Are we creating Trauma for ourselves?
How a cocaine addict set the stage for us to be paranoid about 'Trauma'
Alfred Adler claimed that “we do not suffer from the shock of our experiences -- the so-called trauma -- but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.” For Adler, trauma doesn’t exist. Though, perhaps he means ‘trauma doesn’t have to exist.’
According to Google, interest in the term “trauma” has steadily grown, and began to really take off alongside interest in the term “therapy.”
Trauma addresses more and more things nowadays - it’s no longer just for war veterans or survivors of violent attacks. Some people nowadays are trying to lower the bar for what constitutes a psychic wound as much as possible and loudly demand ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces.’ Others only suspect something in their past might be holding back and are not sure whether that constitutes ‘trauma’ or not. Others are simply on a quest to better themselves and never thought that they might have trauma until a therapist suggested it.
Dr. Alok Kanojia of the very popular HealthyGamerGG channel says that as many as 60% of people in the world have adverse childhood experiences that could be almost classified as traumatic. (60%? Wow! Maybe I have trauma?!) Sounds like the bar for what constitutes trauma is pretty low. You can find plenty of well-viewed videos like this one of Patrick Teahan’s that suggest that your problems today are a result of childhood trauma.
Teahan says that his patient suffering from ADHD’s “story” is more important than their “symptoms.” He talks about how the patient’s “inner child” is at fault for sabotaging their attempts to succeed in life. He brings up a hypothetical situation where a client is late to a Zoom call and their mind is very scattered while sitting on that Zoom call. He says:
“if a client me told about such a zoom call, we would be working with how all of that is related to childhood trauma beliefs.”
He explains that the patient may be very anxious and unfocused during the Zoom call and they are unconscious of the fact that this all stems from childhood trauma. Two questions came to mind when watching this:
How does Patrick Teahan know? If the past trauma is unconsciously having an influence on the person now, how can you confirm that… if that person cannot be conscious of that influence?
Is it helpful to encourage people to ponder how their problems today could be the result being a victim of childhood trauma?
What even is trauma?
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score says that:
“Trauma is actually extremely common. There’s a lot of debate about what a trauma is to this day. But, basically trauma is something that happens to you that makes you so upset that it overwhelms you.”
Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG says that:
“Trauma manifests as so many problems … trauma is a whole brain or whole person effect. You can’t slice it up into one piece because trauma sort of affects every aspect of who we are, how our brain functions, how we form relationships.”
He says that “trauma is the great chameleon of mental illness,” that trauma can masquerade as anything from lack of motivation to impulsivity to being a people pleaser to depression or to addictions. Some Instagram posts seem to be capitalizing on this ‘potentially anything could be the result of trauma.’
Per The Behavior Disorders of Childhood (1970) an adverse experience such as the childhood loss of a parent "has been put forward as a monocausal hypothesis to account, in part or whole, for adult depression, schizophrenia, personality disorder, neurosis, and occupational maladjustment"
In Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman’s book The Empire of Trauma: an inquiry into the condition of Victimhood, they note that the concept of ‘trauma’ started to enter the zeitgeist as people were trying to make sense of the victims of shell shock. They point out in the book that nowadays, “the idea that tragic and painful events, whether individually or collectively experienced, leave marks in the mind which are then seen as ‘scars’” is commonly accepted. Just a few decades ago, “trauma was rarely evoked outside of the closed circles of psychiatry and psychology,” and before that, soldiers experiencing PTSD were met with skepticism and contempt. Nowadays, the psychic suffering of injured workers and soldiers is “no longer contested [and] … excites sympathy and merits [financial] compensation.”
“Over the last 25 years, trauma has become established as a unique way of appropriating the traces of history and one of the dominant modes of representing our relationship with the past. … in the United States the concept of “cultural trauma” has been applied to slavery, the Holocaust, and 9/11, all of which are seen as wounds in the collective memory…” -The Empire of Trauma
The interesting thing about this is that whether a given experience will become psychological trauma depends on the person.
“One of these soldiers is unable to speak. In tears, he writes: I killed a German. Took him out with the butt of my rifle. He was a nice little kid with loved ones back home. I’ll tell my fiancee I’m a murderer and yet, I’ve always rejected violence.” -Shell Shock, National Geographic
Recent research has suggested that Shell Shock was in fact actual brain damage (TBI) from exposure to blast force on the battlefield from explosives.
In Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914–39, they explain that where some men suffered crippling shell shock, others absolutely delighted in unleashing their aggression to kill enemy soldiers.
Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning discusses his time spent in four different concentration camps. He highlighted various mens’ responses to the horrendous, hopeless nature of the camps. He explains that not all men had to suffer the same fate in response to their circumstances; the right mentality could drastically improve a man’s prospects for survival.
What’s curious is that it’s hard to predict whether a given circumstance will become ‘trauma,’ but trauma as a term is so vague that a wide range of experiences, violent or not, can become trauma depending on how someone interprets the experience (or perhaps how others interpret it for them). Apparently trauma isn’t just the result of grave situations like helplessly facing death in a war or a concentration camp, but also (according to Instagram) having an emotionally distant father.
Are people being convinced that they have trauma?
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