okay but like this is what deeply bothers me about the whole “tiktok is making people think every negative experience is a trauma!” thing
Trauma is common. Like really common. How do we accept statistics like “1 in 4 women has been sexually assaulted” or “1 in 3 people grew up in a home with domestic violence” or whatever number of people will fight cancer or be in a car crash or an abusive relationship, and at the same time doubt any suggestion that a lot of people may actually be traumatized?
It’s in our cultural definition of trauma—that trauma is some extreme event outside “normal” life, and that the people that experience it are a sequestered group that is well outside the “average” person.
but like, even strictly Criterion A PTSD type “traumatic” events are…not rare. at all. You can be a hardass about it and say that you have to be raped or threatened with death or violence to have trauma, and that’s still a lot of people that have experienced that. People around you. People that pass by you every day. People that appear and seem “normal” to you.
if you accept the idea that belonging to certain marginalized groups can have some traumatizing elements to it, “most people are traumatized in some way” is just the most blandly obvious statement ever.
but even if you’re for some reason squicky about “watering down” the definition of trauma (lol), we can at least agree that most people are hurt, right? Deeply hurt. Most people have been mangled by their experiences in one way or another. People’s behavior is guided by the fact that they are hurt.
One of my dad’s sayings, which is earnest and not at all shameful or demeaning, is that People Are Broken. And in church settings (because he was a pastor and is still very devout) his measure of the quality of that church setting was always their ability to come to terms with the fact that People Are Broken, not just people Out There or hypothetical people but us, the people around us, the people we live alongside and befriend and love. And if a church thought of Broken People as an external category of people to be “reached,” instead of a near-universal experience of being human in a cruel society, well that church was likely to be, ultimately, toxic. And hardly any church passes that test, because our brokenness is hard to talk about.
We can’t admit that most people are traumatized because it means that the call is coming from inside the house, that the menace is contained within our society instead of being a freak accident/act of god/attack by a lone wolf outside of the normal confines of our world.
But this is the truth. That our world, the nice, “normal” world, the everyday world, hurts people. We are not gentle enough for other humans, our society is not kind enough for humans to thrive.
We have to try to be less cruel. We have to understand that almost everyone has endured something unspeakable and has not fully healed. This is why I don’t care about watering down the definition of trauma. We have not even begun to fully define the wound. There is no virtue in conserving recognition for the most obvious and extreme human pain. Why would we need less compassion?
