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Remilia H's avatar

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.

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Kayla's avatar

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.

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