I once did an emotional processing session starting w: "I feel weird/bad trying to get out of bed" I found my way to expressing a hazy memory: "Nobody woke me up and I missed the pancakes!" ...then I suddenly started sobbing 😭 Traumatic meaning can occur in benign situations.
Trauma, pseudomemories, and capacity for digesting
11 tweets · October 2019 · 49 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
The meaning I made of this event was apparently something like "Nobody loves me and people will leave me behind when something important is happening and it's not safe to sleep-in but it's also not safe to get up because then I might discover the empty plate and feel awful."
(Technically this was not a memory but what I call a "pseudomemory", because I can't locate it as a single specific autobiographical event in my life, and I'm not going to confidently claim it happened as stated. It was clearly very real to my emotional brain though.)
For years I pushed back against "everyone's got this cultural trauma". And of course some people have more intense histories and/or more present blockage than others, but in the last few years I've come to appreciate that indeed, everyone is traumatized.
That linked tweet and this one are both from a thread talking about how there's a kind of memetic meta-trauma that keeps trauma from being able to be digested & developed:
So I resonate a lot w eg @nosilverv's underlying sentiment here but if expressed as "children have right not to undergo trauma" we're gonna end up with a huge motte-bailey mess. There's no clear lines & the issue isn't trauma but capacity for digesting.
Ofc, many co-morbid Adverse Childhood Experiences ALSO wreck capacity for digesting. However, I think that reifying the idea that "trauma shouldn't happen to you" / "you have a right to not experience trauma" makes it harder, not easier, to digest though.
@Aella_Girl has a really rich & nuanced post grappling with the same sorts of question, around the value of recognizing one's pain, but the way that "trauma" & "abuse" can reinforce a blame frame that blocks healing. knowingless.com/2018/09/21/tra…
Most people have heard of PTSD, but most people haven't heard of PTG: post-traumatic growth. That sometimes adverse experiences, *when* they're able to be digested & integrated, yield powerful learning. PTSD isn't inevitable from trauma.
And of course part of the issue here is we've got one complex and very loaded word "trauma" that we're throwing around to mean a lot of different things. Necessary to a collective sensemaking here is going to be developing better language & concepts.
It's feeling like a rich time to be alive and exploring all of these questions together, and learning. 🎶🎵 I'm your landsailor in the bed that we've made may every nail be shown great lifebringer the price that we've paid time that you made it known youtube.com/watch?v=KysI3r…