It isn't my typical register, but I do get formal when I get angry, and my prior interlocutor in this thread did a decent job of making me angry. It is of course the prerogative of the young to be unthinkingly cruel; I was the same. The prerogative of those no longer young is to decide whether and when this tendency deserves to be humored.
> the benefit...someone who needs to be heard will now be heard.
Will they, though? That's what bothers me about this. In a culture suffused with a concept of trauma so vitiated as to apply to seemingly almost anything more noxious than a paper cut, where is there any space for someone to talk about the experience of having suffered something legitimately horrific? If 'trauma' means someone broke it off with me and that sucked and I feel bad about it, how does it also mean what my grandfather did, and my father's girlfriend and later his second wife, and those other men I probably never will know how they got me in that room? If I use 'trauma' to mean those things, and everyone I say it to thinks I'm talking about a bad breakup, then in what sense am I heard?
Too, a culture so suffused offers many opportunities for unnecessary and uncomfortable mishap. I've had this happen, with someone who seemed to approach the concept so lightly as to regard the subject as a sort of shortcut to deepening acquaintanceship, the term that was used being 'trauma bonding' - this in a second conversation, at that.
I was somewhat sharp in dissuading what felt an unwarrantable and startling level of nosiness toward matters which are mine to share or not as I choose. I regret the brusqueness and not the dissuasion, but in her defense I can't imagine it arising at all, as a topic in a professional conversation within a professional setting, were it not a very ordinary aspect of culture in at least some places. Certainly it was nothing more than a clash of cultures, and a mildly inappropriate conversation for work - but the clash and the malaprop are themselves interesting to me, and corroborate a level of normalization and attenuation which, as I say, imperils any useful meaning for the term.
That is a real problem, too. People like to dismiss such arguments as 'merely semantic', as if the sole and only thing that distinguishes us as a species - the thing that stops us killing one another, to the extent anything ever does - were a triviality. But the entire point of having a semiotic framework around such a sensitive and painful topic is to make it possible to discuss in terms which, if not comfortable, are at least no further from it than can be avoided. Remove the framework, and what's left? You can either speak the bald truth, or say nothing. Neither option really serves.
I did the former earlier. It was not entirely without an emotional cost, and that's after about thirty years spent reckoning with this. Not that many years ago I couldn't have done it at all; much of my anger arose in the knowledge that there are people whom my prior interlocutor could successfully have silenced. I don't doubt they have done it before, almost certainly without ever realizing that they had. If I were they, it would bother me to think I might have done that. But, as I said, it is the privilege of youth to be thoughtlessly cruel.
The reason I chose instead to say what I did, and so bluntly, was again because if there is any purpose to such a framework as I describe, it is to be gentle. You're right that this stuff requires to be talked about. It is also extremely difficult to talk about! It is brutal, to say the least, and the cruel thing about it is that it stays that way. The scheme of language around it provides a tool with which to talk about it in a way that hurts less - for everyone.
That's a worthy thing for the same reason that medical anesthesia is a worthy thing. I don't always need it; I have often startled doctors and dentists with my ability to tolerate pain, in one case to a point where I was glad there was a CT scan to prove to an ER doctor I wasn't drug-seeking. Even I, though, do not care to open my soul in this way without something to take the edge off. I may choose to do so when I think it needs doing, but even for me it still hurts. For most people, most who need to do it for reasons like mine, I think it must be much more painful. As with a root canal, it should not be more painful than it absolutely has to be. It should not ever.
The language of trauma is, or was, one of a precious few tools to make that less painful, and certainly the only one available to everyone. Render the tool useless, and in the large majority case you only force a choice between brutality and silence. Most will choose silence. Most do, as you note. I didn't today, but I would still much prefer there continue to be a third and kinder option. The way I see 'trauma' devalued of late cuts directly against that, and if there is an argument to convince me otherwise, it has not been made in this thread today.
After all, it was you who made the point that being heard can save lives. I agree! I absolutely agree with you there. I also want that to keep happening, and I want it to happen more.
> More talking is a good thing, in general.
No. More meaning is a good thing. To speak without meaning, or worse to speak falsely, is a betrayal of what makes us human, and not without instrumental hazard besides - as I believe the state of the US at the moment should suffice on its own to show.
That said, you're quite right that there is a cultural dialogue here. My comments in this thread constitute a contribution to it. They are not perfect, but neither am I.
I had hoped that the like imperfection of others, this being also in the common heritage of humanity, would incline to some degree of charity. Unfortunately, my prior interlocutor was more interested in insisting on their own view, even to condescension and insult, than in hearing anyone else's. Unfortunately, I was not inclined to be very patient in the face of arrogance today. So it goes. Perhaps I'll do better next time. Perhaps they will, too.