Are internet influencers getting trauma backwards?

Is trauma creating a dark cloud in your headspace or is the cloud making you remember the trauma?

About 10 years ago, I saw a video of Tony Robbins talking about how once you’ve bought something you seem to notice it everywhere. Finally got that BMW you had been saving up for? Now when you look around it seems like everyone has BMWs.

Of course the brain is constantly filtering out all kinds of information irrelevant to whatever you’re trying to do. If it wasn’t constantly doing this, simple things like drinking water would be a complete ordeal. Your walking through the living room to the kitchen would come to a stop as you became captivated by the the sunlight reflecting off of the gloss finish of the new issue of Emu Today & Tomorrow magazine on the coffee table.

You can test this feature of your brain out yourself.

1. Close your eyes for 45 seconds.

2. With your eyes still closed think of a color.

3. Still, with your eyes closed, try and bring to mind all the different objects in the room of that color.

4. Open your eyes and notice how many you missed.

This reveals that your perceptual capabilities are enhanced (or diminished) based on your goal. Simply giving yourself the goal of identifying all yellow objects in the room, your brain suddenly gives you this amazing ability to rapidly identify all yellow objects.

A couple years back, I wrote a couple posts on why I disagree with a lot of the ‘trauma’ content floating around on the internet - especially Gabor Mate’s “trauma is underneath all human dysfunction” approach. Mate has written multiple books claiming everything from addiction to ADHD to cancer are caused by trauma.

In two The Guardian articles (1, 2) Mate claims that an episode where he, 71 years old at the time, became very angry with his wife for being late to pick him up from the airport to the point of ignoring her the entire day, was caused by a trauma formed 70 years ago. (Interesting to note at this point that Mate’s entire career is about trauma, yet he doesn’t know how to ‘heal’ it.) Speaking of the trauma, he says “this kind of physio-emotional time warp, preventing me from inhabiting the present moment, is one of the imprints of trauma, an underlying theme for many people in this culture.”

The trauma he refers to is his mother leaving him in the care with another adult for a month while he was 11 months old.

First, reliable long term memories can't be created before the age of 2.
Second, how does he know?

Maybe he was just tired from his flight and became excessively irritated. Or, why isn’t the reason something else like his childhood friend said he looks funny when he's angry? Maybe he has that behavior pattern cause his college girlfriend was often late to their dates.

This is one of the problems with vague "trauma-focused" therapists, psychologists, therapies is that they are too story driven. How a particular behavior pattern arises out of the complex web of our lives is anyone's guess.

Have you ever been in a really bad mood and you just assume the worst of a majority of the people you talk to? Someone makes a friendly comment about your shirt and you think ‘What the hell does that mean? My shirt’s way better than his stupid oversized Emu shirt. You like Emu’s, we get it- you can stop wearing those.’ Worse, you keep reviewing all these negative things that happened to you in the past - things you never think of usually. Then, you get over your hangover or you finally get some sleep, the life review completely stops and you’re the one inviting the Emu man for coffee the next day.

I think most people would say it’s pretty obvious that the bad mood was at the root of the negative interpretation. However, what if this person revealed that when they were a child they were bullied by a guy who often wore Emu shirts?

In that case, you might think maybe it was the trauma that caused his disdain for the Emu shirt wearing man. However, what if the person said they never think of the Emu bully unless they’re in a bad mood …but they tend to review many negative experiences when they’re in a bad mood?

I thought this was a fantastic point made by Victor Frankl: People may mistake ‘trauma’ as say causing a depressive state because they can’t escape thoughts of a particular terrible experience when they’re depressed.

Frankl asserts that’s backwards.

What if you only think of a psychological trauma or some difficulty in life because you’re in a bad mood?

In On the Theory and Therapy of Mental Disorders (Theorie und Therapie der Neurosen), he says:

“Now what is the case when a reef appears at low tide? No one will say that the reef is the cause of low tide, but rather, through the ebbing tide it is merely exposed. But is it otherwise with the abyss between what is and what should be? Is it not merely made apparent, merely exposed through endogenous depression, through this vital ebb? Thus it is valid to say: just as little as the reef is caused by the ebbing tide, is a psychosis caused by a psychological trauma, a complex or a conflict.”

“Something analogous is seen with the vital ebb called endogenous depression. For example, we know an endogenously depressed patient, who during World War I helped out by replacing drafted men as postal carriers, and decades later on the occasion of an endogenous-depressive phase he admitted during his medical history that he stole a post bag at that time. Now it is well known that real guilt hardly ever presents itself in the self-accusations of endogenously depressed patients. Actually, upon closer questioning, it turned out that the theft was of an old, empty sack—without mail! That this little misdeed even came to mind is already the effect of the endogenous depression, but not a cause of it. Neither the great subjective guilt nor the small objective guilt was in this case pathogenic; they were only pathognomonic.”

How does Mate know that his trauma caused his negative mood rather than his negative mood making him think of his trauma?

Let’s say an exhausted Mate was sitting in his uncomfortable airplane seat after a tiring conference that he didn’t particularly want to be at. He kept falling in and out of sleep; his head jerking forward and waking him up whenever his body got too relaxed. Once, he finally found a position that allowed him to sleep for a full 10 minutes until the stewardess woke him up to ask him if he wants pretzels. No, he didn’t want any damn pretzels. Finally, the plane landed and he was already fantasizing about getting home and resting in his recliner. Once the bars lit up on his phone indicating he finally had service, he saw a text from his wife saying she’d be extra late. His irritation spiked as he walked through that stupid bullshit thing that connects the airplane door to the airport. Not only did this text mean he’s gotta hang around in an annoyingly brightly lit airport for another hour, but he couldn’t even try to slouch and attempt to get comfortable in those stiff airport chairs. He’s a pretty famous guy and people would notice him.

“Mate the sloucher!,” they’d say. “Well well well, if it isn’t doctor Mate. Too good to sit up straight in your chair, doctor?,” they’d say. “Looking a little tired, Dr. Mate! Need a bit of Yerba Mate to wake you up?,” they’d cackle.

By the time his wife showed up, he had plenty of time to fan the flames of his irritation by wondering what was so much more important than her dear husband. Once he finally got in the car, he was exceedingly angry and chose to ignore his wife. Sitting alone, mulling in his angry thoughts, he had plenty of time to think of all kinds of other negative things that happened to him- like the time someone told him that his mother left him in the care of another adult for a month.

At the end of the day, PTSD is a thing. My friend recently told me about someone who was so terrified when they were caught in a lightning storm near the top of Mt. Fuji that they simply could not speak of it. The other day a Youtube short popped up on my feed of a young Japanese man who began shaking while talking about his excessively strict father.

I’m not saying trauma doesn’t exist or that there’s no value in investigating your past. However, nowadays I feel like way too much of the internet has been captivated by Gabor Mate’s idea that everyone has to have trauma and trauma is at the root “of all human dysfunction.”

Take a look at this post if you’re curious about what this issue is with that: