Nobody ever talks about post traumatic growth. Nobody ever told me that its not my fault, but it is my responsibility. No matter what awful thing happened, we are responsible for how we react to the thing, and carry on.
The root of all this is the disintegration of community, and safe/easy lives. Our hyoer individualistic culture combined with the ease and convenience of modern life lets us create make believe problems because our minds need problems to solve.
After 9/11 happened, there was no one at Bellevue Hospital, which is a giant psych ward in NYC. Its not coincidence. People had a real problem to contend with so their brains stopped creating problems and everyone helped one another. Until enough time passed and NYC became safe and convenient and overstimulating again.
Read Tribe by Sebastian Junger. It changed my life.
Henry Beecher, MD is a fascinating example as well. His Normandy study looked at how many GI's required pain medication (Pain in Men Wounded in Battle, 1946, Jan. Annals of Surgery). He compared their injuries and pain level with that of civilians i auto wrecks back in Boston. Ultimately, he believed that a war time injury that took you out of action likely hurt less because it ended the war for you. For a civilian, it was the start of the drama, not the end. Erik Vance's Suggestible You and almost anything by Lisa Feldman-Barrett, PhD, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning also provide strong support to the premise: that meaning made by the individual is more important than the event itself.
Nick Haslam has been making a variation of the same argument for years: the tendency for psychologists to pathologise everyday experiences, and how psychology has itself become a form of psychological harm. He uses the notion of concept creep to explain this troubling phenomenon (or pathology) that has resulted in the socially contagious idea of 'trauma', giving rise to trauma culture and/or competing victimhoods within many spheres of life.
I witnessed this phenomenon first hand during my placement (as a counsellor) in a primary school many years ago. Many young children were diagnosing themselves as 'anxious', 'depressed' and 'traumatised', and my role was to try and build resilience by not making them so susceptible or sensitive to (perceived) harms.
Your insightful comment struck me as ominous: "If that’s correct, then the logical conclusion is to start searching for your own hidden trauma so you can heal it, right?" These beliefs in trauma have soaked into our entire narrative culture, the traumatized backstory that is revealed to redeem the protagonist. Storytellers learn that trauma can drive any and every plotline, readers expect it, and so the belief system perpetuates itself.
Trauma therapist here (background in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy). I think what is missing here is the definition of trauma. Much of what pop culture understands as "trauma" is oversimplified. Much of how we organize our experience in the present day (how we make sense of it and experience it) comes from early childhood experiences (0-5 in particular but obviously throughout childhood). Little kids' developing brains are perpetually taking in information about how to organize their experiences of the world and relationships. Take the example in the beginning of your essay. The child who fell down uses all if her senses: to see the faces of caregivers/ the caregiver's reactions and she begins to adapt accordingly. The child might see mom's worried face and start to cry (either from her own pain or from the worry on mom's face), the child might see the flat affect on dad's face and words "you're fine" and she might relax and keep playing or an older child might learn to shutdown that cry. There are a million possibilities! So much of how we experience the world as adults, is shaped by these early experiences and relationships, which often can be wounds or also sometimes trauma (defined as an overwhelming experience that is never integrated). What is also missing in this piece is that the brain doesn't care what actually happens, what matters is how the system perceives the experience in the moment. For an example, it doesn't matter if a child was actually left alone, but if he perceived it that way it is likely to make an impact. Also, because memory is unreliable (van de Kolk), it is not very helpful to try to "remember" past experiences as a lot of pop culture therapy might believe. In fact, ruminating on trying to do so will likely create more suffering and pain. It is important though, to mindfully explore, process and ultimately transform past experiences in order to heal. Super long comment and I hope it adds a bit of clarity:)
This is exactly what I found walking barefoot in the mountains. When I let go of the anticipation of pain, the sensation of my feet on gravel stopped being painful. It was intense but it didn’t injure me. And as long as there’s no glass and I walk slow, rocks in the wild don’t penetrate the skin.
Both of your linked citations lead to the same paper about asthma and not to anything about a nail and a boot. Neither IV Fentanyl nor the fentanyl + midazolam combination as a non-dental sedative were available or FDA approved in the 90s.
Also, I’m also reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts right now, and in the chapter “Their Brains Never Had a Chance,” Maté uses very plain language in articulating that the presence of adverse childhood experiences does not mean a person will grow up to develop ADHD, process addiction, and/or substance use disorder. He only cites the famous ACEs study that shows a high correlation with people who do have those traits with high ACEs, and he uses it to assert that environment is more important than genes. That means that, for example, if a child grows up in a certain kind of home but also has great mentors, access to nutritious school lunches, can pursue music or the arts, etc. there is no reason whatsoever to take a deterministic position regarding the trajectory of his life.
That’s a very sensible thing to say. A kid with no library card who is raised by heroin addicts and has inconsistent school attendance is very obviously going to struggle to fare as well as a kid who can easily get his hands on books, has one or more reliable adults looking out for him, is educated and learns self-discipline.
This sounds like a bad faith approach to what he’s said, and it’s also not even the main thesis of any of his books— it’s a helpful summary of the history of the history of the so-called “addiction gene” which simply does not exist.
Your whole argument is structurally sound and worth reading without the random attack on Maté or the fake citations. Now I can’t help but never take you or any supportive commenters here seriously.
Interesting article. On the predictive power of the brain, the man was trapped in real pain until the moment of revelation: his foot was unharmed & the suffering was a creation of mind. The doctor offered him a kind of initiation in that moment, a veil lifting.
Maybe healing modalities work by offering people this very initiation? When it's spiritual or psychological, we can't take off our boot and see that the nail missed. But if something breaks us open and we become stuck, we can seek a ritual and find a modality/therapy that resonates and with the predictive power of the brain, we recover.
But yeah, I know with myself, I fused my identity to the role of the person that is constantly in need of healing.. and there's a danger to that, the story never ends.
I have what appears to be a lot of nerve damage; I have had emotional trauma. The brain processes emotional & physical trauma the same way.
What Maté & all who believe all phys. trauma comes from emo trauma is that they don't play it both ways. My emotional trauma was a pain I Caused Myself holding onto anxiety. Once I realized I was doing this I let it go & never had it again AND I understood that My Holding On To It was what created all the tension & pain.
When I "feel" my pains caused by nerve damage they have No Emotional Context, only subside for short periods &/or move around 'til they find another location to make feel tense. When I tried to use my experience with emo pain to locate & get relief from my phys pains it never worked. Only when I feel the physical direction my physical pains emanate from do they subside for any amount of time.
The brain also disguises physical pain it doesn't want to admit t itself it has as emotional pain so as to try & distract itself. The few physical pains that have completely dissipated through my doing this never had any emotional connection to anything past or traumatic.
I love this article, I will say to myself that I am a tall, handsome man evertime when I look in the mirror idk if it will come true. I will let you know if it does.
I was just babbling about this idea last week. The idea of Robert Paulson in 'Fight Club.' We are introduced to Robert Paulson sobbing and crying with Jack during a support group. Once he finds 'Fight Club', Robert Paulson's demeanor completely changes. I certainly have nothing against support groups but I love the idea of Robert Paulson's transformation after finding a place that moves away from trauma fixation. Moral of the story...Just don't throw large ball structures through Starbucks windows while police are watching.
Absolutely so relevant for today’s victim mentality generation.
boomers also play the victim card the most. so maybe it's not a generational thing, but a cultural/economic one.
Bravo! I love this read! Thank you!
Nobody ever talks about post traumatic growth. Nobody ever told me that its not my fault, but it is my responsibility. No matter what awful thing happened, we are responsible for how we react to the thing, and carry on.
The root of all this is the disintegration of community, and safe/easy lives. Our hyoer individualistic culture combined with the ease and convenience of modern life lets us create make believe problems because our minds need problems to solve.
After 9/11 happened, there was no one at Bellevue Hospital, which is a giant psych ward in NYC. Its not coincidence. People had a real problem to contend with so their brains stopped creating problems and everyone helped one another. Until enough time passed and NYC became safe and convenient and overstimulating again.
Read Tribe by Sebastian Junger. It changed my life.
Henry Beecher, MD is a fascinating example as well. His Normandy study looked at how many GI's required pain medication (Pain in Men Wounded in Battle, 1946, Jan. Annals of Surgery). He compared their injuries and pain level with that of civilians i auto wrecks back in Boston. Ultimately, he believed that a war time injury that took you out of action likely hurt less because it ended the war for you. For a civilian, it was the start of the drama, not the end. Erik Vance's Suggestible You and almost anything by Lisa Feldman-Barrett, PhD, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning also provide strong support to the premise: that meaning made by the individual is more important than the event itself.
Keep up the great work! Best wishes! S
Nick Haslam has been making a variation of the same argument for years: the tendency for psychologists to pathologise everyday experiences, and how psychology has itself become a form of psychological harm. He uses the notion of concept creep to explain this troubling phenomenon (or pathology) that has resulted in the socially contagious idea of 'trauma', giving rise to trauma culture and/or competing victimhoods within many spheres of life.
I witnessed this phenomenon first hand during my placement (as a counsellor) in a primary school many years ago. Many young children were diagnosing themselves as 'anxious', 'depressed' and 'traumatised', and my role was to try and build resilience by not making them so susceptible or sensitive to (perceived) harms.
Your insightful comment struck me as ominous: "If that’s correct, then the logical conclusion is to start searching for your own hidden trauma so you can heal it, right?" These beliefs in trauma have soaked into our entire narrative culture, the traumatized backstory that is revealed to redeem the protagonist. Storytellers learn that trauma can drive any and every plotline, readers expect it, and so the belief system perpetuates itself.
Trauma therapist here (background in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy). I think what is missing here is the definition of trauma. Much of what pop culture understands as "trauma" is oversimplified. Much of how we organize our experience in the present day (how we make sense of it and experience it) comes from early childhood experiences (0-5 in particular but obviously throughout childhood). Little kids' developing brains are perpetually taking in information about how to organize their experiences of the world and relationships. Take the example in the beginning of your essay. The child who fell down uses all if her senses: to see the faces of caregivers/ the caregiver's reactions and she begins to adapt accordingly. The child might see mom's worried face and start to cry (either from her own pain or from the worry on mom's face), the child might see the flat affect on dad's face and words "you're fine" and she might relax and keep playing or an older child might learn to shutdown that cry. There are a million possibilities! So much of how we experience the world as adults, is shaped by these early experiences and relationships, which often can be wounds or also sometimes trauma (defined as an overwhelming experience that is never integrated). What is also missing in this piece is that the brain doesn't care what actually happens, what matters is how the system perceives the experience in the moment. For an example, it doesn't matter if a child was actually left alone, but if he perceived it that way it is likely to make an impact. Also, because memory is unreliable (van de Kolk), it is not very helpful to try to "remember" past experiences as a lot of pop culture therapy might believe. In fact, ruminating on trying to do so will likely create more suffering and pain. It is important though, to mindfully explore, process and ultimately transform past experiences in order to heal. Super long comment and I hope it adds a bit of clarity:)
This is exactly what I found walking barefoot in the mountains. When I let go of the anticipation of pain, the sensation of my feet on gravel stopped being painful. It was intense but it didn’t injure me. And as long as there’s no glass and I walk slow, rocks in the wild don’t penetrate the skin.
Both of your linked citations lead to the same paper about asthma and not to anything about a nail and a boot. Neither IV Fentanyl nor the fentanyl + midazolam combination as a non-dental sedative were available or FDA approved in the 90s.
Also, I’m also reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts right now, and in the chapter “Their Brains Never Had a Chance,” Maté uses very plain language in articulating that the presence of adverse childhood experiences does not mean a person will grow up to develop ADHD, process addiction, and/or substance use disorder. He only cites the famous ACEs study that shows a high correlation with people who do have those traits with high ACEs, and he uses it to assert that environment is more important than genes. That means that, for example, if a child grows up in a certain kind of home but also has great mentors, access to nutritious school lunches, can pursue music or the arts, etc. there is no reason whatsoever to take a deterministic position regarding the trajectory of his life.
That’s a very sensible thing to say. A kid with no library card who is raised by heroin addicts and has inconsistent school attendance is very obviously going to struggle to fare as well as a kid who can easily get his hands on books, has one or more reliable adults looking out for him, is educated and learns self-discipline.
This sounds like a bad faith approach to what he’s said, and it’s also not even the main thesis of any of his books— it’s a helpful summary of the history of the history of the so-called “addiction gene” which simply does not exist.
Your whole argument is structurally sound and worth reading without the random attack on Maté or the fake citations. Now I can’t help but never take you or any supportive commenters here seriously.
・The boot incident is indeed discussed in that paper. The link takes you to a preview, it's not the full text. Notice how it says "BMA Member Login"
・This took place in Leicester, UK. Midazolam/Fentanyl was in use in the UK since at least 1982
・Maybe Gabor Mate said that in his 17 year old book, but he has said a lot of things since then. I've quoted him correctly
https://medium.com/@doctor_27995/as-an-ex-therapist-it-pains-me-to-say-that-trauma-therapy-makes-no-evolutionary-sense-b36d9c2112eb
Yup, really is a daft set of beliefs, wrote about this some time ago....thanks for having a functioning common sense organ
Interesting article. On the predictive power of the brain, the man was trapped in real pain until the moment of revelation: his foot was unharmed & the suffering was a creation of mind. The doctor offered him a kind of initiation in that moment, a veil lifting.
Maybe healing modalities work by offering people this very initiation? When it's spiritual or psychological, we can't take off our boot and see that the nail missed. But if something breaks us open and we become stuck, we can seek a ritual and find a modality/therapy that resonates and with the predictive power of the brain, we recover.
But yeah, I know with myself, I fused my identity to the role of the person that is constantly in need of healing.. and there's a danger to that, the story never ends.
I have what appears to be a lot of nerve damage; I have had emotional trauma. The brain processes emotional & physical trauma the same way.
What Maté & all who believe all phys. trauma comes from emo trauma is that they don't play it both ways. My emotional trauma was a pain I Caused Myself holding onto anxiety. Once I realized I was doing this I let it go & never had it again AND I understood that My Holding On To It was what created all the tension & pain.
When I "feel" my pains caused by nerve damage they have No Emotional Context, only subside for short periods &/or move around 'til they find another location to make feel tense. When I tried to use my experience with emo pain to locate & get relief from my phys pains it never worked. Only when I feel the physical direction my physical pains emanate from do they subside for any amount of time.
The brain also disguises physical pain it doesn't want to admit t itself it has as emotional pain so as to try & distract itself. The few physical pains that have completely dissipated through my doing this never had any emotional connection to anything past or traumatic.
I love this article, I will say to myself that I am a tall, handsome man evertime when I look in the mirror idk if it will come true. I will let you know if it does.
Placebo is only the tip of the iceberg, the autonomic nervous system is what play a big role underneath
I was just babbling about this idea last week. The idea of Robert Paulson in 'Fight Club.' We are introduced to Robert Paulson sobbing and crying with Jack during a support group. Once he finds 'Fight Club', Robert Paulson's demeanor completely changes. I certainly have nothing against support groups but I love the idea of Robert Paulson's transformation after finding a place that moves away from trauma fixation. Moral of the story...Just don't throw large ball structures through Starbucks windows while police are watching.
"You don't have Trauma, you have Colonization."