“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.
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 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.