Maybe this is the point, but isn't all of this a little "online"?
My experience is that largely these things still carry pretty substantial stigma and taboo around them. Parents aren't generally bragging about their kids' conditions, nor do I hear the trauma plot played out in real life very often. I'm sure this is still happening, and that the grass touching world always still carries the echo of The Discourse, but I don't think the mechanics of attention gathering and special privilege occur to the same degree.
I think the "real life" reaction to the people on the outer boundary of inclusion in a special category is always the subtle look to your partner with an eyeroll and then a polite increase in social distance.
I'm a (seemingly) sympathetic listener so a woman*, our renting next-door neighbor for a time [whose wild, usually nocturnal, behaviour and cycling through other damaged people, including children, in her sometimes-violent and drug-fueled drama - observed from across the lot line as the regular change in personnel in the house - I could not begin to relate] once not long after she had gotten the court order over the assault, or maybe it was the other mom who'd lived with her got it, not sure who assaulted whom [and that after they seemed so jolly together for a couple of months, with nightly carousing under the string of lights in the backyard, that I almost envied them a little!] - mentioned that she didn't have many friends here, and her birthday was upcoming, and maybe we could come over and barbecue ... A little startled at this proposal out of the blue, when there had been very little normal preamble to the mildest sort of acqaintance, I said sure, maybe.
I probably ran into the house and reported this invitation to my husband, like a telling child.
"Absolutely not," was his curt reply, even half-listening.
"Well, I mean, she just invited us for dinner, it might be hard to figure out how to decline that."
I'm gonna start banning these comments. THE RULING CLASS LIVES ONLINE AND YOU ARE ONLINE RIGHT NOW. This is straightforwardly a matter of you trying to assert a status claim over over other people, and it is so fucking tired. What are you adding to this discussion, other than self aggrandizement?
I don't disagree with you - seems like a bit of a hostile response, no?
I'm simply arguing that a really different dynamic exists around the apportionment of status in online environments vs. off. Ergo, if you want to reduce the desire to claim special status (in both environments), one way to do it is to get those people to go touch grass and see what response that claim gets among neighbors and friends.
I find your comment interesting, but being involved in the K-12 system (and higher education), my experience is that this has absolutely moved offline -- if we can even distinguish between the two anymore in WEIRD spaces. Just yesterday, I sat in on a job interview for a learning specialist, and the candidate, not missing a beat from her professional demeanor, referred to her own childhood trauma. I think college students also have a weird relationship with the term and seem to apply it to every minority group, person, etc., in an 'almost to be safe' fashion.
The correct back story, is one of the most sadly important accomplishments in our current culture. If you've suffered for all the appropriate reasons, and you belong to one of the select groups who really earned it, you have a golden ticket to privileges some millionaires can only dream about.
Why would you do that? 😀 I think Andrew Stein is right.
Online isn't _performative_ to the degree that writing a book or making a TV series or movie is performative. But it's still way more performative than—let's not call it "real life", let's call it "life away from the screen."
Trauma references are not all that common in life away from the screen.
I think it depends on the circles. I have a circle of older casual friends, most of whom are largely apolitical but somewhat right-leaning, who don't regularly talk about "trauma". I have another circle of casual friends that's more political and more left-leaning, even "woke", so to speak, and there are definitely people in that group who do talk about trauma in the way that Freddie describes.
Interesting thought. Perspectives are very different from place to place. I personally don't get a lot of trauma talk, but I live in the middle of nowhere and can easily divorce myself from people who really enjoy trauma drama.
I enjoy reading Freddie's work because it's a different view of life for me.
C'mon, Freddie. Not everyone is in the ruling class, and a lot of life still happens in non-online spaces. Online matters, not-online matters too, they are not the same thing even though they influence each other, and distinctions made between them are still relevant - and therefore something more than self-aggrandizement. A claim like the above about how things are in the non-online space is certainly disputable, but it hardly seems like ban material.
I'm not in your comments section very often, so maybe your anger is coming out of a past history I'm unaware of, but just on its own merits, Steiner's experience in non-online spaces does seem to add something of relevance to the discussion, even if it's just personal anecdote.
I think it depends what circles you're in. I'm in my mid 20s and at my college and among my college friends, ADHD was an extremely common excuse/explanation for any difficulties with getting into the PhD program you hoped to get into. Seemingly everybody I knew with less than a 3.5 GPA was seeking out a diagnosis by the end of sophomore year. ADHD meds and the process of getting a diagnosis were extremely commonly discussed.
As someone who was diagnosed as a young kid and would've been sent to a special school for behaviorally disturbed children if the medication hadn't improved my classroom behavior, I found the trend rather frustrating. I had always seen it as something to hide and be ashamed of, and there were suddenly all these interlopers with straight A grade school report cards suddenly discovering ADHD when they learned it would get them extra time on the GRE.
Of course, now that I'm in the workforce at a cut-throat firm, I would never mention ADHD to anybody on my team or in management, and I have seen other young people who used it as an explanation for their poor performance swiftly managed out. I'm certain they suspect it from my general fidgetiness, propensity to blurt stuff out, and general distractibility, but actually disclosing the diagnosis is not a good idea, especially because it has a reputation as a card that young employees attempt to use instead of owning our actual output.
I am definitely not saying that the claims are not made - they come up fairly frequently, and I think a lot more frequently than in the past (though it isn't something I was on the lookout for). I am saying more that the offline response is different - I just don't think they get the same special status or social esteem.
I am deeply, deeply skeptical of the idea that denizens of the modern world suffer to a greater extent than individuals in the past. Yet there certainly is a greater cultural fixation on trauma in the present day. Perhaps life is so generally pleasant thanks to technological advances that any type of pain is magnified by comparison.
Hm, I don’t know of if I buy this. I’m willing to bet that behaviors that could be categorized as “victim” have benefits in the natural world.
Opossums play dead (not victim per say but physically giving one self up to avoid greater damage)
And I’m sure there are species who play wounded in order to increase opportunistic gains. These would tend to be predatory animals and those maybe a valuable strategy.
Pretty sure that playing possum is a myth. I have heard of birds faking injury to lure predators away from a nest, but not for sympathy or because they anticipate moral preening from victim status.
Of course! I cannot in good conscience comment on avian mortality and ethical structures as I’m not an expert in underhanded bird pity parties for clout.
I do think there's some selection bias at play. Perhaps it goes without saying that nearly all the surviving cultural content from before the 19th century emerged from either ancient religious tradition or the perspectives of the rich and powerful, or at least comfortable enough to have the education and time to write, paint, etc.
Now of course every person has the ability to become a published author (in the loosest sense) within minutes. Before, culture was something you created between suffering, even if informed by it; now the suffering is everywhere, online, all the time. Of course, in absolute terms, today's common man or woman lives far more comfortably than their counterpart from centuries ago; but people don't ask if they're doing better than their grandparents. They compare themselves to the world around us, and what does it show us? Lots of people making their bones by displaying fake joy, fake leisure, fake achievement.
Perhaps the need to medicalize and formalize pain in the form of "trauma" is itself a reaction to a culture of hyper-individualized forced positivity that wants you to think you can overcome nearly any earthly problem by "manifesting" your vague positive notions. It's a culture that blames those who suffer for their own suffering. In the face of such nonsense, people feel like they need a diagnosis for their pain to be real, to be worthy of compassion.
I was thinking more of Malcolm Gladwell's essay in the New Yorker, "Getting Over It". It goes without saying that there are vast cultural differences on how to approach "trauma". Consider the differences between Asia and the West. Gladwell's insight was that American society underwent massive shifts from the post-War period to today.
Look at something like _The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit_. A best seller when it was released it probably couldn't be published today because it defies the expectations of modern audiences with regards to how to process trauma. The main character is a WWII vet who experienced the horrors of combat--he accidentally kills his best friend with a hand grenade. And yet he basically gets past the terrible things that he saw (and the atrocities that he committed) on his own, with relatively little fanfare.
I do want to note that the main character is an alcoholic.
I think that's one of the tricks to how our grandparents dealt with it. It was much more acceptable to have cocktail after cocktail every night. I'd assume it helped produce a dreamless sleep.
My brother and my grandfather both have Asperger's and struggle immensely with social situations, making/keeping friends, and finding work. My brother is in therapy and on SSRIs and is teetotal. My grandfather never had a term for his social issues and sensory sensitivities and he drank 6+ standard drinks a night for 40 years. It probably didn't help that his wife had badly treated bipolar/postpartum psychosis that was diagnosed as schizophrenia and unmentionable in polite society.
Not fully disagreeing with you - I think we give far too much fanfare to trauma these days, but many people last century were drinking away all kinds of problems.
Yeah, but social drinking (and smoking) was just a cultural norm for that era. Pretty much everyone was an alcoholic in the modern sense of the word--including lots of people (like the protagonist's wife) who had never been to war.
True that, but there are additional motives in play. I used to proctor the SAT. For one session my assignment was two kids requiring special accomodations, which equated to extra time. The status required an 'official' diagnosis by an MD. From what I could tell about one very average boy (without grilling him) it seemed likely that a parent had lined that up to boost his score. He was a nice kid but seemed to accept his status w/out question, though whatever debility he suffered from was far from obvious. As a teacher I also often interacted with the SPED system. it was known that some parents of kids who were ready to transition out of it to regular student status blocked that because it would've cost them benefits collected on the kid's behalf.
One fascinating difference between people now and, say, those a century ago (probably even less, tbh) is the assumed levels of agency they have in the actions. To contrast with an extreme example below, no one in the Iliad or Odyssey has any agency, they are held hostage to the whim of the gods and largely powerless to fight them. To try and fight the gods is to invite their wrath (as Odysseus finds out), and it might not even be your fault! Try and fight against prophecy and next thing you know your own son has murdered you, taken your place as king, and is having sex with your wife/his mom! The original audience wouldn't have thought this weird; (indeed, they might not have even *thought*, at least per the Bicameral Mind hypothesis)! The Gods are powerful and you are a mortal after all, what are you going to do (probably be raped by Zeus and then turned into a goose for it)? And it's worth noting that the view of agency is not universal but a very WEIRD thing (notably Muslims don't have it; thus "Inshallah"/"mashallah").
Whereas in today's world, and it feels like especially for today's art, there's an assumption of total agency for the protagonists (whether this is really true or not is a different question). And if you have total agency, why did a bad thing happen to you? I think "trauma" is a (kind of dumb, overly broad) framework to try and deal with bad things that might happen (no matter how bad or not the thing was).
That's not true about Muslims. People have agency; otherwise, how could they be held accountable for their choices? The best way of describing the Muslim view of free will v predestination is this story about Imam Ali:
“O Imam which of my actions are free will and which are predestined?" To which Imam replied, “Lift your right leg” the man did it and then he was told “that is free will”. Then the Imam said to “lift the other as well.” which obviously the man could not. To which Imam replied, “That is your predestination.”
As an additional FYI, Insha Allah and Masha Allah serve different purposes:
Insha Allah - if God wills something to happen.
Masha Allah - God has decreed this to happen. It is usually said in an admiring tone, to show appreciation and to ward off jealousy, for example, if someone is showing you their nice new car.
I'm curious about how suffering works. Is it all the same feeling, a universal human experience, that is triggered based on our individual emotional thresholds? Can we learn to adjust our scale of suffering by simply seeing that others have much harder lives? And how do we collectively develop the ability to cope?
As an anecdote, having lived in a developing country for a few years, and experiencing the daily extreme discomfort and stress of life there, my scale of experience expanded to the point that I "suffer" less now within my relatively luxurious day-to-day existence. But I think that shift requires experience not just observation from afar.
There's evidence that the difference between pain and trauma is not the severity of what happens, but the social support you do or don't have before, during, and after. Since we are more lonely and atomized than in the past, I can absolutely believe we are, on average, more traumatized.
Human beings evolved under conditions of great scarcity and hardship. I suspect terrible things happened to our ancestors on a much more frequent basis than today. Would it really make sense if biologically humans were susceptible to trauma to such an extent that harsh conditions rendered people unfit to compete in an evolutionary sense?
As Malcolm Gladwell put it:
"We suffer from what Wilson and Gilbert call an impact bias: we always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do. We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that our psychological immune system will kick in and take away the sting of adversity. “When I talk about our research, I say to people, ‘I’m not telling you that bad things don’t hurt,’ ” Gilbert says. “Of course they do. It would be perverse to say that having a child or a spouse die is not a big deal. All I’m saying is that the reality doesn’t meet the expectation.”
This is the difference between our own era and the one of half a century ago—between “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “In the Lake of the Woods.” Sloan Wilson’s book came from a time and a culture that had the confidence and wisdom to understand this truth. “I love you more than I can tell,” Rath says to his wife at the end of the novel. It’s an ending that no one would write today, but only because we have become blind to the fact that the past—in all but the worst of cases—sooner or later fades away."
Hmmmm... I think you're over-intellectualizing here. Trauma plots in movies & TV are entertaining because everybody loves a good train wreck. "Look," people say to themselves, "these people are wayyyyy more fucked up than I am!" There is that frisson of smugness. Whether you laugh or cry at the imaginary characters' traumas depends entirely on the background music: If violins predominate, you cry.
It's more difficult to be entertained by trauma in books simply because few books are so immersive that they sweep you up in them. There's a lot more room for thought and analysis while you are reading. Also, since books tend to be solo productions, the author invites judgment. Unless it's a trauma that comes totally out of left field—a person was strolling down W. 58th Street when a piano fell on their head—readers are far more inclined than TV & movie viewers to _blame_ the writer for his/her trauma.
As I understand Freddie's point above, it's that not every train wreck is a trauma plot. What makes it trauma plot is specifically trying to explain the trainwreckness through bad past events in the character's life. One of the things that made Hannibal Lecter a compelling character was the *absence* of trauma plot - he was just inexplicably evil and you had to face that. I'm told the sequels *gave* him trauma plot (a bad childhood) and that's a reason I feel less interested in watching them.
Just as a note, for a pretty good discussion on "epigenetic trauma" and why it doesn't really work, Razib Khan had a good post a couple years ago. I wouldn't call it "easily readable", but I think Freddie's readership should be able to make it through.
ETA: Epigenetic trauma isn't the same thing that Freddie writes about, but in most popular understanding of Van Der Kolk's work, it's what people understand the mechanism to be.
Almost all of us have trauma in our lives - some unspeakable, some merely shitty, some self-inflicted and some undeniably the fault of other humans and, more generally, society and its structural fucked-up-ness as a whole. In most cases it ain't your fault - in the end, fault doesn't matter worth a damn. What does matter is "responsibility". What matters for all of us is that no matter who or what is at "fault", it is our responsibility to deal with it.
At core, it is our responsibility to ourselves to deal with our "trauma" and find a path to coping with that it in order to have a "happy" and fulfilling life - preferably without inflicting trauma on others. If you spend all your time and energies around fault, you waste all that time and energy instead of taking responsible action to help yourself live with that trauma. Wallowing in it isn't taking responsibility for "fixing" it. Perhaps this doesn't address Freddie's point, but it hits a button for me whenever I hear the word trauma. People use it as an excuse for not acknowledging their own responsibility to deal with themselves and work to be at more peace with themselves. Using trauma as an excuse, assigning fault on something external and using that to avoid responsibility for doing their inner work.
Isn't there a school of thought that focusing on pain just cripples people? Maybe it's better not to think of it at all and focus on living one's life.
I think this is actually one of the things that distinguishes trauma from mere pain, within the context of the trauma plot and pop psychology generally. Trauma can be "healed" through an emotionally intense and narratively satisfying process, while pain is something you more or less just put up with.
What's interesting to me is that's a culturally specific viewpoint. Different countries/cultures (Asia, Africa, etc.) have a different understanding of "trauma" versus Western societies.
But even the US of the post-WWII era had a different perspective compared to the modern era. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article on Sloan Wilson's _The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit_ called "Getting Over It". The main character in Wilson's novel served in the war and experiences terrible things. He accidentally kills his best friend with a hand grenade and when he rolls the body over he finds the front of the corpse's chest has been ripped away exposing the ribs and the lungs underneath. After he drags the body back to the medical corpsmen hoping that they can do something they tell him his friend has been dead for hours.
There is precious little focus on trauma or PTSD in the novel though. The novel's narrative picks up after the war when the main character has returned to civilian life and his combat service is just something in the past that he has to deal with. As Gladwell points out you couldn't sell a novel like that today because modern audiences wouldn't accept it.
Not noted but probably relevant: the audience for literature was mostly male in Sloan Wilson's day, whereas now it's mostly women (source: looking through what's getting released on Libby/Overdrive); in fairness I think the simple fact that today's audience is very postmodern is a much larger driver of this attitude than gender, I don't think the latter helps.
I think FdB wanted to say that but had to devote time to covering his flank from outraged advocates. Trauma, pain, suffering: universal, like he said. But life is short - and miraculous, if you care to see it that way. Meanwhile eternity is long and ultimately dull. The folly of status-mongering the universal mundane is that it's a piss poor way to spend the precious moment of your life.
I'm of two minds on this. On one hand I've found it helpful to intensely focus on the pain ( physical pain that's constant and predictable which you can neutralize, mental pain where you need to figure something out-should I get rid of the cheating husband) and other times I prefer to get on with life and re-examine the pain off and on so that its not overwhelming. (Death of mother with dementia)
I suspect that the rise in self-diagnosis may correlate with the rise in the widening of unforgivable offences (I agree that so-called cancel culture often does not often have devastating material effects, but humans are emotional and spiritual animals - the idea of being doomed or deemed outside the social body forever cuts deep for many) i.e. it is preemptive self-defence (from both potential cancellation but also guilt and shame).
Speaking of the pixel world vs. Real Life: Spend a few hours perusing cop cams, (online videos of real life events) and you will see dozens upon thousands of suspected perps attempting to foil the cops’ intentions to cuff and detain by screaming special status with every possible complaint, “I’m autistic, I have PTSD, I have anxiety, “I’m bipolar, I’m have depression, I have the heebie jeebies.” Anything but “I”m a drunken criminal.” There is an epidemic of these excuses to avoid accountability. This is learned behavior.
Comedian Tim Dillon said “That’s how you know schizophrenia is real, no one ever claims to have that.” They’re doing fine, if they could just get the CIA radio transmitters out of their dental fillings.
Even if we use a restrictive definition of trauma, such as the one formally used for PTSD (as diagnosed by a professional, not self proclaimed), it turns out that a massive portion of the population qualifies.
Criterion A trauma for DSM PTSD:
The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence, in the following way(s):
Direct exposure
Witnessing the trauma
Learning that the trauma happened to a close relative or close friend
Indirect exposure to aversive details of the trauma, usually in the course of professional duties (e.g., first responders, medics)
I'd bet half the population has experienced at least one Criterion A traumatic event by age 20 and 100% by age 40. Also, 100% of medical professionals, too. It's near universal by a certain age to have had a traumatic event that you had trouble sleeping after and potentially flashbacks for 2-3 months, and find deeply unpleasant to remember or be reminded of. Actual PTSD is defined by having those symptoms and others last for greater than 6 months after the event and cause significant life issues, but PTSD impacts less than 10% of people after a Criterion A trauma.
Of course, it is clear that some traumas are worse than others and some people are more heavily impacted by traumatic events than others, and that certain kinds of early childhood trauma and neglect really screw people up. But, as you remind us in other pieces, people can simultaneously have a mental health or neurodevelopmental explanation for being deeply unpleasant people, deserve some amount of charity for that fact, and still be deeply unpleasant people we are rightful to be scared of or avoid outright.
There's an enduring human fascination with the morbid and grotesque, and a romanticization of mental illness that combine here into an obsession with people who are mentally ill because of morbid and grotesque things in their past. I think it can make excellent art, but trying to shoehorn 2020s psychotherapy The Body Keeps The Score into a novel cheapens it.
The DSM (5) is such a mess. And so easy to misinterpret. People can have PTS without it being PTSD (a disorder) but everyone uses the D to describe their symptoms. I wish people didn't think they understand all of psychology and psychiatry and neuroscience and medical diagnosis and and and etc etc etc just because they can access it online.
Anyway, your point is sound, I just get so mad at this topic.
Definitely agreed. I came of age on 2010s Tumblr, and I had a psychotic manic episode when I was 18. I got into so many fruitless fights trying to explain to other teenagers that just because they felt they could check the DSM boxes they'd googled for manic symptoms didn't mean that they clinically had bipolar disorder. And, worse, plenty of lazy and/or poorly trained mental health professionals do the same thing.
And now that same fallacy has happened with every single mental illness, to the point that there's been this counter reaction to think that no mental illness is real. It feels like people think that either everybody has a mental illness or nobody has a mental illness. Mental illness is either universal or entirely fake.
It's one of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths: "Life is suffering." Historically, _literature_, especially the personal novel, has been crucial in communicating that truth to others. When you read a novel, you find out that you are not alone in suffering; hopefully it expands your sense of compassion for others, even people extremely different from yourself. The expansion of humanism in Western culture, the recognition of universal human rights and human dignity, couldn't have happened without a _lot_ of people writing and reading about extreme suffering.
So, nothing wrong with writing about suffering. But I agree with Freddie -- if you think your suffering makes you special, you haven't been paying attention.
For me, personally, reading trauma plots transitions into gratitude: "Yeah, I have my own suffering, but nothing like _that_. Compared to them, I have no real problems. Thank fucking God."
This is one of the things that has been both familiar and super confusing to me as someone who has studied a fair amount of Buddhist philosophy. I think we have a tendency here in the West to ruminate on some aspects of life that Buddhism wrestled with and made peace with long ago. In many respects I think we're still trying to integrate these understandings. Things like the nature of suffering, identity, the fundamental groundlessness of forms. These things are causing huge existential issues in Western cultures, but ultimately the Buddhist psychological understanding of these things basically came down to, "meh, yeah, things are messy, that's how it is, don't sweat it too much". Alot of these MFers need some Nagarjuna.
Interestingly some of the newer evidence based psychotherapies are heavily influenced by Buddhism - I know DBT was developed by a Zen master, and ACT is also Buddhist influenced.
A key "skill" in both is Radical Acceptance - basically wholly accepting a situation without trying to change it and instead taking concrete steps to live a meaningful life alongside that situation.
I'm not sure how well it really works without a real meditation practice, but western psych PhDs really have made therapy workbooks about how patients need to accept that life is suffering and get on with it.
Sadly a lot of therapists still mostly use talk therapy or are so eclectic as to be meaningless, or even actively help patients ruminate and wallow.
My experience with traditional therapists has been mostly lackluster. The financial schemas based around insurance, etc make it hard to address some issues that aren't easy to pinpoint within 6 sessions or so. Eventually I decided to pay OOP for an "existential consultant" who spoke my language as a philosophy/anthropology nerd much more fluently.
I've had the best luck with PhD psychologists. I'm very nerdy/analytical and well read, and master's level therapists tend not to connect on that level, while the PhDs come from a more academic background.
They typically don't take insurance at all and I have to submit it as an out of network reimbursement.
I personally prefer to stick with clinical mental health types because I've got a history of bipolar 1 somewhat like Freddie's, and the various other kinds of life/spiritual coaches don't know what to do with that, especially with lack of insight into symptoms and medication hesitancy.
I do think that we lost a lot as a society when people started to go to 24 year old therapists instead of priests or spiritual mentors or elders for our deep questions in life. Or that more people read The Body Keeps The Score instead of religious or philosophical texts.
Whenever I read critiques of the "trauma plot," I often think, "Well, hell, all of world literature has always been filled with trauma plots." I mean—The Illiad and Odyssey are not pleasure cruises. The Great Gatsby is not an episode of Real Housewives of East Egg. The House of Mirth is not...mirthy. Isn't "trauma plot" just as much a synonym for "bad book" as it is a description of a contemporary aesthetic?
I am 100% certain that you could conk Edith Wharton on the head and drop her, a "C̶o̶n̶n̶e̶c̶t̶i̶c̶u̶t̶ NY/Mass. Yankee in King Lebron's Court"- fashion, into the present; yield up to her the circumstances related in the book here discussed, *exactly as they happened*, and maybe half an hour in the woman's presence; and she would come up with a smarter, more insightful and readable book on the same bare bones - once she got over the aesthetic shock.
My parents always told me that before I complained about anything, I should take a look around the room first and see whether there were other people worse off than me. If so, it was selfish of me to complain or draw attention to myself because I was taking attention away from those people who deserved to have their needs met before me.
This definitely applies to the whole trauma thing you're talking about. The urge to classify trivial bits of human experience as "trauma" is clearly an attempt to gain attention and sympathy. But attention is a zero-sum game, so this is parasitic and dilutes attention due to people with far greater trauma (e.g. rape, death of a parent, extreme abuse, etc).
I think it's a problem in politics as well. If an alien were to read the media coming from the US over the past ten years, they could very well conclude that the most oppressed and unfortunate people in the world were US college grads. But of course they aren't and I often wish that this group would step aside and make room for the millions of far worse off people in the US not to mention the billions in the rest of the world.
The trauma vs. pain distinction is helpful. We see this in so many things. Nobody wants to be in pain; they want trauma. Nobody is ever sad; they are depressed. Nobody worries anymore; they are anxious. It makes these incredibly common and universal human experiences seem both pathological and avoidable. (That's not to say that depression and anxiety don't exist, but that there is a lot more sadness in the world than there is depression, and a lot more worry than anxiety.)
I think it's also helpful to remember that accommodations not only need to be rare, but they also need to be, as the term itself states, reasonable. As far as I can tell, the less impaired someone is by a disorder (and the more likely they are to have self-diagnosed), the more unreasonable the accommodations they want are. But even people who truly qualify as disabled under the ADA are not entitled to their first-choice accommodations or their ideal accommodations; they get reasonable accommodations.
It's amazing how many times I have a student say to me, when I tell them to stop talking during a quiet work time in class, that they have ADHD. Now, none of the students who've ever said this to me had documented ADHD, but even if they did, "Is entitled to unlimited yapping at all times during class" is absolutely not an accommodation that anyone with ADHD has. Reasonable accommodations usually involve either measures that provide support to participate in the setting along the same (or very similar) lines as everyone else or, if a student is unable to, removal to a different environment. "I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I am" is not an ADA-compliant accommodations for anyone.
I'm not inventive, so I am pretty sure that this morning when I was drinking my coffee and looking at my phone, I was offered the chance to click on something close to this headline (I am certain it contained the words "stories of trauma"):
"Andor is ending and it has brought us untold stories of trauma".
The more I think about it the more I feel that Malcolm Gladwell's essay "Getting Over It" is relevant.
"We suffer from what Wilson and Gilbert call an impact bias: we always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do. We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that our psychological immune system will kick in and take away the sting of adversity. “When I talk about our research, I say to people, ‘I’m not telling you that bad things don’t hurt,’ ” Gilbert says. “Of course they do. It would be perverse to say that having a child or a spouse die is not a big deal. All I’m saying is that the reality doesn’t meet the expectation.”
This is the difference between our own era and the one of half a century ago—between “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “In the Lake of the Woods.” Sloan Wilson’s book came from a time and a culture that had the confidence and wisdom to understand this truth. “I love you more than I can tell,” Rath says to his wife at the end of the novel. It’s an ending that no one would write today, but only because we have become blind to the fact that the past—in all but the worst of cases—sooner or later fades away."
Maybe this is the point, but isn't all of this a little "online"?
My experience is that largely these things still carry pretty substantial stigma and taboo around them. Parents aren't generally bragging about their kids' conditions, nor do I hear the trauma plot played out in real life very often. I'm sure this is still happening, and that the grass touching world always still carries the echo of The Discourse, but I don't think the mechanics of attention gathering and special privilege occur to the same degree.
I think the "real life" reaction to the people on the outer boundary of inclusion in a special category is always the subtle look to your partner with an eyeroll and then a polite increase in social distance.
I'm a (seemingly) sympathetic listener so a woman*, our renting next-door neighbor for a time [whose wild, usually nocturnal, behaviour and cycling through other damaged people, including children, in her sometimes-violent and drug-fueled drama - observed from across the lot line as the regular change in personnel in the house - I could not begin to relate] once not long after she had gotten the court order over the assault, or maybe it was the other mom who'd lived with her got it, not sure who assaulted whom [and that after they seemed so jolly together for a couple of months, with nightly carousing under the string of lights in the backyard, that I almost envied them a little!] - mentioned that she didn't have many friends here, and her birthday was upcoming, and maybe we could come over and barbecue ... A little startled at this proposal out of the blue, when there had been very little normal preamble to the mildest sort of acqaintance, I said sure, maybe.
I probably ran into the house and reported this invitation to my husband, like a telling child.
"Absolutely not," was his curt reply, even half-listening.
"Well, I mean, she just invited us for dinner, it might be hard to figure out how to decline that."
"Tell her we don't eat dinner."
*A professional therapist or counselor, natch.
I'm gonna start banning these comments. THE RULING CLASS LIVES ONLINE AND YOU ARE ONLINE RIGHT NOW. This is straightforwardly a matter of you trying to assert a status claim over over other people, and it is so fucking tired. What are you adding to this discussion, other than self aggrandizement?
I don't disagree with you - seems like a bit of a hostile response, no?
I'm simply arguing that a really different dynamic exists around the apportionment of status in online environments vs. off. Ergo, if you want to reduce the desire to claim special status (in both environments), one way to do it is to get those people to go touch grass and see what response that claim gets among neighbors and friends.
I find your comment interesting, but being involved in the K-12 system (and higher education), my experience is that this has absolutely moved offline -- if we can even distinguish between the two anymore in WEIRD spaces. Just yesterday, I sat in on a job interview for a learning specialist, and the candidate, not missing a beat from her professional demeanor, referred to her own childhood trauma. I think college students also have a weird relationship with the term and seem to apply it to every minority group, person, etc., in an 'almost to be safe' fashion.
The correct back story, is one of the most sadly important accomplishments in our current culture. If you've suffered for all the appropriate reasons, and you belong to one of the select groups who really earned it, you have a golden ticket to privileges some millionaires can only dream about.
Why would you do that? 😀 I think Andrew Stein is right.
Online isn't _performative_ to the degree that writing a book or making a TV series or movie is performative. But it's still way more performative than—let's not call it "real life", let's call it "life away from the screen."
Trauma references are not all that common in life away from the screen.
I disagree. People talk about their trauma all the time in the spaces I swirl in -- literary, arts, and education.
Huh. I guess I just don't move in the right circles. 😀
Haha, it sounds like your circles might be better!
I think it depends on the circles. I have a circle of older casual friends, most of whom are largely apolitical but somewhat right-leaning, who don't regularly talk about "trauma". I have another circle of casual friends that's more political and more left-leaning, even "woke", so to speak, and there are definitely people in that group who do talk about trauma in the way that Freddie describes.
Interesting thought. Perspectives are very different from place to place. I personally don't get a lot of trauma talk, but I live in the middle of nowhere and can easily divorce myself from people who really enjoy trauma drama.
I enjoy reading Freddie's work because it's a different view of life for me.
"let's call it "life away from the screen.""
RETVRN to the phrase "meatspace"
Business and engineering no
Education, social work, arts — very much yes
C'mon, Freddie. Not everyone is in the ruling class, and a lot of life still happens in non-online spaces. Online matters, not-online matters too, they are not the same thing even though they influence each other, and distinctions made between them are still relevant - and therefore something more than self-aggrandizement. A claim like the above about how things are in the non-online space is certainly disputable, but it hardly seems like ban material.
I'm not in your comments section very often, so maybe your anger is coming out of a past history I'm unaware of, but just on its own merits, Steiner's experience in non-online spaces does seem to add something of relevance to the discussion, even if it's just personal anecdote.
I think it depends what circles you're in. I'm in my mid 20s and at my college and among my college friends, ADHD was an extremely common excuse/explanation for any difficulties with getting into the PhD program you hoped to get into. Seemingly everybody I knew with less than a 3.5 GPA was seeking out a diagnosis by the end of sophomore year. ADHD meds and the process of getting a diagnosis were extremely commonly discussed.
As someone who was diagnosed as a young kid and would've been sent to a special school for behaviorally disturbed children if the medication hadn't improved my classroom behavior, I found the trend rather frustrating. I had always seen it as something to hide and be ashamed of, and there were suddenly all these interlopers with straight A grade school report cards suddenly discovering ADHD when they learned it would get them extra time on the GRE.
Of course, now that I'm in the workforce at a cut-throat firm, I would never mention ADHD to anybody on my team or in management, and I have seen other young people who used it as an explanation for their poor performance swiftly managed out. I'm certain they suspect it from my general fidgetiness, propensity to blurt stuff out, and general distractibility, but actually disclosing the diagnosis is not a good idea, especially because it has a reputation as a card that young employees attempt to use instead of owning our actual output.
I am definitely not saying that the claims are not made - they come up fairly frequently, and I think a lot more frequently than in the past (though it isn't something I was on the lookout for). I am saying more that the offline response is different - I just don't think they get the same special status or social esteem.
Offline how though? In trucking, probably not. In higher education though?
Who are you to talk about touching grass? You last did so in 1997.
I am deeply, deeply skeptical of the idea that denizens of the modern world suffer to a greater extent than individuals in the past. Yet there certainly is a greater cultural fixation on trauma in the present day. Perhaps life is so generally pleasant thanks to technological advances that any type of pain is magnified by comparison.
I regret to inform you that I think as a culture we have incentivized this.
Among wild animals, victimhood does not confer any benefits but simply makes you more likely to starve or become food.
Hm, I don’t know of if I buy this. I’m willing to bet that behaviors that could be categorized as “victim” have benefits in the natural world.
Opossums play dead (not victim per say but physically giving one self up to avoid greater damage)
And I’m sure there are species who play wounded in order to increase opportunistic gains. These would tend to be predatory animals and those maybe a valuable strategy.
Pretty sure that playing possum is a myth. I have heard of birds faking injury to lure predators away from a nest, but not for sympathy or because they anticipate moral preening from victim status.
Of course! I cannot in good conscience comment on avian mortality and ethical structures as I’m not an expert in underhanded bird pity parties for clout.
I do think there's some selection bias at play. Perhaps it goes without saying that nearly all the surviving cultural content from before the 19th century emerged from either ancient religious tradition or the perspectives of the rich and powerful, or at least comfortable enough to have the education and time to write, paint, etc.
Now of course every person has the ability to become a published author (in the loosest sense) within minutes. Before, culture was something you created between suffering, even if informed by it; now the suffering is everywhere, online, all the time. Of course, in absolute terms, today's common man or woman lives far more comfortably than their counterpart from centuries ago; but people don't ask if they're doing better than their grandparents. They compare themselves to the world around us, and what does it show us? Lots of people making their bones by displaying fake joy, fake leisure, fake achievement.
Perhaps the need to medicalize and formalize pain in the form of "trauma" is itself a reaction to a culture of hyper-individualized forced positivity that wants you to think you can overcome nearly any earthly problem by "manifesting" your vague positive notions. It's a culture that blames those who suffer for their own suffering. In the face of such nonsense, people feel like they need a diagnosis for their pain to be real, to be worthy of compassion.
Source: Me. I just live in this world.
I was thinking more of Malcolm Gladwell's essay in the New Yorker, "Getting Over It". It goes without saying that there are vast cultural differences on how to approach "trauma". Consider the differences between Asia and the West. Gladwell's insight was that American society underwent massive shifts from the post-War period to today.
Look at something like _The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit_. A best seller when it was released it probably couldn't be published today because it defies the expectations of modern audiences with regards to how to process trauma. The main character is a WWII vet who experienced the horrors of combat--he accidentally kills his best friend with a hand grenade. And yet he basically gets past the terrible things that he saw (and the atrocities that he committed) on his own, with relatively little fanfare.
I do want to note that the main character is an alcoholic.
I think that's one of the tricks to how our grandparents dealt with it. It was much more acceptable to have cocktail after cocktail every night. I'd assume it helped produce a dreamless sleep.
My brother and my grandfather both have Asperger's and struggle immensely with social situations, making/keeping friends, and finding work. My brother is in therapy and on SSRIs and is teetotal. My grandfather never had a term for his social issues and sensory sensitivities and he drank 6+ standard drinks a night for 40 years. It probably didn't help that his wife had badly treated bipolar/postpartum psychosis that was diagnosed as schizophrenia and unmentionable in polite society.
Not fully disagreeing with you - I think we give far too much fanfare to trauma these days, but many people last century were drinking away all kinds of problems.
Yeah, but social drinking (and smoking) was just a cultural norm for that era. Pretty much everyone was an alcoholic in the modern sense of the word--including lots of people (like the protagonist's wife) who had never been to war.
True that, but there are additional motives in play. I used to proctor the SAT. For one session my assignment was two kids requiring special accomodations, which equated to extra time. The status required an 'official' diagnosis by an MD. From what I could tell about one very average boy (without grilling him) it seemed likely that a parent had lined that up to boost his score. He was a nice kid but seemed to accept his status w/out question, though whatever debility he suffered from was far from obvious. As a teacher I also often interacted with the SPED system. it was known that some parents of kids who were ready to transition out of it to regular student status blocked that because it would've cost them benefits collected on the kid's behalf.
One fascinating difference between people now and, say, those a century ago (probably even less, tbh) is the assumed levels of agency they have in the actions. To contrast with an extreme example below, no one in the Iliad or Odyssey has any agency, they are held hostage to the whim of the gods and largely powerless to fight them. To try and fight the gods is to invite their wrath (as Odysseus finds out), and it might not even be your fault! Try and fight against prophecy and next thing you know your own son has murdered you, taken your place as king, and is having sex with your wife/his mom! The original audience wouldn't have thought this weird; (indeed, they might not have even *thought*, at least per the Bicameral Mind hypothesis)! The Gods are powerful and you are a mortal after all, what are you going to do (probably be raped by Zeus and then turned into a goose for it)? And it's worth noting that the view of agency is not universal but a very WEIRD thing (notably Muslims don't have it; thus "Inshallah"/"mashallah").
Whereas in today's world, and it feels like especially for today's art, there's an assumption of total agency for the protagonists (whether this is really true or not is a different question). And if you have total agency, why did a bad thing happen to you? I think "trauma" is a (kind of dumb, overly broad) framework to try and deal with bad things that might happen (no matter how bad or not the thing was).
That's not true about Muslims. People have agency; otherwise, how could they be held accountable for their choices? The best way of describing the Muslim view of free will v predestination is this story about Imam Ali:
“O Imam which of my actions are free will and which are predestined?" To which Imam replied, “Lift your right leg” the man did it and then he was told “that is free will”. Then the Imam said to “lift the other as well.” which obviously the man could not. To which Imam replied, “That is your predestination.”
As an additional FYI, Insha Allah and Masha Allah serve different purposes:
Insha Allah - if God wills something to happen.
Masha Allah - God has decreed this to happen. It is usually said in an admiring tone, to show appreciation and to ward off jealousy, for example, if someone is showing you their nice new car.
I'm curious about how suffering works. Is it all the same feeling, a universal human experience, that is triggered based on our individual emotional thresholds? Can we learn to adjust our scale of suffering by simply seeing that others have much harder lives? And how do we collectively develop the ability to cope?
As an anecdote, having lived in a developing country for a few years, and experiencing the daily extreme discomfort and stress of life there, my scale of experience expanded to the point that I "suffer" less now within my relatively luxurious day-to-day existence. But I think that shift requires experience not just observation from afar.
There's evidence that the difference between pain and trauma is not the severity of what happens, but the social support you do or don't have before, during, and after. Since we are more lonely and atomized than in the past, I can absolutely believe we are, on average, more traumatized.
Human beings evolved under conditions of great scarcity and hardship. I suspect terrible things happened to our ancestors on a much more frequent basis than today. Would it really make sense if biologically humans were susceptible to trauma to such an extent that harsh conditions rendered people unfit to compete in an evolutionary sense?
As Malcolm Gladwell put it:
"We suffer from what Wilson and Gilbert call an impact bias: we always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do. We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that our psychological immune system will kick in and take away the sting of adversity. “When I talk about our research, I say to people, ‘I’m not telling you that bad things don’t hurt,’ ” Gilbert says. “Of course they do. It would be perverse to say that having a child or a spouse die is not a big deal. All I’m saying is that the reality doesn’t meet the expectation.”
This is the difference between our own era and the one of half a century ago—between “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “In the Lake of the Woods.” Sloan Wilson’s book came from a time and a culture that had the confidence and wisdom to understand this truth. “I love you more than I can tell,” Rath says to his wife at the end of the novel. It’s an ending that no one would write today, but only because we have become blind to the fact that the past—in all but the worst of cases—sooner or later fades away."
Hmmmm... I think you're over-intellectualizing here. Trauma plots in movies & TV are entertaining because everybody loves a good train wreck. "Look," people say to themselves, "these people are wayyyyy more fucked up than I am!" There is that frisson of smugness. Whether you laugh or cry at the imaginary characters' traumas depends entirely on the background music: If violins predominate, you cry.
It's more difficult to be entertained by trauma in books simply because few books are so immersive that they sweep you up in them. There's a lot more room for thought and analysis while you are reading. Also, since books tend to be solo productions, the author invites judgment. Unless it's a trauma that comes totally out of left field—a person was strolling down W. 58th Street when a piano fell on their head—readers are far more inclined than TV & movie viewers to _blame_ the writer for his/her trauma.
As I understand Freddie's point above, it's that not every train wreck is a trauma plot. What makes it trauma plot is specifically trying to explain the trainwreckness through bad past events in the character's life. One of the things that made Hannibal Lecter a compelling character was the *absence* of trauma plot - he was just inexplicably evil and you had to face that. I'm told the sequels *gave* him trauma plot (a bad childhood) and that's a reason I feel less interested in watching them.
Just as a note, for a pretty good discussion on "epigenetic trauma" and why it doesn't really work, Razib Khan had a good post a couple years ago. I wouldn't call it "easily readable", but I think Freddie's readership should be able to make it through.
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/you-cant-take-it-with-you-straight
ETA: Epigenetic trauma isn't the same thing that Freddie writes about, but in most popular understanding of Van Der Kolk's work, it's what people understand the mechanism to be.
Almost all of us have trauma in our lives - some unspeakable, some merely shitty, some self-inflicted and some undeniably the fault of other humans and, more generally, society and its structural fucked-up-ness as a whole. In most cases it ain't your fault - in the end, fault doesn't matter worth a damn. What does matter is "responsibility". What matters for all of us is that no matter who or what is at "fault", it is our responsibility to deal with it.
At core, it is our responsibility to ourselves to deal with our "trauma" and find a path to coping with that it in order to have a "happy" and fulfilling life - preferably without inflicting trauma on others. If you spend all your time and energies around fault, you waste all that time and energy instead of taking responsible action to help yourself live with that trauma. Wallowing in it isn't taking responsibility for "fixing" it. Perhaps this doesn't address Freddie's point, but it hits a button for me whenever I hear the word trauma. People use it as an excuse for not acknowledging their own responsibility to deal with themselves and work to be at more peace with themselves. Using trauma as an excuse, assigning fault on something external and using that to avoid responsibility for doing their inner work.
Yeah, couldn't some of this button-pushing be avoided if we talked more about 'suffering' and 'pain' instead?
Isn't there a school of thought that focusing on pain just cripples people? Maybe it's better not to think of it at all and focus on living one's life.
That would certainly be my first choice.
I think this is actually one of the things that distinguishes trauma from mere pain, within the context of the trauma plot and pop psychology generally. Trauma can be "healed" through an emotionally intense and narratively satisfying process, while pain is something you more or less just put up with.
What's interesting to me is that's a culturally specific viewpoint. Different countries/cultures (Asia, Africa, etc.) have a different understanding of "trauma" versus Western societies.
But even the US of the post-WWII era had a different perspective compared to the modern era. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article on Sloan Wilson's _The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit_ called "Getting Over It". The main character in Wilson's novel served in the war and experiences terrible things. He accidentally kills his best friend with a hand grenade and when he rolls the body over he finds the front of the corpse's chest has been ripped away exposing the ribs and the lungs underneath. After he drags the body back to the medical corpsmen hoping that they can do something they tell him his friend has been dead for hours.
There is precious little focus on trauma or PTSD in the novel though. The novel's narrative picks up after the war when the main character has returned to civilian life and his combat service is just something in the past that he has to deal with. As Gladwell points out you couldn't sell a novel like that today because modern audiences wouldn't accept it.
Not noted but probably relevant: the audience for literature was mostly male in Sloan Wilson's day, whereas now it's mostly women (source: looking through what's getting released on Libby/Overdrive); in fairness I think the simple fact that today's audience is very postmodern is a much larger driver of this attitude than gender, I don't think the latter helps.
Very true. I have heard that men and women process pain in very different ways. Males are focused on getting past it, women want to talk about it.
I think FdB wanted to say that but had to devote time to covering his flank from outraged advocates. Trauma, pain, suffering: universal, like he said. But life is short - and miraculous, if you care to see it that way. Meanwhile eternity is long and ultimately dull. The folly of status-mongering the universal mundane is that it's a piss poor way to spend the precious moment of your life.
I'm of two minds on this. On one hand I've found it helpful to intensely focus on the pain ( physical pain that's constant and predictable which you can neutralize, mental pain where you need to figure something out-should I get rid of the cheating husband) and other times I prefer to get on with life and re-examine the pain off and on so that its not overwhelming. (Death of mother with dementia)
I suspect that the rise in self-diagnosis may correlate with the rise in the widening of unforgivable offences (I agree that so-called cancel culture often does not often have devastating material effects, but humans are emotional and spiritual animals - the idea of being doomed or deemed outside the social body forever cuts deep for many) i.e. it is preemptive self-defence (from both potential cancellation but also guilt and shame).
Speaking of the pixel world vs. Real Life: Spend a few hours perusing cop cams, (online videos of real life events) and you will see dozens upon thousands of suspected perps attempting to foil the cops’ intentions to cuff and detain by screaming special status with every possible complaint, “I’m autistic, I have PTSD, I have anxiety, “I’m bipolar, I’m have depression, I have the heebie jeebies.” Anything but “I”m a drunken criminal.” There is an epidemic of these excuses to avoid accountability. This is learned behavior.
Comedian Tim Dillon said “That’s how you know schizophrenia is real, no one ever claims to have that.” They’re doing fine, if they could just get the CIA radio transmitters out of their dental fillings.
Great article. Now go after "disregulated" instead of good old upset. I cringe every time I see that word used. Is nobody ever just upset anymore?
I belive that's dysregulated.
You are right. Sorry my mistake.
Even if we use a restrictive definition of trauma, such as the one formally used for PTSD (as diagnosed by a professional, not self proclaimed), it turns out that a massive portion of the population qualifies.
Criterion A trauma for DSM PTSD:
The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence, in the following way(s):
Direct exposure
Witnessing the trauma
Learning that the trauma happened to a close relative or close friend
Indirect exposure to aversive details of the trauma, usually in the course of professional duties (e.g., first responders, medics)
I'd bet half the population has experienced at least one Criterion A traumatic event by age 20 and 100% by age 40. Also, 100% of medical professionals, too. It's near universal by a certain age to have had a traumatic event that you had trouble sleeping after and potentially flashbacks for 2-3 months, and find deeply unpleasant to remember or be reminded of. Actual PTSD is defined by having those symptoms and others last for greater than 6 months after the event and cause significant life issues, but PTSD impacts less than 10% of people after a Criterion A trauma.
Of course, it is clear that some traumas are worse than others and some people are more heavily impacted by traumatic events than others, and that certain kinds of early childhood trauma and neglect really screw people up. But, as you remind us in other pieces, people can simultaneously have a mental health or neurodevelopmental explanation for being deeply unpleasant people, deserve some amount of charity for that fact, and still be deeply unpleasant people we are rightful to be scared of or avoid outright.
There's an enduring human fascination with the morbid and grotesque, and a romanticization of mental illness that combine here into an obsession with people who are mentally ill because of morbid and grotesque things in their past. I think it can make excellent art, but trying to shoehorn 2020s psychotherapy The Body Keeps The Score into a novel cheapens it.
The DSM (5) is such a mess. And so easy to misinterpret. People can have PTS without it being PTSD (a disorder) but everyone uses the D to describe their symptoms. I wish people didn't think they understand all of psychology and psychiatry and neuroscience and medical diagnosis and and and etc etc etc just because they can access it online.
Anyway, your point is sound, I just get so mad at this topic.
Definitely agreed. I came of age on 2010s Tumblr, and I had a psychotic manic episode when I was 18. I got into so many fruitless fights trying to explain to other teenagers that just because they felt they could check the DSM boxes they'd googled for manic symptoms didn't mean that they clinically had bipolar disorder. And, worse, plenty of lazy and/or poorly trained mental health professionals do the same thing.
And now that same fallacy has happened with every single mental illness, to the point that there's been this counter reaction to think that no mental illness is real. It feels like people think that either everybody has a mental illness or nobody has a mental illness. Mental illness is either universal or entirely fake.
It's one of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths: "Life is suffering." Historically, _literature_, especially the personal novel, has been crucial in communicating that truth to others. When you read a novel, you find out that you are not alone in suffering; hopefully it expands your sense of compassion for others, even people extremely different from yourself. The expansion of humanism in Western culture, the recognition of universal human rights and human dignity, couldn't have happened without a _lot_ of people writing and reading about extreme suffering.
So, nothing wrong with writing about suffering. But I agree with Freddie -- if you think your suffering makes you special, you haven't been paying attention.
For me, personally, reading trauma plots transitions into gratitude: "Yeah, I have my own suffering, but nothing like _that_. Compared to them, I have no real problems. Thank fucking God."
This is one of the things that has been both familiar and super confusing to me as someone who has studied a fair amount of Buddhist philosophy. I think we have a tendency here in the West to ruminate on some aspects of life that Buddhism wrestled with and made peace with long ago. In many respects I think we're still trying to integrate these understandings. Things like the nature of suffering, identity, the fundamental groundlessness of forms. These things are causing huge existential issues in Western cultures, but ultimately the Buddhist psychological understanding of these things basically came down to, "meh, yeah, things are messy, that's how it is, don't sweat it too much". Alot of these MFers need some Nagarjuna.
Interestingly some of the newer evidence based psychotherapies are heavily influenced by Buddhism - I know DBT was developed by a Zen master, and ACT is also Buddhist influenced.
A key "skill" in both is Radical Acceptance - basically wholly accepting a situation without trying to change it and instead taking concrete steps to live a meaningful life alongside that situation.
I'm not sure how well it really works without a real meditation practice, but western psych PhDs really have made therapy workbooks about how patients need to accept that life is suffering and get on with it.
Sadly a lot of therapists still mostly use talk therapy or are so eclectic as to be meaningless, or even actively help patients ruminate and wallow.
My experience with traditional therapists has been mostly lackluster. The financial schemas based around insurance, etc make it hard to address some issues that aren't easy to pinpoint within 6 sessions or so. Eventually I decided to pay OOP for an "existential consultant" who spoke my language as a philosophy/anthropology nerd much more fluently.
I've had the best luck with PhD psychologists. I'm very nerdy/analytical and well read, and master's level therapists tend not to connect on that level, while the PhDs come from a more academic background.
They typically don't take insurance at all and I have to submit it as an out of network reimbursement.
I personally prefer to stick with clinical mental health types because I've got a history of bipolar 1 somewhat like Freddie's, and the various other kinds of life/spiritual coaches don't know what to do with that, especially with lack of insight into symptoms and medication hesitancy.
I do think that we lost a lot as a society when people started to go to 24 year old therapists instead of priests or spiritual mentors or elders for our deep questions in life. Or that more people read The Body Keeps The Score instead of religious or philosophical texts.
Whenever I read critiques of the "trauma plot," I often think, "Well, hell, all of world literature has always been filled with trauma plots." I mean—The Illiad and Odyssey are not pleasure cruises. The Great Gatsby is not an episode of Real Housewives of East Egg. The House of Mirth is not...mirthy. Isn't "trauma plot" just as much a synonym for "bad book" as it is a description of a contemporary aesthetic?
I am 100% certain that you could conk Edith Wharton on the head and drop her, a "C̶o̶n̶n̶e̶c̶t̶i̶c̶u̶t̶ NY/Mass. Yankee in King Lebron's Court"- fashion, into the present; yield up to her the circumstances related in the book here discussed, *exactly as they happened*, and maybe half an hour in the woman's presence; and she would come up with a smarter, more insightful and readable book on the same bare bones - once she got over the aesthetic shock.
I 100% agree with you.
I don't have any trauma. There, I said it.
We can change that! 😀
Yeah, the weather's absolutely lovely today and I'm feeling good.
My parents always told me that before I complained about anything, I should take a look around the room first and see whether there were other people worse off than me. If so, it was selfish of me to complain or draw attention to myself because I was taking attention away from those people who deserved to have their needs met before me.
This definitely applies to the whole trauma thing you're talking about. The urge to classify trivial bits of human experience as "trauma" is clearly an attempt to gain attention and sympathy. But attention is a zero-sum game, so this is parasitic and dilutes attention due to people with far greater trauma (e.g. rape, death of a parent, extreme abuse, etc).
I think it's a problem in politics as well. If an alien were to read the media coming from the US over the past ten years, they could very well conclude that the most oppressed and unfortunate people in the world were US college grads. But of course they aren't and I often wish that this group would step aside and make room for the millions of far worse off people in the US not to mention the billions in the rest of the world.
The trauma vs. pain distinction is helpful. We see this in so many things. Nobody wants to be in pain; they want trauma. Nobody is ever sad; they are depressed. Nobody worries anymore; they are anxious. It makes these incredibly common and universal human experiences seem both pathological and avoidable. (That's not to say that depression and anxiety don't exist, but that there is a lot more sadness in the world than there is depression, and a lot more worry than anxiety.)
I think it's also helpful to remember that accommodations not only need to be rare, but they also need to be, as the term itself states, reasonable. As far as I can tell, the less impaired someone is by a disorder (and the more likely they are to have self-diagnosed), the more unreasonable the accommodations they want are. But even people who truly qualify as disabled under the ADA are not entitled to their first-choice accommodations or their ideal accommodations; they get reasonable accommodations.
It's amazing how many times I have a student say to me, when I tell them to stop talking during a quiet work time in class, that they have ADHD. Now, none of the students who've ever said this to me had documented ADHD, but even if they did, "Is entitled to unlimited yapping at all times during class" is absolutely not an accommodation that anyone with ADHD has. Reasonable accommodations usually involve either measures that provide support to participate in the setting along the same (or very similar) lines as everyone else or, if a student is unable to, removal to a different environment. "I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I am" is not an ADA-compliant accommodations for anyone.
See also: no one catches a cold, it's always the flu; no one has a headache, it's always a migraine.
I'm not inventive, so I am pretty sure that this morning when I was drinking my coffee and looking at my phone, I was offered the chance to click on something close to this headline (I am certain it contained the words "stories of trauma"):
"Andor is ending and it has brought us untold stories of trauma".
The people of Star Wars silenced no more.
The more I think about it the more I feel that Malcolm Gladwell's essay "Getting Over It" is relevant.
"We suffer from what Wilson and Gilbert call an impact bias: we always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do. We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that our psychological immune system will kick in and take away the sting of adversity. “When I talk about our research, I say to people, ‘I’m not telling you that bad things don’t hurt,’ ” Gilbert says. “Of course they do. It would be perverse to say that having a child or a spouse die is not a big deal. All I’m saying is that the reality doesn’t meet the expectation.”
This is the difference between our own era and the one of half a century ago—between “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “In the Lake of the Woods.” Sloan Wilson’s book came from a time and a culture that had the confidence and wisdom to understand this truth. “I love you more than I can tell,” Rath says to his wife at the end of the novel. It’s an ending that no one would write today, but only because we have become blind to the fact that the past—in all but the worst of cases—sooner or later fades away."