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I mean, the point of therapy is to work through your trauma in a way that allows you to avoid maladaptive behaviors, which might include being overly sensitive in situations where it isn’t appropriate and doesn’t help you. We can make some changes to accommodate the bad things that have happened to people, but having trauma doesn’t give you license to go around the world inflicting your emotions on everyone around you. Your mental illness is not your fault, but it is your responsibility, and all that.
“There nothing wrong with being triggered but you need to work on not being a loaded gun.” Was a really nice way I heard a counselor respond to a woman who was making the same point as oop
Your mental illness is not your fault, but it is your responsibility, and all that
Sure, now tell me how to afford it while being constantly at 40% capacity from the overwhelming bullshit of the world and the economy and the job market.
‘Just get therapy’ isn’t nearly as simple as you seem to think
Burp
Sure yes, but what the fuck else am I supposed to do? It sucks but you still have to remain functional, because we don’t live in the utopia where the numbers that provide food and shelter give a damn that your mum hit you too much.
I mean, I feel like I’m making pretty great progress at this “lie down and die” thing. feels like I finally found the thing I was born to do
I’ve seen this more in the last decade or so, someone experiences a moderate amount of distress and then expects to get a free pass on any kind of toxic behavior that they can link to it. I’m assuming some types of counselors are promoting this as a twisted “hurt people hurt people” sort of thing and I’ve helped these sorts of folks until the compassion fatigue really sets in and I realize it’s dragging me down, having real negative effects on my own well being.
So, lately out of self preservation I’m immediately suspicious of people who put their own trauma first in the interpersonal realm, like it’s the first thing you know about them. I’m not sure there are healthy environments where everyone enthusastically shares their trauma and uses it to bond over, although I feel like that concept has been promoted in some trendy pop psych circles. Heck, I see a sign on a church near me that they have a weekly “grief share” session. Sounds horrible and like a speedrun to burnout.
Am I out of line in my thinking about this? Generally I value community building and being compassionate but that sort of thing really has been getting my goat lately.
I think many behaviors are being conflated here: externalizing behavior vs internalizing behavior. People may react to the post with a notable experience from one of those.
E.g., if someone was recently chewed out by a Chad or Karen because some unknown events activated their externalizing survival strategies, it’s more difficult to feel compassion for them – and easier to dislike the post. OTOH, there can be people who self isolate and withhold their preferences to avoid activating events, because they tend to internalize negative emotions.
I don’t think the post is encouraging us to enable bad behavior, but reflect on others’ experiences. I can feel compassion for people in my life who have been hurtful to me, but simultaneously not want to interact with them to protect myself.
I think there are two ways of reading the claim that a traumatized person can’t be responsible for other peoples’ comfort. The first is reasonable: nobody is really responsible for anyone else’s comfort. We have to take care of ourselves at the end of the day, so mentally healthy people especially shouldn’t rely on traumatized people to make them comfortable.
The second is unreasonable: traumatized people, more than anyone, have no obligation to do the basic things that make other people comfortable, in virtue of their trauma.
I think the post just makes it sound a little too much like the second interpretation, because otherwise why focus on traumatized people in the first place? I think that’s what’s getting under most peoples’ skin.
I’m still trying to get a hold of my feelings about it but I think it’s more that some people treat their own trauma as a kind of privilege, like it excuses how they might treat others. I’ve had enough experiences with friends, coworkers and customers being careless or hurtful and imo it’s an uncomfortable truth that traumatized people can be harmful if they haven’t learned effective coping strategies for their own trauma.
I hate engaging in that kind of social triage though and there are a large, increasing number of traumatized people in the world, and it’s hard to access the kind of care that would help someone move past maladaptive behaviors that harm others as the result of their trauma.
For myself, at the moment, I will be maintaining boundaries and trying to avoid traumatized people in general, so as to not become more traumatized myself. This is the opposite of how I’ve previously engaged with people too, I’m consciously trying another strategy. Also apologies for being vague but I think it applies to a lot of situations.
That’s a double-edged sword. Some people with trauma see this as a pass to do whatever and lash out at people etc., which is not great.
As one good saying went, “It’s not your fault, but sadly it is your responsibility”. Support? Great. Some more understanding? Yes! But carte blanche for everything? No.
Nothing in the original post says anything about giving traumatized people a pass for lashing out.
They simply showed the other side of the coin.
Sure, people lash out. Cool. Don’t give them a pass. Again, nothing in the post said you had to give them a pass for lashing out because you understand that their trauma caused them to lash out. Where are you getting that the post even remotely suggests this? What part of the post is this the other side of the coin?
The part that’s bothering people is the “traumatized people can’t be responsible for other people’s comfort.” It sounds too much like “I’m sorry if my reaction made you uncomfortable, but I have trauma and so I’m not responsible.”
If this was what was commented, I’d have a different argument and tone. But they were explicit in mentioning lashing out.
We can discuss your statement, but I didn’t want to muddy my response with it.
Read other comments… almost each and every one is a fucking moron. You know of a society with structures in place to help people gracefully recover from the kind of suffering that really twists psychological structure the hell out of any notion of “normal”?
Because I do not. So much so that so far I have not met a single psychiatrist whose competence I can trust (they must be out there somewhere, but I for one has failed to locate even one), let alone a network aimed at getting people out of traumatic experiences.
I’m really surprised at the negativity. To me, this meme reads as “don’t blame someone for emotional dysregulation/panic etc” not “allow people to horribly mistreat others”.
I make lots of angry phone calls, because I was tortured in a troubled teen facility which is still open.
My family has thoroughly rejected me, because I can be angry and reactive. It is hard not to be angry and reactive, because the torture changed the way that my body reacts to stress, and part of why I am so goddamned angry is that no one intervened.
There are sights, smells, sounds, thoughts, that put me on edge. I am normally an articulate person I think - normally calm. There’s a lot that I can handle. I can deal with a lot of difficult and sensitive issues.
But it’s those triggers. Part of it is that I choose to fight, that I call state agencies, that I call law makers, when I could just try to let the trauma “heal.” But there will still always be triggers I couldn’t avoid, even if I gave up fighting.
“Trauma brain” is difficult for people to understand. It is difficult to advocate and take care of myself when encountering a specific thing makes it impossible for me to sleep for weeks. It is my responsibility to try to treat my trauma - but at the same time, it makes it much harder to get the resources to access that kind of treatment. The biggest triggers are also directly related to mental healthcare, which makes it extremely difficult to make progress with providers. Something that “looks like” the kind of office I was sitting in as a teenager is not a place I will ever feel comfortable.
My dad basically told me I should take meds and read Viktor Frankl, and then cut me off from my family. The problem of being traumatized is that it makes you too hard to support, which means that you end up trapped in a worse and worse situation. You lose all support, and get further traumatized.
I was desperate enough to go inpatient after the election, and was physically assaulted. I don’t know where I am supposed to make my trauma better. Where I get help such that driving down a certain street doesn’t instantly wrench my body into flight or fight mode.
Not being sensitive and hide it, to protect those other people from the slightest bit of discomfort for them.
Big “i have it worse than anyone else” energy
Nah, but it should go both ways, not only broken people hiding anything that could be slightly inconveniencing.
No one gets a free pass for anything (lots of comments talking about that, maybe here in France it’s different? I see nobody getting any special freepass for any kind of problem here, more the opposite).
Exactly. Too many people see hurt people as burdens and they lack even the slightest bit of empathy to be kind to them. It’s such a “push the problem over there” mentality that makes zero sense under any scrutiny. And even for them, since they’ve pushed it so hard, you can see them struggling and not enjoying themselves.
And then they have the fucking gall to claim that neurodivergent people don’t know how to communicate.
The lack of self awareness here is almost amazing
How so? Would you care to elaborate or are you just trying to blow me off and not deal with how my comment makes you feel about yourself?
Being traumatized is a perfectly valid excuse to act shitty. We are social animals, and being somebody else’s problem is half our job.
I always think of this line from the Talking Heads which seem to be appropriate for these times.
“ Patience is a virtue, but I don’t have the time”.
