Misunderstanding Trauma—and ResiliencePerhaps our culture is accidentally creating PTSD by expecting it, assuming that no one could possibly emerge from a trauma psychologically intact.
By LENORE SKENAZY
FROM THE APRIL 2022 ISSUE
As you may have noticed, trauma is everywhere these days, from the friend "traumatized" by her haircut to the talk show guest eager to share her traumatic past. Victims are allowed to "speak their trauma" in court.
Conventional wisdom insists that anyone who experiences trauma will end up emotionally crippled forever. This belief has allowed us to become extremely unforgiving: If a victim is never going to have a good day again, why should the perpetrator?
The idea that trauma changes everything is so common now that it is taken as gospel. A recent New Yorker article by Parul Sehgal traces how trauma became the all-purpose backstory for a huge swath of today's TV shows, movies, and books. Peek into the past of characters from Claire Underwood to Ted Lasso, and you will find that they were deeply hurt by something or someone, which somehow explains everything from their utter ruthlessness (hers) to their irrepressible cheer (his). Viewers easily accept the idea that trauma, above all else, made these people who they are.
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Most people who suffer trauma end up psychologically fine, says Samantha Boardman, a psychiatrist who teaches at Weill Cornell Medicine and the author of the recent book Everyday Vitality (Penguin Life).
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In fact, Wessely said, the one thing that seems to stymie the normal recovery process is professional intervention, a.k.a. "psychological debriefing." He noted that "there have been over 15 trials in which we randomly allocate people to receive debriefing or not, and we know now, for certainty, that this does not work." Worse, "the three best studies, with the longest follow-up, have shown that those who randomly received the debriefing were more likely to develop PTSD"—post-traumatic stress disorder.
It's almost as if our culture is accidentally creating PTSD by expecting it, based on the assumption that no one could possibly emerge from a trauma psychologically intact. In trying to be kind and caring, we are crippling people instead. For the sake of the traumatized themselves, it's time to stop treating them as damaged goods.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/03/15/misunderstanding-trauma-and-resilience/
