One book that really resonated with me was "The Deepest Well" about the epidemic of childhood trauma and its deep and measurable impact on health outcomes for adults. I learned that resolving childhood trauma would help on the order of curing cancer in terms of health outcomes in our society
I had the same experience reading that book. It’s amazing that even though these effects are well documented, they aren’t really taught in medical school. I’ve never come across a doctor who knew anything about it. It’s really incredible and disheartening. Even when people advocate for “trauma-informed care”, they’re just talking about avoiding retraumatization. They never talk about the health consequences of trauma.
>They never talk about the health consequences of trauma.
Yeah, reading the deepest well, then reading all my increased chances for...just about every disease imaginable was grim. There isn't really a 'cure' or real treatment for it either.
I just realized, if I was at a much greater risk for health problems, I'd need to counterbalance that with lifestyle changes. I got treatment for an autoimmune condition. I started using exercise over alcohol to deal with stress. I improved my diet. I'm trying to get more sleep but that one I still struggle with.
I've purposefully made changes to lower the amounts of stress in my life. This is everything from choosing an employer with good WLB, to leaving extra time for myself to get places, to saying the 'serenity prayer' and focusing on things in my control. I cannot control everything that happens to me. I can control my reaction to it, or at least attempt to.
Absolutely agreed. Even foster care itself is inherently traumatizing, no matter how good the foster parents are.
I was wrongfully taken into foster care for a couple months (due to police being called in a false accusation; the police took me without any investigation and handed me over to DFCS — my parents are actually wonderful and I couldn't have asked for a more supportive childhood), and it's positively ridiculous how severely it affected me.
My brother and my uncle both died when I was eight years old, and I was threatened, stalked, and assaulted by an obsessive ex-boyfriend in my early 20s (which ultimately led me to immigrate overseas to hide from him because nothing else worked) — and yet my brief stint in foster care was FAR more traumatic and affects me much more deeply to this day. Everything else barely rates a mention next to foster care. I don't expect I will ever again experience something as psychologically damaging.
I wasn't abused. My parents did everything right both before and after foster care, and my foster parents were fine. It was simply the forcible separation from my family at a young age that messed me up.
Of course, most kids who are taken into foster care aren't like me; they experience abuse at home and are in danger, and foster care is necessary to protect them. But how do you solve childhood trauma in these kids when saving them from abuse is, itself, a source of severe childhood trauma?
First 20 years of my life was me waiting to get out of the environment I was in. The next 5 trying to stay alive. The past 5 improving myself, my mental health, the way I view life and relate to others.
It's all good in the end. For 25 years of my life I thought everyone faked being happy. I now know that it actually is possible to be happy :).
I've been going through a similar metamorphosis, but it didn't start until 36.
I wonder sometimes whether I'll have missed out on some things permanently because of it. For instance, every year my odds of carrying a healthy child to term drop farther, and I'm already considered "geriatric" for pregnancy purposes.
I really don't see how it could have happened any earlier than it did, and I'm grateful it happened at all because I can easily see how it could have been worse, but there's still a grief journey involved even though I try not to dwell on the things lost.
Finally a subject my childhood makes me "expert" at!
People often say that I have a unsavory dark humor, but it's one of the best coping mechanism out there.
My earliest memory is my mother spreading food all over my face because I didn't want to finish my plate. I remember my eyes hurting because of the pepper in it.
My father threatened to shoot the family dog on a weekly basis to make me behave.
I could not leave the house alone until I was around 12, thus making me not socialized. To this day in my 30s I have a hard time forming friendship.
They also threatened me on a daily basis to "give me to CPS". Then they actually did it for two years. I wasn't a delinquent or violent mind you, and didn't do drugs.
They would often bring me in front of the school's psychologist and he would make me cry in front of them, always blaming me, never once asking me what was going on at home.
Once I applied for a job that required a high security clearance. I had to write "all the traumas of your childhood and your adolescence". I filled two pages, one trauma per line, and I just told them that I couldn't be exhaustive because of the sheer quantity.
But I think I can stop here, you get the point.
One of the main thing is the inability of standing up for myself. By default and unless proven otherwise, I'm already convinced that if something bad happens then this is my fault. If someone accuses me of something bogus, I just accept the accusation and apologize. This got me in real deep trouble more than once; fortunately not as an adult.
Also not being able to say "no" and being of hurting people feelings to the point of absurdity.
I could do an AMA in this thread if someone's interested lol
I'm glad you have a sense of humor because that seems like one of the helpful reactions that could arise from such a nightmare.
> They would often bring me in front of the school's psychologist and he would make me cry in front of them, always blaming me, never once asking me what was going on at home.
It's remarkable how institutions (the school psychologist in your case) often re-inflict the trauma that is going on at home. It's their job to protect the child, but often they do the opposite, and it's worth asking why. I experienced this myself, though in a very different context—everyone's story is unique of course.
Good for you for surviving, and best wishes for growth and healing.
> It's remarkable how institutions (the school psychologist in your case) often re-inflict the trauma that is going on at home. It's their job to protect the child, but often they do the opposite, and it's worth asking why. I experienced this myself, though in a very different context—everyone's story is unique of course.
I think the simplest explanation here is Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud. This goes for members of institutions as well, even if they aren't overworked, underpaid, and undertrained as so many are.
On top of that, abusers are often charming and highly skilled liars and manipulators. To get away with it for an extended period of time it is necessary to convince the victims that institutions won't help them, so performing abuse in front of a representative of the institution can be a ploy to reinforce their power. If the school psychologist had been likely to challenge the abusers, they likely would have picked a different authority figure (teacher, principal, &c.).
In my experience, and not only with that instance, power defers to power. An unruly child's pleadings will never prevail over his parents that are really good at making themselves appear as victims (http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-miss...). Or as famous lawyer Gerry Spence said, "the gentleman of the bar is there for the other gentleman of the bar".
Also, let's not deny it, I was not a nice and adults would not be nice in return and I would respond in kind. I was a reflection of what was going at home. This makes other adults not want to be nice at all. I can't count the times where I was told "oops, we forgot to bring one for you" or something along those lines.
> It's their job to protect the child, but often they do the opposite, and it's worth asking why.
It seems pretty simple to me why. If we were talking about a job in tech, there would be 10,000 snarky responses about how it was obvious that this project manager or that maintenance developer was just protecting their job. Same here. Rocking the boat as a guidance counselor or anything like that just invites complaints (warranted or not), and in those roles they're judged by the school administrators on how many (or few) complaints are received. Same as teachers, I think. And though I've read no stories from school psychologists, teachers who get even a few complaints find themselves unwelcome in that district.
Maybe my speculation is wrong in this regard, but if so, I can't see the flaw in it.
I had a very similar upbringing friend, I am so sorry to hear it. It's left me with life long deficiencies that haunt me to today, even when I don't realise it. It's tough.
It's always the deficiencies that are invisible that are the most vicious. You know that something is wrong with you but you can't tell what, why or what.
But if we're doing an AMA : mind writing a bit more about the recovery? You mentioned humor as a coping strategy, so that makes me think You've probably been through some kind of introspection / therapy. Mind writing a bit more on what worked / didn't in Your case?
I would say that recovery started when I got out of the house for university. I picked a university that was at least 6 hours of driving away.
It was absolutely terrible and laborious; yet necessary. Being not socialized and not able to leave home alone for a very long time made me basically afraid of going outside the campus; I had to learn most life lessons people go through from childhood to early adulthood from scratch. People don't forgive you when you're an adult. Abusers love dependent children, even if they lament all the time that "you cost too much".
One of the things that's hard is separating the actual good parenting lessons from the abuse. From basic hygiene to on how to behave socially. Everything was laced in some kind of humiliation. "I told you this would happen, you think you're smarter than me haha!" kind of routine all the time.
I've never had therapy nor did I seek professional help. The bad experiences I've had with psychologists and other "professionals" that sided believed my parents by default were enough for me. This is not what I recommend, but I just can't let myself be vulnerable by the same kind of people again. It's like asking a severe burns victim to go through a firefighting course with live exercises. I have the chance of being smart and deeply introspective, but this is not perfect and very slow and fraught with painful mistakes. Just like most people should not represent themselves in a court of law, even if they're lawyers, I would not recommend doing that.
I mainly relied on the podcasts, shows and books from mental health professionals and also public forums, although I didn't really participate. Writing this stuff used to hurt a lot with a lot of flashbacks. Basically I did my own research, haha. Putting words to emotions and situations helps a lot, because abusers love twisting words, concepts and using logical fallacies to justify themselves. Also learning that I am not alone and that was happened to me was not right nor justified really helped a lot and was very validating.
I'm not done healing and probably never will be healed, but there is resilience and confidence that comes with successfully surmounting adversity.
Yeah, I always assume that I'm the one whose presence is at best a privilege. It takes a lot of effort to take my proper place and stand up for myself. I'll never forgive them for putting this curse inside of me. Now words got out of what they did to me and my sisters and they pretty much have to hide. They deserve everything bad happening to them.
I have two older sisters. They are way older than me, which means they left for college when I was very young (when I was bout 5 or 6). I don't think they went through the same stuff as me, but still lived through a lot of very fucked up shit. We live in the same city and are very close, we see each other for their kids birthday and all of that. I'm very lucky to have them.
I know why my mother had me years later, because when my father was angry he would yell at my mother "it's you who wanted another, so take care of him", but with more vicious insults. It turns out that when my mother had her first pregnancy, she was supposed to have a son but had a miscarriage in the toilet. I think this pretty much explains her using me to satisfy her emotional needs all the time; I literally was her emotional garbage can. Telling me how she feels like an ATM for the family, how she's lonely and not taken seriously by others; things that a husband have to deal with, not a child.
So anyway, my sisters began to extended family members about what happened in our house when they were young and also of what happened to me. Like me, it probably took them years to unshame themselves and flip the culpability unto the abusers. It created a scandal I think in the extended family, although always very hush hush, as is usual in small rural places.
My parents probably got a word of what my sisters told about them and then when my oldest sister got her first child, it was actually my parents who stopped talking to them. They never told me why they stopped talking to my sisters, but we figured it out. For some reason that enraged my father and forced my mother to stop talking to them but not to me. After a few years I got tired of seeing them trying to play nice and burning bridges after bridges with other family members and family friends, and I decided to cut them off. Although my sisters never made any kind of ultimatum, I could see how my parents were throwing a wrench between my and my sisters by only talking to me and not to them.
There are more details to this sordid story. It really could make for a full TV drama episode; these people love drama and being the victim. Don't fall for their game.
Often, traumatized individuals traumatize their children. So it’s at least a somewhat self perpetuating phenomenon that may not decay away over generations. As a result, it seems reasonable to assume that different groups could have different prevalences of traumatized individuals.
How does the prevalence of traumatized individuals characterize a society as a whole? For example, it seems that a society where the majority are traumatized should be fundamentally different from a society where a minority are traumatized.
My mom keeps talking about how much she wants grandchildren. My brother decided the trauma stops with him, so until he's sure he wouldn't repeat any of dad's harmful behaviors, he doesn't want to have kids. I'm only just now getting to a point where I've done enough work that anyone wouldn't be crazy to want to date me, but I'm doing it at an age where biological kids are less and less likely.
So I guess that's one thing that might characterize society: Lots of frustrated would-be grandparents.
"Sex and the Psyche: The Truth About Our Most Secret Fantasies", Brett Kahr.
Silly title, but looks like a serious bit of work. Big study in the UK about ten years ago - 50k people receiving questionnaires, can't remember how many people for closer study, 50 for full day interviews.
Conclusion : sexual fantasy is a coping mechanism for trauma.
Fantasy is a recapitulation, often modified to make it more bearable, of the original trauma.
Fantasy varies between individuals, because trauma varies. Fantasy superficially varies enormously for an individual, but there is always a core theme.
There are many types of early relational trauma, but I strongly recommend the (audio)book: "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents" by Lindsay Gibson, to anyone who thinks they might benefit from reading a book with that title.
I get that's a weird judge-a-book-by-its-cover metric, but it is excellent for working through and understanding those relationships.
(searched for that to post this, and they cite %60 since the 1990s).
Freud himself discovered a tremendous amount of horrible abuse in his patients; depending on the culture, most people just turn a blind eye. People that haven't experienced it and recovered from it a bit are really good at not believing how common it is.
> People that haven't experienced it and recovered from it a bit are really good at not believing how common it is.
Also, for people who have experienced it, it's often the last thing they'd ever want to talk about. With anyone, including people they are really close to.
There's a good chance you could have a close personal friend or even your partner and never know they had gone through something like that.
I have read Gabor Mate's works on the subject. I think he would say that more children are traumatized today. Whether they are traumatized more deeply is another matter.
The earlier trauma happens, the more amplified the effect is. Sometime in the 1950s it became a common parenting approach in the US at least to "not coddle children". That creates trauma for a sensitive child to not have their emotional needs met (an insensitive child may be just fine). There are different degrees of trauma- others that fight wars may experience a much deeper trauma later in life. The trauma to the ignored baby is not as traumatic of an event, but the baby does not have any abilities to cope and the effects are amplified in early developmental stages.
There is less community today to help with the coping process and emotionally distant parenting styles also make coping harder. And there is less religion today- religion both provided community and sometimes specifically helps people deal with trauma.
Trauma can be generational- someone that suffers trauma is much more likely to have difficulties raising their children. Consider someone that survived war but lost their home and witnessed horrors. They may turn to drugs to cope with the psychological pain. Being drug dependent, they have difficulty raising their own children. Those children don't have their emotional needs met, and a cycle of trauma can continue.
From Mate's point of view addiction rates would probably be one way to measure the trauma of society. Drug addiction is a way of coping with severe psychological pain. Drug overdosing is becoming a leading killer in some age groups.
We generally have more resources and knowledge now. People tend to want to raise the bar when that becomes possible.
When kids suffered or died because humans lacked food security, reliable medical treatments etc, it was also generally not really the parent's fault. Knowing you could have been treated better and your parents/the world just didn't actually care about you is scarring in ways that "No one has enough." aren't.
Plus, everyone is in it together when no one has enough. Once you get to "some people could have enough at the expense of other people," victim/perpetrator dynamics show up, but when no one does, you're suffering together.
Abuse of children is isolating for the child victim in a way that suffering hardship as a family unit or community isn't. There's no sense of "I'm as safe as it gets here, at home, with these people (even if that's not very safe)." There is no place of feeling even relative safety, no sense that anyone is even trying to care for or defend you.
One factor might be family size. Purely anecdotal, but I have a friend who grew up in an extremely abusive household and said directly to me that the only reason he thinks he survived his situation was because he had 4 other siblings and they all supported each other during the difficult times.
Another consideration: could it be that with more children, in an abusive household the abuse is typically spreaded out to more children, so that each individual child gets less abuse than in a smaller abusive household?
I think it’s more visible now, but as well, I wonder if it’s just that we have more leisure time to actually worry about / deal with it.
Personally I think every child needs some sort of effective therapy to help heal the trauma of their formative years.
I use trauma freely here, there’s quite a big difference between someone who was bullied a couple of times and is naturally quite resilient vs someone who was mercilessly bullied for years on end pushing them to the brink of life.
I classify both as trauma, very different degrees though.
As well, people react very differently to similar events.
The effects of trauma are not new. What's new is we have a deeper understanding of how it comes about, what the long-term effects are on both an individual and societal level, and what can be done to prevent or remedy it.
> Are children more traumatized now than in the past? Seems like the past was harder on children.
My guess is that in the past child mortality was higher and children traumatised enough just didn't survived. And because of such high mortality no one cared to find out why.
My hunch around childhood is we’re doing better with young kids (due to awareness around this stuff). But we don’t give teenagers the independence they need to develop.
If you read about the history of childhood I think it's clear that children were immeasurably more traumatized in the past. The concept of child abuse barely existed, and the relational needs of children weren't recognized at all.
That raises the question of why contemporary attention to trauma is so elevated, if the problem is actually smaller now than it used to be. There's an easy answer though: this is first moment in (recent) history where we finally have a chance to begin dealing with it.
Divorce is a massive cause of trauma and increasing in the west
I organized a large group of trauma experts last week (church pastors), and although they were amazing and had clearly overcome trauma; residual selfishness and power grabbing meant a child got ignored
The same last night: a bible study with the homeless. A happy and peaceful place, though one member was throwing trauma bombs
There's not a simple switch, though having lived in war zones and done churches of, for instance Syrian refugees, unconditional love of God, and letting trauma be presented in the middle of that is deeply powerful
Children were definitely abused more in the past, but were they traumatised more?
In the past much more than today, kids had defined roles and work to do in families. The stronger sense of identity may have lessened the trauma. As may the knowledge that their peers in neighboring familes were going through the exact same things.
Trauma isn't as simple as more worse things -> bigger/more trauma.
Under certain circumstances people can experiences horrible stuff with barely any ill effect while other times really trivial small things can totally break them.
Just having one stable positive relationship with an adult can make a child significantly more resilient while the child that lacks that relationship might break at a minor problem. There are many factors that determine resilience and it can vary greatly from person to person. And it is situational. Someone might be a hardened war veteran having seen it all but totally break when seeing a child getting a minor wound.
So children today might be objectively better off than in the past but it does not necessary mean their struggles are less valid, they are just different. So hard to say whether they are less traumatized or not, maybe a little bit but mostly probably just in different ways.
But yeah, the main thing is that we are much better at recognizing signs of trauma these days and people can be more open of their struggles so it might seem like there is more traumatized people when probably there is the same amount or less.
Probably more traumatised, but talking about it was much more socially unacceptable (and even potentially dangerous; in many countries involuntary institutionalisation on extremely flimsy basis was very much a thing until the late 20th century, especially for women).
As with many things like this, getting hard numbers would be extremely difficult because it's the sort of thing where peoples' inclination to answer surveys honestly changes with social norms.
Readit News
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33413909-the-deepest-wel...
Yeah, reading the deepest well, then reading all my increased chances for...just about every disease imaginable was grim. There isn't really a 'cure' or real treatment for it either.
I just realized, if I was at a much greater risk for health problems, I'd need to counterbalance that with lifestyle changes. I got treatment for an autoimmune condition. I started using exercise over alcohol to deal with stress. I improved my diet. I'm trying to get more sleep but that one I still struggle with.
I've purposefully made changes to lower the amounts of stress in my life. This is everything from choosing an employer with good WLB, to leaving extra time for myself to get places, to saying the 'serenity prayer' and focusing on things in my control. I cannot control everything that happens to me. I can control my reaction to it, or at least attempt to.
I was wrongfully taken into foster care for a couple months (due to police being called in a false accusation; the police took me without any investigation and handed me over to DFCS — my parents are actually wonderful and I couldn't have asked for a more supportive childhood), and it's positively ridiculous how severely it affected me.
My brother and my uncle both died when I was eight years old, and I was threatened, stalked, and assaulted by an obsessive ex-boyfriend in my early 20s (which ultimately led me to immigrate overseas to hide from him because nothing else worked) — and yet my brief stint in foster care was FAR more traumatic and affects me much more deeply to this day. Everything else barely rates a mention next to foster care. I don't expect I will ever again experience something as psychologically damaging.
I wasn't abused. My parents did everything right both before and after foster care, and my foster parents were fine. It was simply the forcible separation from my family at a young age that messed me up.
Of course, most kids who are taken into foster care aren't like me; they experience abuse at home and are in danger, and foster care is necessary to protect them. But how do you solve childhood trauma in these kids when saving them from abuse is, itself, a source of severe childhood trauma?
It's all good in the end. For 25 years of my life I thought everyone faked being happy. I now know that it actually is possible to be happy :).
I wonder sometimes whether I'll have missed out on some things permanently because of it. For instance, every year my odds of carrying a healthy child to term drop farther, and I'm already considered "geriatric" for pregnancy purposes.
I really don't see how it could have happened any earlier than it did, and I'm grateful it happened at all because I can easily see how it could have been worse, but there's still a grief journey involved even though I try not to dwell on the things lost.
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Hurt people hurt people.
As in, people who feel they are victims often feel they have the right/necessity to hurt others. It’s a real pattern that is hard to talk about.
People often say that I have a unsavory dark humor, but it's one of the best coping mechanism out there.
My earliest memory is my mother spreading food all over my face because I didn't want to finish my plate. I remember my eyes hurting because of the pepper in it.
My father threatened to shoot the family dog on a weekly basis to make me behave.
I could not leave the house alone until I was around 12, thus making me not socialized. To this day in my 30s I have a hard time forming friendship.
They also threatened me on a daily basis to "give me to CPS". Then they actually did it for two years. I wasn't a delinquent or violent mind you, and didn't do drugs.
They would often bring me in front of the school's psychologist and he would make me cry in front of them, always blaming me, never once asking me what was going on at home.
Once I applied for a job that required a high security clearance. I had to write "all the traumas of your childhood and your adolescence". I filled two pages, one trauma per line, and I just told them that I couldn't be exhaustive because of the sheer quantity.
But I think I can stop here, you get the point.
One of the main thing is the inability of standing up for myself. By default and unless proven otherwise, I'm already convinced that if something bad happens then this is my fault. If someone accuses me of something bogus, I just accept the accusation and apologize. This got me in real deep trouble more than once; fortunately not as an adult.
Also not being able to say "no" and being of hurting people feelings to the point of absurdity.
I could do an AMA in this thread if someone's interested lol
I'm glad you have a sense of humor because that seems like one of the helpful reactions that could arise from such a nightmare.
> They would often bring me in front of the school's psychologist and he would make me cry in front of them, always blaming me, never once asking me what was going on at home.
It's remarkable how institutions (the school psychologist in your case) often re-inflict the trauma that is going on at home. It's their job to protect the child, but often they do the opposite, and it's worth asking why. I experienced this myself, though in a very different context—everyone's story is unique of course.
Good for you for surviving, and best wishes for growth and healing.
I think the simplest explanation here is Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud. This goes for members of institutions as well, even if they aren't overworked, underpaid, and undertrained as so many are.
On top of that, abusers are often charming and highly skilled liars and manipulators. To get away with it for an extended period of time it is necessary to convince the victims that institutions won't help them, so performing abuse in front of a representative of the institution can be a ploy to reinforce their power. If the school psychologist had been likely to challenge the abusers, they likely would have picked a different authority figure (teacher, principal, &c.).
In my experience, and not only with that instance, power defers to power. An unruly child's pleadings will never prevail over his parents that are really good at making themselves appear as victims (http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-miss...). Or as famous lawyer Gerry Spence said, "the gentleman of the bar is there for the other gentleman of the bar".
Also, let's not deny it, I was not a nice and adults would not be nice in return and I would respond in kind. I was a reflection of what was going at home. This makes other adults not want to be nice at all. I can't count the times where I was told "oops, we forgot to bring one for you" or something along those lines.
It seems pretty simple to me why. If we were talking about a job in tech, there would be 10,000 snarky responses about how it was obvious that this project manager or that maintenance developer was just protecting their job. Same here. Rocking the boat as a guidance counselor or anything like that just invites complaints (warranted or not), and in those roles they're judged by the school administrators on how many (or few) complaints are received. Same as teachers, I think. And though I've read no stories from school psychologists, teachers who get even a few complaints find themselves unwelcome in that district.
Maybe my speculation is wrong in this regard, but if so, I can't see the flaw in it.
But if we're doing an AMA : mind writing a bit more about the recovery? You mentioned humor as a coping strategy, so that makes me think You've probably been through some kind of introspection / therapy. Mind writing a bit more on what worked / didn't in Your case?
It was absolutely terrible and laborious; yet necessary. Being not socialized and not able to leave home alone for a very long time made me basically afraid of going outside the campus; I had to learn most life lessons people go through from childhood to early adulthood from scratch. People don't forgive you when you're an adult. Abusers love dependent children, even if they lament all the time that "you cost too much".
One of the things that's hard is separating the actual good parenting lessons from the abuse. From basic hygiene to on how to behave socially. Everything was laced in some kind of humiliation. "I told you this would happen, you think you're smarter than me haha!" kind of routine all the time.
I've never had therapy nor did I seek professional help. The bad experiences I've had with psychologists and other "professionals" that sided believed my parents by default were enough for me. This is not what I recommend, but I just can't let myself be vulnerable by the same kind of people again. It's like asking a severe burns victim to go through a firefighting course with live exercises. I have the chance of being smart and deeply introspective, but this is not perfect and very slow and fraught with painful mistakes. Just like most people should not represent themselves in a court of law, even if they're lawyers, I would not recommend doing that.
I mainly relied on the podcasts, shows and books from mental health professionals and also public forums, although I didn't really participate. Writing this stuff used to hurt a lot with a lot of flashbacks. Basically I did my own research, haha. Putting words to emotions and situations helps a lot, because abusers love twisting words, concepts and using logical fallacies to justify themselves. Also learning that I am not alone and that was happened to me was not right nor justified really helped a lot and was very validating.
I'm not done healing and probably never will be healed, but there is resilience and confidence that comes with successfully surmounting adversity.
I know why my mother had me years later, because when my father was angry he would yell at my mother "it's you who wanted another, so take care of him", but with more vicious insults. It turns out that when my mother had her first pregnancy, she was supposed to have a son but had a miscarriage in the toilet. I think this pretty much explains her using me to satisfy her emotional needs all the time; I literally was her emotional garbage can. Telling me how she feels like an ATM for the family, how she's lonely and not taken seriously by others; things that a husband have to deal with, not a child.
So anyway, my sisters began to extended family members about what happened in our house when they were young and also of what happened to me. Like me, it probably took them years to unshame themselves and flip the culpability unto the abusers. It created a scandal I think in the extended family, although always very hush hush, as is usual in small rural places.
My parents probably got a word of what my sisters told about them and then when my oldest sister got her first child, it was actually my parents who stopped talking to them. They never told me why they stopped talking to my sisters, but we figured it out. For some reason that enraged my father and forced my mother to stop talking to them but not to me. After a few years I got tired of seeing them trying to play nice and burning bridges after bridges with other family members and family friends, and I decided to cut them off. Although my sisters never made any kind of ultimatum, I could see how my parents were throwing a wrench between my and my sisters by only talking to me and not to them.
There are more details to this sordid story. It really could make for a full TV drama episode; these people love drama and being the victim. Don't fall for their game.
Huh? I don't recall those questions on my clearance application. Was this a SF-86?
How does the prevalence of traumatized individuals characterize a society as a whole? For example, it seems that a society where the majority are traumatized should be fundamentally different from a society where a minority are traumatized.
So I guess that's one thing that might characterize society: Lots of frustrated would-be grandparents.
Perhaps also many alienated grandparents, confused, hurt, and angry that their children don't want them involved in their grandchildren's lives.
https://www.webmd.com/parenting/news/20230620/dealing-with-a...
https://www.alienatedgrandparentsanonymous.com/
Silly title, but looks like a serious bit of work. Big study in the UK about ten years ago - 50k people receiving questionnaires, can't remember how many people for closer study, 50 for full day interviews.
Conclusion : sexual fantasy is a coping mechanism for trauma.
Fantasy is a recapitulation, often modified to make it more bearable, of the original trauma.
Fantasy varies between individuals, because trauma varies. Fantasy superficially varies enormously for an individual, but there is always a core theme.
https://pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm
I get that's a weird judge-a-book-by-its-cover metric, but it is excellent for working through and understanding those relationships.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK201120/ search for "Evidence for a Decline in Physical and Sexual Abuse"
(searched for that to post this, and they cite %60 since the 1990s).
Freud himself discovered a tremendous amount of horrible abuse in his patients; depending on the culture, most people just turn a blind eye. People that haven't experienced it and recovered from it a bit are really good at not believing how common it is.
I knew someone that was abused as a child. Had trouble with drugs and went into rehab. He said that ALL the people he met in rehab had been abused.
Also, for people who have experienced it, it's often the last thing they'd ever want to talk about. With anyone, including people they are really close to.
There's a good chance you could have a close personal friend or even your partner and never know they had gone through something like that.
The earlier trauma happens, the more amplified the effect is. Sometime in the 1950s it became a common parenting approach in the US at least to "not coddle children". That creates trauma for a sensitive child to not have their emotional needs met (an insensitive child may be just fine). There are different degrees of trauma- others that fight wars may experience a much deeper trauma later in life. The trauma to the ignored baby is not as traumatic of an event, but the baby does not have any abilities to cope and the effects are amplified in early developmental stages.
There is less community today to help with the coping process and emotionally distant parenting styles also make coping harder. And there is less religion today- religion both provided community and sometimes specifically helps people deal with trauma.
Trauma can be generational- someone that suffers trauma is much more likely to have difficulties raising their children. Consider someone that survived war but lost their home and witnessed horrors. They may turn to drugs to cope with the psychological pain. Being drug dependent, they have difficulty raising their own children. Those children don't have their emotional needs met, and a cycle of trauma can continue.
From Mate's point of view addiction rates would probably be one way to measure the trauma of society. Drug addiction is a way of coping with severe psychological pain. Drug overdosing is becoming a leading killer in some age groups.
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We generally have more resources and knowledge now. People tend to want to raise the bar when that becomes possible.
When kids suffered or died because humans lacked food security, reliable medical treatments etc, it was also generally not really the parent's fault. Knowing you could have been treated better and your parents/the world just didn't actually care about you is scarring in ways that "No one has enough." aren't.
Abuse of children is isolating for the child victim in a way that suffering hardship as a family unit or community isn't. There's no sense of "I'm as safe as it gets here, at home, with these people (even if that's not very safe)." There is no place of feeling even relative safety, no sense that anyone is even trying to care for or defend you.
Personally I think every child needs some sort of effective therapy to help heal the trauma of their formative years.
I use trauma freely here, there’s quite a big difference between someone who was bullied a couple of times and is naturally quite resilient vs someone who was mercilessly bullied for years on end pushing them to the brink of life.
I classify both as trauma, very different degrees though.
As well, people react very differently to similar events.
Like honestly, should we prevent suicides then continue treating people the way they were treated pre attempt?
Weird idea of empathy.
My guess is that in the past child mortality was higher and children traumatised enough just didn't survived. And because of such high mortality no one cared to find out why.
That raises the question of why contemporary attention to trauma is so elevated, if the problem is actually smaller now than it used to be. There's an easy answer though: this is first moment in (recent) history where we finally have a chance to begin dealing with it.
I organized a large group of trauma experts last week (church pastors), and although they were amazing and had clearly overcome trauma; residual selfishness and power grabbing meant a child got ignored
The same last night: a bible study with the homeless. A happy and peaceful place, though one member was throwing trauma bombs
There's not a simple switch, though having lived in war zones and done churches of, for instance Syrian refugees, unconditional love of God, and letting trauma be presented in the middle of that is deeply powerful
In the past much more than today, kids had defined roles and work to do in families. The stronger sense of identity may have lessened the trauma. As may the knowledge that their peers in neighboring familes were going through the exact same things.
Under certain circumstances people can experiences horrible stuff with barely any ill effect while other times really trivial small things can totally break them.
Just having one stable positive relationship with an adult can make a child significantly more resilient while the child that lacks that relationship might break at a minor problem. There are many factors that determine resilience and it can vary greatly from person to person. And it is situational. Someone might be a hardened war veteran having seen it all but totally break when seeing a child getting a minor wound.
So children today might be objectively better off than in the past but it does not necessary mean their struggles are less valid, they are just different. So hard to say whether they are less traumatized or not, maybe a little bit but mostly probably just in different ways.
But yeah, the main thing is that we are much better at recognizing signs of trauma these days and people can be more open of their struggles so it might seem like there is more traumatized people when probably there is the same amount or less.
As with many things like this, getting hard numbers would be extremely difficult because it's the sort of thing where peoples' inclination to answer surveys honestly changes with social norms.