Many people who sure as hell never experienced actual trauma are touting trauma everywhere.

But then again, mental damage is intangible, right?

Since you can't experience other people's distress, your worst experience is always at the top of the scale on an individual level. You can use empathy and reason to understand other people's struggles, but your personal experience is unique in scale.

IMHO it's a serious concept, AND it's vastly overused. It's something to be taken seriously, and I think there are a fair number of people who find it has explanatory power in their lives. But yeah, it's also a fad. That this framework has come to be the dominant model of interaction in the discourse is an insult to people who have experienced real trauma, even more so because often there seems to be no effort at healing, just rolling through the identity supermarket picking up various kinds of afflictions and mental illnesses as a personal definition rather than a diagnosis pointing to treatment.

That was maybe more glib than it should have been, and I am sympathetic to the desire to figure out who you are absent many of the normal meaning-making centers people used to have. Without that, there is only the identity supermarket. What's more, trauma-as-spectrum isn't the worst way to think about the aches of being a person. Maybe you weren't beaten as a child, maybe you didn't flee an invading army, but the pain and sadness lives on inside you nonetheless.

The darker side of it is that rolling around on the ground holding your tummy and crying is an efficient attention-getter.

So there's nuance. I think it's a serious idea, with serious consequences, and too many very unserious people have glommed onto it.

Trauma and PTSD is very real, but yeah, a lot of people are discovering it and thinking their little minor quirks are “a little PTSD”. (I actually heard someone say that.) It’s similar to how depression is very real and serious, but the term became diluted by people using “depressed” as a synonym for “sad”.

people have always had pain in their lives

history is full of people with unhealthy behavior

it’s a new label for an age old problem

that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it might just be part of the human condition

Trauma, trauma, trauma. People collect them as though they were Pokémon.

No doubt someone will claim this comment caused them trauma.