I think there’s often a language/terminology challenge around these areas. For instance, at different times I had a grade 3 ankle sprain after endurance training, and a grade 2 wrist sprain after a car crash—those are clearly acute trauma (in the medical meaning of the word) and they do require some mix of healing to the extent possible for recovery of physical function.
But I’ve always found it tricky that the same word ‘trauma’ is used for physical injuries, past bad experiences, and as a broad description of maladaptive patterns of thought and behavior.
It’s a broad word that people use in different ways.
Two things I’ve found useful.
(1) Highest recommendation for Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) which looks at conceptual metaphors:
Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities. Here are some examples:
- His theory explained to me the behavior of chickens raised in factories. - This fact argues against the standard theories. - Life has cheated me. - Inflation is eating up our profits. - His religion tells him that he cannot drink fine French wines. - The Michelson-Morley experiment gave birth to a new physical theory. - Cancer finally caught up with him.
In each of these cases we are seeing something nonhuman as human. But personification is not a single unified general process. Each personification differs in terms of the aspects of people that are picked out.
Consider these examples. - Inflation has attacked the foundation of our economy. - Inflation has pinned us to the wall. - Our biggest enemy right now is inflation. - The dollar has been destroyed by inflation. - Inflation has robbed me of my savings. - Inflation has outwitted the best economic minds in the country.
I think a lot of discussion around the word “trauma” follows these characteristics — the challenge is, a lot of times people move between a literal well-scoped definition of trauma, say the medical one, and a more metaphorical/ontological description. People often do this without noticing it.
For instance, I can talk about the acute trauma of the wrist injury from a car crash, and everyone will largely understand what I’m talking about. But the same word ‘trauma’ will often be used if I had described some fear or aversion of getting into cars going forwards. I don’t have one, but if I did, people would refer to both the wrist injury and the thing which caused the aversion to cars as ‘trauma’ — which seems somewhat confused to me. Clearly a wrist injury needs healing, in the biological and medical sense of the word healing.
Does an aversion to getting into cars need “healing” in the same way? I mean, maybe, if you’ve got a definition of “healing” from neuroscience around how incoming information is processed and how chain reactions of synapses firing in response to a stimuli that produces a maladaptive behavioral pattern is classified as “healing.” But—like, probably not. “Healing” in that context is a metaphor.
For my part, and just speaking for myself, I think the term “extinction” — though less in line with the current cultural milieu — is a much better word than “healing” for removing maladaptive emotional and behavioral patterns.
A traumatic wrist injury is repaired by physical healing.
An irrational aversion to getting in cars is repaired by extinction of the behavior.
How to do the latter — talk-oriented therapies, exposure therapy (which is typically recommended for phobias), practice and training on implementing good patterns in similar situations to ones where you’ve displayed undesirable patterns of behavior, cognitive behavioral therapy if you’re ruminating too much, etc—well, unfortunately there’s no consensus currently on what works the best for any given case.
But I think starting with a model of “I need to heal” is questionable. Relatedly, I’m also skeptical of using the word “heal” for biochemical imbalances — for biochemical-based depression, for instance, I think “I need to get my hormones and biochemistry better-regulated to remove depressive symptoms” is a a mix of more actionable, more accurate, and more subjectively empowering than “I need to heal from depression.”
Anyway, this goes strongly against the current cultural milieu—and I haven’t been maximally precise in the comment. A lot could be nitpicked. But I think extinction of maladaptive thought patterns and maladaptive behavior patterns is more easily accomplished (and a more accurate description of reality) than healing; likewise, “regulating” seems more accurate than healing to me on biochemical based phenomenon.
It’s been useful for me to think about it this way, and sometimes useful for other people. Though, different things work for different people—so add salt liberally. Regardless, Lakoff’s Metaphors is extremely relevant the topic and highly recommended.
You assume that problems are very dualistic, that they are either a physical or a mental problem. Dualism is framework that has some appeal but there’s no inherent reason why it has to be true.
Many people who use the word trauma refer to somato-psychological issues. If we take the car crash, there’s a good chance that it results in changes in fascia and those changes also relate to phobia.
That’s why many people believe that bodywork is useful for dealing with traumatic experiences.
On the contrary—this is a strict materialist perspective which looks to disambiguate the word ‘trauma’ into more accurate nouns, and replace the vague word ‘heal’ with more actionable and concrete verbs.
A phrase like biochemical-based depression looks accurate and actionable on the surface but there are good reasons why there’s no biochemical-based depression in the DSM. The DSM is created by the need for categories that are practically useful for psychiatrists. Biochemical-based depression isn’t a category that’s actionable for professionals.
Even if the trigger of a depression was biochemical-based, making an assumption that you just need to change biochemistry and not anything more “mental” to get back to the status quo after being for months in the mental habits of depression is wrong. In some instances, the person might handle the mental changes without outside help but that doesn’t mean that changing mental habits is not needed.
I think there’s often a language/terminology challenge around these areas. For instance, at different times I had a grade 3 ankle sprain after endurance training, and a grade 2 wrist sprain after a car crash—those are clearly acute trauma (in the medical meaning of the word) and they do require some mix of healing to the extent possible for recovery of physical function.
But I’ve always found it tricky that the same word ‘trauma’ is used for physical injuries, past bad experiences, and as a broad description of maladaptive patterns of thought and behavior.
It’s a broad word that people use in different ways.
Two things I’ve found useful.
(1) Highest recommendation for Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) which looks at conceptual metaphors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By
From Chapter 7, “Personification”:
I think a lot of discussion around the word “trauma” follows these characteristics — the challenge is, a lot of times people move between a literal well-scoped definition of trauma, say the medical one, and a more metaphorical/ontological description. People often do this without noticing it.
For instance, I can talk about the acute trauma of the wrist injury from a car crash, and everyone will largely understand what I’m talking about. But the same word ‘trauma’ will often be used if I had described some fear or aversion of getting into cars going forwards. I don’t have one, but if I did, people would refer to both the wrist injury and the thing which caused the aversion to cars as ‘trauma’ — which seems somewhat confused to me. Clearly a wrist injury needs healing, in the biological and medical sense of the word healing.
Does an aversion to getting into cars need “healing” in the same way? I mean, maybe, if you’ve got a definition of “healing” from neuroscience around how incoming information is processed and how chain reactions of synapses firing in response to a stimuli that produces a maladaptive behavioral pattern is classified as “healing.” But—like, probably not. “Healing” in that context is a metaphor.
For my part, and just speaking for myself, I think the term “extinction” — though less in line with the current cultural milieu — is a much better word than “healing” for removing maladaptive emotional and behavioral patterns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)
In my way of thinking about it,
A traumatic wrist injury is repaired by physical healing.
An irrational aversion to getting in cars is repaired by extinction of the behavior.
How to do the latter — talk-oriented therapies, exposure therapy (which is typically recommended for phobias), practice and training on implementing good patterns in similar situations to ones where you’ve displayed undesirable patterns of behavior, cognitive behavioral therapy if you’re ruminating too much, etc—well, unfortunately there’s no consensus currently on what works the best for any given case.
But I think starting with a model of “I need to heal” is questionable. Relatedly, I’m also skeptical of using the word “heal” for biochemical imbalances — for biochemical-based depression, for instance, I think “I need to get my hormones and biochemistry better-regulated to remove depressive symptoms” is a a mix of more actionable, more accurate, and more subjectively empowering than “I need to heal from depression.”
Anyway, this goes strongly against the current cultural milieu—and I haven’t been maximally precise in the comment. A lot could be nitpicked. But I think extinction of maladaptive thought patterns and maladaptive behavior patterns is more easily accomplished (and a more accurate description of reality) than healing; likewise, “regulating” seems more accurate than healing to me on biochemical based phenomenon.
It’s been useful for me to think about it this way, and sometimes useful for other people. Though, different things work for different people—so add salt liberally. Regardless, Lakoff’s Metaphors is extremely relevant the topic and highly recommended.
You assume that problems are very dualistic, that they are either a physical or a mental problem. Dualism is framework that has some appeal but there’s no inherent reason why it has to be true.
Many people who use the word trauma refer to somato-psychological issues. If we take the car crash, there’s a good chance that it results in changes in fascia and those changes also relate to phobia.
That’s why many people believe that bodywork is useful for dealing with traumatic experiences.
On the contrary—this is a strict materialist perspective which looks to disambiguate the word ‘trauma’ into more accurate nouns, and replace the vague word ‘heal’ with more actionable and concrete verbs.
A phrase like biochemical-based depression looks accurate and actionable on the surface but there are good reasons why there’s no biochemical-based depression in the DSM. The DSM is created by the need for categories that are practically useful for psychiatrists. Biochemical-based depression isn’t a category that’s actionable for professionals.
Even if the trigger of a depression was biochemical-based, making an assumption that you just need to change biochemistry and not anything more “mental” to get back to the status quo after being for months in the mental habits of depression is wrong. In some instances, the person might handle the mental changes without outside help but that doesn’t mean that changing mental habits is not needed.