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Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

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540 points drankl | 2 comments | 06 Jul 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.48s | source
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iambateman ◴[06 Jul 25 23:26 UTC] No.44485087[source]▶
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…

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1. DHPersonal ◴[07 Jul 25 01:07 UTC] No.44485703[source]▶
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.
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2. borski ◴[07 Jul 25 01:55 UTC] No.44485985[source]▶
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.