Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score” | Hacker News Reader

Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”

josepheverettwil.substack.com

296 pointsadityaathalye371 comments

This article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-skeptic, which doesn't seem to agree with mainstream science (setting aside Body Keeps the Score)

> That is, trauma doesn’t lead to dysfunction or abnormal brain function, physiology or hormonal regulation. Rather, an unhealthy person may be more susceptible to trauma.

What has been documented about Adverse Childhood Experiences doesn’t agree with this. There is copious evidence that the presence of ACEs, independent of other factors, leads to poor health outcomes [1]

It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future trauma [2]

There's also data indicating CPTSD, PTSD, and Borderline are distinct disorders [3]

1 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/ https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

2 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5858954/

3 - https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-p...

I think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them? That is, yes, some trauma sticks with you. History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't devastated when we ultimately do lose some family.

Would be like saying you should hammer people on how much grieve they must be feeling because they lost a dog. Now, nor should you also scold people for feeling said grief. It is very personal and hard to really know what experience someone will have until they have it.

more information is better if it’s also provided with the context of how to heal.

> History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma

i’m extremely skeptical that people move on

they suppress, they survive, but without deep understanding its impossible to say move on

you can be ignorant and survive, or face reality and climb the deeply uphill battle of real growth.

of course you can be paralyzed by it, but no one is advocating for that as treatment

I mean... depends on the trauma? Do you consider it traumatic to lose a pet? What is the difference between survival and moving on? What sort of growth would you expect there?

It really depends on the person.

I know someone who grew up in rough neighborhoods, has been in fights, been stabbed, divorced alcoholic father and drug using mother, and yet got a master's degree, a fulfilling career, marriage and family.

I know someone else who happened to be in a bank when it was robbed, and has spent years struggling to hold a steady job because the anxiety developed from the experience has persisted. Later divorced and become a poster child for making bad decisions.

The latter has gone to therapy, the former didn't. Small sample size, don't draw any conclusions other than everyone is different, and beware anyone proclaiming universal truths in psychology.

The extra confounding factor here is that not all therapy is created equal. Some of my life has parallels with your first example. I did my first therapy session in grad school and it helped me out tremendously. Again, anecdotal, but one of the things he did very well was to not allow me to continually re-traumatize myself by rehashing the potential sources of my (maladaptive, dysfunctional, pathological, whatever word you want) thoughts and behaviours. He would listen for a bit and then steer the conversation back to: what’s the delta you’re trying to achieve? I can help you find a route from here to there without needing to go back to the beginning. As it turned out, getting myself to a better mental state helped me let go of a lot of resentment and blame that I held about the people responsible for my childhood. It wasn’t explicit, it just kind of happened as I tweaked my thinking.

There is also an element of… it’s easier to get out of a shitty headspace if you’re not already stuck in a shitty present. I moved out of my home town when I turned 18 and went to university 3 hours away. Close enough that I stayed in touch with my family but far enough away that the day-to-day chaos didn’t affect me. Cell phones weren’t a thing yet so there were plenty of viable excuses for not answering the phone.

In your second example, unlike mine, the person spirals downwards instead of escaping. They start out as anxious from the robbery, then end up anxious and unemployed. Then anxious, unemployed, and divorced. It’s pretty tough to think clearly about addressing and processing the robbery when you’re not sure if you’re going to have enough money for groceries and rent.

I don't know your relationship with the former person, but as for drawing general conclusions, I—as a reader of your comment—can't assume that you have assessed accurately whether their case is better. You might not be aware of subtle abuse in the home, masked depression, overt narcissism, suicidality, etc.

Years in the trenches have taught me that many people who seem successful, put-together, and happy are deeply struggling or causing harm to the people closest to them.

Yea, this seems to be an issue with this entire thread. Lots of people making lots of assumption about others.

As a kid into my teens I had plenty of my own trama, but was quiet and generally didn't interact with many other people my age, generally having friendships with people much older than I was. Once I got into my late twenties this turned around and I ended up being the person who many other people my age and younger would come and talk to about their lives. In general I'm just quiet and let them talk. Listening to a lot people talk about their lives has let me see one thing.

A lot of people are really screwed up from their childhood and bring it into their adulthood

The number of women that have been sexually assaulted or raped that disclose it is downright depressing, especially in their childhood. More depressing is the number of 'high status' people that cover it up.

The number of men that have some kind of depression coping mechanism such as alcoholism or hidden drug use is disturbing too. And a lot of these people are the ones you can't tell. They have successful jobs and make good money, have a wife and kids. All the checkboxes of supposed happiness. But so often these are things they had to do at some point after being driven by narcissistic parents for years. Trama driven workaholics with no at home coping mechanisms are common too.

I have no idea how much people that have had trauma can be fixed. What I'd really like to see is the signs if it taught younger so kids and learn how to avoid it and call it out.

You are free to be as skeptical as you like. You might even imagine I made up both of those people. For all you know, I'm actually one of your split personalities who made that comment just to troll you, and this one too.

I spoke in generalities because the specifics of their stories aren't really mine to tell.

You are right that people are more than the facade they present to the public world. Objectively, though, it's clear that they had very different reactions to traumatic experiences, and healed (or didn't) very differently.

If you can at least assume I didn't make both stories up, then we can at least agree that drawing universal generalizations about trauma, recovery, and what is "best" for people (or what they are "good at") is a fruitless endeavor.

People who face reality and climb towards real growth are also suppressing their negative emotions, surviving, and moving on. Children are specifically different from adults because they don't have any emotional regulation. They just live fully in whatever emotion smacks them in the gut.

Just because you've got a scar doesn't mean it's bad, nor does it mean you haven't moved on if you haven't spent 6 months staring at the healing process. Some people heal quicker, some heal better, some heal slower, some heal worse. Like pretty much everything in biology, it's something of a spectrum.

> you can be ignorant and survive, or face reality and climb the deeply uphill battle of real growth.

> of course you can be paralyzed by it, but no one is advocating for that as treatment

Nominally yes. But in practice what are the effects of the treatments that people advocate for? Do people end up better or worse off?

> > History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma

> i’m extremely skeptical that people move on

Historically, essentially everyone who lived long enough to have children had some of those children die [1]. So either:

- that wasn't traumatic

- they managed to deal with that trauma

- or they didn't move on, and everyone was somewhat traumatised

You can take your choice from the above, but on the whole this was the normal state of affairs for most of human history and prehistory.

[1]: from https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an..., 50% of children died by age ~5

This is a big point that really blows my mind in the discussion. It is basically indisputable that we are exposed to less trauma than people in the past. To a laughable degree.

And it wasn't just children. Before the advent of antiseptics, a prick from a briar could basically kill you. Before modern supply chains, you almost certainly had parasites. Before modern vaccines... The list is remarkably large.

I suppose there is an argument that it is the reduction of traumatic events that makes them more traumatic? Feels like a shaky reason to think "focus more and make sure you fully grappled with how traumatic it was" is the default correct approach.

> It is basically indisputable that we are exposed to less trauma than people in the past. To a laughable degree.

And standards of living and life expediencies have gone up and to the right.

That 100 years ago people managed to cope with the traumatics of daily life doesn't translate to their coping being healthy or their lives being better (consider the massive drinking culture of the mid 1800s that ultimately led to prohibition)

True that standards of living have gone up. I'm... not clear where you were going with this, though?

You are using the word "cope" in a way that implies people did not grow after their trauma in the past. I do think I've been sloppy and said grown from trauma a few times. I meant that to be a time marker, not a cause of growth.

Do I think some people did not manage healthy growth after some events? Absolutely! But I also think many people did find ways to continue to grow.

I think, in the past, yes - most people did not grow, they just coped. They merely distracted themselves with working 12 hour days, drinking their lives away, and beating their wife and children.

Think about it this way - how many passion projects did people have back then? When they weren't working, what were they doing?

I think it’s exactly why we can now look at and face trauma because some of us are not as severely traumatized and in denial like previous generations. We can decide to work on it, rather than just passing it on by mistreating those around us and redirecting our rage towards imagined enemies and threats. Well, some us.

But not everyone reacted to trauma by going into denial? Some people had really crappy things happen to them. They did not deny this, necessarily. They just found a way to move to the next things.

And note, that it wasn't everyone. Some people did not find a way to move on. Worse, some people likely perpetuated their trauma on to others.

"Denial" typically refers not to the denial that something bad happened to you, but to not see how you act it out on others (or yourself). It is exactly those in denial that would claim that they "have moved on", and try hard to make it look like they did also to those around them. It then shows up in violent tendencies, lashing out against kids, enemy images, patterns of avoidance, psychosomatic symptoms, burnout, addictions, obesity, sports injuries due to overdoing it, inability to sit still and listen, etc. - not necessarily PTSD symptoms.

IMHO the death of a child was rarely traumatizing. Intense grief and trauma are different things.

Warfare however was more common or at least more unavoidable than it is now, and would have been a potent source of traumatic experiences.

Ditto attacks by wild animals.

Grieving heals trauma. Death of a child is traumatic but we allow room for this in society. We provide instinctive support to others going through this.

Death in general is an inevitable part of life that can be dealt with in a healthy way. It's still individual but generally there are outlets.

Traumatic disorders are specifically where the symptoms caused by trauma interfere with daily life and are measured in severity and longevity.

We should actively grieve traumatic experiences by paying attention to them where necessary.

When an animal is attacked, e.g., by a lion, it will sometimes completely freeze (which often causes the predator to lose interest). Many different species and families of animals do this, but according to Peter Levine writing a few decades ago, in no species except human is there any evidence that having undergone this freezing response has long-term consequences. There seems to be something about the human mind (or the human lifestyle in modern times) that makes the freezing response tend to have very persistent effects.

I would like to call this freezing response psychological trauma. I think many experts use the phrase that way. Certainly the OP is using the term this way. But if people are going to use "traumatic experience" to refer to any very aversive experience or any experience that makes the person very sad, like you just did, then that is kind of a drag because most very aversive experiences, e.g., death of one's child, do not cause the freezing response or do so only rarely. Must those of us who wish to discuss the human version of this freezing response come up with a different term?

I mean, most of human history sucked major ass and people were drinking themselves to death.

> History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma.

That's the "classical" mindset that modern empirical studies are refuting.

Actually, no, people are often not very resilient at all in moving on from trauma. They suffer greatly, they traumatize others, and it affects their health.

On this, then, I would generally have a hard time agreeing. I'd be comfortable with the idea that not everyone is very resilient. I'd expect that. If the claim, then, is that there is an absurdly high variance there, I'd agree.

But I'm also growingly sympathetic to the idea that telling people they are, in fact, traumatized, is not healthy. People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are told. Especially from authority.

> People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are told.

Research shows that suggestibility is actually moderately correlated with trauma.

If so then its true, telling traumatized people that they are traumatized makes it worse for them.

Correlation is ~not~ [actually] causation?

how do you determine causation from correlation in experiment where you are unable to separate all the factors? you can't.

not agreeing with one side or other - because i frankly don't know enough about it to form an opinion, but using "correlation != causation" is basically a discussion stopper.

My point is their claim assumes causation despite the fact that we may never be able to prove it. I.e. a strong claim with no evidence besides a correlation.

Nobody suggested there was a causation here as that doesn't matter for what was talked about.

Doesn't matter, suggestibility was correlated with trauma, which means they are likely to be suggestible to becoming miserable if you tell them they are.

That requires someone to tell them they are miserable rather than observing them to be miserable.

There’s a lot of historic terms to describe people suffering from traumatic experiences like shell shocked (WWI), soldier’s hart (US civil war), lost/bewildered (US Revolutionary War), etc going back literally thousands of years.

No it doesn't, I didn't say the source of their misery was people telling them that they are, but it could make it worse.

Often the best cure is for your friends and family to treat you just like normal, except maybe demand a bit less and give space.

That’s a common response by friends and family but it’s simply not the best cure. Often it makes things worse and can lead to suicide through feelings of alienation.

> No it doesn't, I didn't say the source of their misery was people telling them that they are, but it could make it worse.

It sounds like you're advocating for repressing traumatic experiences hoping to not cause inconveniences.

You need to separate physical trauma from psychological trauma. There's no debate that getting hit in the head or having explosives go off nearby can cause physical brain damage. That's empirically proven (at least in animal models) and so obvious that it's hard to argue against.

What I'm unclear on is the details: is physical trauma a necessary factor in shell shock as it was understood a century or more ago? Is that shell shock the same thing as the combat stress reaction and/or post-traumatic stress disorder? Is PTSD an amalgamation of two different things that aren't the same? To what extent does suggestion worsen the physical vs psychological sides of PTSD? Is suggestion the only thing that causes shell shock, the CSR, and/or PTSD in the absence of physical damage? Etc.

> Is suggestion the only thing that causes shell shock, the CSR, and/or PTSD in the absence of physical damage? Etc.

I think you're venturing into denialism territory. There is a mountain of evidence supporting the fact that traumatic experiences have a negative impact on health. See for example the impact of stress on, say, cardiac issues, and even growing grey hair and/or going bald altogether.

I'm less saying "it definitely isn't" and more trying to show the complexity of understanding this and the paucity of evidence. Is long-term stress different from a one-off traumatic incident? How much stress does trauma cause? Is therapy effective at preventing stress caused by trauma? What part of therapy is effective: can you stick someone in a room with a nice doctor and no therapeutic plan and achieve a result? Does therapy make things worse for some patients? Which patients are those, and how do you tell?

My personal opinion is that trauma probably has an effect, it's a lot worse in sustained cases, many of the symptoms are mixed up with other conditions, treatment for it is effective (in that it hits statistical significance) but not particularly effective (in that the effect size is small), treating healthy people can make them worse, some traumatised patients probably also get worse after treatment, and the symptoms of e.g. ASR/CSR are so vague that some of them apply to most of the people who read them.

War is a useful lens because of the number of people in similar roles gives good data to work with and there’s institutions interested in how well people function.

People in long term overwhelmingly stressful situations suffered severe issues in WWII without any kind of physical trauma. Shipping across the Atlantic for example was horribly dangerous in terms of percentage of lives lost, but very binary with many ships surviving without ever being shot at. The language used to describe what’s going on isn’t necessarily sufficient for a modern diagnosis, but it’s clear something was wrong.

The constant treat of severe consequences was on its own damaging. Militaries cycle people out of war zones not just the front lines because they become less effective over time. Children growing up in traumatic environments rarely get that kind of reprieve.

Do you have a link to studies showing this?

I had a look and I found one[0] (cw: child abuse) which agrees but the direction is wrong - they discovered trauma leads to suggestibility.

[1] might be implying what you claim but, whilst I'm no expert, I'm reasonably sure "dissociative states"[2] isn't a simple "becoming miserable".

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/2/37 "Our results show that PTSD increases the levels of immediate and delayed suggestibility"

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30987544/ "These results suggest that high suggestibility confers vulnerability to dissociative states in individuals exposed to trauma and displaying an anxious attachment style."

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology)

> I had a look and I found one[0] (cw: child abuse) which agrees but the direction is wrong - they discovered trauma leads to suggestibility.

I never said that trauma comes from suggestibility. Even for traumatized people you can make things worse by using their suggestibility and saying they are miserable, they get more miserable, what you said agree with that.

No it doesn't.

In my case, that reassurance finally gave me a foundation to work on.

I finally knew that it wasn't my fault. I understood thst I didn't deserve what happened. I didn't need to chastise myself for breaking down during flashbacks. For the first time in my life my emotions got a concrete basis of "Yes, that is trauma. It's fucked up. You can work on it." and not "Why are you still worrying about stuff from 20 years ago" or "Well that happens to everyone, and they don't break down like you".

> But I'm also growingly sympathetic to the idea that telling people they are, in fact, traumatized, is not healthy

If the message is, "you are traumatized and therefore permanently damaged", you're right - that's not healthy and also not true. But if the message is "you are traumatized and need to process your trauma", then it's more like telling someone that they have a treatable injury. I think this a pretty critical distinction that rarely gets addressed in these kinds of discussions.

Agreed.

This 1000x.

Discovering you have trauma is a kind of diagnosis, so now you can figure out the kind of professional help you need.

I don't think there's really an epidemic of trauma hypochondriacs. It's not an excuse to play victim or anything. It's simply important to recognize that trauma means you're probably not going to get better on your own, and you should find help.

> It's simply important to recognize that trauma means you're probably not going to get better on your own, and you should find help.

There is no evidence for this, and it is exactly the harmful mindset being criticized. Developing PTSD from traumatic events is the exception, not the rule. The majority of people do get better on their own.

This is so frustrating because I agree with the beginning, but the statement you make after I find to be also misleading if not technically true.

No, you seem to be confused about the definition of trauma. This is important.

By definition, people who undergo traumatic events do not generally get better on their own. If they get over it easily, it's not classified as trauma.

Trauma is not defined by the event itself, but by the person's reaction to it. When you say the majority of people overcome trauma on their own, that is by definition false.

If you have a bad reaction to an event but it goes away within a week or too, it's classified as an acute stress reaction. Not trauma.

What is the definition of trauma, and what is the evidence that most people don't overcome it on their own?

> But if the message is "you are traumatized and need to process your trauma", then it's more like telling someone that they have a treatable injury.

There is a problem of diagnosis, trauma is not as objectively diagnosable as physical injury. If somebody falls out of a tree and stands back up, nobody tells them they probably have broken legs because that obviously isn't true in this instance even if it might usually be true for somebody in their circumstance. But if somebody experiences something that might usually traumatize a person, it is harder to objectively determine if that specific individual is actually traumatized. If somebody is, against apparent odds, basically fine, it is at least conceivable that trusted authorities could gaslight that person into believing they are actually traumatized, in a way that causes that person to become in fact traumatized.

> it is at least conceivable that trusted authorities could gaslight that person into believing they are actually traumatized, in a way that causes that person to become in fact traumatized.

Where are you getting this idea from? That's not a thing.

If someone is so resilient they aren't traumatized by an event that would be traumatic to many others, you think they'll then be genuinely traumatized by someone... telling them they're traumatized?

At worst, being told you're traumatized when you're not, is going to result in a couple of visits with a therapist who will then assess that you seem fine.

I've seen similar with kids? Indeed, it is easily seen as one of the reasons they form fears to many bugs. Parents freak out over the bug that wasn't bothering a kid enough times, and the kid will eventually build a fear of bugs. (Or snakes/spiders/etc.)

Ok, but that's not what social workers etc. do. They don't tell kids how they should be reacting to an adverse event. They observe how a kid is already acting in response, to determine if something was traumatic, and then if therapy will help.

They're not telling kids to be terrified of something that the kid has already dealt with.

Uh, maybe we've met different social workers? Because I've absolutely seen that happen before.

Which, fair that you can easily catch yourself in a 'no true social worker' scenario. But it definitely happens. Especially with how little training we dedicate to camp counselors and such.

> Where are you getting this idea from? That's not a thing.

It absolutely happens with kids who fall on the playground and similar minor traumas. If the parent freaks out the kid will cry and cry. If the parent laughs, the kid will shake it off and laugh. I don't think it's completely outlandish to speculate that this kind of effect might come into play in more serious situations than falling off the monkey bars.

No expert, and fully expect to be flamed, but we are now living in a society that has discouraged "sucking it up" or "burying your emotions" for 30 years. It not really possible to study, at macro level, the impact of that thinking.

A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.

who has discouraged "sucking it up"? what systemic policies have changed to accommodate this? as far as I can tell, someone can explain how they're the victim to anyone and everyone they come across and no one will care. I can't see how anyone emotionally or materially benefits from saying they're a victim. they may want sympathy but they will not get it.

that said, I don't live in a coastal city where there might be more accommodations for such things. where I live, people are generally on their own to find the means to survive. but, in line with the theme of the post, I'm fairly certain people here have a lower life expectancy and generally lower health than people in places where there is a more robust support network. in which case, the body must, in fact, keep the score.

> as far as I can tell, someone can explain how they're the victim to anyone and everyone they come across and no one will care. I can't see how anyone emotionally or materially benefits from saying they're a victim. they may want sympathy but they will not get it.

This is true for a man, not true for a woman. Women in general get a lot of sympathy and things for saying they are a victim. Men just benefit from hiding it as you say though, there is no reason for men to show this.

This is part of the "persecution of conservatives", where they "can't say a thing anymore". They obviously can, and still do, but feel their voices are being suppressed. The reality is that their opinion isn't popular anymore, and they're used to being listened to unconditionally, and can't stand that people don't agree with them anymore.

The annoying thing here is that it's simply not true, especially in regards to men. It's still the norm to be told to suck it up, or you're not a real man. It's toxic masculinity, and it's obvious that's taken on a massive rise in popularity, thanks to folks like Joe Rogan and the like.

> The annoying thing here is that it's simply not true, especially in regards to men. It's still the norm to be told to suck it up, or you're not a real man.

It's also the norm to be told that you need to be vulnerable and share your trauma and you're lesser if you don't. Men get shamed for both not being enough of a victim and being too much of a victim, and have no winning move.

> Men get shamed for both not being enough of a victim and being too much of a victim, and have no winning move.

Can you expand on that? When you say that they get shamed, who or what is causing it?

> It's also the norm to be told that you need to be vulnerable and share your trauma and you're lesser if you don't.

I think the norm now is that you should share your trauma with a therapist, to help heal. I can't imagine telling anyone to share their trauma, regardless of gender.

> and have no winning move.

This is a common incel talking point, and to be honest I don't think it has basis in reality. It's totally fine to share with a therapist and I don't know who would criticize someone for it. If a friend criticizes you for going to therapy, they aren't a friend.

Should you be able to also share with your friend? Yeah, but there's also the concept of trauma dumping, where you use your friends as a therapist, and that has its own problems. Sometimes folks aren't in the right mental space to hear your problems, especially depending on the context (like, were you abused as a child? maybe they were too).

> This is a common incel talking point, and to be honest I don't think it has basis in reality. It's totally fine to share with a therapist and I don't know who would criticize someone for it. If a friend criticizes you for going to therapy, they aren't a friend.

> Should you be able to also share with your friend?

Why did you leap from talking about incels to talking about friends? It's not friends that are the problem, it's partners, for whom it really does seem to be normal to both expect and demand that you share your weaknesses with them, and then get the ick when you do.

> Why did you leap from talking about incels to talking about friends? It's not friends that are the problem, it's partners

Because most of the people saying this kind of stuff tend to be incels, who famously don't have partners.

But my point about friends also applies to partners. Some stuff you need to work out in therapy. Your partner isn't your therapist, and treating them that way gives them the ick, especially early in a relationship.

You're forcing them to bear your trauma. You can expect people really far into a relationship to do this to a point (like nearing engagement, already engaged, or married), but even then it's more fair to share your trauma after you've learned how to bear it yourself, with the help of a professional. Partners should know about your past, especially as it may affect your behavior, but they shouldn't be forced to help you resolve your emotional issues.

That pressure is largely coming from other men. I don't know many women who want to date a guy who's unable to be vulnerable. I think if men made more space for each other to be something other than angry y'all would find life a lot more pleasant.

> That pressure is largely coming from other men.

Not my experience.

> I don't know many women who want to date a guy who's unable to be vulnerable.

Indeed, at least in theory. Unfortunately they also don't want to date a guy who's shown actual vulnerability to them.

> who has discouraged "sucking it up"? what systemic policies have changed to accommodate this?

When I reported being assaulted, I was vigorously encouraged to attend counselling, and it was suggested to me that if I felt fine I should allow myself to be persuaded otherwise.

I have heard anecdotes of e.g. rape victims not being believed because they don't seem to be traumatised enough.

It's not about wanting sympathy. In peace and prosperity times, people has more time to reach adulthood and explore themselves, they don't have to suppress pain in order to survive. Not saying everyone, but many.

I'm no expert either, but for sure there are psychology and sociology studies about generational differences, openness, and things like that.

> A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.

I dunno, in my experience, not really a lot of people?

And the people that did - and yes, they absolutely exist - seem to have some kind of disorder. They all probably would have benefited from therapy and/or medication. They probably do need sympathy (maybe not the way they wanted), may or may not have been victims, and are sort of special cases.

Most people just want to be normal, to have a job, to go see movies, to play games, to spend time with friends, partners, lovers, family.

This is just my life's experience though. Maybe I'm the weird one.

I think you might look harder, it's not necessarily overt. I'd bet it underpins a lot of peculiar political behaviors. I'd also say not always sympathy but sometimes revenge.

> No expert, and fully expect to be flamed, but we are now living in a society that has discouraged "sucking it up" or "burying your emotions" for 30 years. It not really possible to study, at macro level, the impact of that thinking.

> A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be special. They want sympathy.

It doesn't really seem like claiming victimhood is a broadly-repeatable way to make a living for the masses more than 30 years ago... many things that were intended in the 60s and 70s to try to make up for historic victimization have been rolled back in recent decades. But I suppose this could apply to Rush Limbaugh and such - beating the "white males are the persecuted ones, actually!" drum of anger leading to the much-aggrieved whiny MAGA brigade.

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - maybe sometimes if you're an adult. But not childhood trauma...that makes you weaker almost every time, and you take that weakness with you and spread it around.

I didn't say that, though? Some things that don't kill you can, obviously, make you really really weak. Isn't hard to find examples on that front. Polio is the poster case.

But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.

I suspect we would largely align on the idea that growth is the important part. We would also largely agree that trauma is real. Question is how do you combine those ideas?

From what I've seen in my direct circle, childhood trauma leaves deep deep traces, and not in a good way. The idea that childhood trauma encourages growth to me sounds like pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of rhetoric.

And where did I say that? You seem to be purposely misreading my posts.

I said growth is the important part. If you are focusing people on identifying themselves as traumatized, you are doing it wrong. You want to focus them on how to grow. Be that be letting go, coming to terms, whatever. Really depends on the trauma.

It’s attitudinal. Some people just don’t want to stay stuck in their childhood forever because there are too many things they want in life. Is it better to just carry your childhood around and relive it all the time? Some of that is probably fine but do it to the exclusion of your present moments and it’s probably maladaptive.

It sounds like you're trying to argue against a trauma model, but you're basically just describing the state of someone having PTSD and a typical end goal state of therapeutic treatment for it.

> But thinking kids are made weaker from any and all trauma is just reductive to the point of not useful.

Huh? No, that's the whole point, how important and useful it is.

It's to separate out the non-traumatic experiences where you recover just fine... from the genuinely traumatic experiences that do harm you, and for which professional help is really useful in recovering from.

But you haven't separated these things out. You have definitionally stated that some things exist. But you have no method to separate the genuinely traumatic from the potentially traumatic.

Broken bones. Death in the family. Death of the family. Moving. Friends changing. Attacks from coyotes. Loss of pets through unknown reasons. Loss of neighborhood friends to suicide? Which of these is genuinely traumatic?

My point is that this is very individual to the kid. I further posit that many kids will make things more traumatic if you ask them to do so.

Worse, I have seen "was rude to me at camp two years ago" be a significant source of grievance to kids. The whole elevator scene of "I hate you" versus "I never even think of you" is very very real.

Had to post as anon well because feels safer that way.

I don't think you really understand the difference between traumatic events and traumatic disorders. There are 2 fundamental aspects of trauma that without removing will yield worsening mental and physical states.

1. Cause of trauma must be stopped 2. Feeling of the loss of control

As someone whose experienced both childhood neglect and mental abuse, The Body Keeps Score and was able to help me unravel and recover very from incredibly complex childhood and then adulthood trauma.

What you have listed are traumatic events they create a shock and body's sympathetic nervous system recovers. Now say you are in a constant state of shock everyday for your entire life how is the nervous system going to adapt to that? That's right it changes and has to create maladaptive protective mechanisms, socially this doesn't make sense but biologically it does.

It takes digging through this massive book(1000+ pages), to find triggers, possible treatments and improvements 10+ years to get comfortable. But if you ever talk to people with PTSD they are never really healed, mostly scarred but have recurring physiological issues they must cope with.

Similar to what I said in the sibling post, this is classic talking past each other. The word "disorder" doesn't appear in the thread until here. If you are speaking to a definition that distinguishes traumatic events and disorders, you are having a different conversation than I was having. And, as I said in sibling, I think that is a good conversation and one worth having. Just wasn't the one I was in.

> But you have no method to separate the genuinely traumatic from the potentially traumatic.

Yes we do. Psychologists are asked to make these assessments all the time. There are checklists of symptoms.

> Which of these is genuinely traumatic? My point is that this is very individual to the kid.

Every psychologist would agree with you. Trauma is not a categorization of the event, rather a categorization of the response.

> I further posit that many kids will make things more traumatic if you ask them to do so.

This is a strange take and I don't know where you're getting it from. Maybe you're confusing it with the whole "recovered memories" scandal?

So then this is just classic talking past each other? The point of the discussion, to me, was some people have defined it such that everyone is battling childhood trauma. The book literally has the example of the trauma of the umbilical cord wrapping around your neck in the womb.

My main post at the start was only pointing out that I have started seeing people, largely in the mainstream, start saying "maybe we shouldn't definitionally say all of these people were traumatized." Where I take "traumatized" to be "had an event that potentially lead to a particular categorized response."

The take at the end is almost certainly inline with talking past each other. If you are taking the super precise (and, to be clear, I think there are good arguments for doing so) definition of trauma, I'm not pushing that. People, and kids in particular, have a strong sense of wanting to make things fit the patterns they are learning. If they think their sibling is not respectful enough of the pet that just died, they will escalate as much as they can on that view.

Maybe we are, ha. It is absolutely not the case that everyone is battling childhood trauma -- I don't know of any serious thinker who argues that. It seems like quite the strawman. And the umbilical cord thing seems like a pretty unhelpful example, precisely because it's so difficult to verify -- it seems pretty definite that you can be impacted by trauma from before you can remember things, but at the same time it seems hard to say anything definitive about any particular event precisely because you can't remember it.

I think that trauma has been denied and ignored for so many centuries/millenia that we're only now as a society starting to accept that it exists and requires the kind of treatment that a spouse, friends and the church are not equipped to provide. And I don't even think we've gone far enough -- it's still extremely common to hear people insist nobody needs therapy, shrinks are all quacks, they don't believe in therapy, all you need is a good friend to talk to. So it feels strange to me to see this kind of "backlash" against recognition of trauma, which to me seems extremely premature. It's better to err on the side of helping people and pay for a few therapy sessions that turn out not to be needed, than to tell people after something horrific happens to just grin and bear it and you'll forget about it soon enough, because people are naturally resilient and bounce back from anything. Because very frequently, they don't.

Largely agreed. It doesn't take a lot of looking through these threads, though, to find people basically saying everyone in the past merely coped with trauma. Some going so far as to basically assert that the only reason people drank in the past, was as a coping thing. Which, frankly, feels off to me.

Not that you can't cope through drinking. Nor that nobody ever did things wrong. I just don't see any reason to think that would have been the norm.

jaybrendansmith is talking specifically about childhood trauma not any trauma that happens in childhood.

> But not childhood trauma...that makes you weaker

I have only seen "childhood trauma" defined and used as something that has lasting impact. That definition likely comes from studies that study trauma that happens in childhood and how it can have a lasting impact.

Regardless of where it comes from that is how the phrase is typically used.

It would be nice if the field came up with better terms or a better scale that separated out the different traumas by lasting impact, but my assumption is that if it was easy to come up with that kind of scale it probably would have already happened, here is hoping it is easy and it is low hanging from some soon to come along phd student though.

The hazard I'm pointing at, though, is that this will be very individual. And what is a difficult thing to overcome for some kids, will be trivial for others. And seemingly flat out impossible for others, still.

Sure that is true of any trauma physical or otherwise. It is always some part genetic and some part environment. I assume just like for other areas we have a clear picture of a narrow subset of factors that is clearly genetic and some is clearly environment, but we do not have a clear picture on the majority of factors yet.

I think you're both right, but you're talking about different things. People (as in mankind, the human species) do have the ability to bounce back from severely traumatic circumstances. But people (as in most individuals) don't often have the kind of coping skills that would let them tap into this capability. Fortunately, they can be learned and applied even in adulthood.

To heal trauma, you have to actually feel your feelings, without getting sucked into them. If you continually repress/avoid/try to control them, you won't get better. If you wallow in them, you also won't get better.

I think this latter point is what causes some people to think that it's harmful to tell people that they are trauma victims, because they might develop a victim mindset. But people who subscribe to this view often go to the opposite extreme and try to deny that trauma exists, which is just as harmful (and useless).

If you listen to the people who have bounced back - they’ll not tell you that their being traumatized is good. The truth is there is very little support for survivors, and a hell of a lot of support for perpetrators, who often abuse from a position of safety and authority. Of course very few are publicly against survivors, but an entire political structure is arrayed to cast doubt on any accusation, especially if a traumatized person acts traumatized, or the powerful person acts cool and rational.

Also just survivors bias. People either survive or they don't. Plenty of lethal gun cleaning accidents used to happen. Still do.

Indeed, in the end it comes down to the skill of the therapist.

It's unfortunate both that more people don't succeed in getting the therapy they need. A skilled therapist can make an absolutely transformative difference, but only if they decide to find them.

OTOH the nocevo effect is real.

If you tell prople guten intolerance is a thing, you will cause some people will feel real pain. https://theconversation.com/your-gluten-sensitivity-might-be...

If you tell people trauma is probably no big deal in most cases but to seek help in the unlikely event that it does cause more issues then maybe that's better?

Tinnitus is another good example for this idea. Bringing awareness to it makes it worse.

OTOH the nocebo effect is real.

If you tell people gluten intolerance is a thing, you will cause some people will feel real pain. https://theconversation.com/your-gluten-sensitivity-might-be...

And when it comes to stuff that's all in your head anyway, what's the difference between a real disorder and a psychogenic one?

If you tell people trauma is probably no big deal in most cases but to seek help in the unlikely event that it does cause more issues then maybe that's better? It's like they say on the legal disclaimer on Tylenol in Australia - if pain persists see a doctor.

And while I'm couching my words a lot because I don't want to play fake internet doctor, the other side of the argument is also likely not too competent medical opinion.

Ehh, kind of. But at the same time, EMDR works. So revisiting it in a very particular way can help.

However, I concede that there's kind of a hammer and nail problem in therapy. They learn about how much trauma and childhood experience effects a person and tend to laser focus on that because they feel confident doing so. I think there's a certain unhealthines to spending too much time dwelling on the past. Up to some level it's ok, but there should be at least equal focus on the present, future, and agency+self-confidence+self-discovery. Whereas a typical client would not be unreasonable to feel more like a victim given the focus on past experiences and traumas, which naturally reinforces a past-oriented victim mindset. Meanwhile, what most people need is a sense of being able to make things better now and work toward a better future, and practical tools to do so (agency).

Of course, for severe cases, you should probably focus on dealing with the trauma and get the client to a more stable state before taking off the coddling gloves.

I would have to take more time to read up on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The wikipedia intro to it isn't fully favorable, sadly.

And agreed that "severe" cases are almost certainly special cases that should be treated as such. PTSD would almost certainly always qualify as severe?

But the idea that people have "in the womb" trauma just feels patently silly.

For an extensive critical review on research on prenatal trauma (“in the womb”) and theories around it, see Philipp Ployés “The Prenatal Theme in Psychotherapy”, available on libgen. Especially in the past 20 years with improved ultrasound, you can view a lot of what is going on inside, and reason about it. Of course there is no way to fully prove it, but the scientific consensus definitely is that factors like stress of the mother or substance abuse have a long-lasting and measurable negative effect on the child.

Stress of mother and substance abuse is very different from things like "cord wrapped around you." Similarly, some people have the cord literally cut off circulation and such. That is different, as well.

Thanks for the link!

“Cord wrapped around you” can be seen in ultrasound and you can deduce level of stress from amount of movement/lack of movement of fetus. They can be seen to react to outside stimuli from very early on. Agree that it sounds questionable at first to come from symptoms 30 years later to some prebirth trauma situation but it’s a large field of study and not unheard of that in treatment symptoms find relief once a plausible story has been identified. The goal of therapy is not to hunt for historical facts but to find relief. Maybe it’s a made up story, but if it works, who cares? That being said it’s a large and interesting field of serious study, and “trauma from cord wrapped around neck” a real thing that ideally receives treatment closely after birth.

> pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them

I have known a few people who had they not dwelled so much on events, I wonder if their trauma would have been middling instead of major. Hard to say for sure, but I am not the only person to observe these folks seemed to be making their trauma more traumatic.

> I think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them?

There was certainly a fairly prominent British psychologist (IIRC) a handful of years ago who disparaged some of the anxiety and depression awareness campaigns on the grounds that being more aware of psychological ailments like that, when they were on the minor end of the scale and not actually debilitating, was probably unhelpful. That actually in his opinion "suck it up and get on with your life" might be the best advice sometimes, because such conditions can become self-fulfilling, and getting on with your life, doing stuff and achieving things might be the best remedy. Rather than dwelling on the problem and giving yourself the excuse "I am depressed/anxious"

I don't know how/if that maps to trauma, and there was a lot of backlash...

In my experience, he is right.

The problem with "suck it up and get on with it" is that it works, but it's not optimal a lot of the time.

You can be successful and absolutely miserable. You can push yourself to do anything, and be abusing substances at the same time.

Being functional or meeting arbitrary goals of capitalism and patriachy does not make you happy or good.

I think you missed the point.

The point is not pretending to be functional for the sake of it, putting on a facade and calling everything great. It's that being functional often works to help in and of itself.

Getting out of the house, socialising, exercising and working towards your own goals in life, cutting down on booze and drugs, getting proper sleep etc, can and does have an effect and can alleviate the problem. It's not a mask, it's a remedy in many minor cases. Compared to medicalising minor bouts of depression or anxiety (which may well really just be part of the human experience), calling them a 'condition', which may render people more helpless and encourage wallowing in it which is likely to make things worse. Sometimes picking yourself up and getting on with it is what you actually need.

If that doesn't work for you, seek help, sure, nobody's saying you shouldn't.

I agree generally, it's just that this isn't a cure all solution and it's also quite deceiving. Meaning, someone doing well does not mean they are actually doing well. People who are very successful and loved people kill themselves often. Had we asked them if they needed help, they might not have died.

Undoubtedly, the facade of good mental health is a strategy to be successful in a patriarchal capitalist society. That makes it tricky.

This. Totally resonates with me, from personal experience.

I had radiation therapy and 2 years of chemo starting from the age of 1.5 years. During that time, my mother left me alone for a MONTH in the hospital. I've been told the chemo was so bad that at the end, they had to search for veins on my head, since all the veins in my body were already retracted...

I neither am afraid of needles, nor have I ever had therapy in my life. Simply because I didn't need it. I have no PTSD, nor any other aftereffects. The only thing that is obvious now, is that the bond to my mother broke, and I basically feel no "love" towards here, nor do I want to give her any slack for her past and current failings.

This is not intended as a "I am so cool" post. It is simply how my life turned out. Later on, when I learned about PTSD and Trauma, I asked myself several times why I haven't got anything like that. However, the more I think about it, the more it feels like I could unearth something if I really tried.

> That is, yes, some trauma sticks with you. History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't devastated when we ultimately do lose some family.

This is textbook survivorship bias. If you try hard enough you'll eventually discover a never-ending list of examples where people never recovered from trauma and even outright died directly or indirectly die to it.

This is just taking my point to be maximal that people always recovered from these things. I don't think that. But nor do I take what seems to be the near maximal other side, where everyone is fighting some hidden trauma from their childhood.

> But nor do I take what seems to be the near maximal other side, where everyone is fighting some hidden trauma from their childhood.

I think you're trying too hard to downplay a problem by questioning the extent it exists. Perhaps a more productive approach is to try to learn about the topic, starting by learning about the definition of psychological and emotional problem. It's quite possible that your denial is founded on a misplaced sense of what trauma is or isn't.

I think you are still taking my point to a maximal position that I don't hold. People need help all the time. It shouldn't take trauma to get people to agree on that point.

Good help will be goal oriented, though. And the goal is not to maximize your focus on the trauma to make sure you have experienced it all. The goal is to grow for whatever you need, now.

This is true of physical trauma. You don't sit with people and teach them all of the ways that their body has been broken when they get a physical injury. You identify the goals and exercises that they will need to do to achieve them. In many cases, you have to reset realistic goals.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that sometimes you have to tease out what the actual blockage is. In that search, you may be helped by discussing the underlying trauma. But that is firmly in the land of probabilistic approaches where we explicitly don't know a lot.

None of these seems to be making a causal claim, did I miss something? The linked article is saying causation runs in the opposite direction.

The only studies we have are long term longitudinal. IE this one:

> After adjustment for confounding, there were statistically significant positive associations for people reporting four or more ACEs relative to those reporting no ACEs, and this was true for all chronic diseases except hypertension.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8462987

A twin study would be about as close as we could get to a randomized control trial:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

I'm willing to use the term "cause" here, given the copious amount of studies controlling for other confounders. That's the best we can do given there's no ethical way to run a randomized control trial.

It seems like all of those things can be true independently of whether or not a traumatic experience, in and of itself, effects permanent neurological/endocrine changes, though, right?

It sounded to me like his issue was with the claim that there are direct, systematic physical effects directly consequent to the psychological experience. It didn’t sound like an argument against claims like “a rough childhood reverberates into adulthood,” or “traumatic experiences have profound consequences for people.”

If anything, it would seem to me that, to effectively treat people struggling with post-traumatic consequences, it would be useful to understand whether or not your efforts would be usefully invested in physical interventions to address these supposed physical changes. Or if the best treatments are not medical but psychological, or social, or spiritual, or whatever.

It also has that tone scientists use when they speak of Malcolm Gladwell: annoyed that he misrepresents careful experimental findings in service of a good accessible narrative. Even if what he’s saying could turn out to be true—taking issue with the claim that it’s been scientifically demonstrated to be so. Which I’m sympathetic to.

Every serviceman reading this should be hopping mad. He's basically calling anyone suffering from PTS "weak". These are people who enter the service at physical peak (not just personally, globally) and sometimes exit with serious, lifelong, compounding damage. These people aren't weak, they're traumatized. Trauma is real. It can fuck you up.

Well, has anyone ever even tried to tell the veterans to man up, stop dwelling, and get over it? Didn't think so.

None of that controls for socioeconomic status which is likely the most common factor in poor health outcomes. In particular some of these try to put a measure on "family dysfunction"... yeah, good luck with that.

Trauma is a very politically charged topic anyhow with at least a few modern political movements tying themselves to it, it would be very inconvenient for it to not be an all encompassing problem.

Adverse childhood experiences definitely correlate with socioeconomic status. It's possible to disentangle their separate effects on some statistical level, but very difficult on a practical level. For instance, losing your home and living with your mom in a car when you're 6 is a socioeconomic ACE.

Someone else in the discussion here made a comment that service members should be mad at this blog post, as it is essentially saying that people cause their own adverse experiences. Well, again, the US armed services tend to draw disproportionately from lower socioeconomic groups, who tend to have higher numbers of adverse experiences. It's very hard to disentangle these correlated variables when it comes to outcomes for real people. And it's a total copout to then blame servicemembers for their PTSD.

We have the language of a cycle of abuse, a cycle of poverty, a cycle of violence. People have recognized the cyclicality of this for millennia. It's good the blogpost brings that out.

The thing that disappoints me about the discussion here (and in the blog post) is that there is this relentless focus on the psychology of things. Being homeless as a child, having a parent die, having family die violently, etc all do correlate with higher rates of cardiac disease, diabetes, etc. Again, can't disentangle from the socioeconomic aspects, but you also can't blame a kid for their family member dying. The idea that "unhealthy people may be more susceptible to trauma" has some veins of validity, but is also just deeply unkind, inhuman, and inaccurate taken to an absolute. Kids in foster care, kids who experienced a school shooting, kids who had a parent die of cancer, etc -- it is immorally self-serving to say it's their own fault. You know it's not.

The blog post itself cherry-picks by focusing on PTSD and the brain, ignoring correlations between ACEs and cardiac problems and diabetes. By focusing on the brain, the author can easily imply it's made up weakness (no lab results to confront) and then move on to "just get over it", which is adjacent to "it's not my problem". I'm not a fan of over-therapizing and I don't think therapy or crystals will fix your diabetes. But don't throw the baby out with Bessel van der Kolk's bathwater.

The person you replied to specifically listed multiple studies that do account for socioeconomic factors. Take a look at the second paper, and in the introduction you’ll see that they did sub group analysis for multiple socioeconomic factors. I.e. among people of the same geographic, economic, and ethnic backgrounds, those with higher ACE were at higher risk for a bunch of diseases.

Not to say that I think it’s useful to focus so much on personal trauma outside of therapy, I don’t. But dismissing evidence presented to you without engaging with it doesn’t feel useful either.

Indeed, and it's an odd position to take, even if one simply approaches it from common sense.

Someone with psychological trauma is obviously going to spend more time in a state of stress, which in turn is unhealthy by itself, even before secondary effects like use of drugs and alcohol to try self-regulate psychological state.

Makes me wonder if it's motivated by some kind of denial

I've read the book, and it's, IMO, mediocre. However, I don't think anybody who has (for example) worked with foster children could possibly deny that trauma leads to dysfunction.

I glanced at the article links at the bottom:

* The shady Story behind why we think Veganism is healthy - Paid off scientists, swayed politicians, and hidden studies helped us be afraid of meat

*The $200 Billion Industry shrinking our brains - How a completely new food ingredient could be de-evolving our brains

* Men Need more Testosterone, not more Therapy - Focusing too much on emotions is a feminine solution to a masculine problem

yyyeah, hope this guy has fun with whatever's up with him

Alt-right pipeline. Starts with talking about femininity and masculinity in a certain way, then incel talking points, meat being great and vegans being evil. Then undoubtedly something about big pharma and finally about people of certain heritage wearing certain hats.

This may sound far-fetched, but look at youtube comments under videos about carnivore diets or some other right-leaning fad.

I think trauma-skepticism is responding to a very strong case for trauma. "Everyone must find their trauma." "I just started going to therapy, and I _had no idea_ I had so much unresolved childhood trauma." "My parents weren't emotionally fulfilling 100% of the time and that counts as trauma." etc. I'm being a bit flippant, but this view is pushed a LOT.

I think it's correct to push back against the hard case for the "past trauma construction of personality," however it's also ridiculous to suggest that real trauma does not exist and does not really leave a mark on people. In the general sense, this is a problem that nearly every ideological movement faces: in correctly noting the problems with the old view, they overcorrect and assume the old view must be full expunged rather than modified.

>I'm being a bit flippant, but this view is pushed a LOT.

Really? That seems like a big stretch.

No, this is definitely a thing in certain crowds. Not everyone, definitely not everywhere, but some circles really love this stuff.

That's a bit different from the view being pushed "A LOT"

ACEs are a specific events during childhood. Like 10-15 very specific things like abuse, divorce, etc.

I'm sure in the same way "triggered" has been hijacked, people now call everything "trauma" when its not so.

This sounds like a problem with learned definitions. Like how the word racism is misunderstood between different participants in culture war clashes - for some it needs to be intentional and malicious, for others it's an expression of systemic structural issues that's not even always an individuals fault.

Sometimes such distinctions are made larger than they have to be in an attempt to legitimize one as more important. This is pretty common among some people who have Autism/MPD/DID/ADHD or are trans - where out of fear of being seen as less legitimate (or being denied medical care) facing widening diagnostic criteria, higher incidence (or general visibility; trans people are still rare - they are just a great culture war target) or depathologization a "true, legacy criteria diagnosed" and "fashionable self-dx on tiktok" (I'm really exaggerating to set the max bounds here) group are constructed.

Often that really isn't needed. These groups shouldn't be competing for space with each other. But sometimes they're made to - speaking from experience, people who don't believe trans people are "real" love to use the existence of nonbinary people to also attack those who fit into the "classical" strictly binary diagnostic criteria.

Maybe you and others would be less flippant if you had any idea how trivial these forces are compared to the pressures of denial and gaslighting survivors of sexual abuse face e.g. from their entire families.

Gaslighting has ceased to be a meaningful term, and has aggressively drifted to mean "this person didn't agree with my view on things."

It's not. You provided a wrong definition.

So I had a therapist give me EMDR about 5 years ago for little-T trauma. I have no idea whether EMDR is scientifically back or not or whether trauma is overdiagnosed, I just know it worked for me.

But what she said about the therapy (since I always want to know how everything works) is that trauma is basically emotional memory. Y’know how you might have a visual memory about how a certain place looked like when you visited, or sensual memory of how a favorite food tasted, or muscle memory for how to ride a bike, or cognitive memory of how to solve a math problem? The same thing happens with emotions - they get stored away in the brain’s memory centers and can intrude on your present at some later time.

But emotion, by definition, is “that which causes motion”. So if you have a bunch of traumatic memories (oftentimes not even with visual or cognitive components - mine didn’t have them), those emotions continue to influence how you behave for years afterwards. That’s what memory is.

And the point of EMDR is that for some unknown reason, the act of focusing your eyes across the parts of your visual field controlled by different hemispheres forces those emotional memories back into consciousness, where you can then recast and retrigger them based on present-day experience. It literally is implanting false memories - that’s the point - but you want false memory of the event because the true emotional memory is no longer serving you well in the present.

I've had pretty brutal body pain my whole adult life, I saw a lot of different flavours of skelatalmuscular therapy type folks over the years, you name it, I've had it. Around 6/7 years ago I was under a lot of stress with work, some particularly intense interpersonal business stuff to work through and my body pain was at an all time high. I booked an appointment at a random chiropractor near my office first thing in the morning the next day, the guy went to adjust me and then told me that I needed acupuncture first. I told him no because every time I have acupuncture I sob uncontrollably, not from pain, just from reasons I didn't understand, but that the person usually had to stop. He said exactly, I need acupuncture first. He took me to another room in his office, lights out, and stuck some needles in me, no crying, he said he needed to get me crying, moved needles around, found a spot, emotions exploded, crying. He moved the needle, more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my hip. A bunch of muscles I didn't even know existed let go, and that was the best adjustment I've ever had by a mile. It was actually this experience that lead me to reading the body keeps score (Connie Zweig is good also if this kinda stuff interests you).

(Edit: someone emailed so for posterity, It was Steven Schram E 28th St NYC, no clue if he's still there it was some time ago.)

Thanks for sharing. And yes, once you experience something like that, you don't even need scientific evidence that the body keeps the score -- you've experienced it. You know it the same way you know the sky is blue.

And that's what's frustrating when people want to invalidate the whole thing. They just don't know -- they haven't experienced anything like it. But they act like they do know.

Now obviously, scientific validation of these things is important to better understand causes, mechanisms, and healing methods.

But when people claim that the body doesn't store trauma as muscular tension, it's just frustrating because it feels like willful ignorance. Whether they don't know the stories of millions of people like yourself, or choose not to believe them.

Thanks for sharing. I'v'e read the book, and for me it made everything click. I've had serious childhood trauma (violence, alcoholism, etc) and have been "clumsy" all my life. Basically, I was all brain, and I completely neglected my body till I was 40. After reading the book, I posited that clumsy is trauma-related, and since I've resolved the trauma, there is no reason why I can't fix the clumsy. It's a process, and clumsy is almost gone.

I think people who deny this have not experienced serious childhood trauma. I agree that body might not keep the score for everything, but sometimes it really does.

The other thing that happened after reading the book is that I've become aware of how common trauma is. 4 out of 5 my college buddies experienced variety of early traumas: SA, alcoholism. Often I can sense trauma while speaking with someone. There is awkwardness, intensity in their gaze, emotions slightly off. I used to be attracted to it.

man I love stories like this. I know that that's impersonal and it was really hard for you. but it's very comforting and... inspiring?... to hear about people managing to face things they've held onto for many years. I feel like we get used to a model where people stay stuck how they are for most of their lives and I'd like to think that everybody can keep growing (past bad things, in many cases), and this kind of thing is a reminder of that.

I had a similar experience with my first EMDR session. It was in the middle of a normal couples talk therapy session, our therapist said "You're standing on the edge of your unconscious. I want to try something", brought out the lights, gave me the instructions, turned them on, and I just started sobbing. I've always been one to seek a rational explanation for everything, so after she put the lights away, I was like "What the hell just happened?" and she gave me the background for how the therapy supposedly works.

>where you can then recast and retrigger them based on present-day experience. It literally is implanting false memories - that’s the point - but you want false memory of the event because the true emotional memory is no longer serving you well in the present.

I have a hard time seeing this. I find it incredibly difficult to fool myself intentionally. Any time I try my brain just remembers it in a way where I don't get fooled.

Also, the mechanism you explained implies that you could get rid of trauma by yourself any time you remembered the traumatic experience and just blasted yourself with another emotion. Eg eat chocolate when you remember that painful fall.

I think some people fool themselves easier than others. It is common enough that is you will find the effect in any larger study.

> Eg eat chocolate when you remember that painful fall.

Some people do just that and it seems to help them, although they gain some weight.

> I find it incredibly difficult to fool myself intentionally

I'd call it more recontextualizing than fooling yourself. Here's a science analogy:

As a toddler, you probably learned that the sun is up during daytime and down during nighttime. As an older kid, you likely learned that it rises in the east and sets in the west. The ancient geocentric viewpoint was that the sun goes around the earth. Ptolemy noticed that this doesn't match the observed data exactly, and so introduced the idea of "epicycles". A couple thousand years later, Copernicus discarded the idea of the earth as the center of the universe, and proposed that the earth revolves around the sun. Kepler refined Copernicus's ideas into the planets moving in ellipses, with the sun at one focus. Einstein then discarded the idea of having a central point at all, all motion is relative if you set up the correct metric tensors to model acceleration and gravity. But then if you ask a mathematician, Ptolemy was correct in the first place, his idea of epicycles was just a Fourier series decomposition of the observed measurements of the position of planets, and no more or less legit than any other mathematical model that explains the data. The math was just hard to work with.

All of these viewpoints are true, but they explain your senses in more or less detail, and progressively newer and more complex models are capable of explaining a greater variety of situations in greater precision.

The same with emotions. As a kid, the time your mother lost you in the mall was your whole world, because your mother was your whole world. You may have learned that big open spaces filled with crowds are not safe, and carried that forward with you as part of your model of the world. But the point of therapy is to contextualize that emotion, to realize that it was one time, and your life is very different now. You learn to feel it as an emotion, and as a memory, complete with context and everything else, and not as an unconscious rule of thumb that you need to live your life by.

> Also, the mechanism you explained implies that you could get rid of trauma by yourself any time you remembered the traumatic experience

You can! That's the amazing part. Once you've actually had successful EMDR sessions, you can learn the pathways to access your emotions, and just do it by yourself while you're lying in bed. There are apps for it too. And eventually, once you get adept enough at just accessing your emotions and feeling your feelings, you can dispense with the lights too and just recognize what you're feeling in the moment.

Now I just spend the car ride to work or back home decompressing and feeling all the unpleasant emotions that I bottle up during the day because it's my job. If you're doing it right, you can get rid of the therapist after a few years and become emotionally self-sufficient.

What you're touching on here is a deep and persistent question in the history of psychotherapy: is it therapeutic to provide "reparative experience" (something that heals the original pain in a way that didn't happen at the time), or is that an illusion? in which case perhaps it is better to help the client adapt to reality (what actually happened at the time, painful though it may be).

EMDR is based on the earlier, broad therapeutic and communications paradigm Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) [1] of Richard Bandler and John. NLP is broad approach borrowing a lot from linguistics (Chomsky, Korzybski) and cybernetics. It also has been a bit tarnished by its connection to marketing and other things.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10879-023-09582-x

This article is a midwit dismissal; it may contain valid corrections but it is ignorant on the core topic at hand. This is a shame, because it is extremely interesting and under-reported topic!

The core thesis of the book (per Claude) is: "Traumatic experiences become encoded in the body's nervous system, muscles, and organs, not just in conscious memory."

The perfect exposition of the concept is downthread, in a comment by 'neom, which I will excerpt: "[The acupuncturist] moved the needle, [I did] more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my hip." (Thank you for sharing, neom.)

I've had two similar experiences myself in the last year. I haven't read the book and don't know how this subject shows up in the scientific literature, but the proprioceptive experience leaves zero room for doubt about what is happening.

People say lots of dumb and wrong things about trauma. Maybe the book contains some of that, but its titular observation is fascinating, true, and maybe even useful!

I'll close with a related theory of mine, also derived through proprioception: one of the functions of the full-body sob is to reorganize muscular patterns which share an origin with (are identical to?) the emotional origin of the tears.

> "and the thought that was there was the memory of.."

I haven't read the book; what's the distinction between "the brain has a painful memory which is making it tense muscles" and "the muscles are tense because the memory is encoded in the body and muscles"?

I mean, if someone sees a balloon and curls/cringes/flinches their body away because they hate balloons bursting, how would one tell apart "flinching is caused by brain memories of stressful noise" and "flinching is caused by body memories of stressful noise"?

Either can create the other. Thoughts can raise or lower the heart-rate. Bracing the body can restrict breathing. Shallow breathing changes the acidity of the blood which then activates the sympathetic system which changes thinking.

The thesis of TBKS is that the body can continue a feedback loop which encodes a prior strong emotion without active thought. Consider something as simple as a limp that persists after the acute injury has healed.

I wasn't very impressed by the reporting quality in this article, but it seems as though there are some other reviewers of the book were much more thorough in their critique. Emi Nietfeld writing for Mother Jones has more detail and actually contacted some experts for comment: https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/12/trauma-body-keeps-...

From my understanding of some of the most recent research, the body probably does "keep score" - but how that happens and who is predisposed to how much "scoring", it very poorly understood: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11449801/ / https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02785... / https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23768722/

These are all neuroimaging studies. It's generally much less provocative to argue that a behavioral phenomenon has a physical substrate in the brain -- in fact, simple mind-body physicalism requires it -- what is an audacious and less-supported claim is that trauma, however defined, A: affects the body outside the brain and B: does so relatively often.

The book has a lot of flaws. The trauma industry that's grown up around it and similar work has a lot of flaws. The post has a lot of flaws.

They're all quite confident, though.

Best comment by far. The post suffers from making good points about the lack of rigor and narrative nature of the book, but then does exactly the same thing to claim the opposite conclusion the book makes.

I agree.

As I read this I kept thinking that it seemed too skeptical to be rationally critical. Which isn't necessarily an improvement over the book.

My intuition (I know, that isn't better than the book or this post) is that there's truth in both places, and we'd ultimately land somewhere in the middle if we had access to the truth.

This touches on the nature vs nurture problem, wherein there never seems to be a clear victor and the answer seems to be that both play a role depending on what you're measuring. It's also very difficult to say how the chicken and egg scenario unravels, since we don't know what's the chicken and what's the egg, so to speak. The author seems to think they know—confidently as you mentioned—but it's abundantly murky to me.

I suppose we need confident people pushing in all directions to help us look more deeply in places and ways we otherwise might not. But wow, it gets tiring to see such unapologetic bias in scientific contexts. I admittedly stopped reading just passed the half way point and should probably keep most of my opinions about it to myself.

Regarding rationality of skepticism ...

I'm not familiar with the field's research, but how much of the discussed perspective is linked to this book or the paper it is named for? If removing the book would not leave any supporters for the perspective, then skepticism is in fact the rational conclusion.

This is more-or-less Russell's teapot.

I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.

Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.

One of a couple varieties of books covered by the If Books Could Kill podcast is this category, the Surprising Truth That Explains Many Things type.

They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among crowds like HN)

Michael Hobbes, host of IBCK is guilty of those inaccuracies too. Here's him being fact checked regarding claims in the Maintenance Phase podcast: https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/

Yeah, I’ve seen those criticisms before and been convinced-enough that it’s contributed to my not bothering with that podcast. IBCK has been accurate enough when they’ve covered books I’m familiar with that I’m less worried about that being a problem with that show (though I’m sure they do sometimes get things wrong)

I enjoy If Books Could Kill and I used to like You're Wrong About when Michael was on it. However, I have found on If Books Could Kill that they sometimes take the least charitable interpretation of something to ridicule it when a more charitable interpretation might find that there is more nuance than they are presenting.

I haven't listened to Maintenance Phase because it isn't really a topic that I'm all that interested in.

I think you're headed in a helpful direction, but I'm looking for ways to narrow the phenomenon a little more. For example, yesterday I heard from my mom, who is not into technical things, that a lot of the Internet was down. She had heard it on the news. I didn't believe it at first because that information was surprising and clearly targeted at laypeople, but soon I learned it was true: AWS us-east-1 had major issues. So my doubt was unfounded. I'd like my doubts to be more accurate.

The statement "most of the internet seems to be down" is somewhat easy to verify without too much research.

Complex statements requiring lots of specialist knowledge available to very few human beings that are difficult to disprove is where the challenge lies.

So many things are actually concentrated on the "cloud" providers now that significant chunks of "the internet" can all go down at the same time for everyone in a way that was supposed to be impossible with the many-fault-tolerant mindset the internet was originally engineered with. Laypeople don't need to understand any technical topics to understand "a bunch of websites/apps broke for everyone on Sunday". Some are even noting that this is happing more often and affecting more apps at once.

anyways, more on topic with TFA, of course lots of people are looking for excuses for why they aren't what they want to be, and it sounds like this book flips the causation, so that people can say e.g. "I was perfectly healthy until I went through some difficult stuff and now I'm disabled" rather than much more sober but accurate "I was born with some relative weaknesses that make things more difficult for me than others." It looks like he keeps trying to claim that bad experiences leave reliably measurable marks in some way but it simply never holds to the claimed reliability under scrutiny.

Of course, knowing exactly what specific "weaknesses" one actually has compared to a statistical average is the hard part, and jumping to conclusions in that area is just as much playing with fire.

Someone could write a book about "bad experiences give you bad memories, which can bring down your mood when you remember them and demotivate you", but everyone already knows that, and leaving it at that doesn't give the reader the feeling of understanding why they feel less than whole.

Actually the internet was not down at all. It was perfectly up.

Synecdoche

But it's not really true, is it? "The Internet", as in the network, was doing just fine. A large number of services that chose to build their business on the back of another were down, of course, but "a lot of the internet is down" is different than "a lot of websites are down".

If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is down".

To be fair, from a functionality standpoint, AWS hosts like 1/3 of the value that a layperson gets from the Internet, which is all that a non-technical person really cares/things about. ie "the Internet" essentially refers to the top 10-30 services they use.

Which is uncomfortably pragmatic. Many people can go weeks while only directly interacting with a handful of Internet-based services, most of which are presented as apps.

I'm waiting for the day that the lines blur even further and people start saying "my Apple doesn't work" when AWS goes down and 1/3 of their iPhone apps stop working. Or the day that ISPs stop acting as carriers and the Internet truly factions.

Now you understand where the "Wise man under the mountain" trope comes from.

Beside the burden of knowledge and understanding, there is an even higher burden of bringing your knowledge to the laypeople, which is the most thankless, dangerous and tedious undertaking possible.

Yet it is also the most noble, as it drives civilization forward.

In many cases it's insurmountable.

I agree, and one place I've observed this is in quantum physics. The double slit experiment is an experiment where you shine light through two slits, and instead of the expected two bands, it makes a wave-like interference pattern. This single experiment changed how we view all of physics. However, nearly every source targeted at laypeople claims that there is a variation where you can put a detector on one of the slits and it will show two bands. This is false.

One clue is that these claims never detail on what this "detector" is. There are various types of detectors, and instead of showing a two band pattern they show a single slit interference pattern. By not giving specifics, the claim becomes much harder to disprove. This may not be malicious though, as the source of the faulty claim is likely the miscommunication of a thought experiment proposed by Einstein. Einstein proved by thought experiment that any detector couldn't show an interference pattern, which is easily twisted into the incorrect claim that it does show the two band pattern that people initially expected.

Even with all that, it's simply hard to refute. Like you said, it requires rigorous technical arguments, specifically as the faulty claim didn't specify what kind of detector they use. So the layperson has to choose between <some detector makes shape you'd expect> and <multiple complex existing detectors makes different shape>.

In the end, to a layperson, it wouldn't even seem to be all that important. And yet, almost all of the misunderstandings people have about quantum physics come from this one faulty claim. This claim makes it seem like some objects have quantum behavior, and some don't, and that you can change an object from quantum to non-quantum by detecting it. When in reality, all objects have quantum behavior, we just don't usually notice it.

The Wikipedia article [0] cites some work of the experiment being performed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment?useskin...

Until I learned about the Bohmian interpretation of QM (though a comment here on HN) I found QM mathematically sound but physically muddled. BM changed all that. Now I think it's physically sound too. It's remarkable how a change of perspective can shift understanding.

What sucks is when the information wasn't necessarily misleading, but still overwhelmingly misleads people.

>I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

Don't forget the red flag of "Makes me feel better about myself or my situation." Especially if it implies one's superiority over others.

I've often had the experience of reading an article and thinking, "This says people with quality X are, against common sense, actually better at Y. Hey, I have quality X! Aw, rats. This is probably bunk and I'm too flattered to see the errors."

There's a book about that: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53317475-the-quick-fix

> I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

This is my general perspective with history books - most mass market history books simplify the complexity dramatically. You have to get into books with piles of citations before the complexity & nuance level starts to approximate something perhaps like a correct take.

This gets more and more painful the more 'hot' the topic is.

I really disliked The Body Keeps the Score. But at the same time, I think it's probably useful for people who have been traumatized to make sense of their experiences.

I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution. Somatic experiences might help them.

To be honest, reading the book was more helpful than critiquing whether or not my testosterone levels were too low as a 11-year-old, or if I had elevated inflammation because of my diet. Perhaps I'm biased.

This is an interesting point.

Every book doesn't have to be for everyone universally. It's kind of binary to where we might not catch ourselves thinking that way.

It could work for a specific group of people who might have an outsized positive experience and review of it.

>> I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution.

I agree. Like diets, whatever works for you is the "right" answer. At lot of psychological theory can be thought of as just a model to help you make changes regardless of the physical validity of the model.

Indeed, if it works for you, great. What’s at issue here is whether you put the book that worked for you in the “science” section or the “fiction” section of the bookstore.

> But at the same time, I think it's probably useful for people who have been traumatized to make sense of their experiences.

The problem I'm seeing more and more is that these pop culture trauma books are targeted at the widest audience possible. These authors push trauma as the explanation for everything, so people seeking self-help read these books and assume that trauma must be at the root of the problem they're seeking.

For some people, this is true. Identifying and addressing trauma is helpful.

Many conditions can occur without a traumatic root or trigger, though. For people trying to understand and improve their condition, falling into one of these trauma books sends them down a path of trying to force their problem to fit the trauma mold so they can use the trauma tools.

I've written on HN before about how one of the more famous trauma influencers and frequent podcast guests does this (I'm not going to name him because it triggers reactive downvotes and attacks from his fans and I don't want to debate that): He starts searching for "trauma" in his patients' past to use as a starting point for therapy. If he can't find anything he goes back further and further, until arriving at birth. Birth, he claims, is a deeply traumatic experience that can cause issues later in life like relationship problems, attention issues at work, and so on. In this way, everyone who has ever existed now qualifies for trauma therapy because everyone was born, and therefore everyone has trauma that might explain all of their problems in this world.

The conflict of interest is obvious: Once they get a taste of book sales, podcast appearances, or social media fame it becomes against their best interests to narrowly define their practice to classic textbook trauma. So to maximize their appeal, they redefine trauma to be something much simpler such that everyone qualifies (to buy their book). This does a disservice to people with PTSD and really dilutes the concept of these psychiatric terms.

> The problem I'm seeing more and more is that these pop culture trauma books are targeted at the widest audience possible. These authors push trauma as the explanation for everything, so people seeking self-help read these books and assume that trauma must be at the root of the problem they're seeking.

You could replace trauma here and start describing most self books or even some business or leadership books. At least some I have read over the last 35 years.

I bet that social media, influence culture, etc makes it easier to reach a wider audience so the problem is larger or maybe just more obvious and definitely speeds up and feedback loop that seems to bottom out to rent seeking in some cases.

The mind-body link is too important to get the causality wrong and The Body Keeps Score is an ideology where the causality only goes one way.

I have a cousin that had frequent, overwhelming anxiety attacks. She started eating breakfast consistently and the anxiety disappeared at the same time. Anxiety is strongly linked to gut activity, so the temporal correlation is a smoking gun, even if not dispositive.

For her, "understanding past trauma" was irrelevant to the solution.

I'm glad to hear how well this worked for your cousin! I don't eat breakfast often enough.

I specifically wanted to touch on the cycle of trauma & ADHD that's discussed in the article.

> That is, the ADHD leads to very negative experiences. Having had negative experiences (trauma) doesn’t lead to ADHD.

I think integrating traumatic experiences can have a lot of benefits to people, especially in the absence of easy fixes - as far as I know there's not really a smoking gun for ADHD, or borderline, etc. I'd argue the causality matters a bit less here. I say this even though I genuinely hated the fatalistic nature of the Body Keeps the Score, but I think Everett is a bit too quick to discard that the mind is relevant at all. I'd love to be proven wrong.

At least for myself, I've noticed increased well-being / reduced trauma responses when I avoid relationships that cause me a lot of stress, get enough sleep, and exercise regularly. But my baseline disposition is still there, and it's hard to untangle whether or not that's from trauma or from my body.

Everett argues that it's probably just my body (low T / high inflammation / too sensitive?) and I don't think that's very actionable. I'd argue that mind-body link goes in both directions, but that's purely anecdotal.

I also really liked softwaredoug's take on Adverse Childhood Experiences in the thread above.

This is really interesting on the ADHD side. For me, I’m pretty sure the traumatic experiences did lead to the ADHD. My mom kept all of my report cards and you can see exactly where it started. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 36 or 37. I made it through undergrad (barely) and grad school (kicked ass in the challenging courses, took 6 years to finish an MSc thesis). After my diagnosis, I can retrospectively see a lot of ways my life could have been different if I’d known earlier but I have essentially no trauma caused by the ADHD traits other than a few failed relationships in my 20s.

> The Body Keeps [the] Score is an ideology where the causality only goes one way.

No it isn't. You might have interpreted it that way, but there's no such assertion. Quite the opposite in fact: the book details therapies like yoga, EMDR, neurofeedback, and somatic experiencing; each demonstrating body to mind causality.

Lying to people is never useful, look at the history of religion it always becomes a breeding ground of gross exploitation. If people are going to help themselves and others they have to be given tools that can work.

Agreed. I recently started a very physical job after decades of laptop work. Your personality changes quick, anxiety levels etc, as your body adapts. This is at 54 after 3 decades as an IC writing software. Lifestyle is by far the biggest driver, the body’s record is read-write memory rather than write-once.

Was this after you and two zany friends made a scheme to divert a fraction of a penny from each of your employer's transactions into a bank account that you control? And then you gave it all back but the building burned down and Milton made off with the cash?

Took a gap year at 26, farming. I’m not surprised that I got superlean. But for the first time since I was 13, I didn’t eat my words. My stress went down, but I could finally spell out words with full vowels (I usually just say the consonants). I’m also generally low self-esteem, low recognition, low hope, and for a short time I was easily dating, hopeful and it was easy to take strong decisions.

>My stress went down, but I could finally spell out words with full vowels (I usually just say the consonants).

what does this mean?

I read it as his emotional composure improved which improved his diction - he began pronouncing his words more clearly.

What job did you switch to? Are you happy with the change?

Server in a busy restaurant- and it’s more about basing my future on dual incomes for better financial stability, as well as lifestyle. I don’t need evening time at home anymore, I’m done chasing the fantasy relationship.

Anecdotal, but recently I've done a complete 180 on:

- My diet (Mediterranean), with absolutely zero processed foods.

- Sleep (red light on evenings, no screens 1 hour before sleep).

- Daily exercise (lifting and 30 minutes of zone 5 cardio weekly).

My appreciation for life has skyrocketed, I don't feel like I'm being oppressed by life, and my depression symptoms are gone. I used to think the root cause of it all was a pretty rough childhood. It turns out, it's just 'crap in, crap out.' It has been jarring to me that my inner experience and mental health could so drastically change in such a short amount of time.

So yeah, it's anecdotal, but I'm pretty inclined to agree with this article.

The gut-brain axis is highly influential in normal every day depression. It makes sense why you think this works for you.

I workout vigorously 3-4 times a week, try to avoid the regular bad stuff with diet, etc. It doesn't stop the adrenaline dump from being in an abusive relationship for a number of years when there's a minor problem, and it doesn't stop me from randomly having my brain completely shut down when I (unfortunately) remember some aspects of my childhood.

What has helped it CBT and time. The book in mention helped me understand why I feel the way I do, and that deeply rooted trauma (PTSD) exists as a misprogramming of your brain by a traumatic experience that is not "surface level" to trivially identify, and your brain is an excellent helper in compartmentalizing this for your own survival. Whether the information is wrong or right isn't what I care about. It's that it simply provided me a framework from which I could approach the problems I previously didn't really understand and led me on a journey of self discovery and bumpy healing I wouldn't have done otherwise. An inaccurate model is infinitely better than no model.

The author of the substack does an excellent job at taking something that we barely understand (psychology has a lot of problems of reproducibility) and generalizing it into a bullshit youtube short tier soundbite of an article with less information than the book he claims is nonsense. Reading his other article for reference I would be suspect of the author's credibility in any aspect of science other than the dangers of inhaling your own farts.

I especially the call back to another article of his that suggests that just loading up on exogenous testosterone is positively correlated with less PTSD. Funny enough I have had above-average testosterone through most of my life and yet I still managed to get a mild-to-medium form of PTSD.

Without even knowing who the author of the blog post was, found that the article is making some good points, especially showing how some of the claims in the book have no real base, and the studies that are cited sometimes have nothing to do with the conclusions that the author of the book draws out.

But the interesting part is how the comment section here is in part people attacking the author of the blog post on a personal level. In the end, probably the book is a good read and fun, that's why it has such reviews and it became so popular, it also validates people and tells them what they want to hear, it doesn't matter that some?!? of the science behind it is invented or misinterpreted, people just want to feel good about themselves and read or listen to things that validate their opinions. But it does show that this whole religious approach of "we believe in science" is just that, a religion, because people in general just want to hear things that reinforce their opinions, when science is actually about constant learning, experimenting, change, listening and accepting new things.

There is a podcast, Memory Hole, about the recovered memory movement. There is a lengthy section about this book and the people behind it (not positive)

Consider the source — the author appears to believe that trauma itself doesn’t truly exist, is not based on physical phenomena or experiences, and is largely a sales idea manufactured by the therapy industry.

This article, and others, are riddled with rhetorical bullshit. E.g., someone on Instagram said that their emotionally distant father caused trauma, so “emotional distance” is added into the causes of trauma, and this is used to diminish the power of “trauma” itself.

This is exactly as illuminating as a neurotypical arguing whether Tylenol or vaccines cause more Autism. The author’s only skin in the game is being provocative.

Are the claims of lack of supporting data false? They seem pretty specific and easy to verify.

> This is exactly as illuminating as a neurotypical arguing whether Tylenol or vaccines cause more Autism. The author’s only skin in the game is being provocative.

Are you suggesting that only people afflicted with a condition should have the right to research it and look for its causes?

Yes, good to note the overlaps between anti-psychology/anti-therapy and "MAHA".

I am grateful that I had not, in fact, heard of this book. I would like to say I would have rejected the idea, but I'm not certain. And yeah, these criticisms are pretty solid.

I love the book; I found it immensely useful personally for trauma.

I have discussed the book with various medical authorities. Not a single one disagreed or was negative towards it.

> I have discussed the book with various medical authorities. Not a single one disagreed or was negative towards it.

That is indicative of cherry picking the authorities you chose to discuss it with, since the problems with this book and the theories behind it are both well-known and well-documented. Start here:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10497315231206754

>That is indicative of cherry picking the authorities you chose to discuss it with,

Fair to just say anecdotal or they were being polite.

>since the problems with this book and the theories behind it are both well-known and well-documented.

Reading this article, it's exactly what the book was written for, it's exactly what's wrong with "the experts" and it's almost certain that these authors did not read the book.

> that have limited to no evidence (e.g., massage, acupuncture, yoga, community theater, and neurofeedback), according to the latest treatment guidelines by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies

If you read the book, and those authors did not. PTSD experts, including him, had been tracking Traumatic events and the people who almost certainly had PTSD were not getting help from 'the experts'. first responders at 9/11 for example had great benefits and could have seen therapists, had largely gone to chiropractors and yoga to treat their PTSD. Which wasnt something he expected. It wasn't intentional, they simply had body aches and had gone for treatment. But that's how he realized the body connection and how it keeps score.

He wrote the book because 'the experts' discount what works and the lay people dont give 2 shits what the experts think.

Yeah, no, that's how we got the Satanic Panic back in the day.

(and, in many cases, the people who promoted that are the same ones that we're talking about here)

The problem with the trauma model is that it would explain the outcomes even if it as false, as almost everyone will have had a traumatic or adverse experience at some point in their lives, and anyone who hasn't has been sheltered to a point that is in itself traumatic.

Telling someone that past trauma is the cause of their problem, and going through some ritual to find and process it will in some sense heal them, is a textbook example of suggestion.

We know this can make people feel better as long as they buy into it, crux being it also works if we say unrestful ancestral spirits or unbalanced humors are at fault.

The problem with the trauma model is that only the trauma is looked at. NOT the environment that caused it. Because nearly every trauma ... happens at school, and it is the responsibility of teachers and more generally the government. None of the trauma literature even looks at what to change to prevent this, and certainly not considering that the problem is always specific individuals, essentially always teachers.

(because if it's other kids, that too is legally and practically the responsibility of teachers, and it's always specific teachers that don't have a good grip on what happens in class or on the playground)

And the problem is not even necessarily that these people are responsible, but that they won't stop and the trauma will repeat and repeat and repeat again and again, until the kids either run away or use violence to resolve it. Then, of course, you punish the kids harshly for doing that, and find extremely scary sounding names for what the kids did. Anti-social behavior. Theft. No conscience. Psychopaths. Oh but teachers bullying kids in class, that is not psychopathy. Even teachers failing to prevent bullies attacking other kids on purpose, that is not anti-social behavior. Teachers asking kids to become drug dealers, that is NOT a sign of no conscience. School, police and government cooperating to hide that this happens is not illegal or wrong or any of those things and certainly they can't be expected to fix such problems, and certainly the state can't be expected to pay for the consequences the way they demand of everyone else. ONLY the kids' behavior is antisocial.

Yesterday on Netflix I watched "I am a killer", and they showed that a particular woman was proud of what she's done. Of course there was a slight gap in what the police and judge believed had happened. You see, this kid was abandoned by the government (parents kept her home, and didn't even give her enough food. The government visited every once every 8 months and of course child services help was far worse than being left at home). She fixed this situation ... by drug running, and that, she kept doing for 20 years. Now after 15 years she was in the same house where a drug-related murder happened, and "cooperated" with the murder. By then, she had kids, who where in the house and people she could not physically beat were very angry, so she did not intervene. She called the police on the fight the weeks before. They never showed up. The police accusation of her "cooperation" with the murder is 90% that she never called authorities, and didn't risk herself or her kids. She then pointed out that it isn't even true that she didn't intervene, she had called the authorities hundreds of times over 20 years, including not long before the murder about the very same fight, but her expectations of help ... shall we say "evolved" over those hundreds of times she asked for help. When she called the week before, nobody responded. She then also helped hide the body, expecting that the police would punish her if they found out.

Now of course according to the police the cause of such actions are psychopathy, antisocial behavior, not having a conscience, being evil, ... and so on.

The cause of the situation is NOT, and shall NEVER be considered to be that she had an expectation that even if the police reacted, they would either do nothing, or punish her. And this sort of thinking, no matter how rational, shall not even be mentioned in the case at any point, no matter how often she repeats it. It shall ESPECIALLY not be mentioned that this is in fact exactly what happened.

You see, she was right. The police eventually of course intervened (when the guy was 2 months dead, and it wasn't even theoretically possible to help anyone anymore, by the way) ... and punished her.

But of course the state, the non-reaction of everyone whose only job it is to prevent this sort of situation from building to this point, is just totally innocent. The fact that they did not just fail ... but purposefully abandoned her, and especially not that such behavior could be considered to make her reaction rational.

Oh and that when she was arrested she fought her way to her kids, and then told them that the police were going to take her away, take them away, and punish her kids for what happened as well, that that is just how the world works, that they should now care for themselves and ask a particular person "for a job" is the reason the judge added 10 years to her sentence. Of course, from some perspectives, she was simply relaying what happened to her, warn them, and give advice that helped her. Obviously this proves she is evil. That she mentioned she was proud of herself for warning her kids, especially, makes her evil, it was called out specifically by the judge.

Why? Obviously because it shows what police, and society in general, will do to help you. Not only will the police, and judges, and child services, and schools, and ... NOT help, they will punish YOU for anything that goes wrong. That is all they ever do. They will do this ESPECIALLY if it's their fault and their responsibility that things went bad, and it won't matter, at all, how illegal their actions are (yes, it is illegal for the state to fail to get kids to school. Of course, child services regularly physically prevents kids from going to school. This is apparently allowed for child services, that is normal, and that even fucking death row makes accommodations for inmates to go to school is not hypocritical at all). There is ZERO police culpability for not helping in the lead up to the murder. For not helping her as a kid. Zero culpability for child services for failing for 13 years to get her to school. Zero culpability for the school for not making it happen. None whatsoever. There is ZERO responsibility of the state for not helping her to the point she can't read. For not helping her with violent fights at her home. And, above all, you can't even mention that this, of course, wasn't in fact "the state", or "the police" or ... that didn't help, that it was specific individuals that have a name and a responsibility, specific government employees that could be asked to account for their failures.

> None of the trauma literature even looks at what to change to prevent this

Untrue, overgeneralized. I can provide a lengthy list of literature about that, but for now will refer you merely to one of the most prominent researchers who also happened to coin the term Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and pushed for its inclusion in the diagnosis manuals, Judith Herman. Even Sigmund Freud wrote a bunch of highly critical political works, like “Cilivization and its Discontents”.

Sigmund Freud is a person who became rich protecting rapists. His best paying product? "Consultancy".

What did that mean? He'd testify in court how women invite rape. How it is the dream, the deepest desire of every woman to get raped, ideally by their own sons and brothers, and they do everything possible to achieve that. Of course, he only testified for (a lot of) money. Oh, and he'd testify that because such women were a "danger to public morals", they should be incarcerated. He achieved that outcome (women accuses man of rape, Freud testifies, man goes free, woman gets locked up in one of Freud's facilities, paid for by the man, of course)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_Coverup

Oh and just in case you think men came off better: you know what the deepest desire of men is? Murder. Both murdering and getting murdered. He meant (just as he did with women) in general, that every last man desired to murder every other man in existence, and specifically his father, then rape his mother.

Freud's paid testimonies got more than one rapists off scot-free and their victim incarcerated.

You see where the problem with psychological theories is and how bad it gets? Because, of course, Freud immediately preceded something called "industrial psychiatry". Don't look it up. You don't want to know.

And, as your very comment illustrates, this has not caused psychiatry to distance themselves from the man. Of course, psychiatry hasn't even seen the need to distance themselves from the holocaust:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1

( https://archive.ph/rOW5I )

I did not refer to Freud because I agree with his ideas. The claim was that psychotherapists do not look at environmental and societal origins of psychological disorders, which is false, plenty do. Have you looked into the material by Judith Hermann, the other psychotherapist I mentioned? You will find that she writes at length about Freuds denial and patriarchical circumstances.

As someone who has dealt with ideas from social workers since before I could talk, I strongly disagree. Having such ideas applied to a "troubled kid" (by the way, people decided I was troubled at age 3. Of course, the issue, which I will NOT explain, was a teacher). Eventually my parents did pay for psychotherapist for a short time (under threat from a social worker), but societal/insurance help will not pay for anyone even remotely qualified when "helping" a kid, and that means no psychotherapists, only social workers. That psychotherapist, by the way, did agree the problem was somewhere else (mostly because unlike the vast majority of troubled kids I am very smart and I could clearly describe why things happen, both why I myself make specific decisions and why others do). He made a recommendation, which people hoped would involve locking me up, but instead it was promptly ripped to shreds before we were even out of the room, never to reach the people it was about. They did succeed in locking me up for a while by the way, but that ended when I threw an attendant off the stairs (to protect a girl, I was 13), and then went on a day-long walk with the girl. You see, when I was 3 the recommendation was to give me an outlet, fighting sports. By 7 I was winning championships, by 12 I had won a championship in 2 different fighting sports and by age 16 in three. Anyway, after that, the social workers involved for over 10 years decided nothing was wrong with me, and I was home and cured half an hour after dinner the same day. I still have the gift the girl gave me.

If what you mean is that social workers, who don't know anything, are very occasionally invited to schools to tell students "drugs are bad, mmm'kay", sometimes while a teacher who forces his students to sell drugs is taking a break in the teacher's lounge. If that is what you call "looking at environmental and societal origins ..." then yes, that happens. Obviously, this practice makes things worse, not better, as the social workers involved have been informed they lose their jobs if a kid saying "Master blah makes use sell pills" reaches the police. There is, of course, no better way to show kids that crime and violence work and can pay. Government workers, which includes teachers, see themselves as above the law, and more often than not, they're right. They are allowed to go much further than anyone else.

I actually like that in Breaking Bad the whole thing starts in a school. If you think about it for 5 seconds you'll quickly realize that in reality this might be a good idea. Schools are both the perfect environment for drugs and a great environment to make them. A captive workforce (the kids), government protection, and hundreds of easily blamed victims, who aren't even innocent, and on top of everything else, who people will be disinclined to believe ... What's totally unrealistic about Breaking Bad, of course, is the idea a drug-dealing teacher won't involve the schoolchildren. School children are the perfect drug dealers. And that the police doesn't so much as suspect the teacher when showing that school equipment was used to make extra-lethal drugs seems entirely on-point though. Extra-lethal? Yes, extra-pure = extra lethal, a fact that would be evident for someone with knowledge of chemistry. So his moral reasoning makes no sense. He both genuinly protects and poisons children for the exact same reason.

By the way: did you know it is actually legally forbidden for child protection agencies to investigate or accuse schools or anyone in them? Oh and neither is the police (technically the police isn't allowed to investigate a child's claim, also hearsay, in other words responding to parents' claims is also not allowed). "Fun" fact, that. Strange, isn't it, how the law supposedly applies to government workers, but there are all sorts of rules that govern how government workers' behavior and crimes are to be investigated, or rather NOT allowed to be investigated, and who can make accusations, or should I say that the victims are forbidden from making accusations. And I guarantee schools will set social workers onto the victim, the kid, and I guarantee what social workers will do will effectively be a heavy punishment for the kid.

Schools, where pretty much every psychiatric problem is created and carefully ignored and left to fester until it explodes. Then we continue with the kids, usually not the one with the actual psychiatric problem, get harshly punished and described as everything from psychopaths to outright evil.

One thing I heard VERY often: you judge people by their actions, not by what they say. Well, this is what psychotherapists, social workers, psychiatry, ... DO. What you claim they say, well, whatever. It's about as realistic as discussing how romantic evenings would be if the moon were painted pink. What I described is what psychotherapists DO, or at least cooperate with. And you are describing pink moon evenings.

Also, given what Freud did his ideas should be thrown out of psychology along with any mention of the man, other than what a horrible immoral asshole he was, his name should instead only be mentioned as cautionary tale in history books like dr. Mengele's name, and the same goes for a great deal of other famous psychiatrists, like Hans Asperger. Like dr. Mengele, any science with any of these names in it in any way other than a huge "THESE ARE MONSTERS" warning, is not worth practicing.

Judith Herman very much considers the role society and society's treatment of minorities plays in trauma.

Can you point to a single case where, when she "treated" someone, she reported a school teacher or official to the authorities for abusing children? Just one?

Read it a few years back and found some answers. Generational trauma does exists I believe. As for the article I think it claimed the whole theory was BS without much backing arguments

The article goes through and refutes 25(!) claims from the book. I'm not sure how many more backing arguments you could possibly want from a blog post.

How is this article any better?

What if something works even if the arguments are unscientific? Example: How to get an apple from high up in the tree where I can't reach? My theory is that if I knock them with a baseball bat they fall because they are afraid of baseball bats and don't want to be hit. I have tested it and it works. A physics teacher I know disagrees, and a biologist disagrees.

What if psychology has such things that just work even if the theory is wrong? The trauma healing layman psychology industry might have a method that works for some people, so that they get into a better mental state.

Yeah I think there's no point denying that we humans need and are affected by narratives. At least on the psychological level, which, in turn, may have impact on the body as well.

Science has no problem admitting something works without knowing why. Making stuff up to sell a book is preying on vulnerable people.

> Book falls apart

My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.

Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny.

It's a soft science, it is what it is.

we have trouble defining and detecting when someone is in a flow state. or what parts of the brain are involved in grit. heck we are even tipping the begginings on how chronic pain is processed in our brain. if some drug has a greater validity than a placebo, then it's something

now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"

> now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"

Dave Asprey made the claim according to the article not the author of the book. The only evidence I see in the article linking the claim to the book is at the end:

> Where then could Dave have gotten this idea that he has trauma from an experience he couldn’t possibly remember? Probably Bessel van der Kolk.

Which is pretty much nothing.

The article does not go into why I should care what Dave Asprey thinks or does not think on trauma. For all I know it is a cherry picked example of a bad opinion disconnected from the book and typical scientific opinion.

Usually if you have to add 'science' to a term its not science.

We do that incredibly often just to refer to only one part of an incredibly broad concept of "science." Sometimes they get unique terms like "physics" or "chemistry," but not always. This is not a rule that can accurately be applied to all terms matching the pattern "____ science."

Wait…so you’re saying computer science isn’t science? /s

What we call science is short for natural science. Science just comes from the Latin word for knowledge. Different disciplines have different ways of building knowledge. That doesn't necessarily make one better or worse.

Computer science?

There is also a strong likelihood that psychiatric findings get outdated quickly given the rapid evolution of culture, tech, communication and society in general, just 30 years ago internet was just for a few nerds and tech enthusiasts, just 3 years ago you couldn't make the computer realistically pretend to be your lover over chat messages, the landscape in which psychology has to exist that has little to do with it is so ever changing that maybe it was always bit silly to expect it to be a hard science.

> there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.

The scientific process is rarely perfect and levels of average levels of rigour vary between disciplines.

However, there are quite significantly varying levels of quality and rigour in psychological studies. Your criticism seems framed to ignore this and groups the charlatans in with the actuap scientists.

I'd say the article makes a pretty explicit case for why the general thesis of the book does not hold, which makes your comment stand out as comparatively superficial whataboutism

There is always somebody, especially on HN, who will comment on an article debunking pop psychology, "Well that makes sense because it's all bullshit."

I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be.

Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.

Science involves doing experiments, collecting data, and testing hypotheses, i.e. claims are falsifiable.

We don't have the technology to collect the necessary data to be able to test hypotheses for psychiatric and psychological phenomenoms, and even many other non brain related medical claims about the human body.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Seems pretty reasonable to take claims about unverifiable subjects with a grain of salt.

I only skimmed the wikipedia article, but it seems like it is missing emphasis on the biggest problem in soft sciences like psychology - the fact that a huge chunk of their data comes from self-reporting by subjects.

It's the equivalent of basing nutrition science on a Pew poll where people self-report their favorite food.

Sure, it's useful to know people's general preferences sometimes, but for science that data is junk.

Self-reported data is subjective, but when the very thing you are studying is the self-reported subjective experiences of people then it is actually the only data you should care about. Yes “I don’t feel depressed anymore” is a subjective statement but so is “I feel depressed, can you help me?” That specific example is a caricature of course, the data are usually much more specific than “do you feel depressed?”

It is fine to be a sceptic.

However, if you were unlucky enough to suffer with a completely debilitating mental illness, and all you have to treat it are a series of therapies that appear to work for some people, would you not try them?

Trauma therapies like EMDR and CBT can save or transform your life. Maybe they work no better than crystal healing or prayers for some people, but if your life was derailed I bet you would try anything...

> would you not try them?

Would I have to give up on my scepticism to do so? Why?

If I was in distress, and if there was no well-proven treatment available, I'd probably have a go provided the therapy wasn't actually a scam or actively harmful. I'd probably even attempt to engage with it honestly and openly.

But I'd temper my expectations based on the lack of reproducable evidence.

> wasn't actually a scam or actively harmful

I mean people would even try those with enough distress. And to be fair a lot of surprising innovation comes from people trying those! But of course mostly they're a scam or actively harmful.

The replication crisis has become a thought-terminating cliche. There is a lot of space between "this field suffers from methodological issues" and "it can be dismissed outright."

Also, falsifiability is broadly rejected as solution to the demarcation problem.

I honestly think a lack of grounding in philosophy of science leads people to draw the line between science and pseudo-science based on nothing but vibes. For example, I've seen people reject mainstream psychiatry as totally pseudoscience and then endorse evolutionary psychology, a field with a huge bullshit issue.

> For example, I've seen people reject mainstream psychiatry as totally pseudoscience and then endorse evolutionary psychology, a field with a huge bullshit issue.

Both of those have huge bullshit issues, that is the problem with such sciences you have to pick your poison and that guy just picked another than you prefer. Big things like stereotype threat turned out to just be bullshit, but you still see people believing in it since they want to believe in the idea rather than whats actually real.

Edit: Also almost everyone resorts to evolutionary psychology arguments when it suits them, such as why so many eats themselves fat etc.

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

> My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism.

Which makes these books all the more dangerous because the authors are overly confident about their conclusions and hence the attraction (which leads to book sales). When the unexplainable suddenly becomes explainable, the money rolls in.

It's not a soft science.

The problem is that too many people believe you can do research on one group of people, and generalize that universally to all humans, when in fact, the variation in every population of humans is wide enough that you can't say for certain that a given treatment will work for a given set of symptoms—not because the treatments are bad, but because there are differences both in the causes of the same symptoms, and in the workings of the body & brain, between different people.

This doesn't make psychology/psychiatry/psychopharmacology a "soft science"; it just makes it a science that is still in its infancy. Once we have a better understanding of both the various underlying neurological/physical (and, for some, even gastrointestinal, given recent research showing that gut microbiota can affect the mood and brain) causes of various psychological symptoms, and the physical and neurological variations between people, it will be much easier to see, for instance, "ah, we shouldn't use Lorazepam for this patient, because their anxiety is caused by this which is much better treated by CBT and CBD, rather than that which Lorazepam directly addresses".

I think the critique is fundamentally different from saying "it's soft science".

It's saying "it's bad research, misquoting experts and references, drawing sloppy conclusions aimed at a lay audience".

You can do psychology and psychiatry better than that, even if acknowledging they are not hard science.

There's no excuse for being sloppy or outright fraudulent.

soft science you say but the person better not commit suicide or starts working soon and gets better soon. The problem with psiquiatra is that there is the real biological diagnosis, the pseudo diagnosis (neurotic versión of the biological og diagnosis), the intentional fake diagnosis and the not intentional but still fake diagnosis, thats why DSM is not for regular people even if they can read the words the real clinical meaning is almost always different from what non clinical people think It is

It might be a soft science but there's still a difference between that and pseudoscience, and "recovered memories" are pretty firmly in the latter bucket.

https://greyfaction.org/wiki/bessel-van-der-kolk/

I haven’t read the book, but I’m almost always suspicious of criticism targeted at books like this. Let’s say I write a textbook about biology and I write the sentence:

“The Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell”

Technically what I’m saying is wrong. What the mitochondria does is so vast and confusing that no sentence like that can ever encompass its role. In fact, even using the word “role” is questionable because it presumes that the mitochondria’s sole function is to work as a team with other organelles/biological structures when in fact biology doesn’t really care about some abstract idea like “team.” All language is derived from analogy, and all analogies are insufficient to describe reality. In fact, mathematicians now agree that even math is an insufficient language. It can’t fully describe the territory. It can only make maps of it, and all maps are only useful because they are compressed and packaged versions of the territory. The question is just, “how much compression is useful?”

We live in a world where science communication is so atrophied that the flat earth, and creationist theories are still in circulation. Scientists have dramatically failed to market their ideas to the masses, despite the fact that these ideas are inherently compelling. To me, the reason why they’ve failed seems obvious: because they’re so busy tearing down science communicators that none of them can ever get a real hold on the public. And why? Because the books they write are at compression level that the scientists arbitrarily deem irresponsible.

This guy wrote a compelling story about the barrier between mind/body. To do that, he must have distributed a viral package of psychological terminology and concepts. It was then distributed to and consumed by millions of people. In all likelihood, the fact that they were excited by this book probably led them to read other books like it. They probably encountered conflicting ideas, questioned them, and looked them up. They probably have a much rounder understanding of these ideas now than they did when they first read them.

Now this other guy writes a story and all it says is “yo that dude was wrong.” How helpful! How useful! And let’s be 100% clear: the person writing this isn’t communicating the absolute truth. They’re also compressing their ideas. In 100 years, I bet you any psychologist that reads both books will shake their head and point out all the flaws in their analogies. Meanwhile, the cycle continues: the scientists tear each other down and the masses continue sacrificing innocent children to appease the blood god.

Meh. I haven't read any of the books the article talks about, but IMO dismissing their entire premise is more unhelpful than any pseudoscientific claim they make.

AFAICT, this is a pop psychology book that tries to make some interesting topics digestible to a mass audience. Topics that are mostly speculative to begin with, and don't have concrete evidence in any direction.

For example, the entire field of epigenetics has been argued to be pseudoscience, and yet there has been some interesting research around it. Related to the topic of stress specifically, and how effects have been observed across generations[1].

Clearly, more research is needed, but to dismiss it as quackery outright wouldn't be helpful. Many ideas that were initially perceived as outlandish eventually lead to a better understanding of the world. Scientific progress depends on people willing to go beyond the boundaries of conventional knowledge, often at the expense of their reputation.

This reminds me of the uproar in archeology circles about the work of Graham Hancock. He presents himself as a journalist and author, and certainly not an archeologist or scientist, who simply raises some interesting questions about the past. His work is often dismissed as pseudoscientific quackery, which is funny to me since he never claims it to be scientific at all. It is edutainment content for a mass audience interested in these topics, nothing more than that.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10177343/

It tries to make the author's pet theory digestible to a mass audience. The problem is that the author's pet theory is pseudoscience.

And yes, Graham Hancock's theories are also pseudoscience, and branding it as "edutainment" doesn't make that any better (if anything, it's worse because it implies deliberately targeting an audience that can't tell the difference!).

>This reminds me of the uproar in archeology circles about the work of Graham Hancock. He presents himself as a journalist and author, and certainly not an archeologist or scientist, who simply raises some interesting questions about the past. His work is often dismissed as pseudoscientific quackery, which is funny to me since he never claims it to be scientific at all. It is edutainment content for a mass audience interested in these topics, nothing more than that.

This is a weak argument. He has a platform far bigger than any actual archeologist, he consistently misrepresents the archeological viewpoint, he 'just asks questions' about a bunch of coincidences to advance a pseudo-scientific theory that just doesn't make any sense, and then he whines about being silenced when some youtube videos (with a view count substantially lower than his audience) say 'these are some cool sites, but what you're saying doesn't make any sense, and BTW archeologists don't actually think the things you're saying they think'

Funny, I just recommended Antifragile by Nassim Taleb to my book club, and of course, that idea is pretty much the perfect foil to this.

airplane_with_red_dots.jpg

I get the ref, but not the link to anti-fragile or NNT. Help me out?

As we know or a quick STFW will educate - the "airplane with red dots" refers to the idea that the planes that came back had damage indicated on them with red dots and so the initial idea was that the designers of the planes needed to armor those spots...

When it was really the case that the spots that weren't damaged were the ones that actually needed to be armored, because the planes that took damage there didn't come back.

In this case, the data that survived a selection process ("I just recommended this book that dovetails nicely") is the only data considered, when really all of the data needs to be considered.

I'm seeing this as "you're reading the data wrong" or more accurately "you're barking up the wrong tree"

That dovetails with "Dolphins must be friendly, because we always hear about them pushing drowning sailors to shore, and we never hear anything about dolphins pushing drowning sailors out to sea." Wait a minute...

Regardless of what you think of all this, you gotta appreciate the book title “The Body Does Not Keep the Score”.

I thought The Body Keeps The Score was interesting and informative. I made sure to look up counterarguments afterwards, because there were definitely parts that I wasn't so keen on.

Psychology and other social sciences are too multi-variate to speculate on, and the HRB exists so that we don't commit atrocities in the name of properly isolating variables as we poke at the black box we call the human mind. You're never going to get anything right, but we should definitely be referencing surveys of studies instead of single studies. So there's at least one point there for appropriate rigor. Not getting the interpretation of those studies right definitely seems unethical, but so does all of the misconduct stuff Van Der Kolk has been mired in.

It's a disingenuous argument to say that your body doesn't change from a traumatic experience, or that stress doesn't express itself through the body sometimes. It's also problematic to say that because it happens to you doesn't mean you can't work through it and learn to manage it or even control it. What I gleaned from the book is that if I have a physical sensation that I can map to stress or a past experience of trauma, I can understand it, label it, and grow from it.

The book might have some flaws but this article is flat out reactionary drivel.

Example slop: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit...

What the research _actually_ suggests is something more like a combination of those pictures. Except that the scientific research isn't framed in terms of "bad behavior". So that alone should give you a clue about where this blog post is coming from.

That image alone exposes the worldview of the person who wrote this, something like this:

~some people are good quality, some people are bad quality. if you're born as a bad quality person, it's something like bad luck / your fault for falling into bad behavior, no wonder you're struggling. you need to work harder but it might just be that you're a dud.~

> Example slop: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit...

This is pretty much that "the child has bad vibes" tweet except serious.

Yeah imagine showing this to say a kid abused by their parents, either verbally or physically...the author would be like

>> umm... akshually its your fault your daddy beats you

We've all already heard that message from our abusers and have already internalize it.

Or maybe just me?

It's certainly cruel.

From the article: confusing the chicken for the egg is the same reason Gabor Mate’s view that trauma causes ADHD is mistaken.

I have an opinion in this area.

I worked out a theory about trauma and ADHD. It is that they cohabitate (or operate in) the same area. I suspect they each serve to stunt learning by negatively impacting the reward mechanism that cements learning.

The above notions flow from my considerations of my own abuse, neglect and cognizance issues. I have some confidence that they explain much of my long term learning issues.

Explanation

I have always experienced ADHD as a brain fog that obscures and distorts the details involved in natural learning. During childhood, I required a methodical and rigorous study of the same mundane details that my peers absorbed trivially. When my peers felt reinforcing joy in learning, I felt exhaustion and frustration as I raced to catch up to them. Eventually I could mimic their understanding - but by then they had grown further.

During the catching up, I learned a lot of details and had moments where my reward would kick in. But it was for trivialities - for things I achieved that most children learn w/o notice. My positive expressions here could be confusing and discomforting to peers and others and I learned to suppress those feelings.

Regarding abuse and neglect. They pushed my reward system out, much more directly. I learned to bury responsive joy when I received abuse in response. I abandoned responsive joy when it lead to nothing (instead of needed, nurturing reinforcement).

I will note here that children do not do well when given adult-sized burdens of internalizing emotional systems that, in healthy environments, are openly and freely expressed. Emotional misfires are the predictable result of poor containment.

By adolescence, my reward system was reliably - 1) not there when I needed it and 2) often overly-present at unhelpful times. I mistrusted of one of the best parts of being human.

For me, abuse and ADHD were two persistent vectors toward this one transformative outcome, my broken reward system.

For an epilogue, Adderall has been a late stage, happy-ish outcome to this story. Every day, I reliably get a period of trivially-triggered reward. Into this, I can feed experiences and receive learning and understanding. I often say it is the difference between me receiving a lesson and learning it.

This is much better than no payout at all. However, I am distressed by the many interests (DEA,pols) who regularly attack my meds and want to take this away from me.

My wife and I adopted a boy when he was just a few months old. He was born addicted to drugs, and I've read that even newborns experience trauma when they are adopted because they can tell they are no longer with their mother. He is now six and we've been having behavioral issues with him pretty much his whole life. He isn't ADHD but exhibits several of the same behaviors. "Trauma-based ADHD symptoms" or something like that. We finally found a good counsellor (yes, for a 6yo) and are scheduled to have some tests done with a neuropsychologist. I'm concerned that medication is prescribed too quickly, without trying other options first, but we are hoping to find something to help calm him down a bit. We don't know if he has some kind of chemical imbalance from the drugs that were in his system when he was developing, or if it is trauma. Most of the time he is a great kid, but he is often very defiant, more so than your typical kid. Anyway, I'm not sure what my point is other than to rant a bit, but your comment about ADHD and trauma caught my attention. Thanks for sharing.

This is a pretty good takedown. It seems that most pop psych these days is around trying to convert people to an external locus of control. It isn't "your fault". I can see why that's appealing to many, though it actually seems somewhat unappealing to me. I'd prefer to believe I have greater control over my own experience of the world. Even if I don't, I think acting as if I do allows me to bias on the side that's beneficial to me.

You have physical symptoms - joint pain, back pain, racing heart beat, chest pain, panic attacks, dizziness, heart palpitations, or etc. Which one of these is more about "your fault" and which gives you more control?

a) the traditional view, you have some unknown illness, it's incurable, could have happened to anyone, bad luck.

b) people are reporting anecdotally that old horrible memories can lead to physical symptoms years later, and revisiting those memories and coming to terms with them can make the physical symptoms resolve completely in minutes. Maybe there's something scientific to that and maybe there isn't, but here are some of the ways people try it: ..

What I’ve found is that the nature of viral movements (bestselling books, pseudoscience claims, self help, programming movements, architectures, social media phenomena etc) is that the truth or proof for the underlying claim of the viral movement is not important only its widespread virality and ability to spread

Ie the idea has to be convincing enough to spread from person to person as a meme but also have enough armchair level depth to pass the bullshit filters of most reasonable people- ie popularity wins over truth

Most people do not have the intellectual curiosity or time to deeply verify these claims - but inevitably these fads die as they appear..

Clearly this is one example

Thomas Kuhn would say that the exact same thing happens in science literature.

There's a lot of ad hominem it throws around, which doesn't really bolster the argument. It's a catchy headline but it all depends on who you know and what you talk to them about. There are a lot of fucked up, mal-adjusted people out there, and I should know, Because I'm one of them. But enough about me, nobody has a good sampling of the human experience. There are 8 billion humans alive, and there's no way to get a representational sampling of them in order to have an unbiased view of what humans are like. There's especially no way, because you're trapped in your own human body, which bases your experience of other people. Backpacking as a 21 year old woman is way different than backpacking as a 50 year old man. So the question is, has the book helped more per than it's harmed? I don't know. There are certainly people who read it and drew the wrong conclusions, but there are people who have used it to go on to lead healthy productive fulfilling lives. To reduce the entire work down into a single word, bullshit, is reductive to the point of uselessness. Of course that's the headline and the entire article doesn't won't fit up there. The article's author goes into much more detail but even if you don't like the work, calling it bullshit needs to engage more with what level of bullshittery it is and isn't for the review to come across as anything more than an highly motivated takedown because someone in the author's life used it against them.

Kolk was involved in the “memory wars” and repressed memory drama back in the day where people started therapy then suddenly remembered historical abuse by caregivers that in many cases never actually happened (this is a massive simplification DYOR)

Having been involved in the publishing of psychology research I have zero faith in the systems ability to properly control for bullshit.

Trauma informed muppets like Kolk and Gabor Mate are running around spouting absolute bullshit and it’s hurting people, imagine being raised by a parent who read and believed this bullshit, worse still they’ve been to talks by flops like Gabor Mate and are balls deep in whatever viral self help podcast meme is trending…let them

Kolk wrote the article the body keeps the score in 1994 at the height of the memory wars, he spent the next 20 years undeterred, developing and spreading his bullshit and now nearly 30 years later it’s still being talked about and propagated.

https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/alleg...

The core thesis of TBKTS is self-evidently true. Thoughts and emotional experiences can be encoded in the body in self-perpetuating ways that operate outside conscious thought and persist long after the event.

Consider something as simple as a limp that persists after the acute injury has healed. A sharp pain from a sprained ankle quickly teaches the body to discover a new pattern that avoids the pain. They weight different toes. The hips shift. The stride shortens and becomes less symmetrical. People chose different paths on uneven ground. Etc. But once healed, there is no corresponding salient "I'm healed" signal to prompt the body back to a more neutral posture. People will complain of their chronically aching hip, or back. When they try to run, it feels weird. If you try to force them to move in a certain way, they will refuse. Posture and movement planning are highly stylized in a complicated organism like humans, and nobody should be surprised when there are feedback loops and meta-stable attractors there.

I don't need to use loaded words like "trauma" and "therapy" to explain this. There are simple facts. Thoughts can raise or lower the heart-rate. Bracing the body can restrict breathing. Shallow breathing changes the acidity of the blood which then activates the sympathetic system which changes thinking. Psychologists really do fix many panic attacks by teaching people to consciously manage their breathing. TBKTS takes this to 11.

That said, the many assertions about the specific mechanisms by which "trauma" is encoded in the body, and the paths by which they feed back into current thoughts and feelings are more speculative. Some are at best premature, and at worst absolute bullshit like so much of the psych literature.

The value of the book is in the thesis, not the long argument.

>If it’s not ideology, a better explanation has not presented itself. It can’t be that he just doesn’t understand cross-sectional studies. He can’t be that naive. There were just as many cross-sectional studies that disagreed with his theory that he ignored.

In looking for an explanation, he might be outside his expertise. Let's ask someone who does it well.

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_...

>You will observe that she is writing this nonsense not in a peer reviewed journal that could take her to task, e.g. McCall's, but in the WSJ. Why would the WSJ want to support "the Chinese mother?" Because if you're reading it, it's for you.

Scientists, however prominent, announcing a "groundbreaking" theory outside of the scientific press should always be considered with lots of skepticism.

I don't think my day has ever been ruined so much by such an inane story.....that mother is awful... But so is the critic writer..."I'm not saying she's a bad mother " just oof

Probably true. Most mass-appeal science communication is bullshit.

But TBKTS helped to bring "somatics"--the idea that physical and psychological issues are often interwoven--to the mainstream. There is very clear evidence that this is true [1], and underappreciated by a medical field that has a heavy bias toward specialists over generalists. How many people are experts in both gastroenterology and trauma? And yet we all know intuitively that stress and stomach problems go together.

I'll always appreciate TBKTS for this, despite its flaws.

[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/energy-healing-minus-the-no...

What % of TBKTS is based on studies?

What % of those studies have been repeatedly reproduced?

Answers to those two are enough. No further criticism needed.

Trauma to me means there are ways of responding to painful experiences that can keep you in that painful state for a very long time, and/or make things worse. I recognize that simple fact from my own experiences. In that lens, its helpful to reflect on your responses to painful experiences to stop them from developing into long term traumas. Maybe that's why this book, or at least the title, seems to resonate with people. (I haven't read it)

...But it's also good to know the author of the book was wildly mis-citing things

Seems there’s a political angle in this.

Conservatives emphasize the importance of “mindfulness” type approaches, while liberals emphasize “trauma” approaches.

The ideological appeal is obvious: when there’s a conflict between the individual and reality, conservatives say the individual should change, while leftists say society should change.

But is really prefer my psychology not to be dictated by political ideology.

Oh hey look, a clickbait title that breaks the rules here in order to make manosphere garbage look more legitimate.

The title of this article isn’t “Criticisms of The Body Keeps the Score”, it is “The Body Keeps the Score Is Bullshit”

If we’re going to editorialize titles I would suggest “Seed oil and testosterone youtuber has opinions on a book about trauma”

The Body Keeps the Score is stuffed full of, essentially, woo.

I assess it as being correct in noticing a lot of "smoke" around mind body connections. But I found almost all the causeual linkages to be "... really???".

Consciousness in general seems to be poorly understood outside of the "normal experience" state.

The Body Keeps the Score is bullshit, but this Substack is even more bullshit. The author criticizes Bessel van der Kolk for failing to prove causation, and then writes this gibberish:

"In the textbook Evolutionary Psychology, the authors explain that a particular hunter gatherer population isn’t as susceptible to PTSD despite being exposed to similarly tragic events. They argue that part of the physiological changes that come along with PTSD are increased inflammation in the body. Thus, the inflammatory nature of a standard western diet may make some people more susceptible to PTSD."

"A 2020 study on Turkana warriors in Kenya found them to be much less likely to develop PTSD-related symptoms compared to US combat vets despite also experiencing gruesome acts in a war zone."

Where is the proof that diet causes PTSD?

There is nothing funnier about HN than the constant insistence that "The mainstream media is bad and lying to you" while voting random Substack and Medium writers with zero experience or training or authority to the front page.

That goes together nicely with everyone on HN insisting that HN commenters are "special" and "different" from people on the rest of the internet. I guess because we are more likely to like the color orange?

Most people insist they are above average drivers.

You're not wrong, but "The Body keeps the Score" is hardly mainstream science either.

It's completely sensible for most people to believe they are above average drivers, and all be correct. This is because there isn't a single objective measurement for "good at driving."

Imagine that 50% of people are cautious drivers, and 50% are fast drivers. The cautious drivers think being cautious is more important than being fast, so they all believe they are above average. The fast drivers, vice versa. Everyone thinks they're above average, and they are by their own standards, no delusion required.

He's relaying what the textbook he cited claimed. You'll have to check the textbook for their sources. Getting into the weeds about different theories for why various hunter-gatherer societies have lower rates of PTSD is rather off-topic for this blog post. They're just trying to raise a few counter-examples to trauma causing this dysfunction and suggest that unhealthy people or people with abnormal brain scans may be more susceptible to trauma. This would invalidate many of the arguments in The Body Keeps the Score.

Raising counter-examples shouldn't mean throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, and the author's point could easily have been made without repeating an extraordinary claim he fails to provide evidence for. If The Body Keeps the Score had arguments as poorly sourced as "this textbook said that PTSD co-occurs with inflammation, so Western diets could cause inflammation which could cause PTSD", the author of the Substack would rightfully criticize it as unsubstantiated bullshit. His own article should be held to the same standards.

This blogger is a self-help youtuber hawking testosterone treatments and he's a Jordan Peterson acolyte that believes that DMT let's you speak with aliens.

This person takes specific claims from the book and tries to dispute them, while ignoring that the book’s number one big-picture idea of “trauma is unprocessed emotions and memories physically stored in the body” remains the conceptual grounding for all modern non-cognitive trauma processing methods like EMDR (which are clearly effective, even as we do not fully understand e.g. the neurological mechanism by which the adaptive information processing network functions). He then points you to an older article of his that is behind a paywall.

I have my issues with van der Kolk’s work (I would personally not recommend The Body Keeps The Score to most people), but this is sloppy embarrassing clickbait.

I wouldn't say that EMDR is "clearly effective". The studies on it are all over the place so at best it's contentious.

The blog post very much agrees with mainstream science.

The Body Keeps Score is pseudoscience. This sort of pseudoscience has a pretty long history. Arguably it's repackaged Freud. Freud aside, therapists have a long history of advocating theories that are not supported by science. For example, repressed memories, multiple personality disorder, etc.

CPTSD is an area where there is a lot of bad research partially because it's not a recognized disorder by the DSM and partially because of its political affiliations. This works from two sides. You get downward pressure on good research because it isn't recognized by most American psychologists. You also get upward presure from researchers whose motivations are political rather than scientific. I don't understand why political groups are interested in CPTSD, I just know that they empirically are [0]. There have previously been strong political interest in other pseudosciences like Freudian psychotherapy and Jung etc. I don't understand this either, but I'm sure there's an explanation.

> It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future trauma

Many people are targeted for abuse because they are different. For example autistic women are especially frequently targeted for abuse. Thus being autistic (genetic) can cause abuse (environmental) and hence trauma. Many people who are especially isolated or have especially poor social skills will be predisposed to being abused multiple times. Partially this is because abusers can tell if you've been abused and, if you have, there's a good chance your previous abusers got away with it.

If you look at the subreddit overlap for CPTSD linked below, you'll notice that there's significant overlap with genetic psychological conditions that predispose people to getting abused. This makes correlational data hard to interpret, especially because so many psychological papers study a small group over a small period of time and ask only a small number of questions.

> This article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-skeptic

This doesn't mean that mainstream science is skeptical about trauma. There is a great deal of good mainstream research on trauma. However, there is also a ton of systematically bad and wrong information on social media about trauma that is popular despite being wrong. So mainstream science is rightfully skeptical about claims that are unsupported by science.

> There's also data indicating...

Finding good psychology articles is something that's much harder than it sounds. Psychology articles are easy to read compared to, say, physics. But there is a lot of really bad psychology out there that you won't be able to filter out without a background in research psychology. In some ways, familiarity with applied psychology but not research psychology makes things harder because so much of the bad research comes from applied psychology.

For example, is this a good study? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26488918/ "Extrasensory Perception Experiences and Childhood Trauma: A Rorschach Investigation"? Well ESP isn't real. Trauma is real. The Rorschach test is nonsense. But it has an nih.gov link. Is J Nerv Ment Dis a high quality journal? What are the biases of its editors?

What about this one? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7342092/ "Personal Experiences With Auditory Verbal Hallucination and Extrasensory Perception" from Schizophr Bull 2019.

I pick on ESP because it's obviously a violation of the law of physics. Yet applied psychologists keep churning out ESP research just like they keep churning out research about things like repressed memory like The Body Keeps the Score.

[0] For example see the list of subreddits similar to r/cptsd https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/cptsd. It's a mix of subs for people with genetic psychological disorders (narcissism, bpd, bipolar, asd, adhd, etc). And a mix of politicized and religious subreddits (FDS, witchesvpatriarchy, menlib, christianity, etc). Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/pr6wh4/cptsd_and_lef...

Your reference to Freud is funny, given that he not only rejected the trauma theory but based all of psychoanalysis on his rejection of the trauma theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud%27s_seduction_theory

"Within a few years Freud abandoned his theory"

yes but it was Freud's theory and has been revived many times

"Extrasensory Perception Experiences" -- experiencing it as "extrasensory perception" can be very real, like verbal hallucinations are very real experiences. It's well worth to study people who experience these phenomena.

The definitions of psychological disorders are not exact, the comorbidities are high, all of this is not exact science, like you make it seem. CPTSD is not in the DSM because the symptoms are already covered by DSMs extended PTSD definition. I wonder why it is so important for some people to fight over definitions of what to me mostly look like different maladaptive coping mechanisms with very similar underlying causes and very similar treatment options.

To you, things seem to be either "pseudoscience" (on what grounds?) or "scientific", and what you write sounds very much motivated by your own political beliefs. And, why shouldn't people be motivated by their beliefs? They can still be good scientists too.

You dismiss Freud as "pseudoscientific", where he expressed very clearly that he wants people to challenge his theories and develop them further, and that he doesn't think he owns the truth. He wrote lots of material where he merely documents his interactions with patients and presents his thoughts and theories and experiments, based on what was available to him at the time. Nothing what I read of his extensive study material makes me think it's "pseudoscientific", even if many of his theories have now been challenged and disproven. That doesn't make him a bad scientist. You may want to look at your high horse here. Can you explain why you think Freud didn't do science, back when he did it?

> I wonder why it is so important for some people to fight over definitions

This is the work of most of medicine and science. It's not fighting. But understanding what the correct definitions are is foundational to being able to talk accurately about the phenomena. There's a lot of work that goes into understanding psychological disorders from various different perspectives, including neural anatomy, genetics, behavior etc.

> what to me mostly look like different maladaptive coping mechanisms with very similar underlying causes and very similar treatment options.

The existing disorders these days do a pretty good job of not being too overlapping with respect to cause or symptoms. They are frequently confused with each other either due to incomplete information at the time of diagnosis or due to practitioners not being familiar enough with the latest research. Autism I know is one that gets frequently misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder or anxiety.

There are comorbidities, but those comorbidities are sometimes due to things like misdiagnoses.

> To you, things seem to be either "pseudoscience" (on what grounds?) or "scientific"

I'm not sure what you're driving at here. But science and pseudoscience are different.

> what you write sounds very much motivated by your own political beliefs

The only things I think I've written about my political beliefs on HN are that I'm opposed to political violence, I value democracy, and I value truth and the pursuit of truth. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.

> And, why shouldn't people be motivated by their beliefs? They can still be good scientists too.

You can't serve two masters. Science is about what is true. If one believes in a sort of "higher truth" that they make science subservient to then they're not really doing science. That goes for whatever they take the "higher truth" to be. Often it's a religious commitment, but it could be other things.

> dismiss Freud as "pseudoscientific", where he expressed very clearly that he wants people to challenge his theories ....

Science isn't about things like having people challenge your theories. It's about making predictions, having on objectively verifiable method for checking the outcome of the predictions, assessing how and why the predictions went wrong, etc. Freud didn't do any of that.

Freud's theories and whether they are scientific or not has been written about a lot. I think it's probably covered in a lot of intro do psychology books. But you can also find web pages about it.

You may disagree, but I'm more in line with publications such as this:

Frank Tallis, We should still pick up the pearls: on the scientific status of Freud, Brain, Volume 147, Issue 4, April 2024, Pages 1115–1117, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awad414

"We do not think of Galileo as being a bad scientist because he cast horoscopes. Rather, we consider him to be an excellent one on account of his mathematics. Similarly, our estimate of Freud’s scientific reputation should not be based on what he got wrong—or for that matter, whether his putative affair with his sister-in-law proves that he was a congenital liar—but rather, what he got right. Militant ‘Freud bashing’ has favoured a style of argument that lacks nuance, and sometimes, integrity."

The theories of 100 years of psychoanalysis may not be scientifically proven (nor disproven), but there's plenty of opportunity to do that. There's no need to dismiss any and all ideas coming from that space outright based on some generalization around specific people or their individual-centric approach and reasoning.

"The answer to the question of whether psychoanalysis is ‘scientific’—or not—is less clear than is commonly supposed. Popper’s assertion that psychoanalysis does not meet the falsification criterion, which is often automatically accepted as an incontestable truth, hasn’t prevented ‘scientifically minded’ researchers testing psychoanalytic hypotheses experimentally."

I strongly disagree with your statement that psychological disorders are distinct in terms of etiology. That's just not true, and frankly, unscientific to make up such a claim. To provide some citations:

"The reliability and validity of traditional taxonomies are limited by arbitrary boundaries between psychopathology and normality, often unclear boundaries between disorders, frequent disorder co-occurrence, heterogeneity within disorders, and diagnostic instability."

Kotov, R., Krueger, R. F., Watson, D., Achenbach, T. M., Althoff, R. R., Bagby, R. M., Brown, T. A., Carpenter, W. T., Caspi, A., Clark, L. A., Eaton, N. R., Forbes, M. K., Hyman, S. E., Jonas, K. G., Latzman, R. D., Li, J. J., Nelson, B. D., Regier, D. A., Rodriguez-Seijas, C., Ruggero, C. J., … Wilson, S. (2017). The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126(4), 454-477. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000258

"Mental disorders traditionally have been viewed as distinct, episodic, and categorical conditions. This view has been challenged by evidence that many disorders are sequentially comorbid, recurrent/chronic, and exist on a continuum."

Caspi, A., Houts, R. M., Belsky, D. W., Goldman-Mellor, S. J., Harrington, H., Israel, S., Meier, M. H., Ramrakha, S., Shalev, I., Poulton, R., & Moffitt, T. E. (2014). The p factor: One general psychopathology factor in the structure of psychiatric disorders? Clinical Psychological Science, 2(2), 119-137. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702613497473

I think we're coming at this from different point of views and possibly different backgrounds.

My perspective is that ideas need to earn their keep. You have said a few times that I'm "dismissing" ideas, whereas the way science works is that you have to make a case for why your idea should be valued.

Tallis is a clinical psychologist and as I mentioned the clinical (which above I called applied but really I mostly meant clinical) psychologists have been trying to revive Freud for a long time. Tallis is also an author and as even he points out Freud is studied more in literature than in psychology. So yes there is a whole literature of clinical psychologists trying to revive Freud's reputation, and it goes back decades and possibly centuries. I have no problem with you agreeing that literature, but I do want to point out that I already indicated above that it existed.

But clinical psychologists are not trained in research, which is the branch of psychology that conducts the science. So they usually don't have the background to understand whether his contributions count as scientific research. The article also makes at least one factual mistake -- Koller discovered the anesthetic properties of cocaine, Freud did not suggest them. It doesn't seem to make a case for any science Freud did.

Galileo is a good scientist because he did science. We don't include his horoscopes as science. Same with Newton and his alchemy. Freud has just the horoscopes and alchemy so he hasn't achieved the same status.

Most of what people typically say they value in Freud predates him by thinkers whose reputation is stronger. The idea that the mind does a great deal of unconscious work goes back to the 1700s with people like Kant and Hume in philosophy. William James started writing about the unconscious mind in 1890, a few years before Freud. Ramón y Cajal was doing his neuroscience work around the same time as Freud. We sometimes think of Freud as one of the first psychologists and as inventing some famous concepts like the unconscious. But that's not actually true. There were other psychologists who predated him or were working at the same time who are considered today to have made lasting empirical contributions in a way that Freud hasn't. So it's not about his being early it's about the way he chose to go about things.

> their individual-centric approach and reasoning

I'm not sure what you mean here, but if by individual-centric approach you mean case studies, then yes this is very relevant. An individual experience is an anecdote or one datum. You need to systematically study lots of data. Freud dealt in case reports, so units of individual anecdotes. There's not enough information and not enough systematization to extract useful signal from the noise.

> I strongly disagree with your statement that psychological disorders are distinct in terms of etiology. That's just not true, and frankly, unscientific to make up such a claim.

Under your view, how would you explain why the disorders have different rates of heritability, different genetic markers, different fMRI patterns, and different treatments?

> Under your view, how would you explain why the disorders have different rates of heritability, different genetic markers, different fMRI patterns, and different treatments?

"Heritability" is a misnomer. "Heritability" via twin studies cannot account for the prenatal phase, so by definition anything that results from early developmental influences is included in "heritability", where it would be more precise to regard is as environmental. Wouldn't it be weird to claim the first 9 months of plant growth is "hereditary" and has nothing to do with its environment in that phase? Epigenetics play a role in the modification of genetic markers. There is a growing body of research around cell memory and "early consciousness". Anything you can measure from a biological lense provides data for correlation, not causation. You can stop on that level, sure, and then claim that is "etiology", or you can theorize about common causes elsewhere.

Explaining "different treatments" makes it sound like there is an agreement on how to treat, say, CPTSD vs bipolar disorder vs schizophrenia vs BPD vs DID vs GAD, where in practice there is a lot of experimentation and overlap. Of course if you "treat" on the level of say, receptors, and try to influence the system that way, you need to use different drugs, depending on what effect the original cause already had. The same cause may result in different adaptations of the body for different people. If you work on the level of the psyche, you might find that what your patients have in common is a history of violence, towards self and others; the symptoms may disappear either from a continous stream of your carefully tuned drugs, or from removing the ongoing violence. Unfortunately you cannot easily measure that from the outside, and people will not necessarily give you accurate data to work with in your surveys; if you even bother to gather that. Psychotherapy is attempting to remove internalized violence against self/other.

Let me try an analogy here: You are tasked to fix broken houses. The symptom that is described is that the floors are wet and it is cold inside. You arrive at the house and see that, yes, the floor is wet, and the windows are broken; the heating works. It is not false to claim that the broken windows are the "cause" of the wet floor. You put in new windows. Case closed.

You get called to another house, with the same symptom. You find that the roof needs fixing. You create a new category in your diagnostic manual of house disorders.

You try to approach it scientifically: You take the symptoms of 100.000 houses, and categorize measurable problems inside the house and correlate them to what needs to be fixed. You may in fact not be interested in why the windows are broken: You make a living from these repairs. You do sometimes wonder why you get called to the same houses periodically to find the same windows broken, but you don't see anything particularly wrong with the house after you fix it up each time so you move on. It's not your job to identify a group of youngsters that walk around throwing rocks into people's windows and dismantling roofs.

Is it wrong to claim that fixing the windows is the correct treatment at the "origin", and that it wouldn't help if the roof needs fixing? No. Does it say anything about the "root cause"? No.

DSM Disorders Disappear in Statistical Clustering of Psychiatric Symptoms (2024)

https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/traditional-dsm-disorder...

I don't see where you've addressed the genetic and fMRI data etc. Could you be concrete and choose, say, two specific disorders. Walk through the fMRI and connectivity differences and the genetic differences as currently understood in the medical literature and then describe how those these differences come from a common cause in this case. And specifically what studies establish that common cause? That will help ground the conversation in specifics.

> Walk through the fMRI and connectivity differences and the genetic differences as currently understood in the medical literature

"Medicine" can not say anything about kids throwing rocks, it can only talk about broken windows and roofs, because all it measures is houses. I did not argue against measuring and fixing houses. I did not claim there are no visible differences in fMRI, nor did I claim there were, nor did I claim there are no genetic differences, or that there were. Straw man. It makes no difference for what I was arguing about, which you decided to ignore and not engage with.

"The high degree of genetic correlation among many of the psychiatric disorders adds further evidence that their current clinical boundaries do not reflect distinct underlying pathogenic processes, at least on the genetic level."

The Brainstorm Consortium; Anttila, V., Bulik-Sullivan, B., Finucane, H. K., Walters, R. K., Bras, J., … (2018). Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain. Science, 360(6395), eaap8757. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap8757

"This empirical evidence of *shared* genetic etiology for psychiatric disorders can inform nosology and encourages the investigation of common pathophysiologies for related disorders."

Lee, S. H., Ripke, S., Neale, B. M., Faraone, S. V., Purcell, S., Perlis, R. H., … Wray, N. R. (2013). Genetic relationship between five psychiatric disorders estimated from genome-wide SNPs. Nature Genetics, 45(9), 984-994. https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.2711

"evidence accumulated over decades of family and twin studies have shown that familial and heritable components commonly overlap between disorders. […] Genetic influences on psychiatric disorders also share genetic determinants with dimensional psychological and neurocognitive traits that transcend diagnostic boundaries."

Lee, P. H., Feng, Y. A., & Smoller, J. W. (2021). Pleiotropy and Cross-Disorder Genetics Among Psychiatric Disorders. Biological psychiatry, 89(1), 20–31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2020.09.026

"We are so embedded in this structure. We have spent so much time diagnosing mental disorders that we actually believe they are real. But there's no reality. These are just constructs. There's no reality to schizophrenia or depression. We might have to stop using terms like depression and schizophrenia, because they are getting in our way, confusing things." (Thomas R Insel MD, NIMH director 2005-2015)

https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/04/thomas-insel-future-men...

"In the last 2 decades, it has become obvious that child abuse, urbanization, migration, and adverse life events contribute to the etiology of schizophrenia and other psychoses. […] I expect to see the end of the concept of schizophrenia soon." (Murray, R. M. (2016). Mistakes I Have Made in My Research Career. Schizophrenia Bulletin, sbw165. doi:10.1093/schbul/sbw165)

"Clinically, the evidence that symptoms cut across disorders — or that people frequently have more than one disorder — has only grown stronger. […] Even seemingly separate disorders are linked. In 2008, geneticist Angelica Ronald, then at King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry, and her colleagues found that autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) overlapped."

Nature: The hidden links between mental disorders (2020) https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00922-8

"I would say [biomarkers] are potentially highly useful but conceptually and practically incomplete"

Freckelton I., QC (2018). Overdiagnosis in Psychiatry: How Modern Psychiatry Lost Its Way While Creating a Diagnosis for Almost All of Life's Misfortunes, by Paris Joel: Oxford University Press, 2015, xi-xix and 1-181 pp., Psychiatry, Psychology, and Law, 25(2), 325–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/13218719.2018.1463588

Evidence of correlation in genetic studies doesn't answer the questions you were asking. The claim you made was that you don't believe psychological disorders have different causes.

Humans share 98.8% of genetics with chimpanzees. That doesn't tell you humans and chimpanzees are the same. It tells you where to look for the differences between humans and chimpanzees. A similar study to the GWAS study you cite shows that arthritis and type 1 diabetes have significant genetic overlap (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10291128/). That makes sense they're both autoimmune disorders where inflamation plays a major role. But arthritis and type 1 diabetes are not the same disorder.

The GWAS studies narrow down the search for genetic markers. They don't establish some sort of continuum for disorders all controlled by a single cause. They don't mean the difference between mental disorders is environmental. They don't mean that medicine or psychological disorders are social constructs or that there is "no reality to them".

The question of whether two things are distinct is determined by any one difference. 1 and 2 are distinct despite differing by only 1. You can list thousands of ways they are similar (both integers, both positive, both less than 500, both written with marks on a page). But those similarities do not make them identical.

That's why I'm saying once again that if you want to focus the conversation we need to talk about the genetic differences, fMRI differences etc between disorders and then you would need to make the case that those differences have the same cause. At any rate, I don't feel like pursuing this any further, but I wish you well.

P.S. I noticed in one of your earlier comments you said something about psychotherapy. Just in case it's not clear, psychotherapy is very different from psychoanalysis, which is what Freud was doing. Freud has a bad reputation as someone whose theories haven't held up well and who engaged in deliberate fraud. Psychotherapy is an evidence-based branch of medicine and is rightfully well regarded. You'll find that I've several times on this site and elsewhere recommended everyone use psychotherapy just like everyone should have a dentist. I just wanted to clarify that in case you were under the impression that my statements about Freud applied to psychotherapy. However, psychotherapy doesn't have anything to do with "attempting to remove internalized violence against self/other."

I get the feeling we're completely talking past each other. I never claimed that psychological disorders cannot have different causes. They may mostly be variants of a living organism's spectrum of maladaptive reactions to various adverse circumstances, yes.

You seem to read what I write, then make assumptions what I might be saying, and then reply to your assumptions, and ignore most of what I write (e.g. about your claims of "heritability"), which makes this a very weird interaction overall.

I agree with your idea of just letting this be, as I don't find it a very productive exchange.

I don't know why you keep coming back to fMRI and genetic markers, because, again, nothing of what I was trying to say has anything to do with whether there are measurable differences on that level or not. You seem to think that "symptoms" are described in the disorder definitions, and anything you measure is the "cause". Again: To me, it is similarly possible that both are symptoms. You can use that for diagnosis if you feel like you need to make this discrimination, but that doesn't say anything about treatment or etiology.

> psychotherapy doesn't have anything to do with "attempting to remove internalized violence against self/other."

I take it you do not consider the EMDR protocol, ACT, CBT, IFS, ego state, Schema, CFT, EFT, SE, DBT, MBSR, DBT, IPT, systemic therapy, gestalt, to be "psychotherapy" then. All of them work with and address internalized violence against self ("inner critic", self-worth, other negative thinking patterns; chronic often suppressed feelings of shame, anger, grief).

Stoicism is the pole that you cannot control the world, but you can control your reactions to it. It's hard work.

The other pole is that you cannot control your reactions, but you can try to control the world. This is much easier to fit into a consumerist framework.

A DNA molecule without an environment is just a glob of atoms. Information flows in both directions.

On a purely human level though, you should go find some veterans with PTSD and tell them they're just not working hard enough at being stoic.

Thank you.

I never told any veterans to work harder at being stoic, nor did I imply anyone should. That's part of a reaction you had to what I said.

I can't control what you say, but I can control my reaction to you. That's what stoicism is.

It's a good framework to survive in authoritarian country and maybe even a good one to promote as a dictator. You can in fact very often change what other people think, say and do.

Stoicism specifies that one needs right acts, in addition to right thoughts. It’s far less passive than e.g. Russell (though I love Russell, and I even love The History of Western Philosophy in which he levels these criticisms, while many others seem to dismiss it) describes it, though treating it as purely an internal-mindset thing is certainly easier and I think a lot of people in-fact only apply those parts.

Notably, Aurelius (at least—I’m less well-read on Epictetus and others) allows that there are automatic reactions that we can’t, realistically, control. It’s the unintentional, but controllable, maintenance of negative feelings that Stoics aim to consciously tamp down, mostly by breaking the habit of falling into those patterns of thinking in the first place. I think triggered feelings and reactions due to PTSD would tend to fall under the former, though surely a stoic approach might help reduce ongoing harm from those, as it does with more mundane things like being angry at other drivers on the highway. I mean, something in one’s attitudes and ways of thinking must be able help, and if not, guess we better stop bothering with therapy, so it’s not outlandish that stoic practice might improve even that kind of problem, though it may not be the right tool to attack the root of it.

The idea that stoicism even aims to eliminate all negative emotions, or that it blames all of them on the person experiencing them, isn’t really what I’ve found.

Aurelius' writings are interesting - I am struck by how many people try to relate to an emperor trying to stay grounded.

It doesn't mean there isn't good in the writings, it's good to take the positive from things, with the hope that it doesn't let in any of the negative unintended.

That part stands out to me though as where it's perspective might not be for the many, but the few.

I mean, a bunch of his book is stoic epistemology, physics, and metaphysics, all of which is of dubious value. Anyone reading him is definitely going to be picking-and-choosing what they pay attention to, almost nobody today is going to go all-in on the entire edifice of the stoic system of philosophy, and nearly all readers are likely to disregard half or more of his book—as far as the pop-cultural life of the book, these large portions of it are practically invisible for a reason.

I do think it’s remarkable that there’s much salvageable at all in it, given the age of the work (though a fair amount of ancient philosophy remains relevant, or at least functions as good reading and exercises along the lines of koans for developing philosophical ways of thinking, an awful lot is effectively obsolete and only of historical interest) and that it came from one of the most powerful people on the planet. It’s not often you get something with much enduring value at all from someone who also happens to be at or near the pinnacle of human hierarchies of their day.

Though, in fairness, he’s mostly repackaging stuff he learned from others, it’s not exactly original thinking in the same way as the chain of works from Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, say.

Still, it’d be like, I dunno, Franklin Roosevelt penning a philosophically-inclined self-help book that was still widely read and referenced beyond the year 3,000 and in languages that didn’t exist when it was written. Pretty distinctive, very few works at all in that class, and almost none from the perspective of someone that highly placed politically, despite a strong bias in general toward works from the rich and powerful being created at all, and surviving. I’d say the only way it’s likely to permanently fade is if/when “western culture”, to perhaps include near-east and Maghreb Muslim culture, fades (there’s so much overlap of the parts people like, with forms of thinking from the East, that I expect it’d have trouble co-existing with them in the same body of thought, as an actively-read item of interest)

> but I can control my reaction to you. That's what stoicism is.

I think what the parent is saying is this:

Say you (hyperhello) have PTSD from a fire incident in which your face is completely disfigured. You associated this pain (emotional and physical) with the various people who yelled "FIRE" during the escape. Do you, hyperhello, truly have control over this negative reaction when someone yells "FIRE!" in your face?

Is it your take that PTSD symptoms cannot be improved through any action of the individual?

Is it your take that every person in therapy for PTSD so wasting their time?

What if PTSD therapy focusses on accepting things you can't control and sitting with the pain? That's how I work through anxiety, and depression. I know it will never be gone, I don't try and set expectations to live without anxiety, I just try and sit with it, and accept it.

Much of mental trauma is about acknowledging it, and learning to live with it. There is no cure for PTSD, even Ketamine is short acting, not a long term solution, and indeed Ketamine simply helps you sit with the suffering in a different light.

>> There is no cure for PTSD...

But there are treatments. Last I read exposure therapy and EMDR were the two main ones. I don't think I'd be a big fan of exposure until the reactions have been significantly reduced, but everyone is different. EMDR didn't do much for me, but Internal Family Systems did. CBT is also great for some people.

Why are these presented as exclusive poles?

In each case you should look at which one is easier to control and go for that. Why do you need a universal philosophy? Some things are self control, but some things are circumstances that you can navigate or avoid too.

It's not being offered as a dialectic model of reality,

it's anchoring two points and providing a terrtain for analyzing consumer capitalism.

With this frame in hand we can then ask questions like yours, "are there domains within which it is easier or more enjoyable or has higher personal or collective benefit, to work on the world rather than self?"

The answer is certainly yes; agency is real, and we can work to maximize it.

A convenient way to extend the "model" might be to tack on the "serenity prayer."

Choosing to navigate or avoid negative stimulus is a choice you make about your behavior.

https://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

It's proactive introspection. Stoicism can provide freedom because you can be master of yourself.

Not to say that epigenetic effects aren't real.

Stoicism is also another name for emotional repression and even developing a sense of emotional blindness.

To be psychologically healthy, we need to listen to our emotions and process them in a healthy way.

The answer is not to shut down our emotions, or to blindly give in to them, but rather to understand where they're coming from and process them accordingly.

This is a very common misconception. Stoics (at least in the classical sense, which is what I study) seek to classify their emotions as either positive or as passions. And through the analysis of their own opinions, using logic and the concept of aligning with nature and the common good, they seek to agree with what is correct, disagree with what is incorrect, and suspend judgment on that which is not evident. A person can only be good or bad through actions that are their own responsibility; therefore, things outside of their own responsibility (such as a Stoic's son dying) cannot make them either good or bad, but rather their reaction to the event can. The interpretation that if a Stoic suffers when experiencing the death of their own son, they are being a bad Stoic is actually completely incorrect. They will only be a bad Stoic if, from this event, they allow themselves to be carried away by the suffering that is natural to every person who has a natural affection, and start to have opinions and actions contrary to nature.

I'm going to push back on the idea that it's a misconception.

Stoicism treats the (negative) passions as necessarily grounded in false beliefs.

Whereas modern psychology treats our negative emotions as valuable messages that something is affecting our well-being and needs to be addressed.

Stoicism treats negative emotions as errors. Something to be reasoned away, i.e. suppressed. Modern psychology tells us not to reason away but rather to feel fully, to accept, to process and therefore integrate and grow.

Modern psychology (CBT) is built on a Stoic idea: “It’s not things that upset us, but our opinions about things.”

Stoicism doesn’t tell you to repress feelings. It tells you to examine them, to look at the beliefs behind them. If the belief is false (“this event ruins my life”), you correct it; if it’s true, you accept the feeling without letting it take over.

The Stoics called destructive emotions “passions,” but they also recognized healthy ones, like rational joy, caution, and goodwill. The goal isn’t emotional numbness, it’s clarity and alignment with reason and nature.

So, far from emotional blindness, Stoicism actually inspired the same kind of introspection that modern psychology promotes, just with a different vocabulary.

I would encourage you to read about CBT’s history and it’s influence on more modern psychology techniques. It’s likely that you are representing the Stoicism you commonly read about these days, on reddit, youtube and even on some books that take some liberties on translating it or do a bad job of it (it’s hard…). Most modern sources absolutely suck. A good translation from the original greek sources of Epictetus is very hard to come by.

Modern psychology is not CBT. In fact, CBT is widely criticized by psychologists as treating symptoms rather than causes. It's a favorite of health plans because it's short and cheap, not because it's best at helping people long-term. Some of the criticisms of Stoicism are also criticisms of CBT.

What I'm talking about is traditional psychodynamic therapy that is about integration and growth. Not about changing behavioral patterns merely on the surface via cognitive reframing. When you actually allow yourself to integrate and process your emotions, the kind of mental work that stoicism and CBT focus on becomes unnecessary for most people. (CBT techniques can be helpful as a kind as urgent emergency measures, but not as a long-term solution.)

I know you seem to think I've gotten my ideas from Reddit. I can assure you, I've studied this stuff extensively both from the psychology and therapeutic sides of the literature. I've even written, critiquing Seneca's On Anger. I'm not operating from some pop understanding here. What disappoints me is the modern popularity of stoicism within certain circles today, because it actually contains some very harmful ideas.

There is no central, certified, Stoicism source. I have read a little bit of Seneca’s work, and it wasn’t for me. Just realize that there are many authors, and even considering the generality of the most famous ones, saying that Stoicism preaches repressing emotions is just categorically false. I’m not interested in going in circles here though. Thank you for the discussion!

Nowhere did I claim there was a certified source, nor did I say I was basing anything exclusively off Seneca.

But when you write:

> they seek to agree with what is correct, disagree with what is incorrect

That's the repression part -- the "disagree with what is incorrect". Emotions are not correct or incorrect, they simply are. They are valuable and need to be processed and integrated. If you don't, if you simply conclude that a passion is "incorrect", that is repression. So no, it's not "categorically false".

I hope the discussion has been helpful, whether to you or others here. I've seen stoic philosophy do harm to people, which is why I want people to be aware of how it does not align with current thought on psychological health.

It's safe to assume any grand claims linking specific behavior and the brain are bullshit. Humans don't have the technology yet to make the necessary observations.

F-MRI

F-MRIs are not going to give you enough data to cleanly determine cause and effect. I'm sure there is lots of good data for researchers, but I don't think it's going to be easily package-able into these kind of pop psychology books.

I’m a scientist. I haven’t read “the body keeps the score”. It sounds like pseudoscience.

But, I do recognize the importance of models. Our brains are complex, lacking the capacity to comprehend everything, we make models. Models are incomplete (by definition) and often false. But can still be very useful. Or very useful to some. Where useful means: help someone lead a more fulfilling, better life.

So I try not to judge. Even though I try to seek truth. To be a scientist. I know there are useful models out there.

Thank you for sharing this!

I read The Body Keeps the Score about 10 years ago after experiencing a particularly traumatic event. I had been searching for answers at the time for how to heal from the event, and someone recommended the book to me.

I had distilled my memory of the book into the intuitive idea represented by the title that the body remembers what happens to it which of course there is some truth to. So my first reaction to the headline was a bit defensive, "of course it's not bullshit!"

But I had forgotten how much emphasis was put on there being significant lasting changes from events that we couldn't even remember.

> The idea that trauma causes long-lasting damage to the brain and or body is central to van der Kolk’s thesis.

> his narrative paints this hopeless picture of trauma victims as being people who most aspects of their lives are “dictated by the imprint of the past.”

And now I remember that when I read the book originally looking for answers to my own traumas, it left me feeling hopeless, overwhelmed and permanently damaged from what I had gone through. I remember thinking that the high stress I was going through at the time was going to leave me permanently struggling with issues like high cortisol and inability to function normally. Absolutely NOT the message I needed at the time.

Ten years on, my brain is normal and healthy, and I don't have any perceptible problems with cortisol or PTSD-like symptoms. I'm living a healthy, normal life, and not walking around with a heavy trauma score in my body.

That's not to say that trauma from my past didn't play a role in making me who I am today, or that I don't still carry some memories of the difficult events. But I've found my brain to be very plastic and to heal and rewrite itself quite well. And all of the measurable markers of brain health, stress hormones, etc are fully back to normal, healthy ranges.

That's just my anecdote, and I also appreciated the thorough scientific analysis in this article!

citing a paper that says it found “no evidence” of something always seems weak to me in terms of refuting something, I also found no evidence by doing nothing, how do I know the thing you checked or the context in which it was checked is any better than my doing nothing?

not finding something doesn’t seem any more or less convincing…

I think it's called "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" ?

It is, though. What it is not, is proof of absence.

I claim I am god. Pretty much everyone who knows me suggested there’s no evidence of me being god. Would you say not finding that I’m god doesn’t seem any more or less convincing?

> [H]ow do I know the thing you checked or the context in which it was checked is any better than my doing nothing?

Open the paper and look for it's methodology.

I can see why someone might have that opinion. I think the author hasn't met himself yet. As one can only meet and understand another as deeply as they have met themselves. I do wonder if he would gain more awareness of his self after a couple 7g mushroom runs.

Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a hero.

That said, this article is just as bad as the book.

Of course there are massive and complex feedback loops between the brain and the body.

Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd.

I encourage folks to get more massages if they doubt that there's any causal relationship between these phenomena.

Can you give a source for the claim of "extensive sexual misconduct"? I've seen allegations of bullying, which is clearly bad enough, but nothing sexual.

> Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a hero.

I was curious about this accusation, so I read a bit about the scandal. [0]

It seems you are actually talking about Joseph Spinazzola, the executive director of Van der Kolk's trauma center, who was fired for sexual misconduct while Van der Kolk was on sabbatical. Van der Kolk was fired two months later, not for sexual misconduct, but for denigrating and bullying employees.

[0] https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/03/07/allegation...

“Of course there are massive and complex feedback loops between the brain and the body.

Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd.”

The relevant parts are good.

Psychological trauma is one of the more complicated aspects of the human condition.

Because such claims are so hard to verify and so rhetorically potent, I would be in favor of a rule that claims of having been traumatized cannot be presented as evidence in court.

Do you ever litigate torts? Being 'traumatized' is not a legal claim to which simply stating 'I was traumatized' serves as any evidence, so I'm not sure what it is you think you'd be sparing the world. It is obviously the case that anyone could testify regarding the facts of what happened that caused what they believed to be trauma, but I'm not sure where you got the idea that people simply say "I was traumatized" and then win a civil case or send someone to jail.

The rule I propose would disallow not only unsubstantiated claims, but also any argumentation or evidence that tries to substantiate the claim (including testimony by expert witnesses in my ideal the version of the rule) in legal proceedings.

For example, the rule would not disallow "I was almost killed by the defendant's reckless action" and would not disallow "the defendant's attack put me fear for my life", but it would disallow, "and one of the effects of that experience was psychological trauma".

Where do courts allow unsubstantiated claims?

>but also any argumentation or evidence that tries to substantiate the claim (including testimony by expert witnesses in my ideal the version of the rule) in legal proceedings.

So you wont also let people substantiate claims? What??

>For example, the rule would not disallow "I was almost killed by the defendant's reckless action" and would not disallow "the defendant's attack put me fear for my life", but it would disallow, "and one of the effects of that experience was psychological trauma".

Have you ever been involved in such a lawsuit, out of curiosity?

The intentional infliction of emotional distress has long been recognized as a tort. You have to substantiate it, of course.

>The intentional infliction of emotional distress has long been recognized as a tort.

Disallowing testimony about psychological trauma is consistent with criminalizing intentional attempts to cause it -- and in fact the vast majority of attempts to cause psychological trauma are probably covered by existing laws against assault.

(Also, I hope everyone realizes that not all emotional distress is psychological trauma.)

>Disallowing testimony about psychological trauma is consistent with criminalizing intentional attempts to cause it

No it's not. IIED is civil law, btw.

>and in fact the vast majority of attempts to cause psychological trauma are probably covered by existing laws against assault.

Tired of hearing legal recommendations from individuals who don't know the basics, such as the difference between civil and criminal law. Or how evidence works.

Pop-trauma allows people to continue to believe "dreams can be achieved through hard work" while not blaming themselves for not achieving their dreams.

The reason I'm not living the dream could be that it's impossible, or I haven't tried hard enough. I don't want to believe either of those. I'd rather believe that something happened to me in my past that rewired my brain to stifle my full potential. Then I could still hope to someday achieve my dreams, while not doing anything to progress towards them.

It's not popular because it's right. It's popular because it's so, so appealing.

Kind of a silly ending to the article.

>I think Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Mate’s heavy handed trauma narrative is [bad]

followed immediately by

>However if they ‘treat’ their trauma with things like yoga, meditation, psychedelics and have some benefits, it’s very likely they would have had the benefits regardless of whether they viewed it as some sort of trauma treatment or not.

I suppose the author has never heard of placebo effects? Talk about a heavy-handed narrative.

Author also seems to be skeptical of the idea that stress and inflammation can be a major cause of disease in the body. I might just be reading into things, but if that's an accurate assessment on my part, it's wildly inaccurate.

Haha yeah my wife used to use that always as a nice way to explain why she should be able to punish me at all times for all my “failures”. Lol

Oof. I'm seeing lots of issues packed into this. You need good counseling. Not marriage counseling (that's a scam in most cases), but individual counseling. Even just a bro to talk to while you turn wrenches or heft iron. Just find a guy who is older than you, married, and well adjusted and talk to him. I can make some recommendations on where to find men like this, if you would like.

Heck yeah honestly

A chapter of ARM is a really good bet. All you have to do is check their website and show up to a public event and introduce yourself. Lend a hand with setup and teardown.

A church might be a bit of a reach. A man of God (not a pastor, unless he is ex military/cop/etc or was in the trades) might be able to advise you, but if you aren't Christian I don't think it'll be super helpful.

Most of psychology doesn't survive past 20 years, the moment someone tries to replicate the results it fails. A lot of the fraud that is happening in medical science at the moment is in Psychology, their methods are unsound and they build entire diseases on foundations made of sand. They repeatedly get caught misrepresenting referenced papers by reviewers but the journals fail to enforce integrity and scientific principles.

People should be very sceptical of any psychological findings that are younger than about 30 years and ideally you want to have seen several replications and done with greater size, rigour and controls. Anything younger than this and certainly anything that hasn't yet been firmly replicated is on balance of probability going to turn out to be wrong or fraud.

Psychology (and psychiatry) is good enough at finding patterns in the symptoms patients go through, and grouping them into so-called disorders. It's not perfect, but it's a useful tool.

What they are not good at is all the rest: explaining what causes those symptoms in the first place, and how to treat them in the second place. And this isn't something that has changed in the past 30 yrs.

This phenomenon is also not exclusive to soft sciences. Humans (especially domain experts) just really really hate admitting "we don't know."

> Chances are, you’ve heard of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. At 79,898 reviews, the book has more reviews on Amazon than the first book of A Game of Thrones.

> “The Body Keeps the Score has spent 248 weeks on the New York Times paperback-nonfiction best-seller list and counting. To date, it’s sold 3 million copies and been translated into 37 languages.”

Wow 3 million copies despite being translated into 37 languages? The Game of Thrones finale had 19 million viewers. I don't know anyone who has heard of this book and even if all of the 3 million copies were sold to Americans, only 1 in 11 of them would have heard of it.

That's funny because I swear almost every woman in my life has read it or at least knows enough to reference it. Even women who are from different walks of life and don't know eachother.

There are ~130 million US households, so if each copy were bought by a unique household and all 3 million copies were sold in the US, that would mean ~97.5% of US households don't have a copy. Maybe there's some huge multiplier on borrowing from libraries? Personally I've never heard of it, but it seems like it's pretty far outside of my bubble of interests.

Then a hundred Instagram and TikTok influencers make videos about the book.

Reading is at an all time low in the US, the majority of people who have heard of this book probably haven't read a single sentence of it. It's mostly coming from social media content about the book.

> I don't know anyone who has heard of this book

I can't imagine polling everyone I know about a specific book. How does that work?

Also, why would the number of Amazon reviews be a valid metric for popularity? Game of Thrones came out almost 30 years ago. People who bought and read the book probably didn't buy it from Amazon and aren't going to write a review for it now.

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