If Everything Is ‘Trauma,’ Is Anything?
February 9, 2022 2:33 PM Subscribe
“I had someone tell me the other day that the checkout person at Trader Joe’s was ‘love bombing’ them..." (SLNYT)
The backdrop to all this, of course, is the real, collective “age of trauma” we are all living through. Many things are genuinely not good. When everything feels so dire, why wouldn’t our speech patterns be shaped by those extremes? The Trump years, for instance, brought on the rise of “gaslighter” in place of “liar,” because the latter seemed “just not strong enough anymore,” said [language writer Amanda] Montell. Discussions around systemic racism and inequality have helped usher in concepts like “generational trauma,” or the trauma of racism, or the way that trauma manifests in the body, and such awareness has helped erode the stigma around talking about such problems.
The backdrop to all this, of course, is the real, collective “age of trauma” we are all living through. Many things are genuinely not good. When everything feels so dire, why wouldn’t our speech patterns be shaped by those extremes? The Trump years, for instance, brought on the rise of “gaslighter” in place of “liar,” because the latter seemed “just not strong enough anymore,” said [language writer Amanda] Montell. Discussions around systemic racism and inequality have helped usher in concepts like “generational trauma,” or the trauma of racism, or the way that trauma manifests in the body, and such awareness has helped erode the stigma around talking about such problems.
This strikes me as less "people are misappropriating clinical terms" and more "people are realizing how abusive our culture is."
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:57 PM on February 9, 2022 [157 favorites]
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:57 PM on February 9, 2022 [157 favorites]
Well, "gaslighting" originally meant a sustained campaign to make someone doubt their sanity or the veracity of their perceptions or memories, right? It was more involved than just telling ad hoc lies. If its meaning has changed to just be an intensifier of "lying", so be it, but that is a change.
posted by thelonius at 3:13 PM on February 9, 2022 [124 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 3:13 PM on February 9, 2022 [124 favorites]
Here is a list of sentences from this article where the next sentence begins with "But":
"Like so many online daters before him, Caleb was a creep. But..."
"There is in fact a word, [fuckboi], created entirely for men like this. But..."
"There are plenty of horrible things going on in the world, and serious mental health crises that warrant such severe language. But..."
"Much like “gaslighting” — which comes from a British play that was turned into a Hollywood film, “Gaslight,” in which a husband drives his wife to question her own sanity — “love bombing” became an important term in the domestic violence space to describe patterns of manipulation by an intimate partner. But..."
"That shift was critical in the 1990s and early 2000s to legitimizing the concept of domestic abuse, said the sociologist Paige Sweet, the author of “The Politics of Surviving” — and even helped shelters gain government resources because it “medicalized” the concept. But..."
"Discussions around systemic racism and inequality have helped usher in concepts like “generational trauma,” or the trauma of racism, or the way that trauma manifests in the body, and such awareness has helped erode the stigma around talking about such problems. (We can proudly thank our therapists at the Emmys!) But..."
"Words have always reflected culture. But..."
"“It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re policing the language,” said Mr. Haslam. “But..."
I don't want to say that every time a marginalized group, whether BLM or #MeToo or trans people or the victims of abuse, gains the slightest bit of spotlight there is an explicitly bigoted response from conservatives and a downplaying, dismissive response from liberals in corporate media.
But...
posted by AlSweigart at 3:13 PM on February 9, 2022 [177 favorites]
"Like so many online daters before him, Caleb was a creep. But..."
"There is in fact a word, [fuckboi], created entirely for men like this. But..."
"There are plenty of horrible things going on in the world, and serious mental health crises that warrant such severe language. But..."
"Much like “gaslighting” — which comes from a British play that was turned into a Hollywood film, “Gaslight,” in which a husband drives his wife to question her own sanity — “love bombing” became an important term in the domestic violence space to describe patterns of manipulation by an intimate partner. But..."
"That shift was critical in the 1990s and early 2000s to legitimizing the concept of domestic abuse, said the sociologist Paige Sweet, the author of “The Politics of Surviving” — and even helped shelters gain government resources because it “medicalized” the concept. But..."
"Discussions around systemic racism and inequality have helped usher in concepts like “generational trauma,” or the trauma of racism, or the way that trauma manifests in the body, and such awareness has helped erode the stigma around talking about such problems. (We can proudly thank our therapists at the Emmys!) But..."
"Words have always reflected culture. But..."
"“It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re policing the language,” said Mr. Haslam. “But..."
I don't want to say that every time a marginalized group, whether BLM or #MeToo or trans people or the victims of abuse, gains the slightest bit of spotlight there is an explicitly bigoted response from conservatives and a downplaying, dismissive response from liberals in corporate media.
But...
posted by AlSweigart at 3:13 PM on February 9, 2022 [177 favorites]
Came here to say what NoxAeternum said but turns out I didn’t have to.
posted by bixfrankonis at 3:14 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by bixfrankonis at 3:14 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]
I think it’s good that people are able to name more things as harmful. I’m not sure “trauma” is the right word for everything. For example, a therapist labelled as “traumatic” the fact that I didn’t have friends in primary school. To me, this seems devaluing of actual childhood trauma like abuse or rape.
posted by vanitas at 3:17 PM on February 9, 2022 [47 favorites]
posted by vanitas at 3:17 PM on February 9, 2022 [47 favorites]
I'm not an expert on this topic, but it's something I wonder about a lot.
Some potentially relevant links:
The Rise of Therapy Speak (New Yorker)
Is my brother practicing self-care or just being selfish? (The Outline)
My personal anecdote is I have male friends who use therapy language in ways that strike me as manipulative and self-serving at worst, short-sighted and self-centering at best. One friend in particular says he experiences trauma from sexual abuse because his girlfriend once got upset when he didn't want to have sex. He also says he is disabled because of occasional jaw pain. (Please trust that I am explaining these as charitably as I can -- I understand that many people, myself included, downplay their trauma, and I am very confident this is not the case here.)
As somebody who is disabled to the point of limiting day-to-day function/work, and also as somebody who has been raped, I feel very little solidarity with him, even though he feels we have a lot in common with respect to these issues. When he uses those specific words, which took me a long time in therapy to get myself to use, I feel alienated and diluted. When I mention these things to him, he accuses me of disrespecting his experiences, or being a gatekeeper to using certain words. I respect that his issues cause him a lot of pain and feel for him, but I also feel there are very strong differences in experiences here.
So, I don't know! In my personal case, I think he's being a total asshat, but in general, I don't like the idea of gatekeeping words like trauma/disability/abuse, etc. -- I generally subscribe to the idea that people should feel more open to using them. But I also think language is a tricky, subjective thing and there is real potential for people to be harmed by manipulative and/or non-self-aware people with privilege who are already accustomed to taking up space.
posted by bongerino at 3:27 PM on February 9, 2022 [125 favorites]
Some potentially relevant links:
The Rise of Therapy Speak (New Yorker)
Is my brother practicing self-care or just being selfish? (The Outline)
My personal anecdote is I have male friends who use therapy language in ways that strike me as manipulative and self-serving at worst, short-sighted and self-centering at best. One friend in particular says he experiences trauma from sexual abuse because his girlfriend once got upset when he didn't want to have sex. He also says he is disabled because of occasional jaw pain. (Please trust that I am explaining these as charitably as I can -- I understand that many people, myself included, downplay their trauma, and I am very confident this is not the case here.)
As somebody who is disabled to the point of limiting day-to-day function/work, and also as somebody who has been raped, I feel very little solidarity with him, even though he feels we have a lot in common with respect to these issues. When he uses those specific words, which took me a long time in therapy to get myself to use, I feel alienated and diluted. When I mention these things to him, he accuses me of disrespecting his experiences, or being a gatekeeper to using certain words. I respect that his issues cause him a lot of pain and feel for him, but I also feel there are very strong differences in experiences here.
So, I don't know! In my personal case, I think he's being a total asshat, but in general, I don't like the idea of gatekeeping words like trauma/disability/abuse, etc. -- I generally subscribe to the idea that people should feel more open to using them. But I also think language is a tricky, subjective thing and there is real potential for people to be harmed by manipulative and/or non-self-aware people with privilege who are already accustomed to taking up space.
posted by bongerino at 3:27 PM on February 9, 2022 [125 favorites]
For example, a therapist labelled as “traumatic” the fact that I didn’t have friends in primary school. To me, this seems devaluing of actual childhood trauma like abuse or rape.
And to me, you're falling into the societal trap of defining only specific things as being legitimate. Ostracization can be a form of communal abuse, after all, and not having bonds to others can do lasting harm.
Again, this comes back to my earlier point - people are using these terms because they are realizing that we live in a culture that is in many ways built on abuse. And as a result, many invested in the status quo are trying to argue that it's somehow "wrong" to use the language of abuse and trauma to discuss our culture because they would prefer not to confront the reality of our society.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:28 PM on February 9, 2022 [46 favorites]
And to me, you're falling into the societal trap of defining only specific things as being legitimate. Ostracization can be a form of communal abuse, after all, and not having bonds to others can do lasting harm.
Again, this comes back to my earlier point - people are using these terms because they are realizing that we live in a culture that is in many ways built on abuse. And as a result, many invested in the status quo are trying to argue that it's somehow "wrong" to use the language of abuse and trauma to discuss our culture because they would prefer not to confront the reality of our society.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:28 PM on February 9, 2022 [46 favorites]
But "gaslighting" hasn't had its meaning changed to just be an intensifier of lying. Rather, people are finding a useful word to describe lies that aren't ad-hoc at all but part of organized campaigns to shape perceived truth, i.e. most of social media. That it's very very common should be seen as a problem in and of itself, not a sign that naming it is being overdone. But "you're the real racist for bringing race into the conversation" logic is no stranger to the NYT.
posted by traveler_ at 3:31 PM on February 9, 2022 [45 favorites]
posted by traveler_ at 3:31 PM on February 9, 2022 [45 favorites]
One thing I've noticed about the English language is that we can have a technical term that often takes a modifier (e.g. "severe trauma") and then in time the modifier becomes assumed, to the point that the base word is now inherently modified.
Trauma is literally any damage. Medicine refers to all sorts of relatively minor injuries as trauma. Yes, a stab wound is trauma, but so is an ankle sprain or a bruise.
It doesn't need to be a contest of who had it worse. We all carry some amount of mental trauma, and we'd be better off if we understood that instead of dismissing others' minor injuries just because it doesn't fit an arbitrary threshold.
posted by explosion at 3:35 PM on February 9, 2022 [82 favorites]
Trauma is literally any damage. Medicine refers to all sorts of relatively minor injuries as trauma. Yes, a stab wound is trauma, but so is an ankle sprain or a bruise.
It doesn't need to be a contest of who had it worse. We all carry some amount of mental trauma, and we'd be better off if we understood that instead of dismissing others' minor injuries just because it doesn't fit an arbitrary threshold.
posted by explosion at 3:35 PM on February 9, 2022 [82 favorites]
We are, all of us, competing for attention, and it is genuinely a zero-sum game. When someone successfully gets people to pay more attention to something, one strategy other people can use is using similar language to describe something else that they want people to pay more attention to. "Look! This is also an example of that." This can understandably be seen as a hostile act by the people from whom that attention is being diverted.
posted by straight at 3:39 PM on February 9, 2022 [19 favorites]
posted by straight at 3:39 PM on February 9, 2022 [19 favorites]
"If everything is trauma, is anything?" Yes, everything is trauma. Everyone is hurting. These systems are hurting everyone. It's not hard to believe.
posted by bleep at 3:49 PM on February 9, 2022 [70 favorites]
posted by bleep at 3:49 PM on February 9, 2022 [70 favorites]
The fact that we don't have a great language for describing the nuanced flavors of trauma and abuse in the world does not in any way mean that the trauma and abuse doesn't exist, or that it doesn't harm people in all sorts of nuanced ways.
posted by mhoye at 3:50 PM on February 9, 2022 [20 favorites]
posted by mhoye at 3:50 PM on February 9, 2022 [20 favorites]
I think it’s good that people are able to name more things as harmful. I’m not sure “trauma” is the right word for everything. For example, a therapist labelled as “traumatic” the fact that I didn’t have friends in primary school. To me, this seems devaluing of actual childhood trauma like abuse or rape.
Traumatic seems like not precisely the right word, but the aftereffects on an adult of childhood isolation may be similar.
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:51 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]
Traumatic seems like not precisely the right word, but the aftereffects on an adult of childhood isolation may be similar.
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:51 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]
All I know is that I am very close to ponying up the fiver so I can have the handle "Semantic Creep"
posted by srboisvert at 3:54 PM on February 9, 2022 [80 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 3:54 PM on February 9, 2022 [80 favorites]
In my opinion there are a couple of different factors at play.
One, that is relatively innocuous, is that we are curious creatures. When we are presented with a new conceptual framework, it is a natural and very human thing to do to explore the boundaries of that new concept.
A much less innocuous factor, however, and one which deserves to be called out when encountered, is that many in our society have come to appreciate and covet the potential power of victimhood. It is often a good thing that we are inclined to assign greater moral weight and credibility to the arguments of those whom we perceive as having suffered. However, this impulse can be (and increasingly is being) intentionally co-opted by those who speciously lay claim to victimhood.
We need to guard against the latter without abandoning those concepts that are useful to help us understand the struggles and suffering of others, despite the fact that there will always be those who try to misuse our efforts at understanding to their own advantage.
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:58 PM on February 9, 2022 [47 favorites]
One, that is relatively innocuous, is that we are curious creatures. When we are presented with a new conceptual framework, it is a natural and very human thing to do to explore the boundaries of that new concept.
A much less innocuous factor, however, and one which deserves to be called out when encountered, is that many in our society have come to appreciate and covet the potential power of victimhood. It is often a good thing that we are inclined to assign greater moral weight and credibility to the arguments of those whom we perceive as having suffered. However, this impulse can be (and increasingly is being) intentionally co-opted by those who speciously lay claim to victimhood.
We need to guard against the latter without abandoning those concepts that are useful to help us understand the struggles and suffering of others, despite the fact that there will always be those who try to misuse our efforts at understanding to their own advantage.
posted by Nerd of the North at 3:58 PM on February 9, 2022 [47 favorites]
I think Sarah Schulman, also a New Yorker, contributed some insight into this when she wrote Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair in 2016. I assume the essayist is familiar with this book, because how can someone writing this piece not be, but I would guess they don't want to discuss it for some reason?
posted by polymodus at 3:59 PM on February 9, 2022 [22 favorites]
posted by polymodus at 3:59 PM on February 9, 2022 [22 favorites]
It's not love bombing at TJ's but it is definitely deliberate manipulation. I have long been creeped out by TJ's employee's checkout banter. What they are doing is forced emotional labor on behalf of corporation that is trying to sell things to you by establishing emotional bonds between you and their products via their cashier's social stroking of your purchase choices. It's so ridiculously formulaic that I am sometimes tempted to say "Oh really I heard this hummus was absolutely the worst shit and I like trying out awful shit so that's why I am buying it" but I don't really want to wake an employee up from their protective wage-grind stupor where a manager may see or hear.
posted by srboisvert at 4:00 PM on February 9, 2022 [42 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 4:00 PM on February 9, 2022 [42 favorites]
And to me, you're falling into the societal trap of defining only specific things as being legitimate.
Um. Maybe in a thread that is at least partially about gaslighting you oughtn't be telling someone else how to feel about their own history.
posted by wordless reply at 4:03 PM on February 9, 2022 [21 favorites]
Um. Maybe in a thread that is at least partially about gaslighting you oughtn't be telling someone else how to feel about their own history.
posted by wordless reply at 4:03 PM on February 9, 2022 [21 favorites]
Trauma is literally any damage. Medicine refers to all sorts of relatively minor injuries as trauma. Yes, a stab wound is trauma, but so is an ankle sprain or a bruise.
It is also worth noting that chronic minor stresses can cause debilitating and sometimes painful injuries, in both physical and behavioral contexts. The same motion that causes a barely-noticeable brush of sensation can, if you repeat it over and over again (as in a chafing wound), create a painful sore that takes a long time to heal. Sometimes there is variation also in how sensitive different people's tissues are to injury; for example, post-menopausal hormonal profiles tend to result in weaker bones that are more likely to break under stresses that bones from other kinds of people shrug off. That doesn't make the injury sustained from the stressful event any more or less real.
So too brains.
posted by sciatrix at 4:03 PM on February 9, 2022 [41 favorites]
It is also worth noting that chronic minor stresses can cause debilitating and sometimes painful injuries, in both physical and behavioral contexts. The same motion that causes a barely-noticeable brush of sensation can, if you repeat it over and over again (as in a chafing wound), create a painful sore that takes a long time to heal. Sometimes there is variation also in how sensitive different people's tissues are to injury; for example, post-menopausal hormonal profiles tend to result in weaker bones that are more likely to break under stresses that bones from other kinds of people shrug off. That doesn't make the injury sustained from the stressful event any more or less real.
So too brains.
posted by sciatrix at 4:03 PM on February 9, 2022 [41 favorites]
Not having friends in elementary school could really kind of wear you down, year after year. Did you remember how long it seemed to take to get through elementary school? I had some friends, but I was mocked and bullied by quite a lot of the class for years, and it did some harm. I mean those are formative years, it can make you have a default of fearing and distrusting people. If "trauma" is supposed to denote only things that are more discrete events, if it's coming from a metaphor for a serious physical injury, then it may be getting used more widely because we don't have a good word that's a metaphor to chronic conditions that may not seem that serious on any given day but that go on and on, slowly worsening.
posted by thelonius at 4:10 PM on February 9, 2022 [14 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 4:10 PM on February 9, 2022 [14 favorites]
Suddenly, Demi Lovato is not just annoyed by having to pass by sugar-free cookies in a frozen yogurt shop; the singer is a victim of diet culture’s “harmful messaging.”I mean, the whole point of diet culture is that it's a culture. It's everywhere. The ubiquity is part of what causes the harm. Any particular instance my seem trivial, but the cumulative effect is, in fact, harmful, since we are constantly, unavoidably bombarded with subtle and not-subtle messages that we should be policing our bodies and restricting our food intake. And since Demi Lovato has talked a lot about her ongoing issues with bulimia and has gone public about having recently relapsed, that whole sentence honestly seems like kind of a shitty thing to say.
I agree that people may toss around terms like trauma a little blithely, although sometimes I think it's humorous exaggeration for effect, rather than actually thinking their random bad day was really traumatic. But I dunno: I'm unconvinced that this is a serious societal problem.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:29 PM on February 9, 2022 [18 favorites]
And since Demi Lovato has talked a lot about her ongoing issues with bulimia and has gone public about having recently relapsed, that whole sentence honestly seems like kind of a shitty thing to say.
Lovato’s trauma is real but i don’t think it’s trivial that this specific legitimate complaint was leveled at a local froyo stand to her millions of social media followers.
posted by girlmightlive at 4:43 PM on February 9, 2022 [6 favorites]
Lovato’s trauma is real but i don’t think it’s trivial that this specific legitimate complaint was leveled at a local froyo stand to her millions of social media followers.
posted by girlmightlive at 4:43 PM on February 9, 2022 [6 favorites]
“Gaslighting” is now “thrown out anytime someone’s perception of something is challenged,” said Shantel Gabrieal Buggs, a sociologist at Florida State University.
I've seen this one many times online -- people accusing others of "gaslighting" them merely for disagreeing with them about a situation.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:44 PM on February 9, 2022 [32 favorites]
I've seen this one many times online -- people accusing others of "gaslighting" them merely for disagreeing with them about a situation.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:44 PM on February 9, 2022 [32 favorites]
Nerd of the North, I’m really racking my brains and can’t think of an example that I think you’re describing at the end of your comment - there are a couple of stories that come to mind, but I don’t feel confident that I’ve understood your meaning. Would you be willing to share examples of what you’re thinking about around the claiming of victimhood?
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 4:49 PM on February 9, 2022
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 4:49 PM on February 9, 2022
Blythe Trauma, my new lifestyle. I had a Doctor who said to me, "People say that life is wonderful and then sometimes awful things happen. But, they are wrong. Life is difficult and sometimes good things happen." I definitely think we need clear language to describe what happens to us, and how we feel about those goings on. Clinical language is not such a bad thing for the general discussion, because it comes from an area of the brain more easy to manage, even with trauma. Having close friends to let down with is necessary in this time when many people are also traumatized by family, or family's response to their reality, either caused by family, or familial rejection over issues, and inappropriate control of private states or choices.
People get to have the discussion. People are lucky if they have able friends, good with the discussion, good with support, full of liking and love. Not having that, there is the therapeutic community, self help guides, churches, pastors, all of nature.
But, however it goes down, we get to talk about it. Be brave, do it personally if at all possible. The internet has a way of tearing the bandaids off and leaving wounded people sitting alone in front of the screen. So, talk your head off, use the language you choose, and fight against those who would shade your light, and heal as well as you can.
posted by Oyéah at 4:54 PM on February 9, 2022 [10 favorites]
People get to have the discussion. People are lucky if they have able friends, good with the discussion, good with support, full of liking and love. Not having that, there is the therapeutic community, self help guides, churches, pastors, all of nature.
But, however it goes down, we get to talk about it. Be brave, do it personally if at all possible. The internet has a way of tearing the bandaids off and leaving wounded people sitting alone in front of the screen. So, talk your head off, use the language you choose, and fight against those who would shade your light, and heal as well as you can.
posted by Oyéah at 4:54 PM on February 9, 2022 [10 favorites]
The downside of people misusing terminology is how it increases the effort required to explain why something was wrong while also increasing the certainty of the misusers in their mistaken beliefs. Like anti-vaxxers decrying restrictions on the unvaccinated as being "apartheid".
posted by pulposus at 4:57 PM on February 9, 2022 [23 favorites]
posted by pulposus at 4:57 PM on February 9, 2022 [23 favorites]
But I dunno: I'm unconvinced that this is a serious societal problem.
Cool. I'm glad you don't have to deal with that. I'm really glad that you don't, but for some of us walking around in this world, it is a problem.
I agree with the sentiment that we need better language to delineate between Types of Harm to minds, and that our language isn't good at it. But the use of specifically clinical language in more widespread culture, specifically terms like 'trauma' and 'trigger' are making it difficult for people to relay to providers actual problems they're having and increasingly downplays the detrimental effects felt when someone experiences an actual 'trigger' to actual 'trauma.'
I've had to explain to unfamiliar medical providers countless times what certain triggers are for me and not to do certain things during treatment or procedures (to varying degrees of success). This organism that I inhabit has some legitimate triggers, for some documented, lengthy and chronic mental health conditions stemming from some sustained trauma over the course of decades. Within the last 5 years, whenever I engage with a new provider, I now sound like a goddamn tool trying to explain the depth of the issues I experience with (legitimate) triggers for (legitimate) chronic mental health conditions. It is not great. It adds to my distress.
I have left many appointments with many doctors or health care providers after laboring to explain these problems to them with a huge spike in suicidal ideation, because this organism is very close to giving up all the time. Explaining that to people who do not inhabit your brainspace, is incredibly difficult, and taxing. Not only do I have these problems, that do not seem like they will go away, ever, I now have to contend with these terms being used for fucking everything negative, and people rolling their eyes when I use those terms.
Sooooo, pretty please for those in your life who do have triggers that launch them into jags of insomnia, or hyper-vigilance, panic attacks, or worse, maybe stop using those words when you had a bad day or someone said something offensive that made you feel bad. It is still legitimate to have those feelings and not feel great about them, but language matters. Metafilter writ-large is just as bad at this as are most progressive leftist circles.
posted by furnace.heart at 4:59 PM on February 9, 2022 [69 favorites]
Cool. I'm glad you don't have to deal with that. I'm really glad that you don't, but for some of us walking around in this world, it is a problem.
I agree with the sentiment that we need better language to delineate between Types of Harm to minds, and that our language isn't good at it. But the use of specifically clinical language in more widespread culture, specifically terms like 'trauma' and 'trigger' are making it difficult for people to relay to providers actual problems they're having and increasingly downplays the detrimental effects felt when someone experiences an actual 'trigger' to actual 'trauma.'
I've had to explain to unfamiliar medical providers countless times what certain triggers are for me and not to do certain things during treatment or procedures (to varying degrees of success). This organism that I inhabit has some legitimate triggers, for some documented, lengthy and chronic mental health conditions stemming from some sustained trauma over the course of decades. Within the last 5 years, whenever I engage with a new provider, I now sound like a goddamn tool trying to explain the depth of the issues I experience with (legitimate) triggers for (legitimate) chronic mental health conditions. It is not great. It adds to my distress.
I have left many appointments with many doctors or health care providers after laboring to explain these problems to them with a huge spike in suicidal ideation, because this organism is very close to giving up all the time. Explaining that to people who do not inhabit your brainspace, is incredibly difficult, and taxing. Not only do I have these problems, that do not seem like they will go away, ever, I now have to contend with these terms being used for fucking everything negative, and people rolling their eyes when I use those terms.
Sooooo, pretty please for those in your life who do have triggers that launch them into jags of insomnia, or hyper-vigilance, panic attacks, or worse, maybe stop using those words when you had a bad day or someone said something offensive that made you feel bad. It is still legitimate to have those feelings and not feel great about them, but language matters. Metafilter writ-large is just as bad at this as are most progressive leftist circles.
posted by furnace.heart at 4:59 PM on February 9, 2022 [69 favorites]
These are hard times for each of us windowless Liebnizian monads all
posted by y2karl at 5:05 PM on February 9, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by y2karl at 5:05 PM on February 9, 2022 [10 favorites]
The discussion of everyday assholery in this thread reminded me of these lectures on non-defensive communication
posted by eustatic at 5:30 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by eustatic at 5:30 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]
Lovato’s trauma is real but i don’t think it’s trivial that this specific legitimate complaint was leveled at a local froyo stand to her millions of social media followers.Can you elaborate? The article seems to be implying that what is illegitimate is the idea of a diet culture which includes "harmful messaging." There are also, I think, questions about how people with massive followings should interact with less-prominent entities, but that isn't the issue this article discusses. Instead, the point here is that the complaint is trivial. And while Lovato might have, in the midst of an eating disorder relapse, jumped the gun a little bit in this specific instance, I don't think that the basic idea is ridiculous. But like Lovato, I'm in eating disorder recovery, and maybe that's an example of a fake trauma or whatever.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:39 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]
Um. Maybe in a thread that is at least partially about gaslighting you oughtn't be telling someone else how to feel about their own history.
Which I wasn't doing at all - had they said that they felt that not having friends wasn't traumatic for them, I would have accepted that. But what they had said is that the therapist calling their lack of childhood friends as traumatic struck them as serving to devalue "actual childhood trauma like abuse or rape".
This is a problematic attitude. First off, it is dismissal of harm done, and one of the ways our society abuses people is to tell them that the harm they suffer isn't actually harm, and thus they are expected to just accept it. Second, by creating categories of the "legitimate" harmed, it creates the situation where people feel that they either have to fit into one of those categories or feel like they are doing something wrong by claiming that they were harmed. The first makes people dismiss their injuries while still suffering from them, the second causes people to feel ashamed for talking about their injuries because they weren't hurt the "right" way. Both leave people suffering in pain.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:48 PM on February 9, 2022 [22 favorites]
Which I wasn't doing at all - had they said that they felt that not having friends wasn't traumatic for them, I would have accepted that. But what they had said is that the therapist calling their lack of childhood friends as traumatic struck them as serving to devalue "actual childhood trauma like abuse or rape".
This is a problematic attitude. First off, it is dismissal of harm done, and one of the ways our society abuses people is to tell them that the harm they suffer isn't actually harm, and thus they are expected to just accept it. Second, by creating categories of the "legitimate" harmed, it creates the situation where people feel that they either have to fit into one of those categories or feel like they are doing something wrong by claiming that they were harmed. The first makes people dismiss their injuries while still suffering from them, the second causes people to feel ashamed for talking about their injuries because they weren't hurt the "right" way. Both leave people suffering in pain.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:48 PM on February 9, 2022 [22 favorites]
Trauma for some, tiny American flags for others.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:59 PM on February 9, 2022 [18 favorites]
posted by aspersioncast at 5:59 PM on February 9, 2022 [18 favorites]
Did it just get dark in here?
posted by theora55 at 6:56 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by theora55 at 6:56 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]
All I know is that when someone commits suicide, people are sad and wished the person reached out and say it's a horrible waste.
But when someone is suicidal, people are annoyed and doubtful and say they're doing it for the attention and "you've been suicidal for THREE MONTHS now and I don't think you WANT to get better."
The latter can probably get published in the New York Times.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:58 PM on February 9, 2022 [51 favorites]
But when someone is suicidal, people are annoyed and doubtful and say they're doing it for the attention and "you've been suicidal for THREE MONTHS now and I don't think you WANT to get better."
The latter can probably get published in the New York Times.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:58 PM on February 9, 2022 [51 favorites]
I thought this was worth the read but it's hard to have a discussion.
I remember a New Yorker bit about fake emotional support animals that got wildly different reactions, depending on whether your initial reaction reading was "Oh, I know people who boast about lying this way to get their pets in restaurants as if it's a cool lifehack and they totally deserve this" or "The people I know with ESAs have a frigging hard enough time already, why the hell is this writer targeting them?" It's not like anyone's wrong but that's not a gap that gets closed. Same thing here.
FWIW my first thought was that escalating claims of harm because that gets reward is absolutely a thing, and it distracts or dilutes action on behalf of more serious victims. But I come from a heritage (Irish Catholic American) that has some embarrassing members who enjoy deploying the "we were the first slaves" bullshit.
I totally understand that people who've had/seen trauma falsely minimized are going to react differently. And practically speaking, I don't know what decent people can do but assume good faith when others speak to their experience.
posted by mark k at 7:12 PM on February 9, 2022 [25 favorites]
I remember a New Yorker bit about fake emotional support animals that got wildly different reactions, depending on whether your initial reaction reading was "Oh, I know people who boast about lying this way to get their pets in restaurants as if it's a cool lifehack and they totally deserve this" or "The people I know with ESAs have a frigging hard enough time already, why the hell is this writer targeting them?" It's not like anyone's wrong but that's not a gap that gets closed. Same thing here.
FWIW my first thought was that escalating claims of harm because that gets reward is absolutely a thing, and it distracts or dilutes action on behalf of more serious victims. But I come from a heritage (Irish Catholic American) that has some embarrassing members who enjoy deploying the "we were the first slaves" bullshit.
I totally understand that people who've had/seen trauma falsely minimized are going to react differently. And practically speaking, I don't know what decent people can do but assume good faith when others speak to their experience.
posted by mark k at 7:12 PM on February 9, 2022 [25 favorites]
The Rise of Therapy Speak (New Yorker)
Interestingly, Harper's had a Will Self cover story on trauma in December, so I guess there's something in the water in NYC. I wonder if pandemic lockdown culture is producing/allowing room for this kind of introspection about life events in ourselves and others, how they're talking about them, and the particularly (US?) predilection for credentializing expressions about it.
posted by rhizome at 7:26 PM on February 9, 2022 [2 favorites]
Interestingly, Harper's had a Will Self cover story on trauma in December, so I guess there's something in the water in NYC. I wonder if pandemic lockdown culture is producing/allowing room for this kind of introspection about life events in ourselves and others, how they're talking about them, and the particularly (US?) predilection for credentializing expressions about it.
posted by rhizome at 7:26 PM on February 9, 2022 [2 favorites]
I have read some very well thought out responses in this thread. Hooray mefites.
posted by Oyéah at 7:32 PM on February 9, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by Oyéah at 7:32 PM on February 9, 2022 [11 favorites]
people accusing others of "gaslighting" them merely for disagreeing with them about a situation
Gaslighting someone is attempting to convince someone of a false reality that they know to be false, such that if they believed it, they would be believing a false reality. It's different than lying. It's specifically lying about events that the person hearing them was present for and participated in, to the extent where the other person could reasonably doubt their own perceptions.
And it's absolutely happening all over nowadays. It's not an abuse to use the term.
posted by corb at 7:36 PM on February 9, 2022 [26 favorites]
Gaslighting someone is attempting to convince someone of a false reality that they know to be false, such that if they believed it, they would be believing a false reality. It's different than lying. It's specifically lying about events that the person hearing them was present for and participated in, to the extent where the other person could reasonably doubt their own perceptions.
And it's absolutely happening all over nowadays. It's not an abuse to use the term.
posted by corb at 7:36 PM on February 9, 2022 [26 favorites]
Most people do not spend their lives theorizing language and may use terminology loosely without much thought or reflection. So like, in a sense, who cares. But the increasing use of these 'therapy' phrases is an indicator of the increasing acknowledgement of harmful and deceptive behaviors by people with more power toward people with less power. That increasing understanding is a good thing: there are real harms, they are very obviously all around us and evidenced by reams of statistics on abuse and measurable racialized, gendered and otherwise classed inequalities. Seeing, identifying and naming these deceptions and abuses is a great step toward changing them. So we're clumsily heading as a big messy society in the right direction on the subject of abuse, for one example.
To my mind, the thing that is causing some potential problems is not the occasionally poorly lobbed critique (who fucking cares what Demi Lavoto said to a yogurt shop??? Jesus Christ have a sense of scale and impact, NY Times op-ed writer!) but whether these shifts in language and analysis move us toward change or not.
Language shifts are extremely insufficient. And to the extent that most people stop at just talking about abuse, the emphasis on language is failing us a society. Because there is a huge emphasis at least on the left on speaking correctly over taking action. Speech is one kind of action, but lots of things have more material impact than speech. Plenty of folks will say I'd rather someone was a bigot to my face - I know where I stand that way - given that we know that behind our backs that someone will take actions that harm us. Nice language has a limit.
On a social change rather than individual level: let's keep calling out shitty diet culture! That's great! But if we think that's enough - we're wrong. A mean post on social media is not how things change - it's just not. So callouts are not sufficient, and if we get bogged down TOO much in our language, it becomes a barrier to the mass engagement needed to change things. Because people do fuck up and say the wrong thing and also even take harmful actions but we need to move society not just erase all the people who have ever said or done anything harmful.
What's missing to me on the left right now is a theory of power. What is the Problem? Who has the Power to change it? How do we build enough power to pressure that person or people into change? The utility of callouts is just pretty limited when we think about real world examples.
When we think about abuse: it is essential to have a framework - to have words like "gaslighting" or "trauma" to describe experiences we've had. But words are not enough to reduce the amount of trauma and harm being inflicted on kids and women and people with less power by people with more power. It seems to me we need a lot of big social and economic interventions, along with just words, to address abuse. Stuff like universal free healthcare and free education and UBI - so people aren't economically trapped in abusive relationships and also to reduce stress - especially for parents. Stuff like great schools and well funded social service infrastructure to support kids. Excellent, evidence based and free substance treatment programs. Gender parity requirements in public positions of power. These are just a few ideas off the top of my head that we have evidence would decrease abuse and harms. Ideas that require massive and unified public pressure to achieve - not just the right words.
posted by latkes at 8:06 PM on February 9, 2022 [34 favorites]
To my mind, the thing that is causing some potential problems is not the occasionally poorly lobbed critique (who fucking cares what Demi Lavoto said to a yogurt shop??? Jesus Christ have a sense of scale and impact, NY Times op-ed writer!) but whether these shifts in language and analysis move us toward change or not.
Language shifts are extremely insufficient. And to the extent that most people stop at just talking about abuse, the emphasis on language is failing us a society. Because there is a huge emphasis at least on the left on speaking correctly over taking action. Speech is one kind of action, but lots of things have more material impact than speech. Plenty of folks will say I'd rather someone was a bigot to my face - I know where I stand that way - given that we know that behind our backs that someone will take actions that harm us. Nice language has a limit.
On a social change rather than individual level: let's keep calling out shitty diet culture! That's great! But if we think that's enough - we're wrong. A mean post on social media is not how things change - it's just not. So callouts are not sufficient, and if we get bogged down TOO much in our language, it becomes a barrier to the mass engagement needed to change things. Because people do fuck up and say the wrong thing and also even take harmful actions but we need to move society not just erase all the people who have ever said or done anything harmful.
What's missing to me on the left right now is a theory of power. What is the Problem? Who has the Power to change it? How do we build enough power to pressure that person or people into change? The utility of callouts is just pretty limited when we think about real world examples.
When we think about abuse: it is essential to have a framework - to have words like "gaslighting" or "trauma" to describe experiences we've had. But words are not enough to reduce the amount of trauma and harm being inflicted on kids and women and people with less power by people with more power. It seems to me we need a lot of big social and economic interventions, along with just words, to address abuse. Stuff like universal free healthcare and free education and UBI - so people aren't economically trapped in abusive relationships and also to reduce stress - especially for parents. Stuff like great schools and well funded social service infrastructure to support kids. Excellent, evidence based and free substance treatment programs. Gender parity requirements in public positions of power. These are just a few ideas off the top of my head that we have evidence would decrease abuse and harms. Ideas that require massive and unified public pressure to achieve - not just the right words.
posted by latkes at 8:06 PM on February 9, 2022 [34 favorites]
I'm always tempted to ask both "sides" of this argument what the end result is that they fear. I personally happen to agree with either or both or neither, depending on which fear is dominating my psyche on any particular day. I'm going to hypothesize about what we fear based on which side we're taking, and I'd love to hear whether you all think it's accurate for you:
Some of us (GROUP A) are worried about language being co-opted, watered down, misused, exploited for personal gain, or worst of all, turned into ironic jokes. This means important, hard-won words of power, for which there is often no substitute, are being rendered essentially meaningless. So the real harm that we fear is that legitimate victims will lose what little power we have desperately fought for and gained via the use of precise language, and as a result, victims will have even less recourse to justice or claim to amends or even simple acknowledgement of what happened to us. And aggressors are provided cover to continue doing harm.
Some of us (GROUP B) think it's long overdue that we recognize all the ways in which people - especially marginalized groups - are seriously and systematically hurt every single day. Trauma is endemic, not an exceptional event. We are concerned that the harm we have suffered will be minimized and dismissed and erased just because it doesn't meet an arbitrary standard that is easily recognized by everyone in the population. Perhaps the Overton Window hasn't yet shifted our way, and making a case for our claim to important words is the necessary work we need to do in order to have our harm acknowledged. Others may see us as trying to water down legitimate words, or twisting original meanings for personal benefit. But we see it as fighting for well deserved recognition.
Thinking this through, I have two thoughts towards resolving both sides:
1. Maybe Group A needs to stop lumping bad faith actors together with Group B, and Group B needs to see themselves as part of Group A rather than assume Group A is attacking them. There are clear differences between Group B vs. stuff like:
- Casual individual carelessness - "My date didn't look anything like his profile pics, ugh, that's gaslighting" [causes tiiiiny but cumulative harm], vs.
- Intentionally making bait-and-switch salacious claims just for clicks or to cause harm - "Person X is an abuser***" [Fine Print: *** they abuse the planet we live on by using disposable paper towels] ... [causes twitter storm to descend on Person X, and Person X is harassed for several days], vs.
- Individual innocently venting online and getting mobbed with "advice" from random people - "My boyfriend is a manipulator" [you don't give an explanation or context, but nevertheless hundreds of twitter replies urge them to DTMFA, get a restraining order, take the pets with you and run away today!!! You're flooded with links to articles about sociopaths, psychopaths, the Dark Triad, etc. What it adds up to is individually targeted propaganda urging you to take drastic life altering actions based on their uninformed advice], vs.
- People, websites, and large corporations cashing in on pop psychology trends by churning out ridiculous content - "5 Telltale Signs That You're Being Love-Bombed By A User", a psychology today article listing behaviors such as "Your date bought you flowers and laughed at all your jokes" and "Your date wants to text you every morning" [causes small but cumulative harm], vs.
- Abusers co-opting this language to continue their abuse - "When you ask me to stop yelling at you, you're weaponizing a false claim of victimhood to silence me and deny me my right to express feelings openly."
It's silly to conflate such misuse with earnest, good faith, legitimate arguments made by Group B.
2. I wonder if the whole discourse could actually be solved by allowing people to use whatever words they please, and asking, AND THEN WHAT? Because the bottomline really is the demand that follows from the psychology-tinged language they're using.
- "He gaslit me.. SO YOU SHOULD STOP BUYING HIS ART."
- "They are an abuser... SOYOU SHOULD BE CAREFUL IF YOU INTERACT WITH THEM."
- "This person assaulted me... AND I DEMAND JUSTICE."
- "I am traumatized.. AND THEREFORE MY SUBSEQUENT BAD BEHAVIOR SHOULD BE CONDONED/FORGIVEN/EXCUSED."
- "She is a narcissist.. SO I AM MORALLY JUSTIFIED IN SUMMARILY DISCARDING HER AND SHEDDING ALL MY OBLIGATIONS TOWARDS HER."
I think the part in capitals matters most, and that's what we should be using to judge the merits of people's claims of being victimized.
I've been in therapy myself for several years and at first it was a struggle to apply big words like "abuse" and "trauma" to my experiences. Then the next stage was triumphantly using those words, leaning into feeling aggrieved, working through my anger and my need for validation, etc. And then, at last, it's like... okay. Those words do apply to me. But what do those words mean to me? What are my unspoken implications?
Answer: "I was abused by my parents.... AND THEREFORE I HAVE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND AND I'M JUSTIFIED IN TREATING THEM WITH HAUGHTY CONTEMPT FOREVER AND I GET TO SET THEM UP TO FAIL IN EVERY INTERACTION WE HAVE AS WE "RECONCILE" SO THAT I CAN POUNCE ON THAT AS EVIDENCE OF THEIR ETERNAL BADNESS AND THEY CAN'T PROTEST BECAUSE THEY OWE ME ." I had to admit that this was cruel and vindictive - that I should rather distance myself and refuse to reconcile until I was truly ready for it... or else suck it up and set my vindictiveness aside. Shit or get off the pot, as it were.
Interrogating the unspoken implications that follow trendy buzzwords - both our own and other people's - is probably a good way to evaluate the merits or lack thereof of these pronouncements.
posted by MiraK at 8:09 PM on February 9, 2022 [99 favorites]
Some of us (GROUP A) are worried about language being co-opted, watered down, misused, exploited for personal gain, or worst of all, turned into ironic jokes. This means important, hard-won words of power, for which there is often no substitute, are being rendered essentially meaningless. So the real harm that we fear is that legitimate victims will lose what little power we have desperately fought for and gained via the use of precise language, and as a result, victims will have even less recourse to justice or claim to amends or even simple acknowledgement of what happened to us. And aggressors are provided cover to continue doing harm.
Some of us (GROUP B) think it's long overdue that we recognize all the ways in which people - especially marginalized groups - are seriously and systematically hurt every single day. Trauma is endemic, not an exceptional event. We are concerned that the harm we have suffered will be minimized and dismissed and erased just because it doesn't meet an arbitrary standard that is easily recognized by everyone in the population. Perhaps the Overton Window hasn't yet shifted our way, and making a case for our claim to important words is the necessary work we need to do in order to have our harm acknowledged. Others may see us as trying to water down legitimate words, or twisting original meanings for personal benefit. But we see it as fighting for well deserved recognition.
Thinking this through, I have two thoughts towards resolving both sides:
1. Maybe Group A needs to stop lumping bad faith actors together with Group B, and Group B needs to see themselves as part of Group A rather than assume Group A is attacking them. There are clear differences between Group B vs. stuff like:
- Casual individual carelessness - "My date didn't look anything like his profile pics, ugh, that's gaslighting" [causes tiiiiny but cumulative harm], vs.
- Intentionally making bait-and-switch salacious claims just for clicks or to cause harm - "Person X is an abuser***" [Fine Print: *** they abuse the planet we live on by using disposable paper towels] ... [causes twitter storm to descend on Person X, and Person X is harassed for several days], vs.
- Individual innocently venting online and getting mobbed with "advice" from random people - "My boyfriend is a manipulator" [you don't give an explanation or context, but nevertheless hundreds of twitter replies urge them to DTMFA, get a restraining order, take the pets with you and run away today!!! You're flooded with links to articles about sociopaths, psychopaths, the Dark Triad, etc. What it adds up to is individually targeted propaganda urging you to take drastic life altering actions based on their uninformed advice], vs.
- People, websites, and large corporations cashing in on pop psychology trends by churning out ridiculous content - "5 Telltale Signs That You're Being Love-Bombed By A User", a psychology today article listing behaviors such as "Your date bought you flowers and laughed at all your jokes" and "Your date wants to text you every morning" [causes small but cumulative harm], vs.
- Abusers co-opting this language to continue their abuse - "When you ask me to stop yelling at you, you're weaponizing a false claim of victimhood to silence me and deny me my right to express feelings openly."
It's silly to conflate such misuse with earnest, good faith, legitimate arguments made by Group B.
2. I wonder if the whole discourse could actually be solved by allowing people to use whatever words they please, and asking, AND THEN WHAT? Because the bottomline really is the demand that follows from the psychology-tinged language they're using.
- "He gaslit me.. SO YOU SHOULD STOP BUYING HIS ART."
- "They are an abuser... SOYOU SHOULD BE CAREFUL IF YOU INTERACT WITH THEM."
- "This person assaulted me... AND I DEMAND JUSTICE."
- "I am traumatized.. AND THEREFORE MY SUBSEQUENT BAD BEHAVIOR SHOULD BE CONDONED/FORGIVEN/EXCUSED."
- "She is a narcissist.. SO I AM MORALLY JUSTIFIED IN SUMMARILY DISCARDING HER AND SHEDDING ALL MY OBLIGATIONS TOWARDS HER."
I think the part in capitals matters most, and that's what we should be using to judge the merits of people's claims of being victimized.
I've been in therapy myself for several years and at first it was a struggle to apply big words like "abuse" and "trauma" to my experiences. Then the next stage was triumphantly using those words, leaning into feeling aggrieved, working through my anger and my need for validation, etc. And then, at last, it's like... okay. Those words do apply to me. But what do those words mean to me? What are my unspoken implications?
Answer: "I was abused by my parents.... AND THEREFORE I HAVE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND AND I'M JUSTIFIED IN TREATING THEM WITH HAUGHTY CONTEMPT FOREVER AND I GET TO SET THEM UP TO FAIL IN EVERY INTERACTION WE HAVE AS WE "RECONCILE" SO THAT I CAN POUNCE ON THAT AS EVIDENCE OF THEIR ETERNAL BADNESS AND THEY CAN'T PROTEST BECAUSE THEY OWE ME ." I had to admit that this was cruel and vindictive - that I should rather distance myself and refuse to reconcile until I was truly ready for it... or else suck it up and set my vindictiveness aside. Shit or get off the pot, as it were.
Interrogating the unspoken implications that follow trendy buzzwords - both our own and other people's - is probably a good way to evaluate the merits or lack thereof of these pronouncements.
posted by MiraK at 8:09 PM on February 9, 2022 [99 favorites]
Excellent points MiraK. You do say this too, but I want to highlight it: It's also worth being aware of one's assumptions about what the unspoken implications are in other people's statements. Simple example, "Black lives matter" does not necessarily (or ever!) get followed by "more than other people's lives".
posted by Zumbador at 8:37 PM on February 9, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Zumbador at 8:37 PM on February 9, 2022 [5 favorites]
Gaslighting is SOP for the GQP. We're soaking in it.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 8:50 PM on February 9, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by a humble nudibranch at 8:50 PM on February 9, 2022 [4 favorites]
What makes this discussion hard is, I think, that both sides are partly right. On the one hand: we are waking up to abuses and problems that are as ubiquitous and foundational as the air we breathe, and are at last discussing those long-ignored problems.
But on the other hand: these troubles have been so long-ignored that we don't really have good terms for describing them or talking about them, so, as is the nature of people trying to talk about a new concept they don't have words for, we grope for terms which are kind of similar, in the same ballpark, that we can use as signposts to guide people towards the ideas we're actually trying to get at. But in recent times, a lot of the similar terms we've groped for when we want to have new discussions about these newly-recognized ubiquitous abuses, are terms which previously had more precise definitions to describe problems which were very much not ubiquitous things everyone dealt with, but were specific ailments that made life extremely hard in specific ways for a narrow subset of people. And co-opting those terms to use in discussions about harms that we all endure makes things even harder for the people still dealing with those specific ailments, as furnace.heart eloquently described above.
Using the exact same terms is just...sloppy. To give a positive example: Everyone "panics" at times, but not everyone has "panic attacks", and the terms are understood to be different and mean different things. Nobody pooh-poohs people having panic attacks because "oh yeah man, I know just what that's like, I was late for work the other day and couldn't find my car keys, I totally panicked" (okay, yes, I suppose probably some people do say that, because people are terrible, but it's not common). Whereas concepts like trauma and even gaslighting have gotten stretched in ways where that distinction doesn't exist. Is it a real trauma to not have friends in elementary school? That depends on how you define trauma; it's certainly an unpleasant and perhaps mentally damaging experience, but I think we can safely say that it is not the same kind of trauma that say, a survivor of a home invasion might have.
Basically, we would benefit from more words, or at least some more modifiers to those words. Like if we understood some types of mental trauma to be "common childhood trauma" and other kinds to be "survivor of an extreme-situation trauma" and still others to be "gradually accumulated micro-trauma" or whatever modifiers we want to invent, in ways that hopefully sidestep questions about "whose trauma is bad 'enough'?" then we could have our discussions about these widespread phenomena without watering down the utility of the existing terms for people who need those terms, as originally defined, to make themselves understood to doctors and therapists and employers and the like.
Anyways all this is really just a rambling intro to me getting on my hobbyhorse, which is pushing back against the semantic creep of gaslighting. I've complained about that here often, but here's something I'm pretty sure I have not explained before: I was gaslit. Years ago, before the term started to drift. To cut a long story short: Two close friends of mine were having an affair, I began to get suspicious that something was "off", and they realized it. Before I could develop my suspicions into something concrete or voice those suspicions to either of their significant others, they went out of their way to mess with me. Straight-up, literal gaslighting, over the course of - to this day I'm still not sure how long. Weeks? Months? I don't even know because I still can't really trust my own perceptions of that time period. Not just to make me doubt myself and my own perceptions, but also to pre-emptively make me seem like a paranoid nutjob to their SOs (thus destroying my credibility in case I said something). I cannot possibly begin to express to you how bad this is for your mental health (though a few years later, in a sad thread about Ernest Hemingway, I sorta indirectly tried to describe what it's like). Now, I have since lived through the Trump administration and the current era of politicians and media constantly trying to re-write the facts in real time, same as the rest of you, and I am telling you right now, it is not the same experience.
That's not to say that folks aren't describing a real phenomenon when they (from my perspective) misuse the term gaslighting! I think, much like with abuse/trauma, we're in some ways awakening to the fact that for centuries, if not all of human history to date, the "truth" of history was written by the winners, and thus remembered the way the winners wanted it remembered, and a lot of that was lies. That's bad! The GQP trying to put cart before horse and rewrite history and use the rewritten history to make themselves the winners, is also bad, but it's a somewhat different bad thing. Politicians and media figures who simply don't care what the truth is, and don't respect you enough to bother coming up with a believable lie, because they don't give a shit what you believe, is also a real phenomenon and a bad one. And none of these things is the same as having close trusted friends** essentially prank you repeatedly until you start to wonder if you're literally going fucking crazy. So I wish we could come up with some more terms, rather than just using "gaslighting" for all of them. Thanks.
**the "close trusted friends/relatives" part is important to the original concept of gaslighting. You can't get gaslit by Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump because even if they spit a constant, dizzying stream of lies at you 24/7 for years (as they, in fact, have), you aren't likely to doubt your own sanity because you [hopefully] didn't trust them in the first place.
posted by mstokes650 at 8:55 PM on February 9, 2022 [28 favorites]
But on the other hand: these troubles have been so long-ignored that we don't really have good terms for describing them or talking about them, so, as is the nature of people trying to talk about a new concept they don't have words for, we grope for terms which are kind of similar, in the same ballpark, that we can use as signposts to guide people towards the ideas we're actually trying to get at. But in recent times, a lot of the similar terms we've groped for when we want to have new discussions about these newly-recognized ubiquitous abuses, are terms which previously had more precise definitions to describe problems which were very much not ubiquitous things everyone dealt with, but were specific ailments that made life extremely hard in specific ways for a narrow subset of people. And co-opting those terms to use in discussions about harms that we all endure makes things even harder for the people still dealing with those specific ailments, as furnace.heart eloquently described above.
Using the exact same terms is just...sloppy. To give a positive example: Everyone "panics" at times, but not everyone has "panic attacks", and the terms are understood to be different and mean different things. Nobody pooh-poohs people having panic attacks because "oh yeah man, I know just what that's like, I was late for work the other day and couldn't find my car keys, I totally panicked" (okay, yes, I suppose probably some people do say that, because people are terrible, but it's not common). Whereas concepts like trauma and even gaslighting have gotten stretched in ways where that distinction doesn't exist. Is it a real trauma to not have friends in elementary school? That depends on how you define trauma; it's certainly an unpleasant and perhaps mentally damaging experience, but I think we can safely say that it is not the same kind of trauma that say, a survivor of a home invasion might have.
Basically, we would benefit from more words, or at least some more modifiers to those words. Like if we understood some types of mental trauma to be "common childhood trauma" and other kinds to be "survivor of an extreme-situation trauma" and still others to be "gradually accumulated micro-trauma" or whatever modifiers we want to invent, in ways that hopefully sidestep questions about "whose trauma is bad 'enough'?" then we could have our discussions about these widespread phenomena without watering down the utility of the existing terms for people who need those terms, as originally defined, to make themselves understood to doctors and therapists and employers and the like.
Anyways all this is really just a rambling intro to me getting on my hobbyhorse, which is pushing back against the semantic creep of gaslighting. I've complained about that here often, but here's something I'm pretty sure I have not explained before: I was gaslit. Years ago, before the term started to drift. To cut a long story short: Two close friends of mine were having an affair, I began to get suspicious that something was "off", and they realized it. Before I could develop my suspicions into something concrete or voice those suspicions to either of their significant others, they went out of their way to mess with me. Straight-up, literal gaslighting, over the course of - to this day I'm still not sure how long. Weeks? Months? I don't even know because I still can't really trust my own perceptions of that time period. Not just to make me doubt myself and my own perceptions, but also to pre-emptively make me seem like a paranoid nutjob to their SOs (thus destroying my credibility in case I said something). I cannot possibly begin to express to you how bad this is for your mental health (though a few years later, in a sad thread about Ernest Hemingway, I sorta indirectly tried to describe what it's like). Now, I have since lived through the Trump administration and the current era of politicians and media constantly trying to re-write the facts in real time, same as the rest of you, and I am telling you right now, it is not the same experience.
That's not to say that folks aren't describing a real phenomenon when they (from my perspective) misuse the term gaslighting! I think, much like with abuse/trauma, we're in some ways awakening to the fact that for centuries, if not all of human history to date, the "truth" of history was written by the winners, and thus remembered the way the winners wanted it remembered, and a lot of that was lies. That's bad! The GQP trying to put cart before horse and rewrite history and use the rewritten history to make themselves the winners, is also bad, but it's a somewhat different bad thing. Politicians and media figures who simply don't care what the truth is, and don't respect you enough to bother coming up with a believable lie, because they don't give a shit what you believe, is also a real phenomenon and a bad one. And none of these things is the same as having close trusted friends** essentially prank you repeatedly until you start to wonder if you're literally going fucking crazy. So I wish we could come up with some more terms, rather than just using "gaslighting" for all of them. Thanks.
**the "close trusted friends/relatives" part is important to the original concept of gaslighting. You can't get gaslit by Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump because even if they spit a constant, dizzying stream of lies at you 24/7 for years (as they, in fact, have), you aren't likely to doubt your own sanity because you [hopefully] didn't trust them in the first place.
posted by mstokes650 at 8:55 PM on February 9, 2022 [28 favorites]
Because there is a huge emphasis at least on the left on speaking correctly over taking action.
preach, latkes! someone upthread was saying there's good discussion happening here, and I agree, and that's a bit ironic given this paltry contribution.. But I'm very much on board with the "what do we do??" question here
posted by elkevelvet at 9:04 PM on February 9, 2022 [10 favorites]
preach, latkes! someone upthread was saying there's good discussion happening here, and I agree, and that's a bit ironic given this paltry contribution.. But I'm very much on board with the "what do we do??" question here
posted by elkevelvet at 9:04 PM on February 9, 2022 [10 favorites]
Cut it out with the straw men. Let people use what words they want to describe their experiences. If you're not sure what they mean, ask. Keep a weather eye on suspicious parties, those likely to have ulterior motives. (ie someone writing an op-ed in the biggest status-quo rag on the planet)
posted by rhooke at 10:40 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by rhooke at 10:40 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]
can we just not do these paywalled articles, or provide an archive? I never go to the NYT and I'm out of articles for the month on metafilter links.
posted by lkc at 11:06 PM on February 9, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by lkc at 11:06 PM on February 9, 2022 [8 favorites]
if we understood some types of mental trauma to be "common childhood trauma" and other kinds to be "survivor of an extreme-situation trauma" and still others to be "gradually accumulated micro-trauma" or whatever modifiers we want to invent, in ways that hopefully sidestep questions about "whose trauma is bad 'enough'?" then we could have our discussions about these widespread phenomena without watering down the utility of the existing terms for people who need those terms, as originally defined, to make themselves understood to doctors and therapists and employers and the like.
So I want to start off by saying first that I really appreciate what you thoughtfully said above, and please do not take my own response to it as, in any way, saying that you are wrong for having thought it.
But as both a personal trauma survivor of an extreme-situation trauma and a person who is consequentially very interested in studying trauma, the way that you are differentiating trauma is not a clinical separation, but a value separation.
The trauma of surviving a war or a refugee camp is not functionally different - and we know this because it's been measured on a variety of scales - from the trauma of, say, incarceration. It is not functionally different, in terms of scale and impact on life, from the trauma of what we would consider even moderately "normal" child abuse. The severity varies from person to person, but not from class of trauma to class of trauma. In all situations, there was danger to self or sense of self, feelings of helplessness and violation.
These people all need these terms to make themselves understood to doctors and therapists and employers. With what we now know about trauma, we know that all of these people could use accomodations - and be significantly benefited - from accomodations in their daily life.
The only reason we worry about 'watering down' these terms is because we worry if the scope of the problem were known, that no one would be willing to help anymore.
And that's really - so, so shitty, that we think we have to play this competition, where I get help because /my/ trauma is "serious" (understood as: acceptable victim story) but someone else doesn't, or someone else does but I don't.
And like - here's another thing. If people understand - as they say they understand - the danger and fear that comes with police interactions for BIPOC folk, the helplessness felt by being essentially people under siege, who can be kidnapped away from your family or killed at any moment for doing nothing more than existing - then that itself is a trauma that is affecting a huge swath of our population. It is, effectively, a "common childhood trauma". But that doesn't make it any less real or dangerous.
posted by corb at 12:22 AM on February 10, 2022 [59 favorites]
So I want to start off by saying first that I really appreciate what you thoughtfully said above, and please do not take my own response to it as, in any way, saying that you are wrong for having thought it.
But as both a personal trauma survivor of an extreme-situation trauma and a person who is consequentially very interested in studying trauma, the way that you are differentiating trauma is not a clinical separation, but a value separation.
The trauma of surviving a war or a refugee camp is not functionally different - and we know this because it's been measured on a variety of scales - from the trauma of, say, incarceration. It is not functionally different, in terms of scale and impact on life, from the trauma of what we would consider even moderately "normal" child abuse. The severity varies from person to person, but not from class of trauma to class of trauma. In all situations, there was danger to self or sense of self, feelings of helplessness and violation.
These people all need these terms to make themselves understood to doctors and therapists and employers. With what we now know about trauma, we know that all of these people could use accomodations - and be significantly benefited - from accomodations in their daily life.
The only reason we worry about 'watering down' these terms is because we worry if the scope of the problem were known, that no one would be willing to help anymore.
And that's really - so, so shitty, that we think we have to play this competition, where I get help because /my/ trauma is "serious" (understood as: acceptable victim story) but someone else doesn't, or someone else does but I don't.
And like - here's another thing. If people understand - as they say they understand - the danger and fear that comes with police interactions for BIPOC folk, the helplessness felt by being essentially people under siege, who can be kidnapped away from your family or killed at any moment for doing nothing more than existing - then that itself is a trauma that is affecting a huge swath of our population. It is, effectively, a "common childhood trauma". But that doesn't make it any less real or dangerous.
posted by corb at 12:22 AM on February 10, 2022 [59 favorites]
Corb, that is so important to remember, all the time, every day. We’ve been looking for explanations for so many years for human behavior and economic results we don’t want - but (in the US) are generally disinterested in making kids lives better so that they can flourish. What if fentanyl held a tea party and no one fucking came because we all felt so safe and loved and supported that it just wasn’t an option? What if inner city kids were so busy in after school programming at schools with extra funding for arts and entrepreneurship and engineering and diplomacy and research that even the dinosaurs of racist power policing couldn’t pick them up on the walk home from class? Holy shit: what the world might look like if preventing trauma and maximizing resources for resilience were more often our actual priorities.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:09 AM on February 10, 2022 [11 favorites]
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 2:09 AM on February 10, 2022 [11 favorites]
I've been in the situation where my trauma as a survivor of rape was compared to the trauma of a breakup with an emotional abuser. The outcome was not that I understood that trauma better, but that I began to doubt what I was being told by that person. Things that remind you of bad times, even if they make you cry or feel upset, are not triggers. The effects of being a victim an an emotionally abusive relationship are wide ranging, and you can definitely have deep ruts in your brain with behavioral conditioning, and it could definitely be a capital T Trauma.
But that difference, between bad memories and flashbacks? That's what I get stuck on, in a lot of discussions about trauma and Trauma, for want of a better word. I meander about the memory potholes myself sometimes, realising I got out of the habit of music for years because of an emotionally abusive ex for example, but I also have habits from a not abusive marriage. And even when they affect my behaviour or mood - not listening to new music, being defensive about my schedules, whatever - it's not the overwhelm of a flashback.
So I struggle with how we talk about it. Because similarly, when I talk about being triggered that can mean I need to go do a bunch of things I've learned from years of therapy to remind myself of who and where I am, and that I'm safe, or it might mean a few lost days of memories and nearly getting hospitalised for shock the day after (apparently my blood pressure was far too low and did I have someone to pick me up and they'd try admit me if not but it was Christmas). There's a qualitative difference, in the brain, or maybe quantitative, I don't know. But the imprecision of language means it's much more difficult to explain.
I also am reminded, very strongly, of "white women's tears" in these discussions. The use of trauma, mental health, and related ideas is used against the marginalised more than it helps, I think, unless we are explicitly aware. And I have seen far too many (mostly white, mostly cis) women begin arguments and criticise others (mostly non-white, often non-cis or at least gender nonconforming) but when the target responds in any way except fawning, suddenly it's abusive and triggering and harassment. Far too often I've seen the accusation leveraged with no proof, or proof it didn't happen, but if you have enough social capital it becomes accepted. And I am being deliberate by saying white women - as much as I do know men who have done this (my initial anecdote was about a man in fact) the wider social use is by women.
And another, smaller, part of it has been the work I've done to be less of a wreck - discomfort and nerves are not trauma and anxiety. They can feel similar and I think, if we keep digging into it with that idea, they will become it. But a lot of my therapy has been learning to differentiate between those things. I know similar approaches for chronic pain have worked for friends too.
It's hard. Recognising the underlying abusiveness and trauma of capitalism and hegemonic societies built on bigotry is important. Personally and politically. But those tools of recognition are absolutely used against the marginalised.
posted by geek anachronism at 3:09 AM on February 10, 2022 [25 favorites]
But that difference, between bad memories and flashbacks? That's what I get stuck on, in a lot of discussions about trauma and Trauma, for want of a better word. I meander about the memory potholes myself sometimes, realising I got out of the habit of music for years because of an emotionally abusive ex for example, but I also have habits from a not abusive marriage. And even when they affect my behaviour or mood - not listening to new music, being defensive about my schedules, whatever - it's not the overwhelm of a flashback.
So I struggle with how we talk about it. Because similarly, when I talk about being triggered that can mean I need to go do a bunch of things I've learned from years of therapy to remind myself of who and where I am, and that I'm safe, or it might mean a few lost days of memories and nearly getting hospitalised for shock the day after (apparently my blood pressure was far too low and did I have someone to pick me up and they'd try admit me if not but it was Christmas). There's a qualitative difference, in the brain, or maybe quantitative, I don't know. But the imprecision of language means it's much more difficult to explain.
I also am reminded, very strongly, of "white women's tears" in these discussions. The use of trauma, mental health, and related ideas is used against the marginalised more than it helps, I think, unless we are explicitly aware. And I have seen far too many (mostly white, mostly cis) women begin arguments and criticise others (mostly non-white, often non-cis or at least gender nonconforming) but when the target responds in any way except fawning, suddenly it's abusive and triggering and harassment. Far too often I've seen the accusation leveraged with no proof, or proof it didn't happen, but if you have enough social capital it becomes accepted. And I am being deliberate by saying white women - as much as I do know men who have done this (my initial anecdote was about a man in fact) the wider social use is by women.
And another, smaller, part of it has been the work I've done to be less of a wreck - discomfort and nerves are not trauma and anxiety. They can feel similar and I think, if we keep digging into it with that idea, they will become it. But a lot of my therapy has been learning to differentiate between those things. I know similar approaches for chronic pain have worked for friends too.
It's hard. Recognising the underlying abusiveness and trauma of capitalism and hegemonic societies built on bigotry is important. Personally and politically. But those tools of recognition are absolutely used against the marginalised.
posted by geek anachronism at 3:09 AM on February 10, 2022 [25 favorites]
This conversation was a little frustrating to read. It felt like a lot of people were responding to a different article than the one that I read. But I think that that's because there is a contingent of people who just flat-out reject any use of words like "gaslit" or "triggered", in the same way that some people refuse to understand a legitimate context for "privilege". And I think that this is a different conversation to have within circles where those terms are unilaterally accepted, versus in circles where literally every use of any of them gets challenged in a way that somewhat ironically reinforces the reason why people use those phrases anyway.
My take was that this article is written by someone in the former rather than the latter camp, but upon reflection I have no idea whether or not that's true! And perhaps there's a discussion to be had about whether the NYT's audience is genuinely the sort that's prepared to accept that nuance.
I've been rereading a lot of Jo Freeman recently, because I feel like the problems she described in the late-60s feminist movement are echoing issues we're seeing arise again today. And I simultaneously think that what corb et al are describing (where people are essentially gatekeeping trauma) do happen, and suck, and aren't the specific thing this article's getting at—though it's not a line this piece goes out of its way to draw, so, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If I had to put it into my own words, and articulate it a bit more precisely, I'd say that it's the way that this kind of terminology is wielded in some circumstances as a kind of talisman: something that, once presented, must be agreed upon as unilateral truth, because by its nature any disagreement or equivocation serves as proof that the initial claim was correct.
To draw a parallel to a non-leftist culture, there's a (satirical) scene in The Righteous Gemstones where an Evangelical woman's friend suggests that she gets nice things from her megachurch, like a giant house and a private jet, and responds by accusing her friend of being possessed by Satan. The idea being, of course, that from that point on, any insistence that Satan didn't inspire those (mild) criticisms would itself be proof that Satan must be doing the speaking. It's fundamentally a non-falsifiable claim, if I can use that phrase in this context: agreement or disagreement can both be seen as proof. And I'm not saying that lovebombing or gaslighting (or mansplaining or what-have-you) are meaningless concepts, because they're obviously very important, and they're "catching on" because of how frequently they turn out to be very important, but I think that a lot of the language in the article similarly has the potential to be wielded in similarly non-falsifiable ways.
The article cites a line from Natalie Wynn without citing the essay that that line came from, which I found frustrating, because this line:
And it is so so so important to distinguish that trend from the overarching phenomenon of "people having words to describe something important that's all-too-often invisible." I feel like people here have way more experience talking about legitimate experiences with all this (and I am not gatekeeping "legitimate" here at all, or setting a bar for what counts as legitimate in any way) than they have with the version of this I felt the article was trying to get at.
But I had an experience serving as a mediator between a local community organizer and a friend-of-a-friend trans man who, not to mince words, was a flat-out abusive human being. The trans man in question was highly volatile, emotionally abusive, and was absolutely the sort of person who framed every conflict, even ones that he started, as instances where whomever he was picking a fight with was gaslighting him.
The final straw in his and my friendship was when I connected him with this community organizer (who is a brilliant, brilliant person, and eventually left her duties in disgust over shit like this), and he sent me transcripts of their conversation... and it was horrifying. Her talking, pretty clearly and responsively, about her own values as a queer woman, the various initiatives she was taking to create trans-inclusiveness as well as dedicated non-cis gatherings, the ways she was trying to keep open to other perspectives, asking him what he was looking to see that wasn't there, and him responding with torrents of verbal abuse while accusing her of gaslighting him, as if anything other than "penitent, teary-faced confession of sin" qualified as gaslighting. Because that was his definition! And I knew several people who, rather than put up with his calling for their heads on stakes, wound up basically publicly confessing to wrongdoing and begging forgiveness just to shut him up—all of which he took as an opportunity to heap more verbal abuse on them and gloatingly refuse to forgive them.
That's an extreme example, obviously—but it's not isolated, and I'm adjacent to at least one community where that kind of behavior is essentially the norm. These phrases do need to be used in considered, examined ways, because they can create some really weird social hostilities that have nothing to do with trauma or therapy or privilege or abuse. And I think you can simultaneously agree that gaslighting is an all-pervasive, noxious phenomenon in our society and that the idea that literally every accusation of gaslighting is de facto true is... you know, kind of alarming. It's alarming even before you look at how quickly reactionary politics appropriates progressive terminology and makes it about themselves. (I've already seen repeated claims, for instance, that people who insist the Holocaust really happened are "gaslighting" deniers. Because that's what they're saying.)
So there's one conversation happening here that's: "If these words were used as often as they are genuinely pertinent, they would be used so overwhelmingly often that some folks would wind up unnerved by it, which is what this article reads like." And that's an interpretation that I completely understand—and even, quite possibly, a bigger issue than the one I personally felt this article was addressing.
But I definitely am also curious about the conversation which addresses the intended subject of this article (imo, ymmv), which is: at what point does this language stop working to illuminate society and start working to obscure it? When does the linguistic drift of this terminology cross the line into territory where it can no longer address the things it was originally intended to address, because now those things (which needed terminology because they can be hard to articulate otherwise) are again too precise and specialized for the now-generalized term to accurately convey?
It's possible that these are not two conversations that can happen side-by-side, and maybe that's the fault of the article itself, for not knowing how to clearly delineate between the two in a way that lets the latter be meaningfully discussed. But my own experiences in progressive circles definitely have had me thinking a lot about the latter recently, which is tricky, because the only people who can discuss it meaningfully are progressive people themselves who readily acknowledge the importance of the former. It's a nuanced conversation, and nuance is hard. Which is why I've found myself reading a lot of essays from the late 60s and early 70s recently, instead of keeping abreast of the discourse today. This might be something that's easier to discuss in retrospect than in-the-moment—and I think there are an awful lot of echoes of the movement half a century ago in things that are going on today.
posted by rorgy at 3:22 AM on February 10, 2022 [34 favorites]
My take was that this article is written by someone in the former rather than the latter camp, but upon reflection I have no idea whether or not that's true! And perhaps there's a discussion to be had about whether the NYT's audience is genuinely the sort that's prepared to accept that nuance.
I've been rereading a lot of Jo Freeman recently, because I feel like the problems she described in the late-60s feminist movement are echoing issues we're seeing arise again today. And I simultaneously think that what corb et al are describing (where people are essentially gatekeeping trauma) do happen, and suck, and aren't the specific thing this article's getting at—though it's not a line this piece goes out of its way to draw, so, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If I had to put it into my own words, and articulate it a bit more precisely, I'd say that it's the way that this kind of terminology is wielded in some circumstances as a kind of talisman: something that, once presented, must be agreed upon as unilateral truth, because by its nature any disagreement or equivocation serves as proof that the initial claim was correct.
To draw a parallel to a non-leftist culture, there's a (satirical) scene in The Righteous Gemstones where an Evangelical woman's friend suggests that she gets nice things from her megachurch, like a giant house and a private jet, and responds by accusing her friend of being possessed by Satan. The idea being, of course, that from that point on, any insistence that Satan didn't inspire those (mild) criticisms would itself be proof that Satan must be doing the speaking. It's fundamentally a non-falsifiable claim, if I can use that phrase in this context: agreement or disagreement can both be seen as proof. And I'm not saying that lovebombing or gaslighting (or mansplaining or what-have-you) are meaningless concepts, because they're obviously very important, and they're "catching on" because of how frequently they turn out to be very important, but I think that a lot of the language in the article similarly has the potential to be wielded in similarly non-falsifiable ways.
The article cites a line from Natalie Wynn without citing the essay that that line came from, which I found frustrating, because this line:
All pain is ‘harm.’ All ‘harm’ is ‘trauma.’ All ‘trauma’ comes from someone who is an ‘abuser.'...came from this video about a somewhat related subject, which is a lot more nuanced than the article itself is. Basically, Wynn talks about what Jo Freeman wrote about in her classic essay on trashing, and is talking about a specific drift from verb to noun: the transition from a person who does a particular thing (gaslighting, lovebombing) to a person who is a particular thing (gaslighter, lovebomber). That, mixed with that potential non-falsifiability of this language and the ways in which the noun versions of these concepts are often used in the name of outright condemnation of individuals, can lead to some fucked-up shit, for lack of a better phrase.
And it is so so so important to distinguish that trend from the overarching phenomenon of "people having words to describe something important that's all-too-often invisible." I feel like people here have way more experience talking about legitimate experiences with all this (and I am not gatekeeping "legitimate" here at all, or setting a bar for what counts as legitimate in any way) than they have with the version of this I felt the article was trying to get at.
But I had an experience serving as a mediator between a local community organizer and a friend-of-a-friend trans man who, not to mince words, was a flat-out abusive human being. The trans man in question was highly volatile, emotionally abusive, and was absolutely the sort of person who framed every conflict, even ones that he started, as instances where whomever he was picking a fight with was gaslighting him.
The final straw in his and my friendship was when I connected him with this community organizer (who is a brilliant, brilliant person, and eventually left her duties in disgust over shit like this), and he sent me transcripts of their conversation... and it was horrifying. Her talking, pretty clearly and responsively, about her own values as a queer woman, the various initiatives she was taking to create trans-inclusiveness as well as dedicated non-cis gatherings, the ways she was trying to keep open to other perspectives, asking him what he was looking to see that wasn't there, and him responding with torrents of verbal abuse while accusing her of gaslighting him, as if anything other than "penitent, teary-faced confession of sin" qualified as gaslighting. Because that was his definition! And I knew several people who, rather than put up with his calling for their heads on stakes, wound up basically publicly confessing to wrongdoing and begging forgiveness just to shut him up—all of which he took as an opportunity to heap more verbal abuse on them and gloatingly refuse to forgive them.
That's an extreme example, obviously—but it's not isolated, and I'm adjacent to at least one community where that kind of behavior is essentially the norm. These phrases do need to be used in considered, examined ways, because they can create some really weird social hostilities that have nothing to do with trauma or therapy or privilege or abuse. And I think you can simultaneously agree that gaslighting is an all-pervasive, noxious phenomenon in our society and that the idea that literally every accusation of gaslighting is de facto true is... you know, kind of alarming. It's alarming even before you look at how quickly reactionary politics appropriates progressive terminology and makes it about themselves. (I've already seen repeated claims, for instance, that people who insist the Holocaust really happened are "gaslighting" deniers. Because that's what they're saying.)
So there's one conversation happening here that's: "If these words were used as often as they are genuinely pertinent, they would be used so overwhelmingly often that some folks would wind up unnerved by it, which is what this article reads like." And that's an interpretation that I completely understand—and even, quite possibly, a bigger issue than the one I personally felt this article was addressing.
But I definitely am also curious about the conversation which addresses the intended subject of this article (imo, ymmv), which is: at what point does this language stop working to illuminate society and start working to obscure it? When does the linguistic drift of this terminology cross the line into territory where it can no longer address the things it was originally intended to address, because now those things (which needed terminology because they can be hard to articulate otherwise) are again too precise and specialized for the now-generalized term to accurately convey?
It's possible that these are not two conversations that can happen side-by-side, and maybe that's the fault of the article itself, for not knowing how to clearly delineate between the two in a way that lets the latter be meaningfully discussed. But my own experiences in progressive circles definitely have had me thinking a lot about the latter recently, which is tricky, because the only people who can discuss it meaningfully are progressive people themselves who readily acknowledge the importance of the former. It's a nuanced conversation, and nuance is hard. Which is why I've found myself reading a lot of essays from the late 60s and early 70s recently, instead of keeping abreast of the discourse today. This might be something that's easier to discuss in retrospect than in-the-moment—and I think there are an awful lot of echoes of the movement half a century ago in things that are going on today.
posted by rorgy at 3:22 AM on February 10, 2022 [34 favorites]
> I've been in the situation where my trauma as a survivor of rape was compared to the trauma of a breakup with an emotional abuser.
I say this with love and respect: it's really not useful to talk about whether "The harm done to me is objectively more bad/less bad than the harm done to others."
Your feelings are totally understandable, and your pain is worth honoring and healing. I'm not invalidating the peculiar and real hurt we feel when someone compares their apple or our orange - or worse, when they compare their grape to our cantaloupe. And I resonate A LOT with your self-policing on whether you're allowed to use "the big serious words" to describe your experiences, or whether your pain doesn't make the cut.
But respectfully, I think these thoughts and impulses are coming from a place of still struggling with your own experiences, of still being in the middle of the healing process, and not having fully recovered. These are not healthy ruminations that come from inner peace and full recovery and solid self esteem. They're the opposite. And for that reason I don't think these thoughts should form the basis of any argument about how we should think and act under ideal circumstances. Instead we should probably use these ruminations as a signal to get back to practicing our healing habits.
> And I have seen far too many (mostly white, mostly cis) women begin arguments and criticise others (mostly non-white, often non-cis or at least gender nonconforming) but when the target responds in any way except fawning, suddenly it's abusive and triggering and harassment
This is a great point and it kind of ties back with what I was saying earlier re: unspoken implications.
Sometimes people are saying: "I have been traumatized... AND THEREFORE YOU MUST FAWN OVER ME IMMEDIATELY AND STOP HOLDING ME ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE HARM I HAVE DONE TO YOU."
You're spot on in pointing this out as a toxic pattern of behavior that leverages one's own privilege to silence less privileged people.
But the "I have been traumatized" part is not the objectionable bit in the statement. The capitalized bits are what's objectionable. So in challenging people who use this tactic, we shouldn't fall into the trap of arguing whether or not their trauma is genuine enough, big enough, real enough, etc. We shouldn't be distracted by their diversionary tactics!
Rather, we should say, "I'm so sorry that happened to you. We can take a 10 minute break rn since you're so distressed. And then we'll come back and continue *this* conversation which is about holding you accountable for the harm you caused. Your trauma, which is absolutely real and valid, does not excuse the harm. Your trauma is not the subject of this discussion so when we return, please don't talk about it."
posted by MiraK at 4:48 AM on February 10, 2022 [18 favorites]
I say this with love and respect: it's really not useful to talk about whether "The harm done to me is objectively more bad/less bad than the harm done to others."
Your feelings are totally understandable, and your pain is worth honoring and healing. I'm not invalidating the peculiar and real hurt we feel when someone compares their apple or our orange - or worse, when they compare their grape to our cantaloupe. And I resonate A LOT with your self-policing on whether you're allowed to use "the big serious words" to describe your experiences, or whether your pain doesn't make the cut.
But respectfully, I think these thoughts and impulses are coming from a place of still struggling with your own experiences, of still being in the middle of the healing process, and not having fully recovered. These are not healthy ruminations that come from inner peace and full recovery and solid self esteem. They're the opposite. And for that reason I don't think these thoughts should form the basis of any argument about how we should think and act under ideal circumstances. Instead we should probably use these ruminations as a signal to get back to practicing our healing habits.
> And I have seen far too many (mostly white, mostly cis) women begin arguments and criticise others (mostly non-white, often non-cis or at least gender nonconforming) but when the target responds in any way except fawning, suddenly it's abusive and triggering and harassment
This is a great point and it kind of ties back with what I was saying earlier re: unspoken implications.
Sometimes people are saying: "I have been traumatized... AND THEREFORE YOU MUST FAWN OVER ME IMMEDIATELY AND STOP HOLDING ME ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE HARM I HAVE DONE TO YOU."
You're spot on in pointing this out as a toxic pattern of behavior that leverages one's own privilege to silence less privileged people.
But the "I have been traumatized" part is not the objectionable bit in the statement. The capitalized bits are what's objectionable. So in challenging people who use this tactic, we shouldn't fall into the trap of arguing whether or not their trauma is genuine enough, big enough, real enough, etc. We shouldn't be distracted by their diversionary tactics!
Rather, we should say, "I'm so sorry that happened to you. We can take a 10 minute break rn since you're so distressed. And then we'll come back and continue *this* conversation which is about holding you accountable for the harm you caused. Your trauma, which is absolutely real and valid, does not excuse the harm. Your trauma is not the subject of this discussion so when we return, please don't talk about it."
posted by MiraK at 4:48 AM on February 10, 2022 [18 favorites]
>What's missing to me on the left right now is a theory of power. What is the Problem? Who has the Power to change it? How do we build enough power to pressure that person or people into change?
Power and Responsibility, for sure. "If you're going to take that power, you're responsible to us to fulfill this vision of acting responsibly: fix this problem."
posted by k3ninho at 4:59 AM on February 10, 2022
Power and Responsibility, for sure. "If you're going to take that power, you're responsible to us to fulfill this vision of acting responsibly: fix this problem."
posted by k3ninho at 4:59 AM on February 10, 2022
Re: Trader Joe's employees
It's not forced. They hire people that are naturally outgoing and let them do what they want. There is no script.
I frequently will tell someone that I don't like a product they have in their cart. I feel like this response says way more about you as a person than the cashier.
posted by schyler523 at 5:17 AM on February 10, 2022 [18 favorites]
It's not forced. They hire people that are naturally outgoing and let them do what they want. There is no script.
I frequently will tell someone that I don't like a product they have in their cart. I feel like this response says way more about you as a person than the cashier.
posted by schyler523 at 5:17 AM on February 10, 2022 [18 favorites]
In fact, if you did say what you've been holding back from saying, I'd wager you'd get a laugh out of it.
posted by schyler523 at 5:18 AM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by schyler523 at 5:18 AM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
A lot of good points here in this thread. English for me is a poor language to describe emotion and feeling. Some languages have 30+ different words for the word "Love". For example take the word "bittersweet". How many other words are there in the English language that convey this feeling?
posted by DJZouke at 5:37 AM on February 10, 2022
posted by DJZouke at 5:37 AM on February 10, 2022
Sometimes I wonder if these essays - "People are doing [thing], which used to be good... but is it still good?" - do more harm than the practices they question.
They essay itself isn't as bad as possible readings of it, but I can guarantee you that plenty of people will read it and use it to dismiss rather than evaluate all uses of the language in question.
posted by entropone at 5:45 AM on February 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
They essay itself isn't as bad as possible readings of it, but I can guarantee you that plenty of people will read it and use it to dismiss rather than evaluate all uses of the language in question.
posted by entropone at 5:45 AM on February 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
Wasn't most of humanity throughout history suffering from chronic PTSD, with there being enough absence of trauma for us to have a separate word for trauma itself being a relatively recent phenomenon? War, slavery and desperate poverty were common, capital punishment and torture were accepted, domestic violence was the norm (“spare the rod and spoil the child”), disputes were often resolved with violence and vendettas were common, not to mention that there were people who would want to kill you just because you were from a different tribe/nation/religion. Separating baseline human psychology from the effects of trauma is a process that has only begun recently.
posted by acb at 6:36 AM on February 10, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by acb at 6:36 AM on February 10, 2022 [9 favorites]
I can't read the NYT article but judging from the comments I suppose The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism (recently linked by Kottke) might be of interest here.
posted by Western Infidels at 6:41 AM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Western Infidels at 6:41 AM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
Another thing that comes up as I think about this, and think about the history of PTSD and post traumatic sequelae more generally, is that value judgements of which things are traumatic enough to cause long term harm happen every time our culture collectively decides that a new kind of experience can cause long term damage.
In particular, the idea that rape can be traumatic came in for serious pushback and aggression, and not only from people who did not themselves grapple with then-recognized PTSD. In fact, some of the most profoundly offended people to the notion that rape alone could cause PTSD were veterans who had developed PTSD under military fire. It was not uncommon to see arguments that broadening the understanding that rape could cause PTSD was an insult to the injury that these military veterans had suffered, that it cheapened their experiences, and that this use of the term PTSD diluted an important and powerful concept so that it no longer had power for the people who truly needed it. You also often saw (and still see) arguments to the effect of: okay sure rape can cause PTSD but only violent rape--only rape that you were awake and conscious for all of, or only rape that threatened your life (not just your friendships) or only rape when you fought back, or only--
Oops! Turns out that all kinds of rapes can cause lasting trauma.
Let me be frank here for a minute. I've spoken a number of times here about the lead up to the 2017 DC Women's March as an incident that I found profoundly damaging. Briefly, after several days of friendly and apparently excited visitations my grandparents picked an argument that escalated despite both me and my spouse making desperate attempts to de-escalate and appease, and then drove off in their van having abandoned me and my spouse in an Alexandria, VA parking lot. In January, at a time when the entire city was famously booked solid in terms of hotel rooms and temporary housing.
You can actually read my terrified responses to that event in real time right on this website, because this was one of several communities that I turned to for help in that situation. (I was in fact filtering some of my emotions even at the time because, frankly, I was very frightened and not entirely sure anyone would agree to let us inside for the night, and also I was still thinking about how the fuck I was going to get our stuff back from my grandparents.) Here is what happened: I froze my face, shut down as much reaction as I could, talked my spouse through their sobbing horror, and identified a Starbucks in walking distance. Then we went there and I ordered us a couple of drinks while I sounded an alarm to every social network I could think of that I needed help and a place to stay. We sat in that Starbucks for about an hour or two while I alternated composing requests for help, responding to people reaching out to me, weighing alternatives, and making a plan. I was able to find a friend's aunties who could put us up for the night, and a yearmate of mine who had dropped out of our PhD program and moved home to Maryland offered his six year old son's room to us the next morning, but that second one I was actively coordinating throughout the night. We made plans to meet my friend's aunties at midnight at a particular train station.
Then I considered the question of our belongings. We were wearing lightweight, formal clothing with very little on us; both of our laptops were back at my grandparents' house along with most of our gear, including things that would be very difficult to replace, because we had no savings and were not making much money at all. I took a deep breath and called an Uber, input my grandparents' address, and in the car explained the situation. The driver, bless her heart, agreed to sit in the driveway for a little while and take our next fare to the train station. The driver is at this time also comforting my spouse, who is still openly weeping and shaky and sits in the car, but they're my grandparents and I was foolish enough to hope they might love me more than anything else, so I take a deep breath and walk to the front door. My grandfather answers and asks if I'm happy with myself, because my grandmother is near tears, and calls me a selfish ungrateful child who invited herself where she wasn't welcome. I explain very calmly that I am sorry for my imposition, which I hadn't intended. (I had initially contacted my grandmother and asked, since I was intending to be in the area, if she would like to catch lunch while I was visiting.) I furthermore calmly explained that I wouldn't trouble him further, I just needed to pick up my things. He let me in and I swept up our items very quickly, stripped the bed--I didn't want to give anyone any more room to say I was a bad houseguest--gathered up our possessions and left.
Then I got back in the Uber and we met up with my friend's aunties. By that point my spouse was calming down a little, and I did my very best to be a polite enough victim that they wouldn't think twice about letting us stay in their guest room on the grounds that their nephew had called and asked. I ate a little and collapsed and fell asleep almost immediately; in the morning my spouse nudged me that I should probably contact my parents and let them know I was okay, so I did. My mother, who hates that grandmother (my father's mother), asked what I had done to make them react like that. In the morning we moved to my yearmate's house and caught a train downtown to see what was going on at the inauguration.
Now, that was the play by play of the actual event. It's been just over five years and I am still wrapping my head around the fact that that event profoundly changed my threat assessment in the world around me and that it left me with post traumatic symptoms. (It occurred to me, in fact, only this morning in the shower that this event actually did give me the symptoms of classic PTSD, and that the nightmares which have made up easily 95% of all dreams I can remember since then are usually specifically about travelling to visit family I'm on shaky ground with, and it all seems very nice, and then suddenly it gets very bad and I can't understand what is happening.)
But at no point was I in immediate physical danger. Even if I had not been able to secure lodging on that cold January night, we might have been able to find a heated building to stay in. I was completely physically unharmed. Many people offered to help me, including several people from this community.
And I have PTSD anyway, including triggers that kick off intrusive thoughts and emotional spirals; including intrusive emotional experiences and memories of that day, including not being able to control my emotional reactions to certain things, including--okay. Look.
I have all the fucking symptoms, I have a PhD in behavior and now work in a neuroscience lab, I'm inarguably a pretty smart cookie and it literally took five years for me to realize that this is actually fairly textbook PTSD. And the reason for that is value judgements about what level of intense stressful behavior is enough. I can't stress this enough: the minimization of things that happen to me because they're not things that fit in the list of Acceptable Traumatic Events has actively impaired my ability to understand the problem. And this is not remotely unique to me.
The problem of humans reaching out to conversations like this and learning how to weaponize language and dialogue for monkey hierarchical status reasons is evergreen, because humans are very bright and will always reach for things to use for monkey hierarchical status reasons. The way that we solve this problem is thinking deeply about devising responses that don't require us to be able to perfectly distinguish truth from exaggeration in people around us, because we are less good at that than we often think. Those responses usually involve focusing more on behaviors that are not productive and figuring out how to manage them then focusing on whether the trauma was really that bad or not, because the behaviors are the actual problem that needs solving. They're usually simpler to understand, too.
And the validation stuff tends to spill out in ways that are real, real difficult to predict and understand.
posted by sciatrix at 7:10 AM on February 10, 2022 [71 favorites]
In particular, the idea that rape can be traumatic came in for serious pushback and aggression, and not only from people who did not themselves grapple with then-recognized PTSD. In fact, some of the most profoundly offended people to the notion that rape alone could cause PTSD were veterans who had developed PTSD under military fire. It was not uncommon to see arguments that broadening the understanding that rape could cause PTSD was an insult to the injury that these military veterans had suffered, that it cheapened their experiences, and that this use of the term PTSD diluted an important and powerful concept so that it no longer had power for the people who truly needed it. You also often saw (and still see) arguments to the effect of: okay sure rape can cause PTSD but only violent rape--only rape that you were awake and conscious for all of, or only rape that threatened your life (not just your friendships) or only rape when you fought back, or only--
Oops! Turns out that all kinds of rapes can cause lasting trauma.
Let me be frank here for a minute. I've spoken a number of times here about the lead up to the 2017 DC Women's March as an incident that I found profoundly damaging. Briefly, after several days of friendly and apparently excited visitations my grandparents picked an argument that escalated despite both me and my spouse making desperate attempts to de-escalate and appease, and then drove off in their van having abandoned me and my spouse in an Alexandria, VA parking lot. In January, at a time when the entire city was famously booked solid in terms of hotel rooms and temporary housing.
You can actually read my terrified responses to that event in real time right on this website, because this was one of several communities that I turned to for help in that situation. (I was in fact filtering some of my emotions even at the time because, frankly, I was very frightened and not entirely sure anyone would agree to let us inside for the night, and also I was still thinking about how the fuck I was going to get our stuff back from my grandparents.) Here is what happened: I froze my face, shut down as much reaction as I could, talked my spouse through their sobbing horror, and identified a Starbucks in walking distance. Then we went there and I ordered us a couple of drinks while I sounded an alarm to every social network I could think of that I needed help and a place to stay. We sat in that Starbucks for about an hour or two while I alternated composing requests for help, responding to people reaching out to me, weighing alternatives, and making a plan. I was able to find a friend's aunties who could put us up for the night, and a yearmate of mine who had dropped out of our PhD program and moved home to Maryland offered his six year old son's room to us the next morning, but that second one I was actively coordinating throughout the night. We made plans to meet my friend's aunties at midnight at a particular train station.
Then I considered the question of our belongings. We were wearing lightweight, formal clothing with very little on us; both of our laptops were back at my grandparents' house along with most of our gear, including things that would be very difficult to replace, because we had no savings and were not making much money at all. I took a deep breath and called an Uber, input my grandparents' address, and in the car explained the situation. The driver, bless her heart, agreed to sit in the driveway for a little while and take our next fare to the train station. The driver is at this time also comforting my spouse, who is still openly weeping and shaky and sits in the car, but they're my grandparents and I was foolish enough to hope they might love me more than anything else, so I take a deep breath and walk to the front door. My grandfather answers and asks if I'm happy with myself, because my grandmother is near tears, and calls me a selfish ungrateful child who invited herself where she wasn't welcome. I explain very calmly that I am sorry for my imposition, which I hadn't intended. (I had initially contacted my grandmother and asked, since I was intending to be in the area, if she would like to catch lunch while I was visiting.) I furthermore calmly explained that I wouldn't trouble him further, I just needed to pick up my things. He let me in and I swept up our items very quickly, stripped the bed--I didn't want to give anyone any more room to say I was a bad houseguest--gathered up our possessions and left.
Then I got back in the Uber and we met up with my friend's aunties. By that point my spouse was calming down a little, and I did my very best to be a polite enough victim that they wouldn't think twice about letting us stay in their guest room on the grounds that their nephew had called and asked. I ate a little and collapsed and fell asleep almost immediately; in the morning my spouse nudged me that I should probably contact my parents and let them know I was okay, so I did. My mother, who hates that grandmother (my father's mother), asked what I had done to make them react like that. In the morning we moved to my yearmate's house and caught a train downtown to see what was going on at the inauguration.
Now, that was the play by play of the actual event. It's been just over five years and I am still wrapping my head around the fact that that event profoundly changed my threat assessment in the world around me and that it left me with post traumatic symptoms. (It occurred to me, in fact, only this morning in the shower that this event actually did give me the symptoms of classic PTSD, and that the nightmares which have made up easily 95% of all dreams I can remember since then are usually specifically about travelling to visit family I'm on shaky ground with, and it all seems very nice, and then suddenly it gets very bad and I can't understand what is happening.)
But at no point was I in immediate physical danger. Even if I had not been able to secure lodging on that cold January night, we might have been able to find a heated building to stay in. I was completely physically unharmed. Many people offered to help me, including several people from this community.
And I have PTSD anyway, including triggers that kick off intrusive thoughts and emotional spirals; including intrusive emotional experiences and memories of that day, including not being able to control my emotional reactions to certain things, including--okay. Look.
I have all the fucking symptoms, I have a PhD in behavior and now work in a neuroscience lab, I'm inarguably a pretty smart cookie and it literally took five years for me to realize that this is actually fairly textbook PTSD. And the reason for that is value judgements about what level of intense stressful behavior is enough. I can't stress this enough: the minimization of things that happen to me because they're not things that fit in the list of Acceptable Traumatic Events has actively impaired my ability to understand the problem. And this is not remotely unique to me.
The problem of humans reaching out to conversations like this and learning how to weaponize language and dialogue for monkey hierarchical status reasons is evergreen, because humans are very bright and will always reach for things to use for monkey hierarchical status reasons. The way that we solve this problem is thinking deeply about devising responses that don't require us to be able to perfectly distinguish truth from exaggeration in people around us, because we are less good at that than we often think. Those responses usually involve focusing more on behaviors that are not productive and figuring out how to manage them then focusing on whether the trauma was really that bad or not, because the behaviors are the actual problem that needs solving. They're usually simpler to understand, too.
And the validation stuff tends to spill out in ways that are real, real difficult to predict and understand.
posted by sciatrix at 7:10 AM on February 10, 2022 [71 favorites]
“It’s on America’s tortured brow, that Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow”
And so on and so on (sniff)
posted by beesbees at 7:25 AM on February 10, 2022
And so on and so on (sniff)
posted by beesbees at 7:25 AM on February 10, 2022
I am not in any way a relevant medical expert, but from what I’ve learned from both reading and friends’ experiences, whether people develop ptsd depends not just on the relevant events but also on how they are supported or not supported in the immediate aftermath, what their overall stress levels are and thus whether something small becomes a tipping point, etc.
Eg. in sciatrix‘ story (to just use the most recently posted example), it sounds like the minimizing and blaming behavior from another family member (who, it sounds like, you had good reason to expect would be more understanding and supportive in that particular scenario!) is quite clearly a contributing factor on top of the main negative and harmful interactions; as, no doubt, was the broader context of the reason why the Women’s March was going on in the first place, lack of financial resources to provide alternatives, and the whole background of queerphobia within our culture more broadly. One of my friends grew up in a fairly neglectful family where they were often put in the scapegoat role. Their cptsd symptoms are more severe than some other folks from similarly neglectful homes due to a variety of factors including socioeconomic background, the overall value system instilled by their family deepening the effects of the trauma of that neglect and scapegoating, and maybe even the physical effects resulting from inter-generational traumas that formed the background of their parents’ behavior, where other people’s parents can be neglectful for other reasons. Meanwhile, my childhood experience of ostracization has certainly affected me but hasn’t left lasting trauma due to a variety of protective factors that enabled me to process and deal with it in an emotionally healthy and supported way.
So it may not even be so useful to label particular categories of life experiences as traumatic or not traumatic. That is, possibly the misappropriation from medical terminology is in shifting “trauma” from referring to an effect on an individual to an objective (or attempt at objective, at least) evaluation of an event or type of experience.
posted by eviemath at 7:41 AM on February 10, 2022 [12 favorites]
Eg. in sciatrix‘ story (to just use the most recently posted example), it sounds like the minimizing and blaming behavior from another family member (who, it sounds like, you had good reason to expect would be more understanding and supportive in that particular scenario!) is quite clearly a contributing factor on top of the main negative and harmful interactions; as, no doubt, was the broader context of the reason why the Women’s March was going on in the first place, lack of financial resources to provide alternatives, and the whole background of queerphobia within our culture more broadly. One of my friends grew up in a fairly neglectful family where they were often put in the scapegoat role. Their cptsd symptoms are more severe than some other folks from similarly neglectful homes due to a variety of factors including socioeconomic background, the overall value system instilled by their family deepening the effects of the trauma of that neglect and scapegoating, and maybe even the physical effects resulting from inter-generational traumas that formed the background of their parents’ behavior, where other people’s parents can be neglectful for other reasons. Meanwhile, my childhood experience of ostracization has certainly affected me but hasn’t left lasting trauma due to a variety of protective factors that enabled me to process and deal with it in an emotionally healthy and supported way.
So it may not even be so useful to label particular categories of life experiences as traumatic or not traumatic. That is, possibly the misappropriation from medical terminology is in shifting “trauma” from referring to an effect on an individual to an objective (or attempt at objective, at least) evaluation of an event or type of experience.
posted by eviemath at 7:41 AM on February 10, 2022 [12 favorites]
Wow, Sciatrix. I have read some of your previous comments about the incident but something about the way you're telling it now gave me literal shivers. (Not that I didn't feel for you intensely before. It was horrible. I'm so sorry you had to go through that.) Maybe it's just that with the benefit of five years to process, understand, feel, and internalize the various meanings of what this event meant to you, you're able to hone in to your story - the story of what happened to your heart and mind - with increasing clarity and specificity.
Thank you for sharing this powerful narrative of what it feels like when the rug is pulled out from under your life as you know it. It's one of the best descriptions I've read of abuse without outright violence, of trauma that defies conventional definitions of it.
I want to tell a story here, but don't wish to imply that it's anything like your experience. The only similarity is the lack of language, and concepts, and capacity to fully understand what the fuck happened in the immediate aftermath of it. Two years ago, my sister cut me out of her life, calling me a toxic bully for reasons that (to me) are bizarre - like, she said the bullying started ten years ago when my daughter was born and I wrote several emails trying to convince her to visit the baby, even offering to come pick her up because she lives only 2 hours away, or pay for bus/train/air tickets... followed by more examples of how I used to invite her to visit three or four times every year which she now revealed she felt pressured and bullied by... and she said the final straw that broke her back was when I suggested my kids & I might drive over to her place for a weekend she was free - but it had only been 3 months since her last visit and I was bullying her again, and she was very disturbed at how I was always so cheerful while I bullied her, like a psychopath full of chirpy happiness while hurting people, and she could not stand it anymore, and she was cutting me out of her life. I should note that throughout the years, though she often declined my invitations for various reasons of being busy, she had only shown love and camaraderie and joy when we did get together, frequently she'd say she wished we could hang out more. Never had a clue that this was going on underneath.
She's fully within her rights to cut me out of her life. I'm happy for her that she's taking care of her emotional and psychological needs. More power to her that she did what she needed to reduce her overwhelming stress levels.
And on my end, I have been devastatingly impacted by the event. I still can't bring myself to call this sibling break up "traumatic" for me, largely because it's still difficult to even make sense of it. But I think it was traumatic. It shows up in all kinds of ways. In the last two years I've completely stopped dating or even wanting to date, because when I log into dating sites I feel a sick sense in my stomach that "What's the point? How will I ever know that someone is actually enjoying their time with me, and how can I be sure that my enthusiasm to see them is not harming them?" It's not logical but it's there, and so far I can't surmount it.
It's the same with all my friendships and other relationships. I used to be an effusive hostess, frequently throwing parties and social gatherings, I used to be the person in my friend group who takes initiative and makes shit happen. I have never before in my life paid the slightest attention to whether I am suggesting meetups more often than the other person, but now I CONSTANTLY monitor myself and keep a running tally in my head and stay very very careful never to invite anybody more than once unless they have reciprocated. I've never before in my life wondered whether someone saying "Nah, I'm busy on that day," means anything more than nah, they're busy on that day, but now I totally do! I am super duper careful that if someone says they're busy, I am not going to initiate contact with them again, because I don't want to inadvertently bully them or pressure them. If they decline because they're busy, they immediately go on my do-not-contact-them-until-they-contact-me list, and even if they do contact me, they're still on my do-not-invite-them-to-anything-unless-they-invite-me list.
On a deeper level, I have to work very hard to fight this sick sense that inflicting my company on other people is probably causing them a lot of trauma, even if they seem to be enjoying themselves, it's probably because they don't know it yet how toxic this interaction is for them.None of this is logical. I do know it's irrational, but on an emotional level I seem to be convinced.
I'm a natural ambivert, my need for hanging out with people is no less important than my need for alone time, but the incident with my sister has fundamentally obstructed my ability to be myself. A lot of my friends are wondering whether they've offended me in some way because suddenly I seem to have withdrawn. I am trying to make an effort but it feels SO HARD to get back to my old self. I keep falling short. My relationships are suffering, my mental health is suffering, I constantly have dreams (sometimes explicitly with my sister in it, sometimes not) where the main theme of the dream is everything starts off being miraculously normal again and then boom, everything changes for no reason.
--> All of these, when laid out this way, meet the definition of trauma, regardless of the fact that my sister is not an abuser, and she did absolutely nothing violent to me. But the harm to me was real nonetheless. I've never been able to properly articulate this before.
posted by MiraK at 8:17 AM on February 10, 2022 [16 favorites]
Thank you for sharing this powerful narrative of what it feels like when the rug is pulled out from under your life as you know it. It's one of the best descriptions I've read of abuse without outright violence, of trauma that defies conventional definitions of it.
I want to tell a story here, but don't wish to imply that it's anything like your experience. The only similarity is the lack of language, and concepts, and capacity to fully understand what the fuck happened in the immediate aftermath of it. Two years ago, my sister cut me out of her life, calling me a toxic bully for reasons that (to me) are bizarre - like, she said the bullying started ten years ago when my daughter was born and I wrote several emails trying to convince her to visit the baby, even offering to come pick her up because she lives only 2 hours away, or pay for bus/train/air tickets... followed by more examples of how I used to invite her to visit three or four times every year which she now revealed she felt pressured and bullied by... and she said the final straw that broke her back was when I suggested my kids & I might drive over to her place for a weekend she was free - but it had only been 3 months since her last visit and I was bullying her again, and she was very disturbed at how I was always so cheerful while I bullied her, like a psychopath full of chirpy happiness while hurting people, and she could not stand it anymore, and she was cutting me out of her life. I should note that throughout the years, though she often declined my invitations for various reasons of being busy, she had only shown love and camaraderie and joy when we did get together, frequently she'd say she wished we could hang out more. Never had a clue that this was going on underneath.
She's fully within her rights to cut me out of her life. I'm happy for her that she's taking care of her emotional and psychological needs. More power to her that she did what she needed to reduce her overwhelming stress levels.
And on my end, I have been devastatingly impacted by the event. I still can't bring myself to call this sibling break up "traumatic" for me, largely because it's still difficult to even make sense of it. But I think it was traumatic. It shows up in all kinds of ways. In the last two years I've completely stopped dating or even wanting to date, because when I log into dating sites I feel a sick sense in my stomach that "What's the point? How will I ever know that someone is actually enjoying their time with me, and how can I be sure that my enthusiasm to see them is not harming them?" It's not logical but it's there, and so far I can't surmount it.
It's the same with all my friendships and other relationships. I used to be an effusive hostess, frequently throwing parties and social gatherings, I used to be the person in my friend group who takes initiative and makes shit happen. I have never before in my life paid the slightest attention to whether I am suggesting meetups more often than the other person, but now I CONSTANTLY monitor myself and keep a running tally in my head and stay very very careful never to invite anybody more than once unless they have reciprocated. I've never before in my life wondered whether someone saying "Nah, I'm busy on that day," means anything more than nah, they're busy on that day, but now I totally do! I am super duper careful that if someone says they're busy, I am not going to initiate contact with them again, because I don't want to inadvertently bully them or pressure them. If they decline because they're busy, they immediately go on my do-not-contact-them-until-they-contact-me list, and even if they do contact me, they're still on my do-not-invite-them-to-anything-unless-they-invite-me list.
On a deeper level, I have to work very hard to fight this sick sense that inflicting my company on other people is probably causing them a lot of trauma, even if they seem to be enjoying themselves, it's probably because they don't know it yet how toxic this interaction is for them.None of this is logical. I do know it's irrational, but on an emotional level I seem to be convinced.
I'm a natural ambivert, my need for hanging out with people is no less important than my need for alone time, but the incident with my sister has fundamentally obstructed my ability to be myself. A lot of my friends are wondering whether they've offended me in some way because suddenly I seem to have withdrawn. I am trying to make an effort but it feels SO HARD to get back to my old self. I keep falling short. My relationships are suffering, my mental health is suffering, I constantly have dreams (sometimes explicitly with my sister in it, sometimes not) where the main theme of the dream is everything starts off being miraculously normal again and then boom, everything changes for no reason.
--> All of these, when laid out this way, meet the definition of trauma, regardless of the fact that my sister is not an abuser, and she did absolutely nothing violent to me. But the harm to me was real nonetheless. I've never been able to properly articulate this before.
posted by MiraK at 8:17 AM on February 10, 2022 [16 favorites]
It does seem to me, as pointed out by the author and several here, that society is grasping a new set of terminology in living with misinformation and the effects of it on our psychologies. We have new hammers and lots of thing look like nails. We are, collectively, feeling pretty confident on the upwards ride on that learning curve.
It’s more than a silver lining that we are all learning about trauma. It’s more than good that we are gaining knowledge and societal understanding of the unraveling intent of misinformation. These are more than beneficial lessons. They’re necessary for our survival and we have to keep learning and teaching.
posted by Revvy at 8:30 AM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
It’s more than a silver lining that we are all learning about trauma. It’s more than good that we are gaining knowledge and societal understanding of the unraveling intent of misinformation. These are more than beneficial lessons. They’re necessary for our survival and we have to keep learning and teaching.
posted by Revvy at 8:30 AM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
Near the top of the pandemic, in the moment when everyone was panic-buying, I had a moment where I was genuinely afraid about not having tums anymore, because I didn't see them on the shelf. The next time I was at the store, I had a similar bad feeling, very intense and tight, but not intense enough that I couldn't wrestle it into submission and go on as usual. The next time, tums were back in, and I bought a bottle. And every time I visited that specific store afterward, and stood in that aisle, that feeling would recur, and I'd add a bottle to my cart.
I reorganized my closet last year and y'all, there were like 10 bottles in there. too many. accidental antacid hoarding, my bad.
Calling it trauma seems overblown - but I think there was a groove there that could have turned into a traumatic rut if the circumstances had been different.
I wonder, for mefites who speak 2+ languages, does your non-English language have any more nuance for emotional pain? Is there something we could borrow to expand our own vocabulary? I was thinking of the utlanning/framling/ramen/varelse situation fictionally borrowed from Swedish to encapsulate ideas that kinda-sorta existed in English but didn't have specific names.
posted by snerson at 8:37 AM on February 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
I reorganized my closet last year and y'all, there were like 10 bottles in there. too many. accidental antacid hoarding, my bad.
Calling it trauma seems overblown - but I think there was a groove there that could have turned into a traumatic rut if the circumstances had been different.
I wonder, for mefites who speak 2+ languages, does your non-English language have any more nuance for emotional pain? Is there something we could borrow to expand our own vocabulary? I was thinking of the utlanning/framling/ramen/varelse situation fictionally borrowed from Swedish to encapsulate ideas that kinda-sorta existed in English but didn't have specific names.
posted by snerson at 8:37 AM on February 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
I have so many thoughts about this article, but I can’t figure out a way to write them down that I could leave posted in public. I’ll just have to head over to the current “fucking fuck” thread and mash on the keyboard a little.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 9:03 AM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 9:03 AM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
can we just not do these paywalled articles, or provide an archive?
Listen, lkc, Western Infidels, it isn't hard, just copy the original link, then visit archive.today (or one of the mirrors, like archive.fo or archive.is), scroll down and input. I'll do it for you, but this is the last time.
archived link to the OP's NYTimes story
More about archive.today at Wikipedia.
posted by Rash at 9:10 AM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
Listen, lkc, Western Infidels, it isn't hard, just copy the original link, then visit archive.today (or one of the mirrors, like archive.fo or archive.is), scroll down and input. I'll do it for you, but this is the last time.
archived link to the OP's NYTimes story
More about archive.today at Wikipedia.
posted by Rash at 9:10 AM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
I kind of come at this backwards, I think. For years and years I had the reverse experience of language. For example, I didn't realize that for most people the phrase "time flies when you're having fun," doesn't mean "I don't remember a single thing that happened over the weekend so I must have been having fun."
If you want to know how imprecise language is and how locked into our own heads and experience we are, ask a dissociative person.
Thinking of the trigger example, I've pretty much always had trouble with the word trigger and getting medical care. For me, getting triggered for realsies sometimes means I literally cannot locate pain in my body nor can I tell if it is in the present or the past. This makes some things difficult like figuring out if I broke my wrist or my leg (great when you can actually just xray things), figuring out if I'm in labour (almost gave birth to my second child on the side of the road), or locating internal pain (I tend to end up at the hospital at the point I can't walk if I get a UTI.)
For a long time I had no language for it. Then *I* had language for it, but my care wasn't very trauma-informed. If the language is getting watered down now, it's still on medical professionals to work with individuals to sort that out through precise questions.
(That's my "life hack" for anyone dealing with this. I don't say "I have PTSD" or "I'm triggered." If I can say anything I try to say "I lost my daughter in a labour which resulted in her death and me losing over a litre of blood.")
In terms of using language for personal narrative or, gasp, the very limited resource of sympathy and attention, I really don't generally feel like policing language is all that useful. Again, asking specific questions helps. "If you feel like talking about, what makes you feel love bombed in that situation?" But really, I'm okay giving most people sympathy for whatever feels traumatic to them. I've got lots to go around!
The year after my daughter died I took a writing workshop and because I was trying to sort of not freak out, I kept a private tally of the language of birth and death used in that workshop. Some phrases were obviously known to be benign ("kill your darlings," which of course is just a stock phrase but for me having lost a darling it still kind of rubbed). People talked about their novel being a baby, talked about narrative pathways 'dying a-borning," talked about birthing their stories, memorably, "and then I almost violently drowned that baby in the bathtub."
All of that really rubbed on me. But I was consoled that one reason among many for it was that I'm in a country where, at least on the surface, we don't all just as a matter of fact lose women and children to childbirth. Maybe in the past dying-a-borning was a visceral experience for more people and now it's not. The "not" is the real progress.
Even when people annoy me with their use of Serious Trauma Speak for minor things, I think my joy is if for them those are terrible experiences, because they aren't setting them against worst. I hope we get to where the reality is more that than the other.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:13 AM on February 10, 2022 [19 favorites]
If you want to know how imprecise language is and how locked into our own heads and experience we are, ask a dissociative person.
Thinking of the trigger example, I've pretty much always had trouble with the word trigger and getting medical care. For me, getting triggered for realsies sometimes means I literally cannot locate pain in my body nor can I tell if it is in the present or the past. This makes some things difficult like figuring out if I broke my wrist or my leg (great when you can actually just xray things), figuring out if I'm in labour (almost gave birth to my second child on the side of the road), or locating internal pain (I tend to end up at the hospital at the point I can't walk if I get a UTI.)
For a long time I had no language for it. Then *I* had language for it, but my care wasn't very trauma-informed. If the language is getting watered down now, it's still on medical professionals to work with individuals to sort that out through precise questions.
(That's my "life hack" for anyone dealing with this. I don't say "I have PTSD" or "I'm triggered." If I can say anything I try to say "I lost my daughter in a labour which resulted in her death and me losing over a litre of blood.")
In terms of using language for personal narrative or, gasp, the very limited resource of sympathy and attention, I really don't generally feel like policing language is all that useful. Again, asking specific questions helps. "If you feel like talking about, what makes you feel love bombed in that situation?" But really, I'm okay giving most people sympathy for whatever feels traumatic to them. I've got lots to go around!
The year after my daughter died I took a writing workshop and because I was trying to sort of not freak out, I kept a private tally of the language of birth and death used in that workshop. Some phrases were obviously known to be benign ("kill your darlings," which of course is just a stock phrase but for me having lost a darling it still kind of rubbed). People talked about their novel being a baby, talked about narrative pathways 'dying a-borning," talked about birthing their stories, memorably, "and then I almost violently drowned that baby in the bathtub."
All of that really rubbed on me. But I was consoled that one reason among many for it was that I'm in a country where, at least on the surface, we don't all just as a matter of fact lose women and children to childbirth. Maybe in the past dying-a-borning was a visceral experience for more people and now it's not. The "not" is the real progress.
Even when people annoy me with their use of Serious Trauma Speak for minor things, I think my joy is if for them those are terrible experiences, because they aren't setting them against worst. I hope we get to where the reality is more that than the other.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:13 AM on February 10, 2022 [19 favorites]
The word "legitimate" has come up multiple times in this conversation. To me, part of the issue here is an assumption that calling something "not trauma" (or "not gaslighting," "not lovebombing," "not abuse," etc.) is equivalent to calling it "not legitimate." There are so many kinds of obstacles, struggles, disappointments, heartbreaks, etc. that all of us experience in our lives. Not all of the reasons people feel hurt are valid (e.g. the people losing their shit over vaccines), but most of them are, and if someone told you about a hard or sad experience, sympathy and compassion is the right response, regardless of whether it rises to a certain level or meets certain criteria. It should be possible for us to take each other's pain seriously even when it's not specifically trauma.
posted by naoko at 9:38 AM on February 10, 2022 [14 favorites]
posted by naoko at 9:38 AM on February 10, 2022 [14 favorites]
Not all of the reasons people feel hurt are valid (e.g. the people losing their shit over vaccines),
I imagine being required to take a vaccine could cause trauma for someone who believed that it was poison. Like, trauma doesn't care if the danger is real or not.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:31 AM on February 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
I imagine being required to take a vaccine could cause trauma for someone who believed that it was poison. Like, trauma doesn't care if the danger is real or not.
posted by BungaDunga at 10:31 AM on February 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
Maybe so! In which case, "trauma" wouldn't even be a subset of "things that are legitimate," but rather, those would be overlapping circles.
posted by naoko at 10:33 AM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by naoko at 10:33 AM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]
I've been in the situation where my trauma as a survivor of rape was compared to the trauma of a breakup with an emotional abuser.
It might be helpful to provide my own positionality and context. I am a woman of color, and a survivor of violent rape, at gunpoint, by a former intimate partner who had also been emotionally and physically abusive prior to that incident.
I have been in therapy for nearly half my life at this point about it, and still suffer flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, the absolute inability to physically move, even once out of the street when cars were coming directly towards me. I am also a veteran of a war. I have, by every standard that people invent, all the socially acceptable "Good Trauma", the kind that people accept as serious immediately.
I am going to tell you, that in all of that trauma, the thing that causes me the most nightmares, the most general interference with overall functioning, that has caused me the most social and economic disability-related harm is the trauma from the complex web of intimate partner violence, stalking, and surveillance that occurred before the rape.
Different people have different responses to traumatic experiences, and yes, some people have different levels of severity of post-traumatic stress. But what I am trying to explain is that those levels of severity are not determined by an objective standard of what the inciting traumatic event was. There is no chart, no guide, that will tell you. People that were in the very same incident and both experienced PTSD from it will have differing levels of symptomology.
I get that people misuse language - that definitely happens! But simply having a post-traumatic reaction to a stress that isn't as objectively severe as another places us in a competitive hierarchy of trauma that I, for one, as someone who would be placed by others near the top of that hierarchy, absolutely refuse to engage in.
posted by corb at 12:15 PM on February 10, 2022 [40 favorites]
It might be helpful to provide my own positionality and context. I am a woman of color, and a survivor of violent rape, at gunpoint, by a former intimate partner who had also been emotionally and physically abusive prior to that incident.
I have been in therapy for nearly half my life at this point about it, and still suffer flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, the absolute inability to physically move, even once out of the street when cars were coming directly towards me. I am also a veteran of a war. I have, by every standard that people invent, all the socially acceptable "Good Trauma", the kind that people accept as serious immediately.
I am going to tell you, that in all of that trauma, the thing that causes me the most nightmares, the most general interference with overall functioning, that has caused me the most social and economic disability-related harm is the trauma from the complex web of intimate partner violence, stalking, and surveillance that occurred before the rape.
Different people have different responses to traumatic experiences, and yes, some people have different levels of severity of post-traumatic stress. But what I am trying to explain is that those levels of severity are not determined by an objective standard of what the inciting traumatic event was. There is no chart, no guide, that will tell you. People that were in the very same incident and both experienced PTSD from it will have differing levels of symptomology.
I get that people misuse language - that definitely happens! But simply having a post-traumatic reaction to a stress that isn't as objectively severe as another places us in a competitive hierarchy of trauma that I, for one, as someone who would be placed by others near the top of that hierarchy, absolutely refuse to engage in.
posted by corb at 12:15 PM on February 10, 2022 [40 favorites]
I'm going to elaborate slightly because, well, I don't want to give the impression that I think an emotionally abusive relationship isn't Trauma That Is Real.
I specifically referred to the breakup because that's what was presented to me as the trauma. And that my setting boundaries or being unavailable was triggering and thus akin to the abuser - we weren't romantic partners! We were friends! But to him those actions were triggering and too much like the breakup so I should stop.
After a while I worked out that he engaged in a bunch of emotionally abusive behaviours with me but at the time I was just...pissed off. I worked long and hard to get to a place where I could have boundaries and verbalise them, where I could fill my own cup, and it was all trauma stuff. To have that derided as emotionally abusive was upsetting, to say the least. He got broken up with in a sucky way that hurt, and I was supposed to not do the things I need to build myself back as a person after being raped?
And yet, as another friend said, am I gonna judge someone's trauma?
No, but it turns out judging their response, that all caps demand after the trauma, is much the same. Or it is to the person, if not the community. That's what I struggle with. Because to him it was triggering, was felt in the same way as emotional abuse. To not verbalise my boundaries, or ignore violations of them, was similarly so to me. Incompatible needs. Admittedly coloured by my suspicion that his litany of complaints was not as truthful, given his behaviour towards me, and that was the beginning of the end for that friendship. The use of therapeutic language as a form of control put my back up and it's hard to come down from there, for me.
(Plus, at the time, being accused of being fake and a list because when I diassociate I'm pleasant but not authentically me was hard to deal with)
I have friends with cptsd and it's been useful, to all of us, to recognise the kind of...emotional triggers they have. To be able to take care with those.
That all said, I am far far far more concerned with weaponised white fragility - 'feminist' or otherwise - that coopts and uses this language to further harm and marginalise people. The big incident I was vaguely involved with was regarding a woman who enabled a serial harasser to not only gain work at her company and in the industry, but defended him and variously slut-shamed, defamed, and attacked his victims for speaking out. Until there was enough of a shift culturally to make it clear he had done this across two different industries, gotten himself banned from at least one major convention, and done a bunch of it publicly. Then it became about how much everyone was attacking her as a woman and a queer woman and he just said things (except that one time) but worse had happened to her at the hands of other men and she is so heartbroken and traumatised and the harassment and death threats and abuse is just too much. At which point any identification of the structural aspects was deemed harassment.
How do you fix structural inequity when even discussion of it gets interwoven into the personal traumas of those invested in its continuance?
(Note: I did see this dealt with rather effectively at least once, and no surprise it was Courtney Milan and the accusations of harassment and abuse against Stitch - Milan is Chinese American I believe, and Stitch is Black. Milan asked for proof, received screenshots, then made a thread talking about the accusation, and the paucity of proof and the level of bad faith reading needed to parse that as harassment. And yet, folk continue to point to their traumatic experiences with Stitch as to why they don't need to listen to their work about race and media)
posted by geek anachronism at 2:21 PM on February 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
I specifically referred to the breakup because that's what was presented to me as the trauma. And that my setting boundaries or being unavailable was triggering and thus akin to the abuser - we weren't romantic partners! We were friends! But to him those actions were triggering and too much like the breakup so I should stop.
After a while I worked out that he engaged in a bunch of emotionally abusive behaviours with me but at the time I was just...pissed off. I worked long and hard to get to a place where I could have boundaries and verbalise them, where I could fill my own cup, and it was all trauma stuff. To have that derided as emotionally abusive was upsetting, to say the least. He got broken up with in a sucky way that hurt, and I was supposed to not do the things I need to build myself back as a person after being raped?
And yet, as another friend said, am I gonna judge someone's trauma?
No, but it turns out judging their response, that all caps demand after the trauma, is much the same. Or it is to the person, if not the community. That's what I struggle with. Because to him it was triggering, was felt in the same way as emotional abuse. To not verbalise my boundaries, or ignore violations of them, was similarly so to me. Incompatible needs. Admittedly coloured by my suspicion that his litany of complaints was not as truthful, given his behaviour towards me, and that was the beginning of the end for that friendship. The use of therapeutic language as a form of control put my back up and it's hard to come down from there, for me.
(Plus, at the time, being accused of being fake and a list because when I diassociate I'm pleasant but not authentically me was hard to deal with)
I have friends with cptsd and it's been useful, to all of us, to recognise the kind of...emotional triggers they have. To be able to take care with those.
That all said, I am far far far more concerned with weaponised white fragility - 'feminist' or otherwise - that coopts and uses this language to further harm and marginalise people. The big incident I was vaguely involved with was regarding a woman who enabled a serial harasser to not only gain work at her company and in the industry, but defended him and variously slut-shamed, defamed, and attacked his victims for speaking out. Until there was enough of a shift culturally to make it clear he had done this across two different industries, gotten himself banned from at least one major convention, and done a bunch of it publicly. Then it became about how much everyone was attacking her as a woman and a queer woman and he just said things (except that one time) but worse had happened to her at the hands of other men and she is so heartbroken and traumatised and the harassment and death threats and abuse is just too much. At which point any identification of the structural aspects was deemed harassment.
How do you fix structural inequity when even discussion of it gets interwoven into the personal traumas of those invested in its continuance?
(Note: I did see this dealt with rather effectively at least once, and no surprise it was Courtney Milan and the accusations of harassment and abuse against Stitch - Milan is Chinese American I believe, and Stitch is Black. Milan asked for proof, received screenshots, then made a thread talking about the accusation, and the paucity of proof and the level of bad faith reading needed to parse that as harassment. And yet, folk continue to point to their traumatic experiences with Stitch as to why they don't need to listen to their work about race and media)
posted by geek anachronism at 2:21 PM on February 10, 2022 [3 favorites]
Corb, I am sorry these things happened to you, and that you still suffer. I am here, wishing you strength, and peace, may it all come to rest inside of you, and leave you to your uninterrupted being and joy.
posted by Oyéah at 4:15 PM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Oyéah at 4:15 PM on February 10, 2022 [2 favorites]
Am I the only one who thinks that "gaslighting" is far more specific than "trauma"? Gaslighting has a specific piece of media from which it originates, and adds a distinction beyond garden-variety lying. To use it imprecisely undermines the ability to express that one has been gaslit. Keeping the specific meaning allows you have a scale of lying, from mostly harmless white lies, to ordinary lies, to bald-faced lies, to gaslighting, which is by far the most serious because it is deliberate, personal, and intended to make you doubt your own reality.
posted by wnissen at 4:26 PM on February 10, 2022 [14 favorites]
posted by wnissen at 4:26 PM on February 10, 2022 [14 favorites]
wnissen, yes indeed. When I described people misusing "gaslighting", another commenter said, "It's not an abuse to use the term" because, they said, there's a lot of gaslighting going on these days. But surely it is an abuse to misuse the term. And I have seen quite a bit of it. Some of the people using it don't seem to know what it actually means... which dilutes its effectiveness and precision. The same applies to some of the other language discussed here.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:50 PM on February 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 4:50 PM on February 10, 2022 [5 favorites]
I think it's revealing that it's very often the case that the people who complain the loudest that other people are "playing the victim card" turn around and proclaim themselves to be victims.
The problem isn't that language is diluted or the credibility of trauma claims diminished, but that people with privilege will do what they usually do, and that's use their privilege to direct attention to themselves and their concerns and away from the concerns and trauma of those less privileged.
In other words, debating the legitimacy of a claim of trauma is a red herring — what's relevant and worrisome is when such claims are used as a means to protect and reinforce privilege. I think one can discern a great deal by examining and carefully considering the rhetoric that's being deployed and specifically to what ends.
It's not that difficult to identify when someone is deploying the "what about white people's pain, like mine?" tactic. That sort of thing shouldn't be tolerated... otherwise, in general, we should take people at their word when they describe their trauma and take it seriously.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:47 PM on February 10, 2022 [10 favorites]
The problem isn't that language is diluted or the credibility of trauma claims diminished, but that people with privilege will do what they usually do, and that's use their privilege to direct attention to themselves and their concerns and away from the concerns and trauma of those less privileged.
In other words, debating the legitimacy of a claim of trauma is a red herring — what's relevant and worrisome is when such claims are used as a means to protect and reinforce privilege. I think one can discern a great deal by examining and carefully considering the rhetoric that's being deployed and specifically to what ends.
It's not that difficult to identify when someone is deploying the "what about white people's pain, like mine?" tactic. That sort of thing shouldn't be tolerated... otherwise, in general, we should take people at their word when they describe their trauma and take it seriously.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:47 PM on February 10, 2022 [10 favorites]
Denying CRT in schools, is denial of the trauma slavery caused. It is also a denial of harmful institutions still in place, whose intent is to traumatize and lessen the lives of POC. However, listening to people discuss their situations is easy, as long as we realize it is not a pity party or contest. Often grown up adults, strive like children. Then we also must remember, the discussion of hurt, resonates with anyone who has been hurt, and the response to that is going to vary. Suddenly we are all children in original pain, in the middle of an adult discussion. It is our job as human beings to listen and resonate, radiate, affirm that we care, and listen some more. If it dredges up stuff from our past, fully loaded fresh, clear, trauma, we are lucky to have it surface, because often it bottom feeds and erodes the day to day in mysterious ways. When it surfaces take note, and get back to it later, in your quiet, after you have listened and cared and experienced the pain others carry.
Again, I think naming things is important, language that is descriptive, understandable, in common use, and accurate.
posted by Oyéah at 7:04 PM on February 10, 2022
Again, I think naming things is important, language that is descriptive, understandable, in common use, and accurate.
posted by Oyéah at 7:04 PM on February 10, 2022
people are using these terms because they are realizing that we live in a culture that is in many ways built on abuse. And as a result, many invested in the status quo are trying to argue that it's somehow "wrong" to use the language of abuse and trauma to discuss our culture because they would prefer not to confront the reality of our society.
ultimately it's not about language. language is a social means to an end. it's really all about power. whose bad experiences matter enough for others to be socially forced to recognize them?
in ancient societies, some lord or lady suffering a minor social faux pas might lead to grave consequences, but a commoner was expected to suffer forever until death without complaining one bit.
now, in america at least, there is a social upheaval where people who had less power are getting more, and we're arguing about the hierarchy of slights and offenses. whose are worth what, and in what measure? eventually society will settle on some new, mostly arbitrary, order.
some people think our society's entire moral order is inherently fucked up, so the term trauma applies generally, because america has traumatized us all. i think that's wrong. most people don't feel that way, or act that way, let alone vote that way, if we want to involve politics. but it is true that the scope of what counts as trauma should be, and has been, greatly expanded from what it was in america 40 years ago. and that's a good thing.
posted by wibari at 10:26 PM on February 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
ultimately it's not about language. language is a social means to an end. it's really all about power. whose bad experiences matter enough for others to be socially forced to recognize them?
in ancient societies, some lord or lady suffering a minor social faux pas might lead to grave consequences, but a commoner was expected to suffer forever until death without complaining one bit.
now, in america at least, there is a social upheaval where people who had less power are getting more, and we're arguing about the hierarchy of slights and offenses. whose are worth what, and in what measure? eventually society will settle on some new, mostly arbitrary, order.
some people think our society's entire moral order is inherently fucked up, so the term trauma applies generally, because america has traumatized us all. i think that's wrong. most people don't feel that way, or act that way, let alone vote that way, if we want to involve politics. but it is true that the scope of what counts as trauma should be, and has been, greatly expanded from what it was in america 40 years ago. and that's a good thing.
posted by wibari at 10:26 PM on February 10, 2022 [4 favorites]
I really appreciate everyone's thoughts on this topic. I've been struggling with feeling that people are "overusing" the word trauma to describe things that have happened to them. This thread has helped me remember that I shouldn't focus on one word so much as the feeling or concept being expressed.
posted by Braeburn at 5:04 AM on February 11, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Braeburn at 5:04 AM on February 11, 2022 [4 favorites]
>now, in america at least, there is a social upheaval where people who had less power are getting more, and we're arguing about the hierarchy of slights and offenses.
I call this distraction 'let's you and them fight'. Those with power create infighting over gatekeeping, over the language to describe your complaint and the remedy you want, what the vision of better would look like, how broad the tent can be ... plus telling the people who see you as kin but have no power that they will lose something when the people painted as outsiders get a fair space in the planet we share.
Thing is, it's also sold as a zero-sum game where we have to fight over the limited I-don't-know-what people have when they're powerless. Why we aren't teaming up to take power (and responsibility*) from the people lying to us ... is something we hope to arrive at a consensus view on at the next quarterly discussion session, if our wounds are healed from the acrimony of the last few meetings.
*: none of these power-hungry f__kers want responsibility, so go after responsibility and power.
posted by k3ninho at 7:11 AM on February 11, 2022
I call this distraction 'let's you and them fight'. Those with power create infighting over gatekeeping, over the language to describe your complaint and the remedy you want, what the vision of better would look like, how broad the tent can be ... plus telling the people who see you as kin but have no power that they will lose something when the people painted as outsiders get a fair space in the planet we share.
Thing is, it's also sold as a zero-sum game where we have to fight over the limited I-don't-know-what people have when they're powerless. Why we aren't teaming up to take power (and responsibility*) from the people lying to us ... is something we hope to arrive at a consensus view on at the next quarterly discussion session, if our wounds are healed from the acrimony of the last few meetings.
*: none of these power-hungry f__kers want responsibility, so go after responsibility and power.
posted by k3ninho at 7:11 AM on February 11, 2022
I mean, another thing to keep in mind is that two people who are both in pain or unable to access a space can have incompatible needs. When we decide how to prioritize each when two disabled people need incompatible things, we do so with an eye towards balancing need and power. This is my "conflicting accommodations" model of dealing with people who are asking for more accommodation than I can provide, including accommodations like "you cannot set boundaries with me" and "you cannot talk about racism where I might feel bad". Sometimes, people need things that you do not have to give, and you need to talk about where boundaries sit.
See, when you grapple with trauma, one of the things that must be understood is that real pain and need can lead to unacceptable behavior that inflicts great harm. That behavior should not be indulged and allowed to wreak greater pain and trauma in its wake. Additionally, the burden of accommodation is always a calculus between need and power: we expect more accommodation from organizations and institutions with great power, and less from those with less, and we expect to provide more accommodation to individuals with great need than those with less.
And sometimes the things that one person says "I need this to stop being in pain" will cause much greater harm to other people down the line. At that point, you say: "this is not a balanced request. It costs more than I can provide. I am so sorry. I see that you are in pain, but I do not have the power and resources to meet your need right now." And that's.... okay. Unmet needs and desires happen to us. Part of managing trauma specifically is learning how to meet your own needs for self-soothing and for coping with raw emotions as best as you can, and that's something we expect on some level from all traumatized people. Hurt people can still hurt you. We all have to conduct triage. That doesn't mean their pain and emotional experience is not real, but sometimes you have to protect yourself anyway, because yawning need isn't something you can solve by hurling your whole self into it.
So: you can say "I see you are in pain, but I need you to stop doing that." You can say "I see you are in pain, but I don't have the resources to help you right now." You can say "Your pain is real and I can't let it touch me." These are all reasonable things to do in the lens of dealing with people who are being reactive and not controlling their trauma responses well, even if you're taking them at their word when they say they are in emotional pain. Maybe they are! But their actions aren't acceptable right now.
geek anachronism, the first situation you describe, with your friend with the breakup? He's asking you for a level of emotional support and control you can't provide right now, and you can say "I can't do that, I'm sorry" and withdraw without having to take on the responsibility to soothe him. It's very sad that this breakup has left him flailing this hard, but the things he is asking for re: asking you to have no boundaries are beyond your ability to accommodate, so... the next most obvious solution is that you withdraw from the friendship some, which is exactly what you did.
I think the thing I'm trying to underline here is that people don't have to go "excuse me, your use of this term is bullshit" to justify saying that the accommodations someone is asking for because of their emotional responses aren't reasonable, in the same way that people don't have to go "medical exemptions are bullshit" when COVID deniers try to abuse disability accommodations to be allowed to not wear masks in public. This request isbullshit not reasonable because it exerts an undue burden that prevents other people from accessing the space, so we need to come up with solutions that can allow as many people as possible to access. If your trauma is such that you cannot control your behaviors in response to various stimuli, then there are certain things you don't get to do anymore (like be in control of powerful organizations). Using that framing, we can still justify reasonable boundaries and prevent empathy from being weaponized for abuse without making judgements about whether people are lying about their emotional experience.
posted by sciatrix at 7:15 AM on February 11, 2022 [27 favorites]
See, when you grapple with trauma, one of the things that must be understood is that real pain and need can lead to unacceptable behavior that inflicts great harm. That behavior should not be indulged and allowed to wreak greater pain and trauma in its wake. Additionally, the burden of accommodation is always a calculus between need and power: we expect more accommodation from organizations and institutions with great power, and less from those with less, and we expect to provide more accommodation to individuals with great need than those with less.
And sometimes the things that one person says "I need this to stop being in pain" will cause much greater harm to other people down the line. At that point, you say: "this is not a balanced request. It costs more than I can provide. I am so sorry. I see that you are in pain, but I do not have the power and resources to meet your need right now." And that's.... okay. Unmet needs and desires happen to us. Part of managing trauma specifically is learning how to meet your own needs for self-soothing and for coping with raw emotions as best as you can, and that's something we expect on some level from all traumatized people. Hurt people can still hurt you. We all have to conduct triage. That doesn't mean their pain and emotional experience is not real, but sometimes you have to protect yourself anyway, because yawning need isn't something you can solve by hurling your whole self into it.
So: you can say "I see you are in pain, but I need you to stop doing that." You can say "I see you are in pain, but I don't have the resources to help you right now." You can say "Your pain is real and I can't let it touch me." These are all reasonable things to do in the lens of dealing with people who are being reactive and not controlling their trauma responses well, even if you're taking them at their word when they say they are in emotional pain. Maybe they are! But their actions aren't acceptable right now.
geek anachronism, the first situation you describe, with your friend with the breakup? He's asking you for a level of emotional support and control you can't provide right now, and you can say "I can't do that, I'm sorry" and withdraw without having to take on the responsibility to soothe him. It's very sad that this breakup has left him flailing this hard, but the things he is asking for re: asking you to have no boundaries are beyond your ability to accommodate, so... the next most obvious solution is that you withdraw from the friendship some, which is exactly what you did.
I think the thing I'm trying to underline here is that people don't have to go "excuse me, your use of this term is bullshit" to justify saying that the accommodations someone is asking for because of their emotional responses aren't reasonable, in the same way that people don't have to go "medical exemptions are bullshit" when COVID deniers try to abuse disability accommodations to be allowed to not wear masks in public. This request is
posted by sciatrix at 7:15 AM on February 11, 2022 [27 favorites]
Severe poverty, hunger, homelessness, cruelty, torture, and so many other forms of inflicting and experiencing trauma have been around a long time. The difference now is that we know. There is truthful, accurate news. It is trivially easy to know that you could end some forms of pain with your wealth. Bitcoin, NFTs, and other conspicuous consumption as an absorber of money tells you that in the US, there's just so much money available. Billionaires know that their wealth depends on infrastructure that everybody pays for, on low wages and low benefits, war profiteering and pillaging the planet. They know that fossil fuels are wrecking the climate humans and other creatures depend on. And they choose to not care.
As recently as, say, 1930, there was mass starvation, failed crops, disease, torture and government genocide and mass murder that was hard to know about. There's something about knowing harm is being caused, and not just not acting, but genuinely not caring. The GOP seems to be really pushing an agenda of taking pleasure in ignorance, cruelty, etc. housing crisis is growing, economic inequity is growing, political corruption is growing. I tend to catrastrophise about how this will play out; I hope Biden's cheery We can do this approach is effective, but my predictions are pretty dark.
I've got my troubles. Lots of people have more, and more serious troubles, but trauma hurts and compassion is a thing. Trauma isn't a badge of honor, but lots of people use it that way; they must need comfort. Trauma isn't a free pass, but if you need a pass, maybe you need comfort. We have comfort, and food, shelter, health care, housing available, we could choose to reduce trauma. I think it would require an evolutionary leap. Forward, not backward, which is a thing lately.
posted by theora55 at 9:46 AM on February 11, 2022 [3 favorites]
As recently as, say, 1930, there was mass starvation, failed crops, disease, torture and government genocide and mass murder that was hard to know about. There's something about knowing harm is being caused, and not just not acting, but genuinely not caring. The GOP seems to be really pushing an agenda of taking pleasure in ignorance, cruelty, etc. housing crisis is growing, economic inequity is growing, political corruption is growing. I tend to catrastrophise about how this will play out; I hope Biden's cheery We can do this approach is effective, but my predictions are pretty dark.
I've got my troubles. Lots of people have more, and more serious troubles, but trauma hurts and compassion is a thing. Trauma isn't a badge of honor, but lots of people use it that way; they must need comfort. Trauma isn't a free pass, but if you need a pass, maybe you need comfort. We have comfort, and food, shelter, health care, housing available, we could choose to reduce trauma. I think it would require an evolutionary leap. Forward, not backward, which is a thing lately.
posted by theora55 at 9:46 AM on February 11, 2022 [3 favorites]
My teenager, a TikTok psychologist, recently told me proudly that she had accomplished some difficult task by “gaslighting herself,” by which she meant the kind of well-intentioned self-deception that my grandmother would have called “mind over matter” or perhaps just “willpower.”
This is a person who has some actual trauma to deal with, and the blurring of language described in this article deprives her of a vocabulary to deal with it.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 12:21 PM on February 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
This is a person who has some actual trauma to deal with, and the blurring of language described in this article deprives her of a vocabulary to deal with it.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 12:21 PM on February 11, 2022 [2 favorites]
“Teenager has incomplete vocabulary” is far less attention-grabbing and panic-inducing or compelling than “we’re losing the language to talk about… the stuff of self”, I suppose.
posted by eviemath at 6:13 PM on February 11, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 6:13 PM on February 11, 2022 [5 favorites]
This particular teenager’s misunderstanding of “gaslighting” has turned into an important part of her identity. For her to come to understand the difference between minor and well-intentioned untruths versus an abusive, systematic distortion of reality is … well, it’s going to feel a lot like a systematic distortion of reality, which she’s going to fight as if it were abusive. “Yikes” is absolutely the correct reaction.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 8:38 AM on February 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 8:38 AM on February 12, 2022 [3 favorites]
I guess the question I have then, as someone who also devoured pop psych as a teenager, is this: How and why did that understanding of 'gaslighting' become such a fundamental part of her identity? What you're describing isn't simply a misunderstanding, because misunderstandings are pretty easy to rectify. What you're describing is more like the web of belief that you see in people who are in a cult or other totalist group, where the specialized definitions of the group have become part of the mechanism to keep members close. I don't know that I think this is a problem of individual people being lazy with their terminology.
I think that, if your assessment of this teenager is correct, you're dealing with an entirely different problem. And if it's not correct, you have two problems: one is that you're not communicating well with said teenager about what she actually thinks and feels, and the other one is that blaming the problem on other people being lazy with terminology undercuts your motivation to talk to said teenager and listen to why she's got this incorrect idea in her head and talk about what she's thinking about so you can come to a better understanding.
Which is also a strategy that works if she's gotten caught up in a cult or similar kind of charismatic toxic relationship network, by the way, so I tend to try to default to it when I have someone I care about who starts talking about things that seem like total nonsense.
posted by sciatrix at 4:30 PM on February 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
I think that, if your assessment of this teenager is correct, you're dealing with an entirely different problem. And if it's not correct, you have two problems: one is that you're not communicating well with said teenager about what she actually thinks and feels, and the other one is that blaming the problem on other people being lazy with terminology undercuts your motivation to talk to said teenager and listen to why she's got this incorrect idea in her head and talk about what she's thinking about so you can come to a better understanding.
Which is also a strategy that works if she's gotten caught up in a cult or similar kind of charismatic toxic relationship network, by the way, so I tend to try to default to it when I have someone I care about who starts talking about things that seem like total nonsense.
posted by sciatrix at 4:30 PM on February 12, 2022 [2 favorites]
A very reasonable comment, sciatrix, to which I cannot respond in public. I appreciate your thoughts.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 4:54 PM on February 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 4:54 PM on February 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
If we're using therapy language here, I'm surprised no one has brought up the acronym 'DARVO' given some of the anecdotes given in this thread.
Because a bunch of these cautionary examples of having people weaponise what they say/claim is their Trauma, and using that as an excuse in social situations for actions towards others which actually seem pretty abusive?
We have a therapy term for that! It's -
DARVO:
*"deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender". It is a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers.*
Unfortunately yeah, abusers are usually much better at gaming the system and eliciting sympathy in many cases than uh, people who have actually experienced trauma/are the 'victims' because they are aiming for the maximum amount of sympathy, truth be damned, and honestly having less stress and flashbacks and actual trauma probably makes it easier to present sympathetically in social situations.
Geek_Anachronism: Reading between the lines, it sounds like your 'Friend' claimed emotional abuse from a partner? but the main example of being 'triggered' they gave you was apparently situations that reminded them of their partner breaking off contact with them or establishing boundaries?
Which... Is interesting, because breaking off contact is a pretty common and recommended thing for *victims of abuse* to do.
So you've mentioned this 'Friend' 'later' turned out to be emotionally abusive in other unmentioned ways? But primarily, that they equated their break up with your *rape*, and apparently insisted that you weren't allowed to have boundaries with them, be unavailable or not spend time with them, at the risk of 'triggering them'?
They were obviously being abusive and controlling with your boundaries btw, the excuse isn't relevant to that.
But the excuse is *interesting*, because - I'm just spitballing here, with abusers using the DARVO tactic so fucking commonly, I would be super unsurprised to hear that oh -
1. Perhaps the 'Friend' was actually the primarily emotional abuser to their partner? (in toxic relationships it can get messy)
2. The partner tried to establish boundaries/cut off contact with 'Friend'...
DARVO - The 'Friend' denies they were ever abusive obviously. The Friend went on the Attack with friends such as yourself, and claimed the partner was emotionally abusive to them, as they told you
Having established their ex as the 'Offender' and *themselves* as the Victim, they then... use their perceived victim status to excuse their own abusive actions towards partner and others.
They used DARVO on you, at least or as well, because when they ignored your boundaries or unavailability (as abusers do), instead of recognising that they were being abusive/offending against your boundaries, they:
went on the offensive and claimed that *you* were essentially being abusive and triggering them, merely by *having* boundaries.
Having boundaries is not abusive.
So, I dunno, you might have noticed or thought all this before, I'm just reframing this incase it hadn't occurred to you - they apparently initially presented themselves to you as a 'Victim' (a fellow victim, in that they compared it to your experience), and you noticed later that they were abusive towards you...
But well, maybe they were never the victim in their previous relationship situation *either*, at least not the way you or I would understand it (toxic relationships can get messy tho).
They... might have just been 'the Abuser' all along?
And have a long standing pattern of presenting themselves as a 'Victim' to their new friends and acquaintances, and then proceed to behave abusively with the ones they can get away with it with, as they did with you.
Their claims of experiencing Trauma may not be trauma as we'd both think of it, so much as upset at situations where they didn't have control over their victims.
So if part of you was going, then and now, that their experience didn't feel at *all* similar to your own experience of rape - not just in a matter of degree or severity (you didn't compare them yourself), but that what they were *calling* Trauma seemed like an entirely different experience?
Then maybe you were entirely right...?
They may never had what we'd called trauma, but were talking about an abusers lack of control? And if so, maybe you could tell on an empathetic level that you weren't talking about the same emotions or experience, but you were giving them the benefit of the doubt, and didn't have the context at the time to understand what was going on.
You might find yourself talk to someone who left an emotionally abusive relationship and is suffering PTSD, and find you share a lot of empathy with them, or consider that they are two *different* types of trauma, but were both traumatic in more similar ways, in a way that you didn't relate to this supposed friends experience.
Without having the context, we don't know, but I'm guessing there were things about that situation that you're having trouble explaining here that gave you a gut feeling that 'these situations were not the same' despite him telling you they were. So yeah, maybe they weren't?
A hypothesis bought to you by, having seen this shit happen a bunch of times before... If it's not relevant, no worries.
posted by Elysum at 11:42 PM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
Because a bunch of these cautionary examples of having people weaponise what they say/claim is their Trauma, and using that as an excuse in social situations for actions towards others which actually seem pretty abusive?
We have a therapy term for that! It's -
DARVO:
*"deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender". It is a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers.*
Unfortunately yeah, abusers are usually much better at gaming the system and eliciting sympathy in many cases than uh, people who have actually experienced trauma/are the 'victims' because they are aiming for the maximum amount of sympathy, truth be damned, and honestly having less stress and flashbacks and actual trauma probably makes it easier to present sympathetically in social situations.
Geek_Anachronism: Reading between the lines, it sounds like your 'Friend' claimed emotional abuse from a partner? but the main example of being 'triggered' they gave you was apparently situations that reminded them of their partner breaking off contact with them or establishing boundaries?
Which... Is interesting, because breaking off contact is a pretty common and recommended thing for *victims of abuse* to do.
So you've mentioned this 'Friend' 'later' turned out to be emotionally abusive in other unmentioned ways? But primarily, that they equated their break up with your *rape*, and apparently insisted that you weren't allowed to have boundaries with them, be unavailable or not spend time with them, at the risk of 'triggering them'?
They were obviously being abusive and controlling with your boundaries btw, the excuse isn't relevant to that.
But the excuse is *interesting*, because - I'm just spitballing here, with abusers using the DARVO tactic so fucking commonly, I would be super unsurprised to hear that oh -
1. Perhaps the 'Friend' was actually the primarily emotional abuser to their partner? (in toxic relationships it can get messy)
2. The partner tried to establish boundaries/cut off contact with 'Friend'...
DARVO - The 'Friend' denies they were ever abusive obviously. The Friend went on the Attack with friends such as yourself, and claimed the partner was emotionally abusive to them, as they told you
Having established their ex as the 'Offender' and *themselves* as the Victim, they then... use their perceived victim status to excuse their own abusive actions towards partner and others.
They used DARVO on you, at least or as well, because when they ignored your boundaries or unavailability (as abusers do), instead of recognising that they were being abusive/offending against your boundaries, they:
went on the offensive and claimed that *you* were essentially being abusive and triggering them, merely by *having* boundaries.
Having boundaries is not abusive.
So, I dunno, you might have noticed or thought all this before, I'm just reframing this incase it hadn't occurred to you - they apparently initially presented themselves to you as a 'Victim' (a fellow victim, in that they compared it to your experience), and you noticed later that they were abusive towards you...
But well, maybe they were never the victim in their previous relationship situation *either*, at least not the way you or I would understand it (toxic relationships can get messy tho).
They... might have just been 'the Abuser' all along?
And have a long standing pattern of presenting themselves as a 'Victim' to their new friends and acquaintances, and then proceed to behave abusively with the ones they can get away with it with, as they did with you.
Their claims of experiencing Trauma may not be trauma as we'd both think of it, so much as upset at situations where they didn't have control over their victims.
So if part of you was going, then and now, that their experience didn't feel at *all* similar to your own experience of rape - not just in a matter of degree or severity (you didn't compare them yourself), but that what they were *calling* Trauma seemed like an entirely different experience?
Then maybe you were entirely right...?
They may never had what we'd called trauma, but were talking about an abusers lack of control? And if so, maybe you could tell on an empathetic level that you weren't talking about the same emotions or experience, but you were giving them the benefit of the doubt, and didn't have the context at the time to understand what was going on.
You might find yourself talk to someone who left an emotionally abusive relationship and is suffering PTSD, and find you share a lot of empathy with them, or consider that they are two *different* types of trauma, but were both traumatic in more similar ways, in a way that you didn't relate to this supposed friends experience.
Without having the context, we don't know, but I'm guessing there were things about that situation that you're having trouble explaining here that gave you a gut feeling that 'these situations were not the same' despite him telling you they were. So yeah, maybe they weren't?
A hypothesis bought to you by, having seen this shit happen a bunch of times before... If it's not relevant, no worries.
posted by Elysum at 11:42 PM on February 13, 2022 [5 favorites]
Long-time lurker, first time poster. Looks like I am jumping in the deep end, here, so please be gentle if I'm doing it wrong...
I can't speak for Geek_Anachronism, but Elysum has perfectly described something I'm being subjected to, currently, by an emotionally/psychologically abusive former "partner." So, Elysum's post is, unfortunately, very relevant to my situation, and I appreciate learning another name for what I've been undergoing.
I managed to evict this abusive person from my house just two weeks ago. After their move out, I learned a lot more about who they actually were, and with all my worst fears confirmed I cut off contact seven days ago. Their smear campaign against me continues, however. I feel stripped of self-worth and self-dignity, personal control and community.
I don't want to derail the thread too far with my own horror story. I mostly want to reaffirm the hypothesis: Weaponizing the language of abuse and exploiting the language of victimhood are probably very common tactics—ones I'd imagine are increasingly prevalent, especially among narcissists and psychopaths.
Over the weekend, I've also heard the terms "ambient abuse" or "narcissistic abuse," of which DARVO seems to be a popular flavor. Now I can add it to the list of fun new vocabulary I've been learning, along with "triangulation" and "abuse by proxy."
Please be careful who you believe.
posted by tovarisch at 2:40 AM on February 14, 2022 [8 favorites]
I can't speak for Geek_Anachronism, but Elysum has perfectly described something I'm being subjected to, currently, by an emotionally/psychologically abusive former "partner." So, Elysum's post is, unfortunately, very relevant to my situation, and I appreciate learning another name for what I've been undergoing.
I managed to evict this abusive person from my house just two weeks ago. After their move out, I learned a lot more about who they actually were, and with all my worst fears confirmed I cut off contact seven days ago. Their smear campaign against me continues, however. I feel stripped of self-worth and self-dignity, personal control and community.
I don't want to derail the thread too far with my own horror story. I mostly want to reaffirm the hypothesis: Weaponizing the language of abuse and exploiting the language of victimhood are probably very common tactics—ones I'd imagine are increasingly prevalent, especially among narcissists and psychopaths.
Over the weekend, I've also heard the terms "ambient abuse" or "narcissistic abuse," of which DARVO seems to be a popular flavor. Now I can add it to the list of fun new vocabulary I've been learning, along with "triangulation" and "abuse by proxy."
Please be careful who you believe.
posted by tovarisch at 2:40 AM on February 14, 2022 [8 favorites]
(PS.: I don't mean to imply that anyone else with horror stories to share might be derailing the thread. You are brave for sharing, and I hope we can all find the peace and recovery that we deserve.)
posted by tovarisch at 2:46 AM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by tovarisch at 2:46 AM on February 14, 2022 [2 favorites]
It was and is something I'm aware of - I am 'lucky' enough that I'd seen it played out in non-personal circumstances more than once so recognising the nature of it was part of not becoming too entangled in the cycle. But the interesting element to me is the idea of "not judging trauma".
Because yes they probably do feel traumatised - but abrupted and unmet entitlement, or the false construction of facts, that led to the trauma is an element. Being traumatised that none of the usual emotional manipulation worked and your victim is grey rocking you may well exist - and I know there was enough childhood trauma in my example that it's gonna be all tied up in that. Or traumatised by vaccination, when you have made an effort to convince yourself it is going to make you sterile or a lizard person, or soulless, also likely exists and in an individual those all probably look the same. Hell in brain scans it probably does.
But culturally? In a community? I do think it is different. And requires a different response.
I once was told that I was "ranking trauma" by insisting that the overall category of "sex pest" including everyone from 'awkwardly approaches people for sex online' to 'repeatedly drugs and rapes young teenagers' needed to be clearer. Primarily because how you as a person and how you as a community engage the offender and protect people is different. I was told "sexual harassment can be even worse than sexual assault" and it felt wrong to me because I "didn't really believe the victims". It came as no surprise to find out that the person who told me that was, or had been, close friends with a woman who had enabled a serial predator then claimed mental health and trauma when held accountable.
Because when it comes down to it? I do rank trauma. Severity, applicability, accommodations, all of that. Partially because I do that to myself - the trauma I had from a car crash was neatly straightforward, minor, and required fewer interventions or accommodations. The PTSD from rape required far more, and unsurprisingly was bound up in those years of denying it happened and telling myself it wasn't that bad. The other assorted traumas are usually along that spectrum somewhere. And sometimes have those competing needs, where treatment or accommodations for one runs right into the bad zone of another (neurodiversity, queerness, and PTSD are not good roomies). So when I see someone not taking that into account at a broader social level, I start doubting their ability to work with trauma. Their ability to contribute to a better environment.
Because a blanket "accept it without judgement" is going to be rife with people manipulating and abusing that. Particularly for trauma because we know trauma makes you a target for more abusers.
posted by geek anachronism at 2:09 PM on February 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
Because yes they probably do feel traumatised - but abrupted and unmet entitlement, or the false construction of facts, that led to the trauma is an element. Being traumatised that none of the usual emotional manipulation worked and your victim is grey rocking you may well exist - and I know there was enough childhood trauma in my example that it's gonna be all tied up in that. Or traumatised by vaccination, when you have made an effort to convince yourself it is going to make you sterile or a lizard person, or soulless, also likely exists and in an individual those all probably look the same. Hell in brain scans it probably does.
But culturally? In a community? I do think it is different. And requires a different response.
I once was told that I was "ranking trauma" by insisting that the overall category of "sex pest" including everyone from 'awkwardly approaches people for sex online' to 'repeatedly drugs and rapes young teenagers' needed to be clearer. Primarily because how you as a person and how you as a community engage the offender and protect people is different. I was told "sexual harassment can be even worse than sexual assault" and it felt wrong to me because I "didn't really believe the victims". It came as no surprise to find out that the person who told me that was, or had been, close friends with a woman who had enabled a serial predator then claimed mental health and trauma when held accountable.
Because when it comes down to it? I do rank trauma. Severity, applicability, accommodations, all of that. Partially because I do that to myself - the trauma I had from a car crash was neatly straightforward, minor, and required fewer interventions or accommodations. The PTSD from rape required far more, and unsurprisingly was bound up in those years of denying it happened and telling myself it wasn't that bad. The other assorted traumas are usually along that spectrum somewhere. And sometimes have those competing needs, where treatment or accommodations for one runs right into the bad zone of another (neurodiversity, queerness, and PTSD are not good roomies). So when I see someone not taking that into account at a broader social level, I start doubting their ability to work with trauma. Their ability to contribute to a better environment.
Because a blanket "accept it without judgement" is going to be rife with people manipulating and abusing that. Particularly for trauma because we know trauma makes you a target for more abusers.
posted by geek anachronism at 2:09 PM on February 14, 2022 [6 favorites]
Trauma is not a competition. Some people play it that way, comparing bad events, bad feelings, trying to rate them, asking for more sympathy. If you experience more trauma, you experience more wounding; some people have more resilience, heal faster. But some people seem resilient until they fall apart. Sympathy, compassion, and trying to help are not limited.
If you've never seen the movie Gaslight, please watch it. Ingrid Bergman is so beautiful and fragile, there are literal gas lights, great story.
I dislike words being so fluid, changing ,meaning so rapidly; it does not enhance communication, but it's a thing now, not going to stop.
posted by theora55 at 2:27 PM on February 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
If you've never seen the movie Gaslight, please watch it. Ingrid Bergman is so beautiful and fragile, there are literal gas lights, great story.
I dislike words being so fluid, changing ,meaning so rapidly; it does not enhance communication, but it's a thing now, not going to stop.
posted by theora55 at 2:27 PM on February 16, 2022 [1 favorite]
To add further, I was clarifying that sometimes when abusers are using the language of trauma, we may have a gut empathic response that they *aren't talking about the same kind of trauma* - because... they really aren't, they are describing not having control over a victim or losing narcissistic supply.
It's not a matter of degree of trauma, but that they are talking about something different.
However, when it comes to degrees of trauma between people, life experience is always subjective, not objective....
The worst thing that's ever happened to someone *is the worst thing that's ever happened to them*, even if it's not as bad as something that happened to someone else... And that worst thing can really shake someone.
I was describing some of the housing insecurity of my childhood to a woman I knew, including being sent to school with bulldozers outside when I was about 8 and our home being demolished by the time school finished (and subsequently living on friends couches for awhile).
She admitted that she felt really embarrassed and 'weak' at how much some more minor things in her own childhood had negatively affected her - when her parents divorced, she overheard their money worries and discussion of 'losing the house'.
Her parents were *VERY WEALTHY* but she was a child and didn't have the context to understand that they were actually talking about having to sell their essentially very expensive mansion and buy two new houses in still-nice suburbs.
She thought they were going to be *homeless* and she was *terrified for months*, but didn't want to stress her parents out more by mentioning it, so she just... Freaked out for months as an 8 year old.
So yeah, objectively, not as big a deal as a bunch of the stuff that happened to me. She felt very poor little rich girl about it, but I genuinely sympathised -
I told her, the worst thing that's ever happened to you is still the worst thing that's happened to *you*.
I think when people say they find what I'd call 'misery porn' makes them feel better about their own life, it's because it's trying to provide something of an external yardstick or relative scale for suffering against which they can reframe their own trials, but that only works to an extent, because it's still all internal, and yeah, we don't know how much something has affected someone, or what has made it easier or harder for them to cope.
Yes, honestly if we are dealing with other people's traumas we do need to assess the scale somewhat because sometimes we need to 'triage' when it comes to the support we can help them with.
I've been at festivals providing support for several people having a bad trip, but two of them were having a bad time and being very loud & complainy about it, while their more quiet friend was having a fully fledged slightly paranoid break with reality and thought there was a massive conspiracy against them.
I gave the two louder friends tasks to do and explained that they needed to dial things down a bit in order for me to help their friend, as they were in a slightly more critical situation.
We kind of do need to prioritise needs in social situations, honestly.
But, I have to do that honestly acknowledging we might not be able to assess the scale of emotional harm someone is experiencing very accurately merely from knowing *what* happened to them.
posted by Elysum at 6:47 PM on February 20, 2022
It's not a matter of degree of trauma, but that they are talking about something different.
However, when it comes to degrees of trauma between people, life experience is always subjective, not objective....
The worst thing that's ever happened to someone *is the worst thing that's ever happened to them*, even if it's not as bad as something that happened to someone else... And that worst thing can really shake someone.
I was describing some of the housing insecurity of my childhood to a woman I knew, including being sent to school with bulldozers outside when I was about 8 and our home being demolished by the time school finished (and subsequently living on friends couches for awhile).
She admitted that she felt really embarrassed and 'weak' at how much some more minor things in her own childhood had negatively affected her - when her parents divorced, she overheard their money worries and discussion of 'losing the house'.
Her parents were *VERY WEALTHY* but she was a child and didn't have the context to understand that they were actually talking about having to sell their essentially very expensive mansion and buy two new houses in still-nice suburbs.
She thought they were going to be *homeless* and she was *terrified for months*, but didn't want to stress her parents out more by mentioning it, so she just... Freaked out for months as an 8 year old.
So yeah, objectively, not as big a deal as a bunch of the stuff that happened to me. She felt very poor little rich girl about it, but I genuinely sympathised -
I told her, the worst thing that's ever happened to you is still the worst thing that's happened to *you*.
I think when people say they find what I'd call 'misery porn' makes them feel better about their own life, it's because it's trying to provide something of an external yardstick or relative scale for suffering against which they can reframe their own trials, but that only works to an extent, because it's still all internal, and yeah, we don't know how much something has affected someone, or what has made it easier or harder for them to cope.
Yes, honestly if we are dealing with other people's traumas we do need to assess the scale somewhat because sometimes we need to 'triage' when it comes to the support we can help them with.
I've been at festivals providing support for several people having a bad trip, but two of them were having a bad time and being very loud & complainy about it, while their more quiet friend was having a fully fledged slightly paranoid break with reality and thought there was a massive conspiracy against them.
I gave the two louder friends tasks to do and explained that they needed to dial things down a bit in order for me to help their friend, as they were in a slightly more critical situation.
We kind of do need to prioritise needs in social situations, honestly.
But, I have to do that honestly acknowledging we might not be able to assess the scale of emotional harm someone is experiencing very accurately merely from knowing *what* happened to them.
posted by Elysum at 6:47 PM on February 20, 2022
« Older Entertainment Weekly, InStyle cease print... | "We see something like a dreamscape." Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:42 PM on February 9, 2022 [69 favorites]