Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

As a child, my dad’s brother fell out of a bunk bed and got a traumatic brain injury that would kill him 15 years later.

My dad experienced real trauma but was told to bottle it up. After 30 years, he finally went to counseling and it was transformational for him.

By contrast, I had some mean fifth grade classmates who still live in my head in uncomfortable social situations…

Did my dad have trauma and need to put a “label” on it? Yep. Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...

As a society, we’re responding to the fact that a lot of our family and friends are living with the weight of a past which haunts them or psychological challenges which deeply affects their ability to relate to the world.

I think it’s ok to be overweight on therapy-talk. Kind of like how a little too much inflation is ok after a long period of zero inflation…

But I do think we should let younger people have more time before they get labeled/diagnosed. There’s a lot of 15 year olds who are just kinda weird…

Isn’t the point of labeling something as a “trauma” to be a signifier for the moment or behavior that affected you greatly and not something that meets an arbitrary level of awfulness, especially by way of comparison? Your father lost a brother, which is definitely certainly traumatic, but my grandfather lost a son. Does that equate to a greater trauma, therefore nullifying your father’s loss? I would say no! Comparing traumas means in my mind that nobody can ever heal because someone else will always have experienced something that was in some way worse.

Not all bad things are trauma. According to the APA: “Any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. Traumatic events include those caused by human behavior (e.g., rape, war, industrial accidents) as well as by nature (e.g., earthquakes) and often challenge an individual’s view of the world as a just, safe, and predictable place. Any serious physical injury, such as a widespread burn or a blow to the head.”

It’s not useful to compare trauma, but not all negative things that happen are trauma.

And perhaps more importantly, not all trauma causes PTSD, which is a defined set of symptoms later in life.

How does a TBI kill someone 15 years later? Do you mean that it caused a suicide or was it a physiological sequela?

It can mean they suffered serious health problems for 15 years until a particularly bad seizure or some such took them. TBI can cause long-term conditions like epilepsy, physical disability, organ dysfunction, sleep problems etc.

I was very struck reading about about a mass-shooting "survivor" dying 20 years later and it being considered a murder. It sounded wrong but when reading the account of the terrible health problems they suffered every day until their death, I was left in no doubt it was not just murder but a far crueler one than those that died on the day.

> Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...

You might be selling yourself or others short with that notion of trauma that excludes what sounds like bullying.

I personally don't find traumatic impact to be determined by the severity of the event. If anything, it feels like I am built for the "big stuff" like family tragedy and during such events, where others have fallen to pieces, I can step up, I am more focussed and capable than normal. A stoic acceptance of such events comes naturally, it's life, it happens and I know I am needed.

In contrast, small events: rejection, failure, embarrassment, conflict etc. can be paralysing, debilitating, brain-breaking poison that I can't escape with out great suffering and effort.

The cases that cause me effort are expressly where the impact is irrational. Natural grief, sadness at misfortune etc. heal with time but irrational impact is where an inconsequential grit of sand has seized the entire gearbox and only grow without attention.

That makes sense. I naively assumed that if someone had survived ~15 years they would more or less be likely to live as long as anyone else, but on reflection there's no real reason to believe such a positive thing.