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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're not telling kids to be terrified of something that the kid has already dealt with.
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.
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.
Research shows that suggestibility is actually moderately correlated with trauma.
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.
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.
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.
It sounds like you're advocating for repressing traumatic experiences hoping to not cause inconveniences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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".