Haha yeah my wife used to use that always as a nice way to explain why she should be able to punish me at all times for all my “failures”. Lol
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Because such claims are so hard to verify and so rhetorically potent, I would be in favor of a rule that claims of having been traumatized cannot be presented as evidence in court.
> “The Body Keeps the Score has spent 248 weeks on the New York Times paperback-nonfiction best-seller list and counting. To date, it’s sold 3 million copies and been translated into 37 languages.”
Wow 3 million copies despite being translated into 37 languages? The Game of Thrones finale had 19 million viewers. I don't know anyone who has heard of this book and even if all of the 3 million copies were sold to Americans, only 1 in 11 of them would have heard of it.
The other pole is that you cannot control your reactions, but you can try to control the world. This is much easier to fit into a consumerist framework.
On a purely human level though, you should go find some veterans with PTSD and tell them they're just not working hard enough at being stoic.
Ie the idea has to be convincing enough to spread from person to person as a meme but also have enough armchair level depth to pass the bullshit filters of most reasonable people- ie popularity wins over truth
Most people do not have the intellectual curiosity or time to deeply verify these claims - but inevitably these fads die as they appear..
Clearly this is one example
The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.
Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.
I can't control what you say, but I can control my reaction to you. That's what stoicism is.
In each case you should look at which one is easier to control and go for that. Why do you need a universal philosophy? Some things are self control, but some things are circumstances that you can navigate or avoid too.
They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among crowds like HN)
My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.
Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny.
It's a soft science, it is what it is.
That said, this article is just as bad as the book.
Of course there are massive and complex feedback loops between the brain and the body.
Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd.
I encourage folks to get more massages if they doubt that there's any causal relationship between these phenomena.
For example, the rule would not disallow "I was almost killed by the defendant's reckless action" and would not disallow "the defendant's attack put me fear for my life", but it would disallow, "and one of the effects of that experience was psychological trauma".
I have my issues with van der Kolk’s work (I would personally not recommend The Body Keeps The Score to most people), but this is sloppy embarrassing clickbait.
it's anchoring two points and providing a terrtain for analyzing consumer capitalism.
With this frame in hand we can then ask questions like yours, "are there domains within which it is easier or more enjoyable or has higher personal or collective benefit, to work on the world rather than self?"
The answer is certainly yes; agency is real, and we can work to maximize it.
A convenient way to extend the "model" might be to tack on the "serenity prayer."
Reading is at an all time low in the US, the majority of people who have heard of this book probably haven't read a single sentence of it. It's mostly coming from social media content about the book.
Is it your take that every person in therapy for PTSD so wasting their time?
People should be very sceptical of any psychological findings that are younger than about 30 years and ideally you want to have seen several replications and done with greater size, rigour and controls. Anything younger than this and certainly anything that hasn't yet been firmly replicated is on balance of probability going to turn out to be wrong or fraud.
not finding something doesn’t seem any more or less convincing…
now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"
Please stop with the fallacy that what appears to be true for you is also true for everyone else.
edit: I weep for the ignorance present here. I may be done with HN.
It's proactive introspection. Stoicism can provide freedom because you can be master of yourself.
Not to say that epigenetic effects aren't real.
This article, and others, are riddled with rhetorical bullshit. E.g., someone on Instagram said that their emotionally distant father caused trauma, so “emotional distance” is added into the causes of trauma, and this is used to diminish the power of “trauma” itself.
This is exactly as illuminating as a neurotypical arguing whether Tylenol or vaccines cause more Autism. The author’s only skin in the game is being provocative.
I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution. Somatic experiences might help them.
To be honest, reading the book was more helpful than critiquing whether or not my testosterone levels were too low as a 11-year-old, or if I had elevated inflammation because of my diet. Perhaps I'm biased.
The idea that stoicism even aims to eliminate all negative emotions, or that it blames all of them on the person experiencing them, isn’t really what I’ve found.
The scientific process is rarely perfect and levels of average levels of rigour vary between disciplines.
However, there are quite significantly varying levels of quality and rigour in psychological studies. Your criticism seems framed to ignore this and groups the charlatans in with the actuap scientists.
I was curious about this accusation, so I read a bit about the scandal. [0]
It seems you are actually talking about Joseph Spinazzola, the executive director of Van der Kolk's trauma center, who was fired for sexual misconduct while Van der Kolk was on sabbatical. Van der Kolk was fired two months later, not for sexual misconduct, but for denigrating and bullying employees.
[0] https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/03/07/allegation...
But TBKTS helped to bring "somatics"--the idea that physical and psychological issues are often interwoven--to the mainstream. There is very clear evidence that this is true [1], and underappreciated by a medical field that has a heavy bias toward specialists over generalists. How many people are experts in both gastroenterology and trauma? And yet we all know intuitively that stress and stomach problems go together.
I'll always appreciate TBKTS for this, despite its flaws.
[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/energy-healing-minus-the-no...
What they are not good at is all the rest: explaining what causes those symptoms in the first place, and how to treat them in the second place. And this isn't something that has changed in the past 30 yrs.
This phenomenon is also not exclusive to soft sciences. Humans (especially domain experts) just really really hate admitting "we don't know."
I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be.
Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.
We don't have the technology to collect the necessary data to be able to test hypotheses for psychiatric and psychological phenomenoms, and even many other non brain related medical claims about the human body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Seems pretty reasonable to take claims about unverifiable subjects with a grain of salt.
To be psychologically healthy, we need to listen to our emotions and process them in a healthy way.
The answer is not to shut down our emotions, or to blindly give in to them, but rather to understand where they're coming from and process them accordingly.
Much of mental trauma is about acknowledging it, and learning to live with it. There is no cure for PTSD, even Ketamine is short acting, not a long term solution, and indeed Ketamine simply helps you sit with the suffering in a different light.
Complex statements requiring lots of specialist knowledge available to very few human beings that are difficult to disprove is where the challenge lies.
Are you suggesting that only people afflicted with a condition should have the right to research it and look for its causes?
Beside the burden of knowledge and understanding, there is an even higher burden of bringing your knowledge to the laypeople, which is the most thankless, dangerous and tedious undertaking possible.
Yet it is also the most noble, as it drives civilization forward.
In many cases it's insurmountable.
Which makes these books all the more dangerous because the authors are overly confident about their conclusions and hence the attraction (which leads to book sales). When the unexplainable suddenly becomes explainable, the money rolls in.
...But it's also good to know the author of the book was wildly mis-citing things
The problem is that too many people believe you can do research on one group of people, and generalize that universally to all humans, when in fact, the variation in every population of humans is wide enough that you can't say for certain that a given treatment will work for a given set of symptoms—not because the treatments are bad, but because there are differences both in the causes of the same symptoms, and in the workings of the body & brain, between different people.
This doesn't make psychology/psychiatry/psychopharmacology a "soft science"; it just makes it a science that is still in its infancy. Once we have a better understanding of both the various underlying neurological/physical (and, for some, even gastrointestinal, given recent research showing that gut microbiota can affect the mood and brain) causes of various psychological symptoms, and the physical and neurological variations between people, it will be much easier to see, for instance, "ah, we shouldn't use Lorazepam for this patient, because their anxiety is caused by this which is much better treated by CBT and CBD, rather than that which Lorazepam directly addresses".
One clue is that these claims never detail on what this "detector" is. There are various types of detectors, and instead of showing a two band pattern they show a single slit interference pattern. By not giving specifics, the claim becomes much harder to disprove. This may not be malicious though, as the source of the faulty claim is likely the miscommunication of a thought experiment proposed by Einstein. Einstein proved by thought experiment that any detector couldn't show an interference pattern, which is easily twisted into the incorrect claim that it does show the two band pattern that people initially expected.
Even with all that, it's simply hard to refute. Like you said, it requires rigorous technical arguments, specifically as the faulty claim didn't specify what kind of detector they use. So the layperson has to choose between <some detector makes shape you'd expect> and <multiple complex existing detectors makes different shape>.
In the end, to a layperson, it wouldn't even seem to be all that important. And yet, almost all of the misunderstandings people have about quantum physics come from this one faulty claim. This claim makes it seem like some objects have quantum behavior, and some don't, and that you can change an object from quantum to non-quantum by detecting it. When in reality, all objects have quantum behavior, we just don't usually notice it.
When it was really the case that the spots that weren't damaged were the ones that actually needed to be armored, because the planes that took damage there didn't come back.
In this case, the data that survived a selection process ("I just recommended this book that dovetails nicely") is the only data considered, when really all of the data needs to be considered.
I'm seeing this as "you're reading the data wrong" or more accurately "you're barking up the wrong tree"
It's the equivalent of basing nutrition science on a Pew poll where people self-report their favorite food.
Sure, it's useful to know people's general preferences sometimes, but for science that data is junk.
They're all quite confident, though.
anyways, more on topic with TFA, of course lots of people are looking for excuses for why they aren't what they want to be, and it sounds like this book flips the causation, so that people can say e.g. "I was perfectly healthy until I went through some difficult stuff and now I'm disabled" rather than much more sober but accurate "I was born with some relative weaknesses that make things more difficult for me than others." It looks like he keeps trying to claim that bad experiences leave reliably measurable marks in some way but it simply never holds to the claimed reliability under scrutiny.
Of course, knowing exactly what specific "weaknesses" one actually has compared to a statistical average is the hard part, and jumping to conclusions in that area is just as much playing with fire.
Someone could write a book about "bad experiences give you bad memories, which can bring down your mood when you remember them and demotivate you", but everyone already knows that, and leaving it at that doesn't give the reader the feeling of understanding why they feel less than whole.
It's saying "it's bad research, misquoting experts and references, drawing sloppy conclusions aimed at a lay audience".
You can do psychology and psychiatry better than that, even if acknowledging they are not hard science.
There's no excuse for being sloppy or outright fraudulent.
Example slop: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit...
What the research _actually_ suggests is something more like a combination of those pictures. Except that the scientific research isn't framed in terms of "bad behavior". So that alone should give you a clue about where this blog post is coming from.
That image alone exposes the worldview of the person who wrote this, something like this:
~some people are good quality, some people are bad quality. if you're born as a bad quality person, it's something like bad luck / your fault for falling into bad behavior, no wonder you're struggling. you need to work harder but it might just be that you're a dud.~
I think what the parent is saying is this:
Say you (hyperhello) have PTSD from a fire incident in which your face is completely disfigured. You associated this pain (emotional and physical) with the various people who yelled "FIRE" during the escape. Do you, hyperhello, truly have control over this negative reaction when someone yells "FIRE!" in your face?
Every book doesn't have to be for everyone universally. It's kind of binary to where we might not catch ourselves thinking that way.
It could work for a specific group of people who might have an outsized positive experience and review of it.
Psychology and other social sciences are too multi-variate to speculate on, and the HRB exists so that we don't commit atrocities in the name of properly isolating variables as we poke at the black box we call the human mind. You're never going to get anything right, but we should definitely be referencing surveys of studies instead of single studies. So there's at least one point there for appropriate rigor. Not getting the interpretation of those studies right definitely seems unethical, but so does all of the misconduct stuff Van Der Kolk has been mired in.
It's a disingenuous argument to say that your body doesn't change from a traumatic experience, or that stress doesn't express itself through the body sometimes. It's also problematic to say that because it happens to you doesn't mean you can't work through it and learn to manage it or even control it. What I gleaned from the book is that if I have a physical sensation that I can map to stress or a past experience of trauma, I can understand it, label it, and grow from it.
It doesn't mean there isn't good in the writings, it's good to take the positive from things, with the hope that it doesn't let in any of the negative unintended.
That part stands out to me though as where it's perspective might not be for the many, but the few.
- My diet (Mediterranean), with absolutely zero processed foods.
- Sleep (red light on evenings, no screens 1 hour before sleep).
- Daily exercise (lifting and 30 minutes of zone 5 cardio weekly).
My appreciation for life has skyrocketed, I don't feel like I'm being oppressed by life, and my depression symptoms are gone. I used to think the root cause of it all was a pretty rough childhood. It turns out, it's just 'crap in, crap out.' It has been jarring to me that my inner experience and mental health could so drastically change in such a short amount of time.
So yeah, it's anecdotal, but I'm pretty inclined to agree with this article.
Having been involved in the publishing of psychology research I have zero faith in the systems ability to properly control for bullshit.
Trauma informed muppets like Kolk and Gabor Mate are running around spouting absolute bullshit and it’s hurting people, imagine being raised by a parent who read and believed this bullshit, worse still they’ve been to talks by flops like Gabor Mate and are balls deep in whatever viral self help podcast meme is trending…let them
Kolk wrote the article the body keeps the score in 1994 at the height of the memory wars, he spent the next 20 years undeterred, developing and spreading his bullshit and now nearly 30 years later it’s still being talked about and propagated.
https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/alleg...
AFAICT, this is a pop psychology book that tries to make some interesting topics digestible to a mass audience. Topics that are mostly speculative to begin with, and don't have concrete evidence in any direction.
For example, the entire field of epigenetics has been argued to be pseudoscience, and yet there has been some interesting research around it. Related to the topic of stress specifically, and how effects have been observed across generations[1].
Clearly, more research is needed, but to dismiss it as quackery outright wouldn't be helpful. Many ideas that were initially perceived as outlandish eventually lead to a better understanding of the world. Scientific progress depends on people willing to go beyond the boundaries of conventional knowledge, often at the expense of their reputation.
This reminds me of the uproar in archeology circles about the work of Graham Hancock. He presents himself as a journalist and author, and certainly not an archeologist or scientist, who simply raises some interesting questions about the past. His work is often dismissed as pseudoscientific quackery, which is funny to me since he never claims it to be scientific at all. It is edutainment content for a mass audience interested in these topics, nothing more than that.
I agree. Like diets, whatever works for you is the "right" answer. At lot of psychological theory can be thought of as just a model to help you make changes regardless of the physical validity of the model.
I read The Body Keeps the Score about 10 years ago after experiencing a particularly traumatic event. I had been searching for answers at the time for how to heal from the event, and someone recommended the book to me.
I had distilled my memory of the book into the intuitive idea represented by the title that the body remembers what happens to it which of course there is some truth to. So my first reaction to the headline was a bit defensive, "of course it's not bullshit!"
But I had forgotten how much emphasis was put on there being significant lasting changes from events that we couldn't even remember.
> The idea that trauma causes long-lasting damage to the brain and or body is central to van der Kolk’s thesis.
> his narrative paints this hopeless picture of trauma victims as being people who most aspects of their lives are “dictated by the imprint of the past.”
And now I remember that when I read the book originally looking for answers to my own traumas, it left me feeling hopeless, overwhelmed and permanently damaged from what I had gone through. I remember thinking that the high stress I was going through at the time was going to leave me permanently struggling with issues like high cortisol and inability to function normally. Absolutely NOT the message I needed at the time.
Ten years on, my brain is normal and healthy, and I don't have any perceptible problems with cortisol or PTSD-like symptoms. I'm living a healthy, normal life, and not walking around with a heavy trauma score in my body.
That's not to say that trauma from my past didn't play a role in making me who I am today, or that I don't still carry some memories of the difficult events. But I've found my brain to be very plastic and to heal and rewrite itself quite well. And all of the measurable markers of brain health, stress hormones, etc are fully back to normal, healthy ranges.
That's just my anecdote, and I also appreciated the thorough scientific analysis in this article!
If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is down".
> That is, trauma doesn’t lead to dysfunction or abnormal brain function, physiology or hormonal regulation. Rather, an unhealthy person may be more susceptible to trauma.
What has been documented about Adverse Childhood Experiences doesn’t agree with this. There is copious evidence that the presence of ACEs, independent of other factors, leads to poor health outcomes [1]
It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future trauma [2]
There's also data indicating CPTSD, PTSD, and Borderline are distinct disorders [3]
1 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/ https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
2 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5858954/
3 - https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-p...
The problem I'm seeing more and more is that these pop culture trauma books are targeted at the widest audience possible. These authors push trauma as the explanation for everything, so people seeking self-help read these books and assume that trauma must be at the root of the problem they're seeking.
For some people, this is true. Identifying and addressing trauma is helpful.
Many conditions can occur without a traumatic root or trigger, though. For people trying to understand and improve their condition, falling into one of these trauma books sends them down a path of trying to force their problem to fit the trauma mold so they can use the trauma tools.
I've written on HN before about how one of the more famous trauma influencers and frequent podcast guests does this (I'm not going to name him because it triggers reactive downvotes and attacks from his fans and I don't want to debate that): He starts searching for "trauma" in his patients' past to use as a starting point for therapy. If he can't find anything he goes back further and further, until arriving at birth. Birth, he claims, is a deeply traumatic experience that can cause issues later in life like relationship problems, attention issues at work, and so on. In this way, everyone who has ever existed now qualifies for trauma therapy because everyone was born, and therefore everyone has trauma that might explain all of their problems in this world.
The conflict of interest is obvious: Once they get a taste of book sales, podcast appearances, or social media fame it becomes against their best interests to narrowly define their practice to classic textbook trauma. So to maximize their appeal, they redefine trauma to be something much simpler such that everyone qualifies (to buy their book). This does a disservice to people with PTSD and really dilutes the concept of these psychiatric terms.
But, I do recognize the importance of models. Our brains are complex, lacking the capacity to comprehend everything, we make models. Models are incomplete (by definition) and often false. But can still be very useful. Or very useful to some. Where useful means: help someone lead a more fulfilling, better life.
So I try not to judge. Even though I try to seek truth. To be a scientist. I know there are useful models out there.
I workout vigorously 3-4 times a week, try to avoid the regular bad stuff with diet, etc. It doesn't stop the adrenaline dump from being in an abusive relationship for a number of years when there's a minor problem, and it doesn't stop me from randomly having my brain completely shut down when I (unfortunately) remember some aspects of my childhood.
What has helped it CBT and time. The book in mention helped me understand why I feel the way I do, and that deeply rooted trauma (PTSD) exists as a misprogramming of your brain by a traumatic experience that is not "surface level" to trivially identify, and your brain is an excellent helper in compartmentalizing this for your own survival. Whether the information is wrong or right isn't what I care about. It's that it simply provided me a framework from which I could approach the problems I previously didn't really understand and led me on a journey of self discovery and bumpy healing I wouldn't have done otherwise. An inaccurate model is infinitely better than no model.
The author of the substack does an excellent job at taking something that we barely understand (psychology has a lot of problems of reproducibility) and generalizing it into a bullshit youtube short tier soundbite of an article with less information than the book he claims is nonsense. Reading his other article for reference I would be suspect of the author's credibility in any aspect of science other than the dangers of inhaling your own farts.
I especially the call back to another article of his that suggests that just loading up on exogenous testosterone is positively correlated with less PTSD. Funny enough I have had above-average testosterone through most of my life and yet I still managed to get a mild-to-medium form of PTSD.
As I read this I kept thinking that it seemed too skeptical to be rationally critical. Which isn't necessarily an improvement over the book.
My intuition (I know, that isn't better than the book or this post) is that there's truth in both places, and we'd ultimately land somewhere in the middle if we had access to the truth.
This touches on the nature vs nurture problem, wherein there never seems to be a clear victor and the answer seems to be that both play a role depending on what you're measuring. It's also very difficult to say how the chicken and egg scenario unravels, since we don't know what's the chicken and what's the egg, so to speak. The author seems to think they know—confidently as you mentioned—but it's abundantly murky to me.
I suppose we need confident people pushing in all directions to help us look more deeply in places and ways we otherwise might not. But wow, it gets tiring to see such unapologetic bias in scientific contexts. I admittedly stopped reading just passed the half way point and should probably keep most of my opinions about it to myself.
But what she said about the therapy (since I always want to know how everything works) is that trauma is basically emotional memory. Y’know how you might have a visual memory about how a certain place looked like when you visited, or sensual memory of how a favorite food tasted, or muscle memory for how to ride a bike, or cognitive memory of how to solve a math problem? The same thing happens with emotions - they get stored away in the brain’s memory centers and can intrude on your present at some later time.
But emotion, by definition, is “that which causes motion”. So if you have a bunch of traumatic memories (oftentimes not even with visual or cognitive components - mine didn’t have them), those emotions continue to influence how you behave for years afterwards. That’s what memory is.
And the point of EMDR is that for some unknown reason, the act of focusing your eyes across the parts of your visual field controlled by different hemispheres forces those emotional memories back into consciousness, where you can then recast and retrigger them based on present-day experience. It literally is implanting false memories - that’s the point - but you want false memory of the event because the true emotional memory is no longer serving you well in the present.
Would be like saying you should hammer people on how much grieve they must be feeling because they lost a dog. Now, nor should you also scold people for feeling said grief. It is very personal and hard to really know what experience someone will have until they have it.
But there are treatments. Last I read exposure therapy and EMDR were the two main ones. I don't think I'd be a big fan of exposure until the reactions have been significantly reduced, but everyone is different. EMDR didn't do much for me, but Internal Family Systems did. CBT is also great for some people.
“The Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell”
Technically what I’m saying is wrong. What the mitochondria does is so vast and confusing that no sentence like that can ever encompass its role. In fact, even using the word “role” is questionable because it presumes that the mitochondria’s sole function is to work as a team with other organelles/biological structures when in fact biology doesn’t really care about some abstract idea like “team.” All language is derived from analogy, and all analogies are insufficient to describe reality. In fact, mathematicians now agree that even math is an insufficient language. It can’t fully describe the territory. It can only make maps of it, and all maps are only useful because they are compressed and packaged versions of the territory. The question is just, “how much compression is useful?”
We live in a world where science communication is so atrophied that the flat earth, and creationist theories are still in circulation. Scientists have dramatically failed to market their ideas to the masses, despite the fact that these ideas are inherently compelling. To me, the reason why they’ve failed seems obvious: because they’re so busy tearing down science communicators that none of them can ever get a real hold on the public. And why? Because the books they write are at compression level that the scientists arbitrarily deem irresponsible.
This guy wrote a compelling story about the barrier between mind/body. To do that, he must have distributed a viral package of psychological terminology and concepts. It was then distributed to and consumed by millions of people. In all likelihood, the fact that they were excited by this book probably led them to read other books like it. They probably encountered conflicting ideas, questioned them, and looked them up. They probably have a much rounder understanding of these ideas now than they did when they first read them.
Now this other guy writes a story and all it says is “yo that dude was wrong.” How helpful! How useful! And let’s be 100% clear: the person writing this isn’t communicating the absolute truth. They’re also compressing their ideas. In 100 years, I bet you any psychologist that reads both books will shake their head and point out all the flaws in their analogies. Meanwhile, the cycle continues: the scientists tear each other down and the masses continue sacrificing innocent children to appease the blood god.
Don't forget the red flag of "Makes me feel better about myself or my situation." Especially if it implies one's superiority over others.
I've often had the experience of reading an article and thinking, "This says people with quality X are, against common sense, actually better at Y. Hey, I have quality X! Aw, rats. This is probably bunk and I'm too flattered to see the errors."
"In the textbook Evolutionary Psychology, the authors explain that a particular hunter gatherer population isn’t as susceptible to PTSD despite being exposed to similarly tragic events. They argue that part of the physiological changes that come along with PTSD are increased inflammation in the body. Thus, the inflammatory nature of a standard western diet may make some people more susceptible to PTSD."
"A 2020 study on Turkana warriors in Kenya found them to be much less likely to develop PTSD-related symptoms compared to US combat vets despite also experiencing gruesome acts in a war zone."
Where is the proof that diet causes PTSD?
> History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma
i’m extremely skeptical that people move on
they suppress, they survive, but without deep understanding its impossible to say move on
you can be ignorant and survive, or face reality and climb the deeply uphill battle of real growth.
of course you can be paralyzed by it, but no one is advocating for that as treatment
I do think it’s remarkable that there’s much salvageable at all in it, given the age of the work (though a fair amount of ancient philosophy remains relevant, or at least functions as good reading and exercises along the lines of koans for developing philosophical ways of thinking, an awful lot is effectively obsolete and only of historical interest) and that it came from one of the most powerful people on the planet. It’s not often you get something with much enduring value at all from someone who also happens to be at or near the pinnacle of human hierarchies of their day.
Though, in fairness, he’s mostly repackaging stuff he learned from others, it’s not exactly original thinking in the same way as the chain of works from Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, say.
Still, it’d be like, I dunno, Franklin Roosevelt penning a philosophically-inclined self-help book that was still widely read and referenced beyond the year 3,000 and in languages that didn’t exist when it was written. Pretty distinctive, very few works at all in that class, and almost none from the perspective of someone that highly placed politically, despite a strong bias in general toward works from the rich and powerful being created at all, and surviving. I’d say the only way it’s likely to permanently fade is if/when “western culture”, to perhaps include near-east and Maghreb Muslim culture, fades (there’s so much overlap of the parts people like, with forms of thinking from the East, that I expect it’d have trouble co-existing with them in the same body of thought, as an actively-read item of interest)
>but also any argumentation or evidence that tries to substantiate the claim (including testimony by expert witnesses in my ideal the version of the rule) in legal proceedings.
So you wont also let people substantiate claims? What??
>For example, the rule would not disallow "I was almost killed by the defendant's reckless action" and would not disallow "the defendant's attack put me fear for my life", but it would disallow, "and one of the effects of that experience was psychological trauma".
Have you ever been involved in such a lawsuit, out of curiosity?
The intentional infliction of emotional distress has long been recognized as a tort. You have to substantiate it, of course.
Stoicism treats the (negative) passions as necessarily grounded in false beliefs.
Whereas modern psychology treats our negative emotions as valuable messages that something is affecting our well-being and needs to be addressed.
Stoicism treats negative emotions as errors. Something to be reasoned away, i.e. suppressed. Modern psychology tells us not to reason away but rather to feel fully, to accept, to process and therefore integrate and grow.
However, if you were unlucky enough to suffer with a completely debilitating mental illness, and all you have to treat it are a series of therapies that appear to work for some people, would you not try them?
Trauma therapies like EMDR and CBT can save or transform your life. Maybe they work no better than crystal healing or prayers for some people, but if your life was derailed I bet you would try anything...
I know someone who grew up in rough neighborhoods, has been in fights, been stabbed, divorced alcoholic father and drug using mother, and yet got a master's degree, a fulfilling career, marriage and family.
I know someone else who happened to be in a bank when it was robbed, and has spent years struggling to hold a steady job because the anxiety developed from the experience has persisted. Later divorced and become a poster child for making bad decisions.
The latter has gone to therapy, the former didn't. Small sample size, don't draw any conclusions other than everyone is different, and beware anyone proclaiming universal truths in psychology.
(Edit: someone emailed so for posterity, It was Steven Schram E 28th St NYC, no clue if he's still there it was some time ago.)
Stoicism doesn’t tell you to repress feelings. It tells you to examine them, to look at the beliefs behind them. If the belief is false (“this event ruins my life”), you correct it; if it’s true, you accept the feeling without letting it take over.
The Stoics called destructive emotions “passions,” but they also recognized healthy ones, like rational joy, caution, and goodwill. The goal isn’t emotional numbness, it’s clarity and alignment with reason and nature.
So, far from emotional blindness, Stoicism actually inspired the same kind of introspection that modern psychology promotes, just with a different vocabulary.
I would encourage you to read about CBT’s history and it’s influence on more modern psychology techniques. It’s likely that you are representing the Stoicism you commonly read about these days, on reddit, youtube and even on some books that take some liberties on translating it or do a bad job of it (it’s hard…). Most modern sources absolutely suck. A good translation from the original greek sources of Epictetus is very hard to come by.
That's the "classical" mindset that modern empirical studies are refuting.
Actually, no, people are often not very resilient at all in moving on from trauma. They suffer greatly, they traumatize others, and it affects their health.
Just because you've got a scar doesn't mean it's bad, nor does it mean you haven't moved on if you haven't spent 6 months staring at the healing process. Some people heal quicker, some heal better, some heal slower, some heal worse. Like pretty much everything in biology, it's something of a spectrum.
I have discussed the book with various medical authorities. Not a single one disagreed or was negative towards it.
And that's what's frustrating when people want to invalidate the whole thing. They just don't know -- they haven't experienced anything like it. But they act like they do know.
Now obviously, scientific validation of these things is important to better understand causes, mechanisms, and healing methods.
But when people claim that the body doesn't store trauma as muscular tension, it's just frustrating because it feels like willful ignorance. Whether they don't know the stories of millions of people like yourself, or choose not to believe them.
I have a cousin that had frequent, overwhelming anxiety attacks. She started eating breakfast consistently and the anxiety disappeared at the same time. Anxiety is strongly linked to gut activity, so the temporal correlation is a smoking gun, even if not dispositive.
For her, "understanding past trauma" was irrelevant to the solution.
That goes together nicely with everyone on HN insisting that HN commenters are "special" and "different" from people on the rest of the internet. I guess because we are more likely to like the color orange?
Most people insist they are above average drivers.
The reason I'm not living the dream could be that it's impossible, or I haven't tried hard enough. I don't want to believe either of those. I'd rather believe that something happened to me in my past that rewired my brain to stifle my full potential. Then I could still hope to someday achieve my dreams, while not doing anything to progress towards them.
It's not popular because it's right. It's popular because it's so, so appealing.
>I think Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Mate’s heavy handed trauma narrative is [bad]
followed immediately by
>However if they ‘treat’ their trauma with things like yoga, meditation, psychedelics and have some benefits, it’s very likely they would have had the benefits regardless of whether they viewed it as some sort of trauma treatment or not.
I suppose the author has never heard of placebo effects? Talk about a heavy-handed narrative.
Author also seems to be skeptical of the idea that stress and inflammation can be a major cause of disease in the body. I might just be reading into things, but if that's an accurate assessment on my part, it's wildly inaccurate.
What I'm talking about is traditional psychodynamic therapy that is about integration and growth. Not about changing behavioral patterns merely on the surface via cognitive reframing. When you actually allow yourself to integrate and process your emotions, the kind of mental work that stoicism and CBT focus on becomes unnecessary for most people. (CBT techniques can be helpful as a kind as urgent emergency measures, but not as a long-term solution.)
I know you seem to think I've gotten my ideas from Reddit. I can assure you, I've studied this stuff extensively both from the psychology and therapeutic sides of the literature. I've even written, critiquing Seneca's On Anger. I'm not operating from some pop understanding here. What disappoints me is the modern popularity of stoicism within certain circles today, because it actually contains some very harmful ideas.
> After adjustment for confounding, there were statistically significant positive associations for people reporting four or more ACEs relative to those reporting no ACEs, and this was true for all chronic diseases except hypertension.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8462987
A twin study would be about as close as we could get to a randomized control trial:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
I'm willing to use the term "cause" here, given the copious amount of studies controlling for other confounders. That's the best we can do given there's no ethical way to run a randomized control trial.
The core thesis of the book (per Claude) is: "Traumatic experiences become encoded in the body's nervous system, muscles, and organs, not just in conscious memory."
The perfect exposition of the concept is downthread, in a comment by 'neom, which I will excerpt: "[The acupuncturist] moved the needle, [I did] more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my hip." (Thank you for sharing, neom.)
I've had two similar experiences myself in the last year. I haven't read the book and don't know how this subject shows up in the scientific literature, but the proprioceptive experience leaves zero room for doubt about what is happening.
People say lots of dumb and wrong things about trauma. Maybe the book contains some of that, but its titular observation is fascinating, true, and maybe even useful!
I'll close with a related theory of mine, also derived through proprioception: one of the functions of the full-body sob is to reorganize muscular patterns which share an origin with (are identical to?) the emotional origin of the tears.
However, I concede that there's kind of a hammer and nail problem in therapy. They learn about how much trauma and childhood experience effects a person and tend to laser focus on that because they feel confident doing so. I think there's a certain unhealthines to spending too much time dwelling on the past. Up to some level it's ok, but there should be at least equal focus on the present, future, and agency+self-confidence+self-discovery. Whereas a typical client would not be unreasonable to feel more like a victim given the focus on past experiences and traumas, which naturally reinforces a past-oriented victim mindset. Meanwhile, what most people need is a sense of being able to make things better now and work toward a better future, and practical tools to do so (agency).
Of course, for severe cases, you should probably focus on dealing with the trauma and get the client to a more stable state before taking off the coddling gloves.
But I'm also growingly sympathetic to the idea that telling people they are, in fact, traumatized, is not healthy. People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are told. Especially from authority.
A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.
I specifically wanted to touch on the cycle of trauma & ADHD that's discussed in the article.
> That is, the ADHD leads to very negative experiences. Having had negative experiences (trauma) doesn’t lead to ADHD.
I think integrating traumatic experiences can have a lot of benefits to people, especially in the absence of easy fixes - as far as I know there's not really a smoking gun for ADHD, or borderline, etc. I'd argue the causality matters a bit less here. I say this even though I genuinely hated the fatalistic nature of the Body Keeps the Score, but I think Everett is a bit too quick to discard that the mind is relevant at all. I'd love to be proven wrong.
At least for myself, I've noticed increased well-being / reduced trauma responses when I avoid relationships that cause me a lot of stress, get enough sleep, and exercise regularly. But my baseline disposition is still there, and it's hard to untangle whether or not that's from trauma or from my body.
Everett argues that it's probably just my body (low T / high inflammation / too sensitive?) and I don't think that's very actionable. I'd argue that mind-body link goes in both directions, but that's purely anecdotal.
I also really liked softwaredoug's take on Adverse Childhood Experiences in the thread above.
No it isn't. You might have interpreted it that way, but there's no such assertion. Quite the opposite in fact: the book details therapies like yoga, EMDR, neurofeedback, and somatic experiencing; each demonstrating body to mind causality.
That is indicative of cherry picking the authorities you chose to discuss it with, since the problems with this book and the theories behind it are both well-known and well-documented. Start here:
And yes, Graham Hancock's theories are also pseudoscience, and branding it as "edutainment" doesn't make that any better (if anything, it's worse because it implies deliberately targeting an audience that can't tell the difference!).
that said, I don't live in a coastal city where there might be more accommodations for such things. where I live, people are generally on their own to find the means to survive. but, in line with the theme of the post, I'm fairly certain people here have a lower life expectancy and generally lower health than people in places where there is a more robust support network. in which case, the body must, in fact, keep the score.
I have an opinion in this area.
I worked out a theory about trauma and ADHD. It is that they cohabitate (or operate in) the same area. I suspect they each serve to stunt learning by negatively impacting the reward mechanism that cements learning.
The above notions flow from my considerations of my own abuse, neglect and cognizance issues. I have some confidence that they explain much of my long term learning issues.
Explanation
I have always experienced ADHD as a brain fog that obscures and distorts the details involved in natural learning. During childhood, I required a methodical and rigorous study of the same mundane details that my peers absorbed trivially. When my peers felt reinforcing joy in learning, I felt exhaustion and frustration as I raced to catch up to them. Eventually I could mimic their understanding - but by then they had grown further.
During the catching up, I learned a lot of details and had moments where my reward would kick in. But it was for trivialities - for things I achieved that most children learn w/o notice. My positive expressions here could be confusing and discomforting to peers and others and I learned to suppress those feelings.
Regarding abuse and neglect. They pushed my reward system out, much more directly. I learned to bury responsive joy when I received abuse in response. I abandoned responsive joy when it lead to nothing (instead of needed, nurturing reinforcement).
I will note here that children do not do well when given adult-sized burdens of internalizing emotional systems that, in healthy environments, are openly and freely expressed. Emotional misfires are the predictable result of poor containment.
By adolescence, my reward system was reliably - 1) not there when I needed it and 2) often overly-present at unhelpful times. I mistrusted of one of the best parts of being human.
For me, abuse and ADHD were two persistent vectors toward this one transformative outcome, my broken reward system.
For an epilogue, Adderall has been a late stage, happy-ish outcome to this story. Every day, I reliably get a period of trivially-triggered reward. Into this, I can feed experiences and receive learning and understanding. I often say it is the difference between me receiving a lesson and learning it.
This is much better than no payout at all. However, I am distressed by the many interests (DEA,pols) who regularly attack my meds and want to take this away from me.
I think people who deny this have not experienced serious childhood trauma. I agree that body might not keep the score for everything, but sometimes it really does.
The other thing that happened after reading the book is that I've become aware of how common trauma is. 4 out of 5 my college buddies experienced variety of early traumas: SA, alcoholism. Often I can sense trauma while speaking with someone. There is awkwardness, intensity in their gaze, emotions slightly off. I used to be attracted to it.
But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.
I suspect we would largely align on the idea that growth is the important part. We would also largely agree that trauma is real. Question is how do you combine those ideas?
There is also an element of… it’s easier to get out of a shitty headspace if you’re not already stuck in a shitty present. I moved out of my home town when I turned 18 and went to university 3 hours away. Close enough that I stayed in touch with my family but far enough away that the day-to-day chaos didn’t affect me. Cell phones weren’t a thing yet so there were plenty of viable excuses for not answering the phone.
In your second example, unlike mine, the person spirals downwards instead of escaping. They start out as anxious from the robbery, then end up anxious and unemployed. Then anxious, unemployed, and divorced. It’s pretty tough to think clearly about addressing and processing the robbery when you’re not sure if you’re going to have enough money for groceries and rent.
And agreed that "severe" cases are almost certainly special cases that should be treated as such. PTSD would almost certainly always qualify as severe?
But the idea that people have "in the womb" trauma just feels patently silly.
I'm no expert either, but for sure there are psychology and sociology studies about generational differences, openness, and things like that.
I dunno, in my experience, not really a lot of people?
And the people that did - and yes, they absolutely exist - seem to have some kind of disorder. They all probably would have benefited from therapy and/or medication. They probably do need sympathy (maybe not the way they wanted), may or may not have been victims, and are sort of special cases.
Most people just want to be normal, to have a job, to go see movies, to play games, to spend time with friends, partners, lovers, family.
This is just my life's experience though. Maybe I'm the weird one.
Years in the trenches have taught me that many people who seem successful, put-together, and happy are deeply struggling or causing harm to the people closest to them.
Also, falsifiability is broadly rejected as solution to the demarcation problem.
I honestly think a lack of grounding in philosophy of science leads people to draw the line between science and pseudo-science based on nothing but vibes. For example, I've seen people reject mainstream psychiatry as totally pseudoscience and then endorse evolutionary psychology, a field with a huge bullshit issue.
I assess it as being correct in noticing a lot of "smoke" around mind body connections. But I found almost all the causeual linkages to be "... really???".
Consciousness in general seems to be poorly understood outside of the "normal experience" state.
I said growth is the important part. If you are focusing people on identifying themselves as traumatized, you are doing it wrong. You want to focus them on how to grow. Be that be letting go, coming to terms, whatever. Really depends on the trauma.
This is a weak argument. He has a platform far bigger than any actual archeologist, he consistently misrepresents the archeological viewpoint, he 'just asks questions' about a bunch of coincidences to advance a pseudo-scientific theory that just doesn't make any sense, and then he whines about being silenced when some youtube videos (with a view count substantially lower than his audience) say 'these are some cool sites, but what you're saying doesn't make any sense, and BTW archeologists don't actually think the things you're saying they think'
> A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.
It doesn't really seem like claiming victimhood is a broadly-repeatable way to make a living for the masses more than 30 years ago... many things that were intended in the 60s and 70s to try to make up for historic victimization have been rolled back in recent decades. But I suppose this could apply to Rush Limbaugh and such - beating the "white males are the persecuted ones, actually!" drum of anger leading to the much-aggrieved whiny MAGA brigade.
It sounded to me like his issue was with the claim that there are direct, systematic physical effects directly consequent to the psychological experience. It didn’t sound like an argument against claims like “a rough childhood reverberates into adulthood,” or “traumatic experiences have profound consequences for people.”
If anything, it would seem to me that, to effectively treat people struggling with post-traumatic consequences, it would be useful to understand whether or not your efforts would be usefully invested in physical interventions to address these supposed physical changes. Or if the best treatments are not medical but psychological, or social, or spiritual, or whatever.
It also has that tone scientists use when they speak of Malcolm Gladwell: annoyed that he misrepresents careful experimental findings in service of a good accessible narrative. Even if what he’s saying could turn out to be true—taking issue with the claim that it’s been scientifically demonstrated to be so. Which I’m sympathetic to.
Which is uncomfortably pragmatic. Many people can go weeks while only directly interacting with a handful of Internet-based services, most of which are presented as apps.
I'm waiting for the day that the lines blur even further and people start saying "my Apple doesn't work" when AWS goes down and 1/3 of their iPhone apps stop working. Or the day that ISPs stop acting as carriers and the Internet truly factions.
This is true for a man, not true for a woman. Women in general get a lot of sympathy and things for saying they are a victim. Men just benefit from hiding it as you say though, there is no reason for men to show this.
Both of those have huge bullshit issues, that is the problem with such sciences you have to pick your poison and that guy just picked another than you prefer. Big things like stereotype threat turned out to just be bullshit, but you still see people believing in it since they want to believe in the idea rather than whats actually real.
Edit: Also almost everyone resorts to evolutionary psychology arguments when it suits them, such as why so many eats themselves fat etc.
The annoying thing here is that it's simply not true, especially in regards to men. It's still the norm to be told to suck it up, or you're not a real man. It's toxic masculinity, and it's obvious that's taken on a massive rise in popularity, thanks to folks like Joe Rogan and the like.
Disallowing testimony about psychological trauma is consistent with criminalizing intentional attempts to cause it -- and in fact the vast majority of attempts to cause psychological trauma are probably covered by existing laws against assault.
(Also, I hope everyone realizes that not all emotional distress is psychological trauma.)
not agreeing with one side or other - because i frankly don't know enough about it to form an opinion, but using "correlation != causation" is basically a discussion stopper.
This is pretty much that "the child has bad vibes" tweet except serious.
As a kid into my teens I had plenty of my own trama, but was quiet and generally didn't interact with many other people my age, generally having friendships with people much older than I was. Once I got into my late twenties this turned around and I ended up being the person who many other people my age and younger would come and talk to about their lives. In general I'm just quiet and let them talk. Listening to a lot people talk about their lives has let me see one thing.
A lot of people are really screwed up from their childhood and bring it into their adulthood
The number of women that have been sexually assaulted or raped that disclose it is downright depressing, especially in their childhood. More depressing is the number of 'high status' people that cover it up.
The number of men that have some kind of depression coping mechanism such as alcoholism or hidden drug use is disturbing too. And a lot of these people are the ones you can't tell. They have successful jobs and make good money, have a wife and kids. All the checkboxes of supposed happiness. But so often these are things they had to do at some point after being driven by narcissistic parents for years. Trama driven workaholics with no at home coping mechanisms are common too.
I have no idea how much people that have had trauma can be fixed. What I'd really like to see is the signs if it taught younger so kids and learn how to avoid it and call it out.
I have known a few people who had they not dwelled so much on events, I wonder if their trauma would have been middling instead of major. Hard to say for sure, but I am not the only person to observe these folks seemed to be making their trauma more traumatic.
Trauma is a very politically charged topic anyhow with at least a few modern political movements tying themselves to it, it would be very inconvenient for it to not be an all encompassing problem.
Would I have to give up on my scepticism to do so? Why?
If I was in distress, and if there was no well-proven treatment available, I'd probably have a go provided the therapy wasn't actually a scam or actively harmful. I'd probably even attempt to engage with it honestly and openly.
But I'd temper my expectations based on the lack of reproducable evidence.
When I reported being assaulted, I was vigorously encouraged to attend counselling, and it was suggested to me that if I felt fine I should allow myself to be persuaded otherwise.
I have heard anecdotes of e.g. rape victims not being believed because they don't seem to be traumatised enough.
It's also the norm to be told that you need to be vulnerable and share your trauma and you're lesser if you don't. Men get shamed for both not being enough of a victim and being too much of a victim, and have no winning move.
> of course you can be paralyzed by it, but no one is advocating for that as treatment
Nominally yes. But in practice what are the effects of the treatments that people advocate for? Do people end up better or worse off?
In looking for an explanation, he might be outside his expertise. Let's ask someone who does it well.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_...
>You will observe that she is writing this nonsense not in a peer reviewed journal that could take her to task, e.g. McCall's, but in the WSJ. Why would the WSJ want to support "the Chinese mother?" Because if you're reading it, it's for you.
Scientists, however prominent, announcing a "groundbreaking" theory outside of the scientific press should always be considered with lots of skepticism.
I mean people would even try those with enough distress. And to be fair a lot of surprising innovation comes from people trying those! But of course mostly they're a scam or actively harmful.
There’s a lot of historic terms to describe people suffering from traumatic experiences like shell shocked (WWI), soldier’s hart (US civil war), lost/bewildered (US Revolutionary War), etc going back literally thousands of years.
I have a hard time seeing this. I find it incredibly difficult to fool myself intentionally. Any time I try my brain just remembers it in a way where I don't get fooled.
Also, the mechanism you explained implies that you could get rid of trauma by yourself any time you remembered the traumatic experience and just blasted yourself with another emotion. Eg eat chocolate when you remember that painful fall.
Can you expand on that? When you say that they get shamed, who or what is causing it?
There was certainly a fairly prominent British psychologist (IIRC) a handful of years ago who disparaged some of the anxiety and depression awareness campaigns on the grounds that being more aware of psychological ailments like that, when they were on the minor end of the scale and not actually debilitating, was probably unhelpful. That actually in his opinion "suck it up and get on with your life" might be the best advice sometimes, because such conditions can become self-fulfilling, and getting on with your life, doing stuff and achieving things might be the best remedy. Rather than dwelling on the problem and giving yourself the excuse "I am depressed/anxious"
I don't know how/if that maps to trauma, and there was a lot of backlash...
I'm not familiar with the field's research, but how much of the discussed perspective is linked to this book or the paper it is named for? If removing the book would not leave any supporters for the perspective, then skepticism is in fact the rational conclusion.
This is more-or-less Russell's teapot.
The Body Keeps Score is pseudoscience. This sort of pseudoscience has a pretty long history. Arguably it's repackaged Freud. Freud aside, therapists have a long history of advocating theories that are not supported by science. For example, repressed memories, multiple personality disorder, etc.
CPTSD is an area where there is a lot of bad research partially because it's not a recognized disorder by the DSM and partially because of its political affiliations. This works from two sides. You get downward pressure on good research because it isn't recognized by most American psychologists. You also get upward presure from researchers whose motivations are political rather than scientific. I don't understand why political groups are interested in CPTSD, I just know that they empirically are [0]. There have previously been strong political interest in other pseudosciences like Freudian psychotherapy and Jung etc. I don't understand this either, but I'm sure there's an explanation.
> It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future trauma
Many people are targeted for abuse because they are different. For example autistic women are especially frequently targeted for abuse. Thus being autistic (genetic) can cause abuse (environmental) and hence trauma. Many people who are especially isolated or have especially poor social skills will be predisposed to being abused multiple times. Partially this is because abusers can tell if you've been abused and, if you have, there's a good chance your previous abusers got away with it.
If you look at the subreddit overlap for CPTSD linked below, you'll notice that there's significant overlap with genetic psychological conditions that predispose people to getting abused. This makes correlational data hard to interpret, especially because so many psychological papers study a small group over a small period of time and ask only a small number of questions.
> This article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-skeptic
This doesn't mean that mainstream science is skeptical about trauma. There is a great deal of good mainstream research on trauma. However, there is also a ton of systematically bad and wrong information on social media about trauma that is popular despite being wrong. So mainstream science is rightfully skeptical about claims that are unsupported by science.
> There's also data indicating...
Finding good psychology articles is something that's much harder than it sounds. Psychology articles are easy to read compared to, say, physics. But there is a lot of really bad psychology out there that you won't be able to filter out without a background in research psychology. In some ways, familiarity with applied psychology but not research psychology makes things harder because so much of the bad research comes from applied psychology.
For example, is this a good study? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26488918/ "Extrasensory Perception Experiences and Childhood Trauma: A Rorschach Investigation"? Well ESP isn't real. Trauma is real. The Rorschach test is nonsense. But it has an nih.gov link. Is J Nerv Ment Dis a high quality journal? What are the biases of its editors?
What about this one? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7342092/ "Personal Experiences With Auditory Verbal Hallucination and Extrasensory Perception" from Schizophr Bull 2019.
I pick on ESP because it's obviously a violation of the law of physics. Yet applied psychologists keep churning out ESP research just like they keep churning out research about things like repressed memory like The Body Keeps the Score.
[0] For example see the list of subreddits similar to r/cptsd https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/cptsd. It's a mix of subs for people with genetic psychological disorders (narcissism, bpd, bipolar, asd, adhd, etc). And a mix of politicized and religious subreddits (FDS, witchesvpatriarchy, menlib, christianity, etc). Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/pr6wh4/cptsd_and_lef...
Often the best cure is for your friends and family to treat you just like normal, except maybe demand a bit less and give space.
> Eg eat chocolate when you remember that painful fall.
Some people do just that and it seems to help them, although they gain some weight.
I haven't listened to Maintenance Phase because it isn't really a topic that I'm all that interested in.
To heal trauma, you have to actually feel your feelings, without getting sucked into them. If you continually repress/avoid/try to control them, you won't get better. If you wallow in them, you also won't get better.
I think this latter point is what causes some people to think that it's harmful to tell people that they are trauma victims, because they might develop a victim mindset. But people who subscribe to this view often go to the opposite extreme and try to deny that trauma exists, which is just as harmful (and useless).
But when you write:
> they seek to agree with what is correct, disagree with what is incorrect
That's the repression part -- the "disagree with what is incorrect". Emotions are not correct or incorrect, they simply are. They are valuable and need to be processed and integrated. If you don't, if you simply conclude that a passion is "incorrect", that is repression. So no, it's not "categorically false".
I hope the discussion has been helpful, whether to you or others here. I've seen stoic philosophy do harm to people, which is why I want people to be aware of how it does not align with current thought on psychological health.
If the message is, "you are traumatized and therefore permanently damaged", you're right - that's not healthy and also not true. But if the message is "you are traumatized and need to process your trauma", then it's more like telling someone that they have a treatable injury. I think this a pretty critical distinction that rarely gets addressed in these kinds of discussions.
A church might be a bit of a reach. A man of God (not a pastor, unless he is ex military/cop/etc or was in the trades) might be able to advise you, but if you aren't Christian I don't think it'll be super helpful.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment?useskin...
Discovering you have trauma is a kind of diagnosis, so now you can figure out the kind of professional help you need.
I don't think there's really an epidemic of trauma hypochondriacs. It's not an excuse to play victim or anything. It's simply important to recognize that trauma means you're probably not going to get better on your own, and you should find help.
Huh? No, that's the whole point, how important and useful it is.
It's to separate out the non-traumatic experiences where you recover just fine... from the genuinely traumatic experiences that do harm you, and for which professional help is really useful in recovering from.
I think the norm now is that you should share your trauma with a therapist, to help heal. I can't imagine telling anyone to share their trauma, regardless of gender.
> and have no winning move.
This is a common incel talking point, and to be honest I don't think it has basis in reality. It's totally fine to share with a therapist and I don't know who would criticize someone for it. If a friend criticizes you for going to therapy, they aren't a friend.
Should you be able to also share with your friend? Yeah, but there's also the concept of trauma dumping, where you use your friends as a therapist, and that has its own problems. Sometimes folks aren't in the right mental space to hear your problems, especially depending on the context (like, were you abused as a child? maybe they were too).
> But not childhood trauma...that makes you weaker
I have only seen "childhood trauma" defined and used as something that has lasting impact. That definition likely comes from studies that study trauma that happens in childhood and how it can have a lasting impact.
Regardless of where it comes from that is how the phrase is typically used.
It would be nice if the field came up with better terms or a better scale that separated out the different traumas by lasting impact, but my assumption is that if it was easy to come up with that kind of scale it probably would have already happened, here is hoping it is easy and it is low hanging from some soon to come along phd student though.
Someone else in the discussion here made a comment that service members should be mad at this blog post, as it is essentially saying that people cause their own adverse experiences. Well, again, the US armed services tend to draw disproportionately from lower socioeconomic groups, who tend to have higher numbers of adverse experiences. It's very hard to disentangle these correlated variables when it comes to outcomes for real people. And it's a total copout to then blame servicemembers for their PTSD.
We have the language of a cycle of abuse, a cycle of poverty, a cycle of violence. People have recognized the cyclicality of this for millennia. It's good the blogpost brings that out.
The thing that disappoints me about the discussion here (and in the blog post) is that there is this relentless focus on the psychology of things. Being homeless as a child, having a parent die, having family die violently, etc all do correlate with higher rates of cardiac disease, diabetes, etc. Again, can't disentangle from the socioeconomic aspects, but you also can't blame a kid for their family member dying. The idea that "unhealthy people may be more susceptible to trauma" has some veins of validity, but is also just deeply unkind, inhuman, and inaccurate taken to an absolute. Kids in foster care, kids who experienced a school shooting, kids who had a parent die of cancer, etc -- it is immorally self-serving to say it's their own fault. You know it's not.
The blog post itself cherry-picks by focusing on PTSD and the brain, ignoring correlations between ACEs and cardiac problems and diabetes. By focusing on the brain, the author can easily imply it's made up weakness (no lab results to confront) and then move on to "just get over it", which is adjacent to "it's not my problem". I'm not a fan of over-therapizing and I don't think therapy or crystals will fix your diabetes. But don't throw the baby out with Bessel van der Kolk's bathwater.
Not to say that I think it’s useful to focus so much on personal trauma outside of therapy, I don’t. But dismissing evidence presented to you without engaging with it doesn’t feel useful either.
You could replace trauma here and start describing most self books or even some business or leadership books. At least some I have read over the last 35 years.
I bet that social media, influence culture, etc makes it easier to reach a wider audience so the problem is larger or maybe just more obvious and definitely speeds up and feedback loop that seems to bottom out to rent seeking in some cases.
>> umm... akshually its your fault your daddy beats you
If you tell prople guten intolerance is a thing, you will cause some people will feel real pain. https://theconversation.com/your-gluten-sensitivity-might-be...
If you tell people trauma is probably no big deal in most cases but to seek help in the unlikely event that it does cause more issues then maybe that's better?
If you tell people gluten intolerance is a thing, you will cause some people will feel real pain. https://theconversation.com/your-gluten-sensitivity-might-be...
And when it comes to stuff that's all in your head anyway, what's the difference between a real disorder and a psychogenic one?
If you tell people trauma is probably no big deal in most cases but to seek help in the unlikely event that it does cause more issues then maybe that's better? It's like they say on the legal disclaimer on Tylenol in Australia - if pain persists see a doctor.
And while I'm couching my words a lot because I don't want to play fake internet doctor, the other side of the argument is also likely not too competent medical opinion.
Dave Asprey made the claim according to the article not the author of the book. The only evidence I see in the article linking the claim to the book is at the end:
> Where then could Dave have gotten this idea that he has trauma from an experience he couldn’t possibly remember? Probably Bessel van der Kolk.
Which is pretty much nothing.
The article does not go into why I should care what Dave Asprey thinks or does not think on trauma. For all I know it is a cherry picked example of a bad opinion disconnected from the book and typical scientific opinion.
What I'm unclear on is the details: is physical trauma a necessary factor in shell shock as it was understood a century or more ago? Is that shell shock the same thing as the combat stress reaction and/or post-traumatic stress disorder? Is PTSD an amalgamation of two different things that aren't the same? To what extent does suggestion worsen the physical vs psychological sides of PTSD? Is suggestion the only thing that causes shell shock, the CSR, and/or PTSD in the absence of physical damage? Etc.
The title of this article isn’t “Criticisms of The Body Keeps the Score”, it is “The Body Keeps the Score Is Bullshit”
If we’re going to editorialize titles I would suggest “Seed oil and testosterone youtuber has opinions on a book about trauma”
I had radiation therapy and 2 years of chemo starting from the age of 1.5 years. During that time, my mother left me alone for a MONTH in the hospital. I've been told the chemo was so bad that at the end, they had to search for veins on my head, since all the veins in my body were already retracted...
I neither am afraid of needles, nor have I ever had therapy in my life. Simply because I didn't need it. I have no PTSD, nor any other aftereffects. The only thing that is obvious now, is that the bond to my mother broke, and I basically feel no "love" towards here, nor do I want to give her any slack for her past and current failings.
This is not intended as a "I am so cool" post. It is simply how my life turned out. Later on, when I learned about PTSD and Trauma, I asked myself several times why I haven't got anything like that. However, the more I think about it, the more it feels like I could unearth something if I really tried.
