Trauma As Physics
Trauma As Physics
It's in the interest of victim narratives that all other people who encountered the thing that traumatized you, must also be traumatized.
If everyone is traumatized by the same thing, then this means your trauma is absolute and inevitable; the “responsibility” for the trauma isn’t inside you, but in the thing that happened to you. Your trauma is like a law of physics. It’s absolute, it’s inevitable. Touch stove, get burned. Anyone touches stove, anyone gets burned.
But if some people don’t experience trauma in response to something, then this means it’s no longer absolute. This means your trauma is also partially your responsibility, your reaction. The thing you encountered wasn’t inherently traumatizing, you are inherently traumatizable. Someone else touched the stove and didn’t get burned - so what’s wrong with your hand?
This is my guess for what underlies some of the hostility I feel when I express that I haven’t really experienced sexual assault as traumatizing. My existence alone threatens their trauma physics, because I am proof that trauma isn’t a fact about the environment.
I don’t mean to trivialize people’s traumas. It’s okay if trauma comes from inside! Just because you are part of the equation doesn’t mean it’s any less valid or serious or real. You experienced something as terrible and you don’t have to justify that to anybody.
But I do suspect that believing in trauma as physics is an unhelpful frame to healing from trauma. If the terrible thing is a monster outside your door, outside of yourself, then you are powerless; you’re fighting against it as definitionally independent of yourself. You cannot have control over it - or else if you did that would mean it is part of you, and this would mean you’re no longer a victim.
I suspect some of this comes out of a discomfort in owning your own authority? Like, maybe people who believe in trauma physics need it in order to feel confident in their own experience. They’re looking for social agreement - everyone can see the monster outside the door, I’m not crazy. To them, maybe it’s not okay to acknowledge that the monster is partly their own creation, because this opens them up to judgment. They do in fact feel like they need to justify it; they have not yet accepted themselves as an author of their own fate. Being a victim is safety; it’s the message that you are okay, that nothing about you is at fault. You are unjudgeable, you are pure - because to ascribe corruption to something means to ascribe agency, and you have none. The monster is outside your door, remember?
In general, I think this thing applies to a lot of things that aren’t trauma-specific, too - but rather anything you believe to be universally damaging. I hear a lot of people arguing that sex work is inherently degrading, and as such the existence of people who say “no, it’s not degrading for me” threatens their view of degradation-as-physics. In this case you are forced to interpret the dissenting opinion as a lie; these people are lying to themselves, they cannot possibly actually find this to be non-degrading. Anything bad in their life is taken as evidence that they’re actually secretly suffering, and of course when they grow up they’ll eventually look back and regret everything.
More subtly, I think there’s faint traces of this thing inside self-help stuff, too. Anyone else who doesn’t do therapy is emotionally fucked. Anyone who is sad has something wrong with them. Anyone who demonstrates insecurity isn’t self-accepting. Your rescue lies in the attempts to fix, which requires that everyone else be attempting to fix too, or they are not rescued. I do think the way this manifests here is a bit more nuanced and might be worth its own blog post later.
I hate writing conclusion paragraphs, so I asked chatGPT to do it for me:
In conclusion, the belief that trauma is a law of physics, where everyone who encounters a traumatic event will inevitably be traumatized, is not only unhelpful for healing from trauma but also undermines the agency of the individual. It's important to acknowledge that trauma is not a universal experience and can be partially a result of one's own reaction and interpretation of events. While the experiences of others should be validated, it's also crucial to recognize the role of personal responsibility in the healing process. This viewpoint applies to other aspects of life beyond trauma and helps to challenge the notion that there is a universal standard for what is considered damaging. By embracing this perspective, we can promote self-acceptance and empowerment in our own lives.
As someone who was traumatized, I really want to respond to this because, for the longest time, kinda had this idea, and it was in letting go of being responsible for my trauma that I was able to start healing from it, and start setting healthy boundaries, something I had never been good at.
It was the recognition that the things that happened to me were abusive, were harmful, allowed me to recognize that my experiences of pain and trauma were a predictable outcome of the things that I went through that I could stop taking responsibility for things for which I was not responsible. This was a necessary prerequisite for me to make peace with the things that happened and to heal from the effects they had on me. One of the things that may have caused me to be traumatized by what I went through was an increased susceptibility to that sort of trauma due to the way my brain is wired or my previous lived experiences. Here's the thing: those are both outside of my control.
I guess what I'm saying is that doing the opposite of what you said helped me a lot.
Mainstream psychiatry has been saying for years that not every potentially-traumatic experience results in PTSD symptoms. But ordinary people who talk about trauma (and talking about trauma is more and more common) seem to be pulling away from this definition. The common belief now is that trauma = bad experience, so that we can call a bad thing "traumatizing" even with zero evidence that anyone actually experienced PTSD after the bad thing.
I guess the steel man of this is that if you say "X is traumatizing" it's a way of saying "X increases the chance that someone will experience post-traumatic symptoms." But it certainly is different from the classical, mainstream view, according to which it would make no sense to call something a trauma prospectively; it can only be identified as a trauma if it shown to have caused post-traumatic symptoms.
And of course the mainstream view also has it that only a small category of bad things qualify as traumas that can trigger PTSD. Versus the popular view that any bad thing (such as, in a memorable Reddit post I saw, having to wear a swimsuit while fat) is definitionally traumatizing.