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.
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.