”
Agree with all that. I disagree only that demand for labor has decreased, and near-full employment is my evidence for that. Many jobs are shitty, but someone is demanding the labor.
Well, I guess what I am trying to say is that more people are asked to do work, but less work, and paid less for it too, adjusted for inflation.
Gig economy and short stints at jobs are an example of how little employers really value their labor force, as opposed to the “company man” who worked for decades and got a pension.
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.
I think trauma is also a bit relative. If you grew up with bad physical and emotional abuse from one parent the emotional distance and isolation from another might not even be a blip on your radar, at least until you've worked through the other stuff. And on the flip side if you had a great childhood with stable housing, plenty of food/money then hitting rock bottom in adulthood might be pretty traumatic since you never had to develop the mental tools required to handle serious adversity. Obviously some trauma is objectively worse but competing over trauma severity is pointless.
The thing is, kids who grew up in those good families are in fact more resilient then abused kids.
Kids with bad childhood will not categorize semi bad childhood as trauma, but have worst interpersonal relationships, worst stress handling, abuse drugs or alcohol more often and display whole range of at risk behaviors
It is simply not true that being poor or abused or neglected makes people resilient.
That's an excellent and fair point. Perhaps "resilience" is the wrong term for abused folks and it could be said as "ability to continue functioning at their usual level of dysfunction". I've seen enough examples of ostensibly well raised (typically younger) adults being hit really hard by adversity that I think there's something to it. Maybe confirmation bias or perhaps those individuals had overprotective parents that shielded them from developing a lot of skills. That sort of dysfunctional parenting can be harder to recognize in adults.
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.
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..."
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'"
This is pretty frustrating as 90s-kid who had a Good Childhood™ and struggles with interpersonal issues. I have a close friend from childhood who also had quite a Good Childhood™ and he can't shut up about "trauma" and it seems like every two years he has this big epiphany about how he addressed some "trauma" he was previously repressing and how now that he's done so he's All Better Now™. His behavior and overall life outcomes do not have any correlation with these epiphanies. Both of our lives absolutely pale in comparison to the lives of average children in previous generations in terms of 'trauma'. Minimal bullying, no fights, always plenty of toys and food, loving parents, etc.
I know some people with real, legitimate trauma (verbal and physical abuse) and they said that visiting a therapist really helped them to feel a lot better. In such cases of legitimate trauma, I agree that one should do something about it if it's making you feel bad. However, many of those people were already. interpersonally excellent before and after 'addressing' their trauma.
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. I could take my worst experiences, which I have moved on from and don't feel any need[0] to think about, and inflate them, but I'm pretty sure that would be creating a new psychological problem.
[0]I don't feel any hesitance to thinking about them either. I can sit and ponder them for a whole afternoon if I like, without emotional fluctuation. They're just memories.