![]() ![]() But many began expressing concern at the rapidly expanding definitions: could this risk erasing the differences between PTSD and depression, anxiety, or otherwise equate catastrophic events with more ambiguous forms of suffering? Arguably yes - and some argue that our propensity to call something trauma when it isn’t could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, wherein we do end up feeling symptoms of trauma. ![]() Is there an objective measure of trauma? There are many uncertainties that make it such a slippery term: is trauma in the event that took place, or in a feeling the individual develops over time in response to something less tangible? There’s a list of situations that officially count as traumatizing in the DSM: in volume III, the number stood at 14 in volume IV, it rose to 19. Repeated Exposure to Trauma Does Not Make People Stronger, Shows New Study “When people say the pandemic has been a collective trauma, I say, absolutely not,” Bessel van der Kolk, author of the bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score, told The Atlantic. In the post-pandemic context, the word gained greater currency. With infidelity, offensive language, the list goes on, prompting New York Times editor Jessica Bennet to ask: if everything is trauma, is anything? Even the more recent “West Elm Caleb” phenomenon - in which a 25-year-old man was found serially cheating on and ghosting many women - elicited the accusation of causing such pain, that his “victims” shared trauma. Take the “trauma-sensitive” yoga instructor who spoke about having “hair trauma” from growing up with frizzy hair, or the Emory students who were allegedly traumatized by seeing “Trump 2016” written in chalk in public. “‘I have trauma,’ just becomes like, ‘I’m depressed’ or, ‘I’m addicted to cookies,’” Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist, told Vox. However, the slow and steady expansion of the term’s boundaries have resulted in the term being left completely unbounded. Take the fact that there was a protracted battle to recognize domestic violence survivors as legitimate claimants to a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, previously only reserved for war veterans. The DSM defines trauma as “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence,” though many have pointed out for a while that strictly technical definitions can be limiting, and not capture the range of human experiences that have a deeply damaging impact on us. It’s also collective, intergenerational, and cultural. Many even rush in to designate other people’s trauma as “valid” (another word co-occurring with trauma talk). Others often draw boundaries by asking their mutuals or acquaintances not to “trauma dump” when they’re the recipient of emotional burdens. Influencers - whether qualified to do so or not - fill up social media timelines with ahistorical lists of what a trauma response looks like. And it may well be - it’s ubiquitous on the internet, appearing simultaneously in earnest conversations about surviving trauma, and in irony-poisoned jokes about everything being trauma. Last year, Vox called ‘trauma’ the word of the decade. In Words Mean Things, we unpack weighty words whose meanings have been sacrificed to hot takes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |