I didn't say that, though? Some things that don't kill you can, obviously, make you really really weak. Isn't hard to find examples on that front. Polio is the poster case.
But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.
I suspect we would largely align on the idea that growth is the important part. We would also largely agree that trauma is real. Question is how do you combine those ideas?
From what I've seen in my direct circle, childhood trauma leaves deep deep traces, and not in a good way. The idea that childhood trauma encourages growth to me sounds like pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of rhetoric.
It’s attitudinal. Some people just don’t want to stay stuck in their childhood forever because there are too many things they want in life. Is it better to just carry your childhood around and relive it all the time? Some of that is probably fine but do it to the exclusion of your present moments and it’s probably maladaptive.
It sounds like you're trying to argue against a trauma model, but you're basically just describing the state of someone having PTSD and a typical end goal state of therapeutic treatment for it.
And where did I say that? You seem to be purposely misreading my posts.
I said growth is the important part. If you are focusing people on identifying themselves as traumatized, you are doing it wrong. You want to focus them on how to grow. Be that be letting go, coming to terms, whatever. Really depends on the trauma.
jaybrendansmith is talking specifically about childhood trauma not any trauma that happens in childhood.
> But not childhood trauma...that makes you weaker
I have only seen "childhood trauma" defined and used as something that has lasting impact. That definition likely comes from studies that study trauma that happens in childhood and how it can have a lasting impact.
Regardless of where it comes from that is how the phrase is typically used.
It would be nice if the field came up with better terms or a better scale that separated out the different traumas by lasting impact, but my assumption is that if it was easy to come up with that kind of scale it probably would have already happened, here is hoping it is easy and it is low hanging from some soon to come along phd student though.
The hazard I'm pointing at, though, is that this will be very individual. And what is a difficult thing to overcome for some kids, will be trivial for others. And seemingly flat out impossible for others, still.
Sure that is true of any trauma physical or otherwise. It is always some part genetic and some part environment. I assume just like for other areas we have a clear picture of a narrow subset of factors that is clearly genetic and some is clearly environment, but we do not have a clear picture on the majority of factors yet.
> But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.
Huh? No, that's the whole point, how important and useful it is.
It's to separate out the non-traumatic experiences where you recover just fine... from the genuinely traumatic experiences that do harm you, and for which professional help is really useful in recovering from.
But you haven't separated these things out. You have definitionally stated that some things exist. But you have no method to separate the genuinely traumatic from the potentially traumatic.
Broken bones. Death in the family. Death of the family. Moving. Friends changing. Attacks from coyotes. Loss of pets through unknown reasons. Loss of neighborhood friends to suicide? Which of these is genuinely traumatic?
My point is that this is very individual to the kid. I further posit that many kids will make things more traumatic if you ask them to do so.
Worse, I have seen "was rude to me at camp two years ago" be a significant source of grievance to kids. The whole elevator scene of "I hate you" versus "I never even think of you" is very very real.
Had to post as anon well because feels safer that way.
I don't think you really understand the difference between traumatic events and traumatic disorders. There are 2 fundamental aspects of trauma that without removing will yield worsening mental and physical states.
1. Cause of trauma must be stopped
2. Feeling of the loss of control
As someone whose experienced both childhood neglect and mental abuse, The Body Keeps Score and was able to help me unravel and recover very from incredibly complex childhood and then adulthood trauma.
What you have listed are traumatic events they create a shock and body's sympathetic nervous system recovers. Now say you are in a constant state of shock everyday for your entire life how is the nervous system going to adapt to that? That's right it changes and has to create maladaptive protective mechanisms, socially this doesn't make sense but biologically it does.
It takes digging through this massive book(1000+ pages), to find triggers, possible treatments and improvements 10+ years to get comfortable. But if you ever talk to people with PTSD they are never really healed, mostly scarred but have recurring physiological issues they must cope with.
Similar to what I said in the sibling post, this is classic talking past each other. The word "disorder" doesn't appear in the thread until here. If you are speaking to a definition that distinguishes traumatic events and disorders, you are having a different conversation than I was having. And, as I said in sibling, I think that is a good conversation and one worth having. Just wasn't the one I was in.
So then this is just classic talking past each other? The point of the discussion, to me, was some people have defined it such that everyone is battling childhood trauma. The book literally has the example of the trauma of the umbilical cord wrapping around your neck in the womb.
My main post at the start was only pointing out that I have started seeing people, largely in the mainstream, start saying "maybe we shouldn't definitionally say all of these people were traumatized." Where I take "traumatized" to be "had an event that potentially lead to a particular categorized response."
The take at the end is almost certainly inline with talking past each other. If you are taking the super precise (and, to be clear, I think there are good arguments for doing so) definition of trauma, I'm not pushing that. People, and kids in particular, have a strong sense of wanting to make things fit the patterns they are learning. If they think their sibling is not respectful enough of the pet that just died, they will escalate as much as they can on that view.
Maybe we are, ha. It is absolutely not the case that everyone is battling childhood trauma -- I don't know of any serious thinker who argues that. It seems like quite the strawman. And the umbilical cord thing seems like a pretty unhelpful example, precisely because it's so difficult to verify -- it seems pretty definite that you can be impacted by trauma from before you can remember things, but at the same time it seems hard to say anything definitive about any particular event precisely because you can't remember it.
I think that trauma has been denied and ignored for so many centuries/millenia that we're only now as a society starting to accept that it exists and requires the kind of treatment that a spouse, friends and the church are not equipped to provide. And I don't even think we've gone far enough -- it's still extremely common to hear people insist nobody needs therapy, shrinks are all quacks, they don't believe in therapy, all you need is a good friend to talk to. So it feels strange to me to see this kind of "backlash" against recognition of trauma, which to me seems extremely premature. It's better to err on the side of helping people and pay for a few therapy sessions that turn out not to be needed, than to tell people after something horrific happens to just grin and bear it and you'll forget about it soon enough, because people are naturally resilient and bounce back from anything. Because very frequently, they don't.
Largely agreed. It doesn't take a lot of looking through these threads, though, to find people basically saying everyone in the past merely coped with trauma. Some going so far as to basically assert that the only reason people drank in the past, was as a coping thing. Which, frankly, feels off to me.
Not that you can't cope through drinking. Nor that nobody ever did things wrong. I just don't see any reason to think that would have been the norm.
But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.
I suspect we would largely align on the idea that growth is the important part. We would also largely agree that trauma is real. Question is how do you combine those ideas?