Childhood trauma that leads to toxic stress can have epigenetic affects and dramatically increases one’s chance for many illnesses and many causes of death. It is truly stunning. This is true even for those who feel like their trauma was no big deal (heck, others had it worse, right?) if they have a high ACE score (adverse childhood experiences).
Nadine Burke Harris writes and talks about it and how a larger ACE score should be detected as part of normal health screenings for everyone because of its outsized influence on health.
Trauma can impact sleep, sleep is necessary for cleaning and organizing the brain.
Stress hormones prevent many autonomic processes from occurring on a normal cycle.
It would make sense that external stressors could lead to diseases that rely on autonomic processes to run to completion. Make sure your /tmp stays clean folks or it could cause an outage.
I am of the opinion that many people have experienced childhood trauma in one form or another, and generally speaking few people want to admit to or have grown up without tragedy. Is there a particular type of "trauma" here? Are we saying those who've been abused physically, mentally or sexually? Are we saying someone who had a loved one die before their time?
A common metric is the ACE test. Consider how many ACEs a child has experienced, over what time periods they occurred, and how their family responded to them. A child with many ACEs and a family that didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t respond to these experiences is worse off than a kid whose family immediately took corrective action, generally.
>Abuse includes physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in childhood. Household dysfunction includes growing up with domestic violence, substance abuse or mental illness in the home, parental divorce or separation, and incarceration.
The other thing that tends to go unnoticed is that many people at a very young age experience the death of a dear loved one they were deeply bonded with. This can have profound and unimaginable effects on the stability of their psychology in ways that are poorly understood. It’s very possible for ones own internal primitive neural structures to permanently throw themselves completely out of chemical balance through self inflicted damage through stress mechanisms caused by the activity of these structure.
The reason this is possible is because the most physiologically potent aspects of the limbic system develop well before the prefrontal and other more modern structures can completely solidify. Because these structures are grow slower and are more elaborate, the homeostasis necessary for their stable growth is much more delicate.
There are likely periods of chemical vulnerability during development that can act as transformation pathways of the entire development of the advanced structures. They will continue to express their growth/maturation genes and develop in some way but it leads to a completely different operational configuration and also one that relies heavily on conceptual and even chemical aspects of the external environment for internal conceptual and chemical stability.
The one of the main functions of limbic system is the main component in the fear/flight/fright mechanism. This system exists because its operation of generating chaotic action and bias of reaction has in some way granted its host a significant increased statistical advantage toward surviving and reproducing whereas, although it can make a big difference, the more advanced structures have not adapted the capability of continued existence as a species on its own.
Natural selection favors whatever social genetic traits confer an increased rate of survival of an organism to reproductive maturity and then what personally governing traits lead the individual to reproduce. It is fair to presume that all traits of the human mind developed completely for only two purposes, to reproduce and to behave in ways that ensure your offsprings survival which unintentionally contributes to widespread survival advantage of humans outside ones family, increasing the chances that there will be similar individuals to confer a symmetrical advantage in return. Pretty much a cloud of increased likelihood for the species as a whole in that area to survive. Pretty much everything we think is important in society can be traced down the bias in the limbic systems chaos system
If you only had that, then you have a low ACE score, which reduces the risk for all, compared to someone with a higher ACE score, as that paper explains.
>A traumatic experience in a person’s life occurring before theageof18thatthepersonrecallsasanadult.
The ACE score is a measure of cumulative exposure to particular adverse childhood conditions. Exposure to any single ACE condition is counted as one point. Points are then totaled for a final ACE score. It is important to note that the ACE score does not capture the frequency or severity of any given ACE in a person’s life, focusing instead on the number of ACE categories experienced. In addition, the ACE categories used in the ACE study reflect only a select list of experiences
>Note: two categories from the original ACE study, physical and emotional neglect, were not included in the BRFSS survey. In addition, drug and alcohol use by someone living in the home were counted as separate ACEs in the Minnesota BRFSS analysis and not combined into one as in the BRFSS analyses conducted in other state
From page 13
>This study confirms that a majority of Minnesotans are experiencing ACEs in childhood. As in other states, ACEs tend to occur together. This study also confirms that there is an association between the number of ACEs and health and social outcomes so that the more ACEs a person has the greater the effect on physical
and mental health and social well-being.
>Table 1 shows the distribution of ACE scores for all Minnesotans and by gender. Table 1 indicates that 21 percent of Minnesotans reported three or more ACEs and 8 percent reported five or more ACEs.
>Consistent with other states’ results, women experience even greater numbers of ACEs. In Minnesota, 57 percent of women and 54 percent of men reported experiencing one or more ACE in childhood. Almost a quarter of women (24 percent) reported experiencing three or more ACEs in childhood compared to 19 percent of men.
> ACEsalsotendtooccurtogether,meaning that those Minnesotans reporting one ACE are more likely to report other ACEs. This is consistent with the ACE findings from other states. Table 2 illustrates that of the 55 percent of Minnesota adults with one ACE, 40 percent have one ACE and 60 percent have two or more ACEs. This graph also shows that among those having at least one ACE, 15 percent have five or more ACEs.
>Table3showstheprevalence
of each ACE among Minnesota adults. The three most common ACEs reported by Minnesota adults include emotional abuse with 28 percent of Minnesotans indicating that a parent or adult in their home swore, insulted or put them down in their youth; living with a problem drinker or alcoholic (24 percent); and separation or divorce of
a parent (21 percent).
> The results from the Minnesota Student Survey show that differences among racial/ethnic groups have
been very consistent over the last 15 years. In every year the survey has been administered since 1995, African American, American Indian and Hispanic 9th graders have been at least twice as likely as White students to report
three or more kinds of adverse experiences. In every year, Asian students have been slightly more likely than White students to report three or more adverse experiences.
The pdf is quite short and uses plain language. I encourage anyone interested to read it in full.
Most people start from a place where they say "I am completely normal and everything I do is normal" and reason from there.
For a person to acknowledge their trauma they must be wanting to be free of it and at least be able to see them themselves for who they truly are.
Your idea that most people have experienced trauma growing up of some form, but few want to admit to such really does not surprise me.
What is with the "particular type of trauma" idea? While they are not the same at all I don't see the value in any hierarchy of trauma. Trauma is an individual's inability to cope with an experience.
I haven’t yet read the study but one thing I would assume should have great effects is:
Anything that causes long lasting ptsd like simptoms, where you are constantly afraid, or have triggers which make you afraid.
This exposes you to a lot of adrenaline and other who-knows-what hormones in a period where your brain is still in heavy development.
I have little idea about these things, apart from the fact that I had a traumatic childhood, and developed MS, which is a disease that also has some link with what happens to you before the age 15 (how far you live to the equator therefore in theory how D3 deficient you grow up before the age 15 is significantly correlated with the chance of developing the disease)
This is just a random thought I cannot back it with anything.
Scientists have a hard time figuring out the cause, maybe because the slow vague onset of the disease?
When I first had my symptoms which made diadnosis possible I already had a couple of demyelinated lesions. Did they show up the days before? Or years ago? Who knows.
You cannot do daily mri scans of a large enough population to catch even 1 patient at exactly the beginning of their disease, and even if you catch it, how can you gather useful information non-invasively?
Anyways, I try reading scientific papers, and avoid the overhyped “eat this to cure your MS” type articles.
They are so confident in everything, but of the 100 of real studies I’ve looked at, almost none of them had any surefire way to slow disease progression, some of the findings even contradict popular belief.
For example eating whole grains, drinking wine in moderation and drinking coffe may have a small positive effect, instead of cutting out all gluten.
Or it might just be a currelation in a way that wine drinkers have a higher socioeconomical status, which they tried correcting for, but they missed some unknown factor anyway?
Just try doing the regular healthy lifestyle; good food, some moderate excercise, no stress.. Because you can still get all the other lifestyle diseases ontop of MS as anyone else, and as we are more vulnerable we need to be more careful.
> Are we saying someone who had a loved one die before their time?
I hope not. Death is something you have to learn to cope with at some point. If we call that already a trauma, I think we have a rather big problem. And I am saying this because I have experience with it. I had my father and my aunt die in their 30s, when I was around 13. That was unpleasant, but still from the "such is life" category.
We all experience trauma eventually. Death is one we'll all see. Saying it is not traumatic is unhelpful. Acknowledging that it is traumatic, and helping people out who are experiencing it for the first time is exactly how people "learn to cope with it".
Having your father die at such a young age is certainly considered to be traumatic but a lot depends on your feeling if safety and connection to another adult.
I had almost no connection to my mother, so you might like to call it traumatic. However, I was not telling my whole story. The reality is, I have a disability since childhood, so I always had "more complicated" problems then death to deal with. Thats why I insist calling the death of a family member trauma is exaggregation. There are things in life which are far more problematic to deal with.
> few people want to admit to or have grown up without tragedy.
Did you indeed mean "without"? (Or did you mean "with", as in: "few people want to admit to have grown up with tragedy"?)
(Not a native speaker, maybe I'm missing something)
If so, I wonder, what are reasons people want to tell others that they grew up with tragedy?
(I wonder what "tragedy" means in your text, eg an alcoholic parent or getting beaten or ... A grandparent died? Quite different things, the word can mean)
They actually do the opposite: they boast of the harsh conditions of their childhood, not as victims but as survirvors/tough self-made people. And of course their traumas/tough conditions are made up to be actually hard (to the point of absurdity).
So in both cases, they do the opposite of what I claimed people commonly stoop to today:
(a) presenting lesser, irrelevant issues and "slights" as "traumas"
(b) focusing on how traumatised they were by those (that is, playing the victim, not taking pride in overcoming them or at least pretending to be a tough survivor like the four Yorkshiremen).
I understand that you are now saying that you accept people talking about their traumas, if you personally agree that they have suffered, and if you personally understand and recognise what they are saying within your own narrative: one of overcoming and having power, as these four successful parodies are claiming.
But that's not the reality of trauma for many people. Some people are never going to be quaffing wine in a fancy restaurant and reminiscing with their aged school-chums. Some people will suffer evident psychological harm that they may never fully recover from.
The four yorkshiremen's tales centre on a factual recounting, not touching upon feelings or harm done or how the situation was dealt with. [it was presented in this way with the effect of parodying this attitude.]
I think this deserves the pushback you are getting. It has damaged generations, to not be able to talk about their subjective experiences of objective harm.
I think your attitude is selfish (in the sense that you're making it about yourself). It does you no harm for people to tell their stories, in their own terms. Why not let folks be?
>I understand that you are now saying that you accept people talking about their traumas, if you personally agree that they have suffered
Whereas there are people who don't do that? Who are OK with people talking about their traumas if they thing those people are faking it/overblown them?
You dressed the description up to make me sound like some exception. But I think everybody (except perhaps the totally indifferent) only accept others talking about their traumas if they believe those other are genuine and talk the truth. Else, they consider them hypocrites or liars or opportunists, and so on. Isn't that the case?
Let's make it perfectly clear what I mean:
(a) I'm totally fine with people talking about their real traumas as traumas
(b) I'm also totally fine with people talking about their real traumas as things they brushed off/soldiered through
(c) I believe many people have real traumas
(d) I believe many more overblow or make-up traumas to play the victims, score sympathy points, get a leverage, etc.
(e) I don't like the latter category - I consider them hypocrites, and I think they cheapen real trauma for everybody
(f) I use my own opinion to consider who belongs to (a) and is legit or who belongs to (e) and is thus a hypocrite. What's the alternative? Taking whatever everybody says as necessarily true even if I have doubts about their honesty or history?
(g) who am I to judge other people's stories? Well, I'm the arbiter of my opinion. Shouldn't I judge for myself (including whether another is a hypocrite or not)?
If the parent's example was what I was talking about, then a "plus 20" years adjustment on my part wouldn't fix anything, since people have been doing the "four yorkshiremen" style thing not just 70 years ago, but since forever (and still do).
But that (the parent's example) is not what I claimed people didn't do 50 years ago. If anything, it's the opposite.
In the "four workshiremen" sketch they take pride in their traumas/harsh situations that they went through, and compete to exaggerate even greater traumatic/harsh situations. Today many people exaggreate irrelevant slights as traumas, and do so in order play the victim, not the tough survivor.
Nice cynical, cruel take. It says more about you that you believe people who speak about their trauma are only doing it to play victim.
You ever wonder how trauma is passed through generations? Because of the premise you are saying: people in denial about a trauma they experienced. They assume the shitty experiences they had are normal and then repeat the same acts that were visited upon them.
In my reading about cptsd during my counseling (uh oh, am I playing a victim?) one of the most common thoughts identified in childhood trauma is downplaying the severity and assuming it is common. That leads to people not seeking treatment.
Try showing some compassion and assume good faith.
>Nice cynical, cruel take. It says more about you that you believe people who speak about their trauma are only doing it to play victim
That would be a very valid critique - but only if I had said anything of the sort.
I never said that "people who speak about their trauma are only doing it to play victim", as if it's somehow impossible to speak about trauma and not doy to play victim.
What I said that people today (meaning, lots of people today, which is neither the same as "everybody", nor even the same as "everybody who talks about trauma") overblow insignifant "traumas" to play the victim.
There are, of course, also people with real traumas (real abuse, parent loss, and so on). Those, by definition, don't have to overblow BS "traumas", and, by extension, are not those I criticized.
So, I can't really answer your points, any other way, expect to say that they don't actually respond to what I did say.
It did address what you said. You are demeaning people with trauma when you say “lots” have “BS” traumas. It ties in with people doubting their trauma.
You don’t get to decide what is and isn’t trauma. You aren’t the arbiter of what is trauma.
Respect what people say or just keep your thoughts to yourself. It’s not hard.
I think we are talking about a link that can be observed on some statistical analysis done on survey results from samples without blinds. Pointing out the link isn't quite enough to publish anything, so we add some of the buzzwords that trend well, RNA here and there usually satisfies demand. It doesn't demonstrate anything but it justifies research spendings, salary and stipends of those two researchers groups, the universities also got to be mentioned, given what they are going through it may help acquire more leads to occupy next terms seats.
I'd like to share a perspective that I can't reconcile. I'll start with a quick list of personal childhood(6-16 year old?) trauma: sexual abuse at 12 by a sadistic man 3 times my size that I feared, getting hit with a baseball bat in two separate incidents the second time fracturing a vertebrae, at 12 having an adult hit me so hard it fractured my sternum (to this day my chest has a bony ridge), losing 3 close childhood friends starting at age 10, watching a woman's head get run over by a city bus at age 6. Getting beaten so badly by a gang that my eyelid has a permanent droop (the girls mocked my new asymmetry) Watching a neighbor who I liked get stabbed in the neck and then beg for mercy (he had gambling debts) when I was 10. I could go on.
Oddly, at the time none of the above "traumatized" me because the media, movies about NYC and the mob, Catholic school (lots of torture pictures in our study book), other friends experiences, etc. set my expectations that violence and sadism against boys/men is normal and that I am lucky to not have gotten worse.
I didn't start to feel anger or trauma until I went away to college in the early 90's and no one seemed to have similar stories. Not even close. Oddly living somewhere safe with decent people made me bitter and resentful.
What I can't reconcile is that my new friends genuinely felt bad for me in a way that my NYC buddies didn't. And that somehow created the trauma. Is that typical ? And does that imply that an avoidance strategy, or a wise-cracking support group, might have better mental health outcomes than time with an empathetic therapist ?
"Overall, education seems the most important mediator." according the article.
> I didn't start to feel anger or trauma until I went away to college in the early 90's and no one seemed to have similar stories
I've got stories like yours. And I too thought I wasn't traumatized, at least not too much.
But I was wrong.
The trauma was a weakness below the surface and given the right mix of pressure (the pressures of startups don't by default provide a safe environment for mental health) it gave way almost 35 years later almost ending my story.
A year of therapy later and I live a simpler life now. I survived my past, few could and there's strength in that.
I concur with you that a kind of anxiety exists due to people who just shrug it off, and this was worse and seems to keep the past more present.
A few kind individuals heard me, didn't dismiss, and didn't judge, and have been more support than leagues of others. And being heard by those few people who are softer and gentler, has been absolutely restorative.
I'm glad others don't have stories like ours, but sad that means most people can't connect with survivors who do have these stories.
My parents went through the Cultural Revolution, which involved being sent to a labor camp for a couple years, having various relatives harassed into committing suicide, and even though everyone in their age cohort experienced equally horrific things, I could tell something wasn't right about them, even as a kid. They, however, would not think of themselves as traumatized. I don't know about your case in particular, but in general, I think psychological injuries tend to leave a mark, even if they are normalized, and even if the sufferer is not necessarily aware of them.
It’s a delicate subject to discuss, to say the least. There has been some tangential research in this area, but most researchers want to avoid the perception of questioning anyone’s response to or definition of trauma.
We do know that the language used to describe a situation can have profound effects on the perceived severity. There is a famous study in which subjects were shown footage of cars crashing into each other and asked to estimate the speed of the collision. It turns out that the way the collision is described has a significant effect on the estimate of the speed. For example, asking someone how fast the cars “smashed” into each other results in more severe estimates than if you ask how fast the cars “collided”. There has been extrapolation to suggest that merely reframing events as traumas is enough to amplify their severity, which could unfortunately create unhelpful negative feedback loops when others are merely trying to help.
There is also a trend toward younger generations feeling that their lives are more due to fate or random chance than their own actions. Reframing outcomes as traumas inherently shifts the outcome to something that is inflicted upon us. Is it possible that prior to your friends’ reframing of those events you viewed the outcomes more as your own successful navigation out of (obviously terrible) random events? Reframing events as traumas can shift the perspective to one of being a helpless victim rather than an active navigator.
>There is also a trend toward younger generations feeling that their lives are more due to fate or random chance than their own actions.
Or earlier generations believing it was ordained by God? I'd say there is definitely a massive cultural away from "it's God's will", which I hope leads to higher independence: its a shame to think randomness means no agency.
Here is an interesting and insightful blog post by someone who was abused as a child, but due to being homeschooled didn't realize she was abused until a year after leaving home. And once she realized she had been abused she started suddenly experiencing an enormous amount of anxiety and depression.
Mm. Seconded. I had an unhappy childhood, but there was one teacher in particular at my boarding school who looked out for me - he was kind, when nobody else was - he didn’t beat me as the other masters would, he’d have me and other boys who were having a hard time over for cocoa and board games in the evenings. He’d take us swimming at the lake on Sundays, where we’d all do our best to out-daredevil each other as he took pictures.
He was sent to prison the year before last, as it transpires that he wasn’t just a nice old man, he was a pederast, grooming his prey.
That, more than anything else, has bought me unwelcome trauma - the one thing in my childhood that didn’t suck, turns out to have sucked after all - and it changed the context from childhood fun to “actually, that was weird”.
It could be framed as you being about to get scammed (like in a pyramid scheme), getting the little starting profit they give all new members to entice, but actually leaving before you get scammed.
Since you’re experiencing trauma as a result of learning that new information, I’d like to provide some food for thought on the off chance that it might help you. I do this with the best of intentions; it’s how I would try to look at the situation if it happened to me.
I believe that the way we as a society currently respond to things like abuse often results in way more trauma and victimhood than what victims would experience without that reaction. Needless to say, abuse is unacceptable and deserves punishment. However, I think we would end up with less suffering in the world if we’d become more reserved in deciding what qualifies as abuse, especially when it comes to (otherwise consensual) sex. Morality is subject to fashion after all.
I’m of the opinion that an act is not abusive if it’s not experienced as such, on the condition that the people involved in the act are aware of the possible consequences of it.
In your case, both at the time and up until recently, you didn’t experience the events as abusive but as actually positive. Like you said, the teacher was kind and comforting. What you learnt about him later doesn’t change that fact, and it doesn’t have to reduce him to an abuser.
To put things in perspective: in Ancient Greece, pederast relationships were completely accepted; strongly encouraged even! There’s no evidence that these relationships, a cultural tradition in a highly developed civilization, were experienced as abusive. They were also about love, education, and doing activities together, so it seems like your teacher would fit the definition of an erastês. It’s very possible that he wasn’t evil, just a man looking for love and intimacy in the wrong era/culture.
What I assume has given you trauma is the mere potentiality of sexual abuse, at a time you were suffering actual physical abuse. From what I can gather it didn’t end up actually happening, so there’s no telling whether he wanted more from you, and if he did, whether he would have acted in a way that felt abusive to you at the time (coercion/threatening).
Maybe I’m too open-minded by today’s Western moral standards, but when it comes to youth-adult relationships, I don’t think we should equate sex to abuse. It’s suffering we want to prevent, and suffering is the result of abuse. If you look at it like that, what you experienced and now view as grooming could actually be seen as a way of avoiding abuse.
You might disagree with my definition of abuse and argue that it would’ve been abusive in any case, but again, given the information you provided this is how I would personally look at it in this situation. I hope these different perspectives can help at all.
It's only slightly related to your whole experience (and sorry you lived through such things).. but IMO "emotional relativism" (for the lack of a proper term) is probably a big part of our brains pain ladder.
Injustice is mostly relative-based, for instance. if everybody gets through shit you feel it's painful but okay, if you're the only one getting bad treatment then you feel a lot worse.. abandoned, isolated, alienated, lied to .. the pain and anger can be amplified a lot in those cases.
And in general it's a big issue in society. Many people resent the world because their reality seem worse than whoever is next to them, most of us don't know each others lives, we pretend things are ok a lot but unless we discuss things with some depth, we never know and we can feel unjustly treated and go crazy our peers.
Your comment about the empathetic friends is interesting. Was it a matter of "you say you feel for me but you have no idea what it was, so it's just words" while NYC guys may not care but they know, they went through it.. that's enough for you to feel fair ?
It definitely wasn't just words to my new college friends as the stories are bad but not so extreme that one can't imagine having such an experience. But as a way to form closer friendships it failed. It was the first time I ever felt someone pitied me. That oddly made me feel ashamed. I'd question if a woman can ever really be attracted to man they pity or a man who has been sexually abused, for example.
Basically, you used abuse as a shared bonding experience with other kids in the same position. That probably created strong bonds. But that benefit went away when you talked with non-abused people.
For whatever it is worth, the normalization of abuse is one of negative aspects that keeps influencing people long after. Kids that were abused can grow to think it is normal which then leads to them directly into abusive relationships as adults.
> I'd question if a woman can ever really be attracted to man they pity or a man who has been sexually abused, for example.
Why? This seem more related to gender roles or blaming yourself for abuse. Or you think that being sexually abused transforms men? Or it is purely about womens lack of capacity to be into someone vulnerable?
> Why? This seem more related to gender roles or blaming yourself for abuse. Or you think that being sexually abused transforms men? Or it is purely about womens lack of capacity to be into someone vulnerable?
I believe the author just shared their own instinctive reaction to the event. Shame is a mechanism of our cultural and moral foundation, often tightly integrated with the roles (indeed by gender) and expectations set out for us.
We may be able to reflect on their merits, and what causes shame varies in place and time but it's seldom voluntary to experience shame.
I kinda see what you mean, you don't want that kind of bond with others, you want a more honorable role somehow ? Or maybe you expect too much of yourself and thought "I should have made my life better earlier" ?
The woman aspect I can't answer, every psychology can be different, some will never love with pity, some may only love with pity (I for instance, have a mental block on loving someone just because of fun times.. as if it's not enough somehow)
> Injustice is mostly relative-based, for instance. if everybody gets through shit you feel it's painful but okay
This is why various social groups haze new members, and also the reasoning behind some of the rituals in military training such as the "Crucible" in the Marine Corps (takes place over 54-hours and includes food and sleep deprivation and over 45 miles of marching).
When they all go through the same abusive crap, it creates a common bond among them.
This reminds me of a talk by Michael Yapko titled "Keys to unlocking depression"[1], where he said:
"My first job was working in a psychiatric facility and I was the admissions person. It was my job to admit new patients to the unit. ...
"I would interview people who had been through the worst experiences that you could imagine. People who had been raped, tortured, mutilated, people who had fled their homelands literally with bullets whizzing past their head, people who lost their entire family in one fell swoop in a plane crash or a car crash, people who had suffered the worst adversities you could possibly imagine.
"When I would interview these people it would be easy to appreciate why they were broken, why they were so despairing, why they had given up on life. ... But what fascinated me clinically ... was when I interviewed people who had been through these horrific experiences, people who probably should have been depressed but they weren't, and I wanted to know why not. What is it about the way these people are coping that somehow serves to insulate them against depression?"*
There's something about depression when your mental model of the world becomes a swamp.
I've never been through losses as horrible as Yapko describes, but I'd say these people had still a clear yes/no point of view on how to live. What I'm curious is how these people avoided PTSD though..
That is a good observation. Nothing so bad for me (except 15 years battling) but I had always assumed everyone with a higher education was more or less decent, until my breakup at 23. I’m 38.
The violence of it stunned me. And the worst violence, is that everyone is fine with what women do to men at breakup - when the same people would be up in arms if a male were a “pervert narcissist” telling truths in a vexating way, while they don’t mind that my girlfriend asked me to move to another country only to dump me there without notice, without remotely thinking that I would be homeless for 3 days and it was winter, and would be too disoriented to recover abroad or to choose to come back. I know, expecting people who say “I love you” to mildly care for you after breakup is a childish expectation. I… I didn’t know. I had been fed popular songs usually saying “We broke up but I wish you the best”. I didn’t know someone who loved me could suddenly make me homeless because I wasn’t pleasing her in bed anymore. This is violent. And society is fine with that, and people don’t tell that normal girls might do that, while they warn all the time about pervert narcisssists.
For 15 years I oscillated between good person, gay, misogynist, or worse, and cut ties with 98% of my friends and all my family. But clearly, my mental model of people’s interactions is a swamp: I both understand nothing of why people are unnecessarily mean gratuitously, and both understand very clearly that we are pieces of meat. I could now strangle kittens without any feeling right now, and yet I don’t do that and still donate to charities, because I try to believe in a world of decent people. Which the world clearly is not. My mental model is a swamp, this is correct.
I get bitter whenever I think that other people have never had to deal with the problems I have.
Similarly, I feel good/lucky when I remember that some people have to deal with problems much worse than mine.
I usually think about the second category more, but sometimes people talk about something and it leads me to think about the former category, a switch inside me turns on and I feel like shit, so I try to withdraw from those situations if possible.
My point is: comparing my problems with those of the rest of people makes me feel better or worse, depending on the comparison.
I wouldn't qualify my situation as trauma, but some inconsequential conversation can suddenly make me feel disturbed it touches on the specific subjects that I feel bad about.
Some people have their schizophrenia awakened by stressing in their finals. While some people get much brutal stressors like rape and don't have any lingering issues.
> And does that imply that an avoidance strategy, or a wise-cracking support group, might have better mental health outcomes than time with an empathetic therapist ?
But generally, yeah, that's a lot. Try going to therapy. Or reading a book like "The body keeps the score" that explains how trauma affects people (including things that happened to you). I think you might find yourself in some pages of that book.
(Armchair psychologist here)
The absence of perceived trauma while still in the environment that can produce similar traumatic experiences is normal and makes sense. You are adapted to your environment as a child.
But, once you leave the said environment for something safer and more comfortable (note that it’s a historical anecdote, not many people could do that say 150 years ago), you also face the need to re-shape your identity in a way so that you can thrive.
This points out to you the fact that previous experiences were in fact traumatic and need to be emotionally processed, re-lived and understood in a way.
> note that it’s a historical anecdote, not many people could do that say 150 years ago
It might actually be. 1871 is just few years after civil war in United States, many people were moving away from severely abusive situations. Whether soldiers, former slaves, citizens in places where armies went through.
Plus, people in past did moved to other cities just to escape abusive parents too.
There's a book, Laughter out of Place, https://www.amazon.de/Laughter-Out-Place-Shantytown-Anthropo..., that talks about gallows humour of people in a particular Rio de Dajeiro favela (amongst other genreal cultural observations). It might interest you or others here; I remember it being pretty well written when I read it more than a decade ago.
I would imagine it has to be somewhat severe trauma to create a physiological change? My parents went through an awful divorce but I was fine (6/7), shortly after we moved however, I was raped by the new neighbour for a period of time(12/13), less than a year after I developed vitiligo, an autoimmune disorder thought to be linked to childhood trauma.
It might also be how supported or responsive your support systems were at the time. An awful divorce might be ameliorated if one or both parents still supported the child emotionally.
Wouldn't that mean that we should see a spike of Alzheimers in countries ravaged by war like the ones in Africa? Yet that does not seem to be the case.
Nadine Burke Harris writes and talks about it and how a larger ACE score should be detected as part of normal health screenings for everyone because of its outsized influence on health.
See https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_... or her book “The Deepest Well.”