Isn't there a class element here? Just as with mental illness chic the people who actually suffer the least seem to be drawn to the concept like moths to a flame.
I'm not on Tiktok and have no intention of joining it. But if this trauma discourse is in any way similar to how social justice bullies operate as you say, then it sounds awful and we need to get it under control quickly.
Completely unrelated but good on you for reaching out to a different (mostly unreceptive) audience with that free press post. The comment section was bugging out that Bari Weiss let a self-proclaimed Marxist post a column.
I am a new psychotherapist at 47 years-old, and I find the pop-psychology use of concepts in the field quite annoying. I have heard some baffling things throughout my grad school training and now, in consultation groups in the field. Trauma is one of those hot spots, although there are many more. Thank you for giving voice to these issues.
TikTok has been an unmitigated disaster for a certain segment of young generation.
I saw a teenage girl faint very gracefully in the bathroom of a theater after a showing of Barbie this summer. While her mother poured water onto her mouth saying baby please wake up. It struck me as extremely fake, so I set out to TikTok and watched other girls gracefully faint in front of the camera multiple times a day.
I'm coming at this as an LMSW that's now done talk therapy for over two years.
The article kinda goes back and forth on this, so its hard for me to get an exact read, but I reject the binary notion of trauma where the answers are "Trauma becomes my entire identity" and "Trauma should be gotten over entirely".
You shift a bit later on in the piece, talking about how people can incorporate their experience to trauma in various healthy ways and that is more what I agree with. In my experience, its an unfair and unrealistic burden to put on a person that we are going to solve your trauma to the point where its just gone. Part of what makes trauma tricky is how easy the traumatic moment can be triggered by any sort of cue. It can be crushing to think you got your trauma wrapped neatly in a box in your mental attic only to discover its been lingering free this whole time.
Building a relationship with that trauma, placing it in a healthy spot within your life and having it be a constant back-and-forth dialogue between yourself and what happened to you as part of a lifelong relationship is the most effective approach.
Axtually, the whole thing too often reminds of of self-absorbed human kittens throwing a tantrum about how their life is ruined! Ruined! because Mom wouldn't let them go on the class ski trip after they brought home a report card full of "Ds".
PTSD is one of the more treatable mental health disorders through evidence-based CBT methods. But like anything else, you have to want to recover. You learn to take responsibility for your own condition, manage your triggers rather than avoiding them, and not project your PTSD into obligations on other people. Things like trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic.
I was raised in a community with a lot of Holocaust survivors. They definitely had baggage, but they somehow functioned better than a lot of supposedly traumatized 20-somethings today. And they never, ever felt sorry for themselves. Human beings have been through an awful lot - outside of the contemporary West, it's quite normal to go through war, famine, disasters, and a lot of premature death. Sometimes this perspective is valuable.
I have recently encountered (against my will!) social media content about "anti-carceral" therapy, which claims that traditional therapy results in lifelong trauma for the patient. The practitioners also charge high hourly fees to explain how white supremacy and capitalism have created the patients' mental health problems. There is pushback in the replies, but the original posters respond that they will not do the labor of arguing in the comments. There is a lot of bullshit floating in the ether of mental health professions right now.
The comparison to physical trauma is interesting, because there is a slightly comparable overlap. Many folks who have experienced physical trauma, like traumatic injury, deal with chronic issues even after the "healing" is done. The term "Maximally Medically Improved" exists for such cases.
A key difference is physical medicine readily differentiates between trauma, understanding the complicated and extreme nature of certain cases. There are varying grades of hamstring tears, fractures, brain injuries and so on. Two people may have both broken their fibula, but medicine will differentiate how the injury happened, the degree of the fracture, and fracture type. There is an understanding that while one of these individuals will be back walking within 6 weeks, another may be dealing with 6 months of physical therapy and a lifetime of complications.
There seems to be a resistance to doing so within popular mental health discourse, where everything is treated the same. Attempting to grade psychological trauma like this in popular discourse will land you in hot water.
Great post. The idea of "Complex PTSD" or C-PTSD seems to be expanding to include everyone who wants the diagnosis. I'm sure the original definition was intended to be more narrow, but on social media it can mean almost anything. You don't need a traumatic event in your past, just a relationship that made you feel bad.
Very well said. These trends are both baffling and alarming.
The great majority of people who go through potentially traumatic events do not, of course, go on to develop PTSD.
Isn't there a class element here? Just as with mental illness chic the people who actually suffer the least seem to be drawn to the concept like moths to a flame.
"...we have to be willing to say no to young people who are spreading bullshit about this [any] topic."
This is a key statement here that can be applied to all sorts of modern issues. I know a few university administrators who really need to do this.
I'm not on Tiktok and have no intention of joining it. But if this trauma discourse is in any way similar to how social justice bullies operate as you say, then it sounds awful and we need to get it under control quickly.
Completely unrelated but good on you for reaching out to a different (mostly unreceptive) audience with that free press post. The comment section was bugging out that Bari Weiss let a self-proclaimed Marxist post a column.
Victim status earns social.cachet and, as you alluded, offers its acolytes a "get out of jail free" card and also an easy means of attacking critics.
Therefore, humans carefully cultivate their traumas, curate amongst the many cultivars and lovingly nurture those traumas to create an identity.
The irony being that people whose lives are far harder than WEIRD citizens who didn't get enough affirmation, for the most part, could give a shit.
I am a new psychotherapist at 47 years-old, and I find the pop-psychology use of concepts in the field quite annoying. I have heard some baffling things throughout my grad school training and now, in consultation groups in the field. Trauma is one of those hot spots, although there are many more. Thank you for giving voice to these issues.
TikTok has been an unmitigated disaster for a certain segment of young generation.
I saw a teenage girl faint very gracefully in the bathroom of a theater after a showing of Barbie this summer. While her mother poured water onto her mouth saying baby please wake up. It struck me as extremely fake, so I set out to TikTok and watched other girls gracefully faint in front of the camera multiple times a day.
I'm coming at this as an LMSW that's now done talk therapy for over two years.
The article kinda goes back and forth on this, so its hard for me to get an exact read, but I reject the binary notion of trauma where the answers are "Trauma becomes my entire identity" and "Trauma should be gotten over entirely".
You shift a bit later on in the piece, talking about how people can incorporate their experience to trauma in various healthy ways and that is more what I agree with. In my experience, its an unfair and unrealistic burden to put on a person that we are going to solve your trauma to the point where its just gone. Part of what makes trauma tricky is how easy the traumatic moment can be triggered by any sort of cue. It can be crushing to think you got your trauma wrapped neatly in a box in your mental attic only to discover its been lingering free this whole time.
Building a relationship with that trauma, placing it in a healthy spot within your life and having it be a constant back-and-forth dialogue between yourself and what happened to you as part of a lifelong relationship is the most effective approach.
Axtually, the whole thing too often reminds of of self-absorbed human kittens throwing a tantrum about how their life is ruined! Ruined! because Mom wouldn't let them go on the class ski trip after they brought home a report card full of "Ds".
In each case, the response is to "grow up".
PTSD is one of the more treatable mental health disorders through evidence-based CBT methods. But like anything else, you have to want to recover. You learn to take responsibility for your own condition, manage your triggers rather than avoiding them, and not project your PTSD into obligations on other people. Things like trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic.
I was raised in a community with a lot of Holocaust survivors. They definitely had baggage, but they somehow functioned better than a lot of supposedly traumatized 20-somethings today. And they never, ever felt sorry for themselves. Human beings have been through an awful lot - outside of the contemporary West, it's quite normal to go through war, famine, disasters, and a lot of premature death. Sometimes this perspective is valuable.
I have recently encountered (against my will!) social media content about "anti-carceral" therapy, which claims that traditional therapy results in lifelong trauma for the patient. The practitioners also charge high hourly fees to explain how white supremacy and capitalism have created the patients' mental health problems. There is pushback in the replies, but the original posters respond that they will not do the labor of arguing in the comments. There is a lot of bullshit floating in the ether of mental health professions right now.
The comparison to physical trauma is interesting, because there is a slightly comparable overlap. Many folks who have experienced physical trauma, like traumatic injury, deal with chronic issues even after the "healing" is done. The term "Maximally Medically Improved" exists for such cases.
A key difference is physical medicine readily differentiates between trauma, understanding the complicated and extreme nature of certain cases. There are varying grades of hamstring tears, fractures, brain injuries and so on. Two people may have both broken their fibula, but medicine will differentiate how the injury happened, the degree of the fracture, and fracture type. There is an understanding that while one of these individuals will be back walking within 6 weeks, another may be dealing with 6 months of physical therapy and a lifetime of complications.
There seems to be a resistance to doing so within popular mental health discourse, where everything is treated the same. Attempting to grade psychological trauma like this in popular discourse will land you in hot water.
Great post. The idea of "Complex PTSD" or C-PTSD seems to be expanding to include everyone who wants the diagnosis. I'm sure the original definition was intended to be more narrow, but on social media it can mean almost anything. You don't need a traumatic event in your past, just a relationship that made you feel bad.
Tiktok is like twitter in that it turns anyone who uses it regularly into a loser.