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Comment by The_Amp_Walrus | Hacker News Reader

you're conflating "not having an overwhelming negative reaction to it" with "never feel anything about it"

you can know something is bad and act accordingly without having a disordered and painful relationship with it

But you are supposed to have a painful relationship with it. You are never ever supposed to be at peace with it. It's who you become as the holder of that pain that provides any foundation. In a sense, "zapping it" limits your potential. A surrogate mother robs the mother of child-bearing (in all normal cases like Kim Kardashian, not for cases where the original mother cannot physically give birth). That's just a fact. The trauma event has already robbed them, why rob them twice?

Most people will have no capacity to feel what you feel about it. You have the gift of feeling what is necessary to feel about that event. It's precious, and it needs to be nurtured. My utter contempt and sorrow for what I feel about certain things belongs in the world, as best as I can hold and steer it.

No one can feel your pain, and if you zap it, then not even you can feel it. It's unloving to yourself and your experience.

Try telling all this to someone who is effectively emotionally/physically disabled because their mind and body either enter a rollercoaster or just shutdown in response to anything vaguely reminiscent of something they experienced.

I think these treatments are better understood as methods to encourage one's mind and body to reprocess some experience so that it is "merely" a terrible thing that happened so they can live a stabler, more balanced, more normal life.

The tribe that you speak of is much much bigger than those who have an official diagnosis of PTSD via psychology. For example, addicts all have PTSD that is commonly related to past childhood/family abuse dynamics. They take drugs over it. So, as a matter of fact, that is exactly what is told to them. You can in fact hold your pain, and I believe it is righteous to do so.

It kind of reminds me of Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind. You cannot just erase something. Drugs effectively erase the bad feelings, but they don't last. Okay, so such a treatment being discussed is, I suppose, an everlasting solution. Why would I be against this? Because you cease being you in your entirety (which includes your trauma).

It's not an easy sell by any measure, especially for those who just go "well fuck that, I can erase this with some cocaine right now". Erasing it is a solution, for sure, but it's not a free solution. Something is lost in the process (you). Understanding that, stay with me here, that it's beautiful is part of it, that you have a beautiful part of you forever. It's completely didactic, you have to teach the person that they went through something and are PRETTIER in their surviving of it. Then it stops being traumatic.

If we zap them, we take away the pretty. If I zap you, and then say lets talk about it, and you say "well I don't feel any which way about it anymore", then it's lost. It's gone. So something is lost in the process. So yeah, this is exactly what is told to the most beaten down people in life.

I wouldn't zap the mustard seed.

> you cease being you in your entirety

You cease being you every second of every day.

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