I disagree with the notion that we should come up with different words for things which share underlying structure but which don’t conform to our expectations about what “trauma” looks like, or that we should treat “meditators who have Seen The Matrix” as weird edge cases that don’t count and should be ignored when coming up with language.
The alternate perspective I offer is to view the successful meditators as people who simply have a more clear view of reality and therefore a better idea of how to define terms which cleave reality at the joints. The reasons it’s important to cleave reality at it’s joints are obvious in an abstract sense, but less obvious is that by doing this you actually change how pain is experienced and it doesn’t require years of meditation.
My favorite example of this is when my kid cousin burned his hand pretty bad, and I found him fighting back tears as everyone tried to console him and offer ice. No one had any idea that their understanding of pain/suffering was meaningfully flawed here because the kid was clearly a central case of their concept of “hurt” and not some “meditator who has Seen The Matrix”. No one saw their own responses to the situation as “trauma responses” because “it’s not overwhelming” and “just trying to help, because I feel bad for him”, but their actions were all in attempt to avoid their own discomfort at seeing him uncomfortable, and that failure to address the uncomfortable reality is the exact same thing and led to the exact same problems.
It’s worth noting that they were doing it because they didn’t know better and not that they didn’t have the mental strength to resist even if they did, but it’s exactly that “Well, it doesn’t count as trauma because it’s not that intense” thinking that allowed them to keep not knowing better instead of noticing “Wow, I’m uncomfortable seeing this kid injured and distressed like this”, and proceeding as makes sense. In that case, simply asking if it the pain that was distressing him is all it took for him to not be distressed and not even perceive the sensations as “painful” anymore, but you can’t get there if you are content with normal conflations between pain/suffering/meta-suffering/etc.
When people don’t see themselves as “trauma limited” it’s sometimes true, but it’s also often that they don’t recognize the ways in which the same dynamics are at play because they don’t have a good reference experience for how it could be different or a good framework to lead them there. Discarding “intuitive” language and working only with precise language that lays bare the conflations is an important part of getting there.
He was essentially gaslighted into thinking he had to sit there and suffer about it, rather than saying “oops” and laughing it off.
He already knew how to relate to pain pretty well from his older brothers playfully “beating him up” in what is essentially a rough game of “tickling” that teaches comfort with mild/non-harmful pain. In fact, when I stopped to ask him if it was the pain that he was distressed about, his response—after briefly saying “Yeah!” and then realizing that it didn’t fit—was that when he feels pain his brain interprets it as “ticklish”, and that it therefore it didn’t actually hurt and instead “just tickles”.
Everyone else was uncomfortable for him though, and while he was prepared to laugh off a burn that was relatively minor all things considered, he wasn’t prepared to laugh off a strong consensus of adults acting like something definitely not okay happened to him, so as a result he was pressured into feeling not-okay about it all.
I disagree with the notion that we should come up with different words for things which share underlying structure but which don’t conform to our expectations about what “trauma” looks like, or that we should treat “meditators who have Seen The Matrix” as weird edge cases that don’t count and should be ignored when coming up with language.
The alternate perspective I offer is to view the successful meditators as people who simply have a more clear view of reality and therefore a better idea of how to define terms which cleave reality at the joints. The reasons it’s important to cleave reality at it’s joints are obvious in an abstract sense, but less obvious is that by doing this you actually change how pain is experienced and it doesn’t require years of meditation.
My favorite example of this is when my kid cousin burned his hand pretty bad, and I found him fighting back tears as everyone tried to console him and offer ice. No one had any idea that their understanding of pain/suffering was meaningfully flawed here because the kid was clearly a central case of their concept of “hurt” and not some “meditator who has Seen The Matrix”. No one saw their own responses to the situation as “trauma responses” because “it’s not overwhelming” and “just trying to help, because I feel bad for him”, but their actions were all in attempt to avoid their own discomfort at seeing him uncomfortable, and that failure to address the uncomfortable reality is the exact same thing and led to the exact same problems.
It’s worth noting that they were doing it because they didn’t know better and not that they didn’t have the mental strength to resist even if they did, but it’s exactly that “Well, it doesn’t count as trauma because it’s not that intense” thinking that allowed them to keep not knowing better instead of noticing “Wow, I’m uncomfortable seeing this kid injured and distressed like this”, and proceeding as makes sense. In that case, simply asking if it the pain that was distressing him is all it took for him to not be distressed and not even perceive the sensations as “painful” anymore, but you can’t get there if you are content with normal conflations between pain/suffering/meta-suffering/etc.
When people don’t see themselves as “trauma limited” it’s sometimes true, but it’s also often that they don’t recognize the ways in which the same dynamics are at play because they don’t have a good reference experience for how it could be different or a good framework to lead them there. Discarding “intuitive” language and working only with precise language that lays bare the conflations is an important part of getting there.
I think I missed the problem in the case of the burned-hand kid – what was the issue in this case?
He was essentially gaslighted into thinking he had to sit there and suffer about it, rather than saying “oops” and laughing it off.
He already knew how to relate to pain pretty well from his older brothers playfully “beating him up” in what is essentially a rough game of “tickling” that teaches comfort with mild/non-harmful pain. In fact, when I stopped to ask him if it was the pain that he was distressed about, his response—after briefly saying “Yeah!” and then realizing that it didn’t fit—was that when he feels pain his brain interprets it as “ticklish”, and that it therefore it didn’t actually hurt and instead “just tickles”.
Everyone else was uncomfortable for him though, and while he was prepared to laugh off a burn that was relatively minor all things considered, he wasn’t prepared to laugh off a strong consensus of adults acting like something definitely not okay happened to him, so as a result he was pressured into feeling not-okay about it all.