Interesting, this is not really how I think about trauma at all! Or if it is you’ve framed it in a way that I never would have.
I tend to think of trauma as things that happened in the past that led to stuck memories that are strongly immune to updating. When things happen that will create stuck memories it’s not very clear that that’s what’s going to happen; it’s only well after the fact that it’s clear something is stuck. Thus there’s no sense to me in which these things have to be processed, they just are.
There’s something else, which I don’t really have to deal with any more, that looks more like what you’re talking about: new stuff happens that violates my expectations and meta-expectations about the world, and then I have to spend time letting my mind work through what the new evidence means and maybe deal with some emotional stuff caused by those expectations being forced to change.
(To be fair, though, I’m a bit weird in that I’ve meditated a lot and that’s changed me in important ways such that you might say I’ve mentally refactored away lots of my technical debt. Memory reconsolidation was also really useful here for clearing out traumatic things so that they were no longer stuck.)
(I also note that I use trauma just to refer to these stuck memories, and not to big things that are supposed to be Traumatic.)
I think “stuck memories immune to updating” is something that I’d expect to happen if you let [the-sort-of-thing-I’m-talking-about] sit rather than get processed. A commenter on FB noted that “This feels like a pretty good ontology for un-complex trauma. I did a CPT for PTSD program recently and was pretty amazed (and a bit envious) of how much it helped people who had uncomplex traumas” (while going on to note that people with complex traumas have a different thing going on).
i.e. it seems like the central reference class for “trauma’d people” are people who had a series of experiences long in the past they barely remember. But, those people had to have had that experience “recently” at some point. If it happens when you’re a kid you probably have way fewer tools for processing it healthily.
...
Not sure if this is contra your phrasing or not, but: based on how I use the english language, I think it makes sense to use the word trauma for specifically things that hurt/are-distressing/disturbing/scary. (i.e. google dictionary says “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience” which roughly matches my experiences).
I think insofar as there are stuck-memories-that-don’t-update that aren’t rooted in something unpleasant, (but which maybe share important structure with a common way that distressing things cause stuck-memories) I’d come up with another word for that. (dunno what psych literature says, but if there’s jargon that departs a lot from common usage while being relevant to common usage, I think that’s a recipe for unnecessary confusion)
(I can imagine people, maybe meditators-in-particular, for whom “hurt/distress” isn’t really a coherent category, and once you See The Matrix it makes more sense to think in terms of surprise/model-violation/resistance-to-update. But, like, I’d guess the “hurt”/”not-hurt” distinction is still pretty relevant for most people?)
(I say all this still thinking it makes sense to have a conception of little-t traumas that might have had an outsized impact despite not seemingly like they should have been particularly big deals.)
I think “stuck memories immune to updating” is something that I’d expect to happen if you let [the-sort-of-thing-I’m-talking-about] sit rather than get processed.
If someone has a relative who dies and they are very sad the next week, no doctor would diagnose them as depressed. The person would only be diagnosed as depressed if they don’t process the experience.
If you let these things sit, the body engages in a process to disassociate the experience which reduces the emotional input a bit but which then also makes updating harder.
It’s useful to distinguish “bad experience that’s in the state of being processed” from “bad experience that’s outside of processing”. Gordon seems to use trauma only to refer to the later category and you seem to want to include the term to cover both.
I disagree with the notion that we should come up with different words for things which share underlying structure but which don’t conform to our expectations about what “trauma” looks like, or that we should treat “meditators who have Seen The Matrix” as weird edge cases that don’t count and should be ignored when coming up with language.
The alternate perspective I offer is to view the successful meditators as people who simply have a more clear view of reality and therefore a better idea of how to define terms which cleave reality at the joints. The reasons it’s important to cleave reality at it’s joints are obvious in an abstract sense, but less obvious is that by doing this you actually change how pain is experienced and it doesn’t require years of meditation.
My favorite example of this is when my kid cousin burned his hand pretty bad, and I found him fighting back tears as everyone tried to console him and offer ice. No one had any idea that their understanding of pain/suffering was meaningfully flawed here because the kid was clearly a central case of their concept of “hurt” and not some “meditator who has Seen The Matrix”. No one saw their own responses to the situation as “trauma responses” because “it’s not overwhelming” and “just trying to help, because I feel bad for him”, but their actions were all in attempt to avoid their own discomfort at seeing him uncomfortable, and that failure to address the uncomfortable reality is the exact same thing and led to the exact same problems.
It’s worth noting that they were doing it because they didn’t know better and not that they didn’t have the mental strength to resist even if they did, but it’s exactly that “Well, it doesn’t count as trauma because it’s not that intense” thinking that allowed them to keep not knowing better instead of noticing “Wow, I’m uncomfortable seeing this kid injured and distressed like this”, and proceeding as makes sense. In that case, simply asking if it the pain that was distressing him is all it took for him to not be distressed and not even perceive the sensations as “painful” anymore, but you can’t get there if you are content with normal conflations between pain/suffering/meta-suffering/etc.
When people don’t see themselves as “trauma limited” it’s sometimes true, but it’s also often that they don’t recognize the ways in which the same dynamics are at play because they don’t have a good reference experience for how it could be different or a good framework to lead them there. Discarding “intuitive” language and working only with precise language that lays bare the conflations is an important part of getting there.
He was essentially gaslighted into thinking he had to sit there and suffer about it, rather than saying “oops” and laughing it off.
He already knew how to relate to pain pretty well from his older brothers playfully “beating him up” in what is essentially a rough game of “tickling” that teaches comfort with mild/non-harmful pain. In fact, when I stopped to ask him if it was the pain that he was distressed about, his response—after briefly saying “Yeah!” and then realizing that it didn’t fit—was that when he feels pain his brain interprets it as “ticklish”, and that it therefore it didn’t actually hurt and instead “just tickles”.
Everyone else was uncomfortable for him though, and while he was prepared to laugh off a burn that was relatively minor all things considered, he wasn’t prepared to laugh off a strong consensus of adults acting like something definitely not okay happened to him, so as a result he was pressured into feeling not-okay about it all.
Interesting, this is not really how I think about trauma at all! Or if it is you’ve framed it in a way that I never would have.
I tend to think of trauma as things that happened in the past that led to stuck memories that are strongly immune to updating. When things happen that will create stuck memories it’s not very clear that that’s what’s going to happen; it’s only well after the fact that it’s clear something is stuck. Thus there’s no sense to me in which these things have to be processed, they just are.
There’s something else, which I don’t really have to deal with any more, that looks more like what you’re talking about: new stuff happens that violates my expectations and meta-expectations about the world, and then I have to spend time letting my mind work through what the new evidence means and maybe deal with some emotional stuff caused by those expectations being forced to change.
(To be fair, though, I’m a bit weird in that I’ve meditated a lot and that’s changed me in important ways such that you might say I’ve mentally refactored away lots of my technical debt. Memory reconsolidation was also really useful here for clearing out traumatic things so that they were no longer stuck.)
(I also note that I use trauma just to refer to these stuck memories, and not to big things that are supposed to be Traumatic.)
I think “stuck memories immune to updating” is something that I’d expect to happen if you let [the-sort-of-thing-I’m-talking-about] sit rather than get processed. A commenter on FB noted that “This feels like a pretty good ontology for un-complex trauma. I did a CPT for PTSD program recently and was pretty amazed (and a bit envious) of how much it helped people who had uncomplex traumas” (while going on to note that people with complex traumas have a different thing going on).
i.e. it seems like the central reference class for “trauma’d people” are people who had a series of experiences long in the past they barely remember. But, those people had to have had that experience “recently” at some point. If it happens when you’re a kid you probably have way fewer tools for processing it healthily.
...
Not sure if this is contra your phrasing or not, but: based on how I use the english language, I think it makes sense to use the word trauma for specifically things that hurt/are-distressing/disturbing/scary. (i.e. google dictionary says “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience” which roughly matches my experiences).
I think insofar as there are stuck-memories-that-don’t-update that aren’t rooted in something unpleasant, (but which maybe share important structure with a common way that distressing things cause stuck-memories) I’d come up with another word for that. (dunno what psych literature says, but if there’s jargon that departs a lot from common usage while being relevant to common usage, I think that’s a recipe for unnecessary confusion)
(I can imagine people, maybe meditators-in-particular, for whom “hurt/distress” isn’t really a coherent category, and once you See The Matrix it makes more sense to think in terms of surprise/model-violation/resistance-to-update. But, like, I’d guess the “hurt”/”not-hurt” distinction is still pretty relevant for most people?)
(I say all this still thinking it makes sense to have a conception of little-t traumas that might have had an outsized impact despite not seemingly like they should have been particularly big deals.)
If someone has a relative who dies and they are very sad the next week, no doctor would diagnose them as depressed. The person would only be diagnosed as depressed if they don’t process the experience.
If you let these things sit, the body engages in a process to disassociate the experience which reduces the emotional input a bit but which then also makes updating harder.
It’s useful to distinguish “bad experience that’s in the state of being processed” from “bad experience that’s outside of processing”. Gordon seems to use trauma only to refer to the later category and you seem to want to include the term to cover both.
I disagree with the notion that we should come up with different words for things which share underlying structure but which don’t conform to our expectations about what “trauma” looks like, or that we should treat “meditators who have Seen The Matrix” as weird edge cases that don’t count and should be ignored when coming up with language.
The alternate perspective I offer is to view the successful meditators as people who simply have a more clear view of reality and therefore a better idea of how to define terms which cleave reality at the joints. The reasons it’s important to cleave reality at it’s joints are obvious in an abstract sense, but less obvious is that by doing this you actually change how pain is experienced and it doesn’t require years of meditation.
My favorite example of this is when my kid cousin burned his hand pretty bad, and I found him fighting back tears as everyone tried to console him and offer ice. No one had any idea that their understanding of pain/suffering was meaningfully flawed here because the kid was clearly a central case of their concept of “hurt” and not some “meditator who has Seen The Matrix”. No one saw their own responses to the situation as “trauma responses” because “it’s not overwhelming” and “just trying to help, because I feel bad for him”, but their actions were all in attempt to avoid their own discomfort at seeing him uncomfortable, and that failure to address the uncomfortable reality is the exact same thing and led to the exact same problems.
It’s worth noting that they were doing it because they didn’t know better and not that they didn’t have the mental strength to resist even if they did, but it’s exactly that “Well, it doesn’t count as trauma because it’s not that intense” thinking that allowed them to keep not knowing better instead of noticing “Wow, I’m uncomfortable seeing this kid injured and distressed like this”, and proceeding as makes sense. In that case, simply asking if it the pain that was distressing him is all it took for him to not be distressed and not even perceive the sensations as “painful” anymore, but you can’t get there if you are content with normal conflations between pain/suffering/meta-suffering/etc.
When people don’t see themselves as “trauma limited” it’s sometimes true, but it’s also often that they don’t recognize the ways in which the same dynamics are at play because they don’t have a good reference experience for how it could be different or a good framework to lead them there. Discarding “intuitive” language and working only with precise language that lays bare the conflations is an important part of getting there.
I think I missed the problem in the case of the burned-hand kid – what was the issue in this case?
He was essentially gaslighted into thinking he had to sit there and suffer about it, rather than saying “oops” and laughing it off.
He already knew how to relate to pain pretty well from his older brothers playfully “beating him up” in what is essentially a rough game of “tickling” that teaches comfort with mild/non-harmful pain. In fact, when I stopped to ask him if it was the pain that he was distressed about, his response—after briefly saying “Yeah!” and then realizing that it didn’t fit—was that when he feels pain his brain interprets it as “ticklish”, and that it therefore it didn’t actually hurt and instead “just tickles”.
Everyone else was uncomfortable for him though, and while he was prepared to laugh off a burn that was relatively minor all things considered, he wasn’t prepared to laugh off a strong consensus of adults acting like something definitely not okay happened to him, so as a result he was pressured into feeling not-okay about it all.