Boring & straightforward trauma explanation
I thought of this a couple years ago and figured it was so obvious that it wasn’t worth posting about, but people are still discussing trauma endlessly, and I have not seen an explanation written anywhere, so here’s this.
“Trauma” is a bad experience deemed anomalous. It means “the world is not usually like that”. We do not call any behavior or emotional pattern “trauma” if it is obviously adaptive.
If you are in a war and you lie down and panic when you hear loud bangs, nobody will call you traumatized. When the war is over and you panic at fireworks, people will say you are traumatized. If then a bomb lands nearby and you survive because you took cover, they’ll say you were smart and acted fast.
If 10% of your country got murdered a generation or two ago for not going with the political majority, then you are completely sane for shutting off the thinky brain in politics. (The USSR, China, Korea, Vietnam, Nigeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Lebanon...) If that won’t happen where you live now, it’s “intergenerational trauma”.
If you got raped (and half your friends did too) and you are anxious and distrustful, then maybe you are just correctly calibrated about your own social sphere. If it was in a different country 10 years ago, then it’s trauma.
If you got ostracized and called creepy in school, you might have a good idea of what actually happens when you ask girls out in public. If your classmates were jerks and you don’t have acne anymore, it’s trauma.
If you got emotionally beat up by all your exes, then being less open might be a good idea. If they were all cocaine addicts from the same town, it’s trauma.
If driving a car makes you want to throw up since your last accident, you might be a bad driver. If a helicopter landed on you, it’s trauma. (I have heard it said that if you’re worried about your driving then you’re probably a safe driver. The last person I met who was seriously worried about their driving totaled her car a week later. Everybody, including me, was telling her she was fine and shouldn’t worry.)
It often takes years to get over trauma because that’s how long it takes to get enough evidence. Even a terrible driver will only crash every few years. And you can’t trust your friends (or therapist) to make a very accurate assessment of the risk, because nobody has good data.
TLDR: Trauma is a subjective term. If you think a bad event won’t happen again soon, you call it trauma. Otherwise, you don’t call it anything. It’s a matter of judgement.[1]
- ^
Two things make the judgement difficult. (1) It’s hard to tell how anomalous your own experiences are. (2) Traumatizing things are usually shameful & private — you can’t easily go ask 20 people how their war went. I have no answer for this.
Another definition along the same vein:
Trauma is overgeneralization of emotional learning.
There are different ways you can define a term. You can define a term like depression as being about certain neurological mechanisms or you can define it as whether a psychiatrist labels it as depression. The DSM is famously neutral about mechanisms and just cares about a list of symptoms as accessed by the subjective judgement of a psychiatrist.
I think that’s the DSM having that perspective is holding back progress at dealing with mental illnesses. While I think the DSM doesn’t directly have a definition for traumaI would expect that it would be good to have nonsubjective definitions for trauma as well.
How about this: trauma is a set of one or more habits that
was adaptive at one time but isn’t anymore and
is hurting you or likely to hurt you in some way.
One of the ideas in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is you might be treating as dangerous something that actually isn’t dangerous (and don’t learn that it’s safe because you’re avoiding it).
so the account you’re giving here seems to be fairly standard.
On the other hand: some things actually are dangerous.
I think there might be other aspects to trauma, though. Some possible candidates:
- memories feel as if they are “tagged” with an emotion, in a way that memories normally aren’t
-depletion of some kind of mental resource; not sure what to call it, so I won’t be too so specific about exactly what is depleted
I think this is just incorrect? It is still a learned behavior if it’s adaptive, it’s just that people don’t go to the doctor’s office complaining that they are afraid of getting stabbed when they got stabbed last Tuesday. You’re right that we wouldn’t generally call this trauma, but that doesn’t mean that the person is not traumatized.
If we had a magical cure for trauma and we used it on the guy who gets stabbed on Tuesdays, he would still be afraid of knives and would perhaps even be better at avoiding being stabbed (since he now avoids the subway and bikes to work instead of freezing up in a fugue while he rides). I think it would be fair under this example to say “Trauma is a certain kind of learned response [with a gajillion caveats]”, not your definition.
I am not sure if it needs to be conditional on if the event is unusual or not, or if would happen again or not in a forward looking sense in reality. Could you explain why the restriction there? Especially on <We do not call any behavior or emotional pattern ‘trauma’ if it is obviously adaptive.>