Good News: You Don't Have Trauma
An update for basically every person online these days
These are some things I believe to be true beyond any reasonable doubt. They become clear upon examining the data:
1.) Trauma doesn’t automatically result from intensely negative and stressful life events. In psychology potential stressors are known as ‘PTE’ rather than trauma. This stands for ‘potentially traumatic event’ and they are so called because even among people who are in car accidents or firefights or are sexually assaulted (etc.) only about 10% of people experience trauma. The human mind is resilient and quite used to dealing with horrible events.
2.) Identifying oneself as ‘traumatized’ (even if you’re a veteran dealing with persistent nightmares or hyper-arousal) reduces your ability to heal and process the trauma effectively. Labelling oneself as someone ‘with PTSD’ can be helpful in that it opens up certain resources but the label itself isn’t helpful. It retards healing, on average. Psychologists have known this for 50 years and it was often mentioned in the professional debate in the 1970’s-80’s over whether to create a clinical label for PTSD.
3.) Our society (the modern U.S. and Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, et. al.) is the safest and most comfortable society in history, by orders of magnitude.
4.) Many young (and not-so-young) people now have self-applied ‘trauma’ to their online and real-world persona and added the category of ‘traumatized person’ to their self-image.
Why would people do such thing? Why would people willingly (eagerly) adopt the designator of someone who’s suffered badly and is still dealing with symptoms? There are many reasons I’m sure but social scientists have identified (rightly, in my opinion) that we’ve moved from an honor culture to a dignity culture and now are in a victim culture in many areas. You can investigate the features of each kind of society and see if they ring true but a victim culture is one is which ‘victims’, people who have been negatively treated or affected because of some attribute or experience, now have special status and cachet. We’ve moved from a situation in which mental health was a neglected area and mental illness was stigmatized to one in which certain mental burdens are beneficial to the status games that people play. It’s a toxic recipe and it may have something to do with our plummeting mental health (as life continues to get easier and safer for all).
The sad thing is that mental illness is STILL stigmatized. Try telling a trans activist that gender dysphoria or trans are symptoms of mental illness. They’re psychological conditions which often create functional impairments (even aside from social treatment of the conditions) and are positively correlated with anxiety and depression and suicidality (even in areas where trans is celebrated) and so qualify for the label of ‘mental illness’ by any objective rubric… but mentioning this is equivalent to associating trans with crime or sin to these people. These are often the same people who argue for the de-stigmatization of mental illness.
Trauma is now a diagnostic category which may be doing more cumulative harm than good. Therapists and psychologists should be pushing back against young people appropriating the coveted status of ‘trauma victim’ online (if they won’t do it then who will?) or in their practices but therapy has been hobbled by its reflexive tendency to affirm rather than judge critically. This is a benefit when it helps patients open up and develop trust with providers but it’s incredibly destructive when the field is faced with social contagions (cutting, ED’s, ‘complex trauma’). We need to quickly arrive at a collective social understanding: strict parents or stressful conversations or difficult jobs are not ‘trauma’ and if they’ve traumatized you then you are especially fragile and unbalanced and need intensive professional support. In no case is this something to be proud of or display.