Asserting everyone deserves the same prize is still handing out prizes. There is nothing to be prized in any of this.

> This is likely the way you worked through your trauma. It is not a universal experience.

Neither is forming the habit of assuming no agency that you described. I had that habit. To the extent I broke it, I described how I have done that. It's a bit rich of you to describe an experience of trauma that corresponds with mine, and then claim there is no merit in my description of how I responded to that experience.

> I cannot parse this word salad.

'Word salad' is a psychiatric term of art describing the faulty use of language seen in some undergoing psychotic or schizophrenic episodes. I assume you do not intend to suggest I am either, but in that case one wonders why you resort to the phrase at all.

Unwinding the dependent clause, then: You have implicitly claimed great generosity of perspective in your analysis of all human suffering as equally meaningful and worthy. You have also given the lie to that claim, in responding to my analysis without any evident effort to understand the perspective that informs it. Because your standing to make the argument is built on this claim of generosity, the error impugns the argument as a whole.

> That terrible, awful things happen in this world does not mean those whom suffered less are not worthy of empathy, accommodation, support, etc.

If I have said otherwise at any time here or elsewhere, I would appreciate you quoting where I did so. I should not like to think I could make such an error and fail to notice.

What I have said is that there is merit in keeping a sense of perspective, and where objectively something much worse could have happened than has, then including that fact in one's analysis can be useful. A major purpose of therapy is to provide an outside perspective, isn't it? You give the impression of assuming no other source of such perspective exists. I have twice now described one.

I have likewise at no point discounted the value of empathy, accommodation, or support. I think we define those terms differently, though. It's easy to wallow in misery. It is comfortable to wallow in misery. Of whom in such a state could anything fairly be expected? - even by oneself.

Of course, it also has the problem that nothing ever improves for doing that. And the thing about living through it - for any definition of 'it' - is that you still have the rest of a life to get through the best way you can, after.

In what sense is it supportive to suggest other than that people be about that work, to the absolute extent of their capacities to do so? In what sense accommodative, to suggest that a wound which can be healed or at least closed not be? In what sense empathetic, to suggest that no one need even try to find ways not to suffer?

I grant you not all can achieve this. It's not their situation to which I speak; I would not dare. But many more can than can't, and it seems to me a shocking and frankly culpable insult to all those of us who can to suggest that we need not, or that there can come no point at which we are living in it merely for the sake of living in it.

I would like you to show the generosity you claimed earlier - to really grant us agency, victims or survivors or whatever you care to call us. Encompass the idea that we can, should, and must at least try to overcome, will you? To do otherwise grants much more power to those who have misused us than they ever deserve.

As someone who's edited millions of words in recent years, in a few languages, I'd put what you wrote (and other parts) on the harder to parse end of the spectrum. Understandable, with time, sure, but not written for clarity. A bit like code golf. Logical, operational, but not conducive to a flowing exchange of ideas.

I enjoy your writing, fwiw, it's likely better than most, and you've every reason to be proud of it, but you're not making it easy to follow along for an international audience.

I think you're also missing the point, again fwiw. If a soft snowflake brain (quote unquote) shows being shouted at or barked at by a dog as trauma under fmri, because they haven't been conditioned to tolerate any more, then that might well be classed as trauma. This doesn't undermine anyone else's experience.

It's also potentially indicative of less traumatic lives being lived in general, of the threshold lowering. Which should be a good thing. Or that, if you reject the trauma, the bone you have to pick is not in fact with the definition of trauma, perhaps, but unrecognised privilege.

Whatever it is, I think the benefit of accepting self definitions, despite the fact that they will be abused by hypochondriacs and attention seekers (human condition?), is that someone who needs to be heard will now be heard. Having grown up before all this stuff, can confirm that hasn't always been the case. This can save lives. Despite it being abused. That's the upside I can see. Perhaps it could be done more intelligently. I'm sure it will evolve. But yes, I can see the merit. More talking is a good thing, in general.

I think a lot of these identity issues have roots in modern lifestyles, consumerism etc but as set out above, it's about taking the rough with the smooth, to use an old phrase. Improved quality of life vs first world problems.

Finally, more generally, I'm sure everyone wants less trauma. We should perhaps be training resiliency alongside talking therapy. But resiliency only gets you so far in some cases.

I hope I'm not too guilty of talking too much about too little. Hopefully my 2c contributes something of value.

Peace to all.

> the benefit...someone who needs to be heard will now be heard.

Will they, though? That's what bothers me about this. In a culture suffused with a concept of trauma so vitiated as to apply to seemingly almost anything more noxious than a paper cut, where is there any space for someone to talk about the experience of having suffered something legitimately horrific? If 'trauma' means someone broke it off with me and that sucked and I feel bad about it, how does it also mean what my grandfather did, and my father's girlfriend and later his second wife, and those other men I probably never will know how they got me in that room? If I use 'trauma' to mean those things, and everyone I say it to thinks I'm talking about a bad breakup, then in what sense am I heard?

Too, a culture so suffused offers many opportunities for unnecessary and uncomfortable mishap. I've had this happen, with someone who seemed to approach the concept so lightly as to regard the subject as a sort of shortcut to deepening acquaintanceship, the term that was used being 'trauma bonding' - this in a second conversation, at that.

I was somewhat sharp in dissuading what felt an unwarrantable and startling level of nosiness toward matters which are mine to share or not as I choose. I regret the brusqueness and not the dissuasion, but in her defense I can't imagine it arising at all, as a topic in a professional conversation within a professional setting, were it not a very ordinary aspect of culture in at least some places. Certainly it was nothing more than a clash of cultures, and a mildly inappropriate conversation for work - but the clash and the malaprop are themselves interesting to me, and corroborate a level of normalization and attenuation which, as I say, imperils any useful meaning for the term.

That is a real problem, too. People like to dismiss such arguments as 'merely semantic', as if the sole and only thing that distinguishes us as a species - the thing that stops us killing one another, to the extent anything ever does - were a triviality. But the entire point of having a semiotic framework around such a sensitive and painful topic is to make it possible to discuss in terms which, if not comfortable, are at least no further from it than can be avoided. Remove the framework, and what's left? You can either speak the bald truth, or say nothing. Neither option really serves.

I did the former earlier. It was not entirely without an emotional cost, and that's after about thirty years spent reckoning with this. Not that many years ago I couldn't have done it at all; much of my anger arose in the knowledge that there are people whom my prior interlocutor could successfully have silenced. I don't doubt they have done it before, almost certainly without ever realizing that they had. If I were they, it would bother me to think I might have done that. But, as I said, it is the privilege of youth to be thoughtlessly cruel.

The reason I chose instead to say what I did, and so bluntly, was again because if there is any purpose to such a framework as I describe, it is to be gentle. You're right that this stuff requires to be talked about. It is also extremely difficult to talk about! It is brutal, to say the least, and the cruel thing about it is that it stays that way. The scheme of language around it provides a tool with which to talk about it in a way that hurts less - for everyone.

That's a worthy thing for the same reason that medical anesthesia is a worthy thing. I don't always need it; I have often startled doctors and dentists with my ability to tolerate pain, in one case to a point where I was glad there was a CT scan to prove to an ER doctor I wasn't drug-seeking. Even I, though, do not care to open my soul in this way without something to take the edge off. I may choose to do so when I think it needs doing, but even for me it still hurts. For most people, most who need to do it for reasons like mine, I think it must be much more painful. As with a root canal, it should not be more painful than it absolutely has to be. It should not ever.

The language of trauma is, or was, one of a precious few tools to make that less painful, and certainly the only one available to everyone. Render the tool useless, and in the large majority case you only force a choice between brutality and silence. Most will choose silence. Most do, as you note. I didn't today, but I would still much prefer there continue to be a third and kinder option. The way I see 'trauma' devalued of late cuts directly against that, and if there is an argument to convince me otherwise, it has not been made in this thread today.

After all, it was you who made the point that being heard can save lives. I agree! I absolutely agree with you there. I also want that to keep happening, and I want it to happen more.

> More talking is a good thing, in general.

No. More meaning is a good thing. To speak without meaning, or worse to speak falsely, is a betrayal of what makes us human, and not without instrumental hazard besides - as I believe the state of the US at the moment should suffice on its own to show.

That said, you're quite right that there is a cultural dialogue here. My comments in this thread constitute a contribution to it. They are not perfect, but neither am I.

I had hoped that the like imperfection of others, this being also in the common heritage of humanity, would incline to some degree of charity. Unfortunately, my prior interlocutor was more interested in insisting on their own view, even to condescension and insult, than in hearing anyone else's. Unfortunately, I was not inclined to be very patient in the face of arrogance today. So it goes. Perhaps I'll do better next time. Perhaps they will, too.