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Notes -
"Trauma" As Poetry
Recently I've had cause to interact with a number of zoomers and zillennials, and on several occasions I've been asked "are you traumatized?" or "do you have any trauma?", as though this were a perfectly normal question to ask someone, and not some weird fuckass question. I respond, in all seriousness and without any irony, "no, and in fact I would dare to say that I've never felt any pain at all. My life is unreasonably beautiful, beautiful enough to think that something is amiss. What did I do to deserve this? How long will God let me continue with my selfishness before He realizes that the debt must be paid and the balance corrected?" (This usually kills the conversation.)
It's tempting to tell people that they don't know what real pain is. But the man of science seeks to explain, not to judge. When there is a psychological difference between individuals -- on the one hand, individuals who proactively endeavor to see themselves as "traumatized", who know how to take advantage of the appearance of weakness, who derive a secret pleasure from reliving every slight and wallowing in every painful memory, and on the other hand, individuals who resist the category of Trauma and who feel that the ground will fall out from underneath them if they do not project an image of strength at all costs, who are enticed by the idea of "invincibility" (regardless of the underlying material reality), who have no way of measuring their own worth without the presence of inferiors to serve as a foil (and before you draw any hasty conclusions, there are plenty of men in the former category and women in the latter) -- it is natural to wish to inquire into its origin. Why the difference? Whence?
I don't mean to deny the reality of PTSD, symptoms of which were recorded in the medical literature as far back as ancient Greece, as a mechanistic biological response to extreme injury. But the contemporary concept of Trauma is different -- it requires no specific observable pattern of behavior or disability, only the attestation of the individual. Human lives were historically filled with a great deal more famine, disease, and death than they are at present, but solemn intonations about how the weight of your personal burdens have permanently impacted your ability to lead a tolerable existence were comparatively rare. Thus we can infer that the concept of Trauma, as well as the practice of the telling of the traumatic narrative, are the results of historical and social processes -- created, not eternal.
Recently there was a post on the front page about how time seems to flow faster as you age. This, as far as I can tell, is a human universal. The author's further claim, however, that "childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that is difficult for the rest of life to match", is rather not a human universal. You find this out quickly when you start to ask different people how they subjectively relate to memory and the passage of time. For some, there is an unbroken chain of continuity between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood -- they've had the same underlying "essence" the whole time, it's all equally real and vital, all part of the same process of development (and you might naturally expect childhood memories to be particularly important under this model, since it is childhood that lies at the origin of this one chain of being). For others, the leaps and breaks are more discontinuous, salience is determined by different criteria. In my own case, the "center of narrative gravity", the center of narrative vibrancy, is a sliding window that mainly focuses on the last 5-10 years, and the further back in time you go, the more it feels like those memories belong to a different life entirely. I have been "born" several times, and probably will be born several more.
There is a great deal of individual variation in the perception of time, not only in the speed of its flow, but in its global geometry, its peaks and valleys. For some, there is a constant tension as the past and future continuously try to contract themselves into the present to form a single point; for others, no such issue can ever arise, because only the present exists. You can collect memories like documents in a file cabinet, taking great care of your ever expanding and carefully organized collection, or you can collect them like drops of water in a bucket, letting them become indistinct as they swirl around and blur together. For many individuals, there is a deeply felt sense that they just are the specific narrative weaved together by happenstance out of the various incidental concrete events of their lives (as opposed to say, being a disembodied Cartesian cogito, or a set of abstract principles for reasoning and operation, or an anointed soul with a unique destiny, or...); this is where their center of being lies. Memories, even seemingly trifling memories, or memories that would be better off forgotten, leave deep indentations and are constantly revisited and tended too, because it is just this fabric of memories that constitutes the fabric of subjectivity itself in these cases.
We can now offer the working hypothesis that those who find it appealing to organize their experience in terms of Trauma (as opposed to the menagerie of other concepts we have available for navigating suffering and dissatisfaction) are those who experience exactly this kind of subjectivity. The traumatic narrative would then be the personalized expression of a deeply felt subjective truth, a unique perspective on the world given form and made manifest in material reality -- in other words, Art. And the public telling of the traumatic narrative would be a communal art form to supplant earlier and outmoded forms like the folk song or the heroic myth. Whereas earlier communal forms, often in closer alliance with religion, focused on general abstract truths or the history and destiny of the community as a whole, the traumatic narrative places the contingent individual and his contingent narrative at the center -- and why shouldn't it? It's perfectly in line with the historical shift announced by Descartes and Kant, the transition from ancient and scholastic philosophy to modern philosophy, the abandonment of Virtue and Being in favor of Freedom and The Subject. There should be no concerns about the decline of culture; culture only changes forms, taking on new appearances that would seem strange and foreign to earlier eras. Everyone is an artist and everyone has the means to share their creations, which turns contemporary discourse into an assemblage of the bountiful fruits of the imagination.
Again quoting the author of the previously linked post:
Everyone has their own personal mythology of course, but not all mythologies are constructed in the same way. For some, everything of mythological significance is on the sensual surface of the event; for others, the event is mere material for the construction of an original narrative. And other mythologies are just stillborn. Broader theories of cultural dynamics are impossible without first getting clear on the functioning of these mechanics on an individual level.
This is often raised as a point (alongside the Herodotus quote that is used to back it up for evidence) but the reality is far more interesting - there doesn't seem to be compelling evidence for the existence of PTSD in anything other than highly rare cases in the ancient and even medieval periods. PTSD is real, but it is not a simple correlation between experiencing death/danger -> PTSD, which raises some really interesting points about the nature of human trauma and experience that might tie into your argument.
I'm paraphrasing the arguments of Bret Devereaux here, who did a far better review of the evidence and lack thereof in this post, which is well worth a read for further detail, but anyway in summary:
First, PTSD is a very serious diagnostic term, which goes beyond experiencing grief or shame about a past event or an anxiety around entering a dangerous situation. PTSD requires:
If you go looking for something in history, you'll find stories that could resemble the above here and there, the most famous being Herodotus' one. Quoting Bret:
Taking a step back, if PTSD was common this seems impossible. A majority of adult free males in many of these societies experienced combat for several century periods in our sample (during the Second Punic war, only a few thousand out of a body of 150,000 eligible men avoided serving). It's unlikely that such societies would put any possible PTSD symptoms in their victory speeches, but we have a huge body of other material where symptoms might appear if they are common (medical texts, private texts, histories where the conquered are discussed, candid advice for Abbots dealing with knights retiring to monasteries etc.) and there is... nothing. Societies might not want these stories front and center, but plenty of things that were embarrassing were still recorded. If PTSD occurred at modern rates it should be everywhere and impossible to brush under the carpet (like in WW1), instead there is simply very little to suggest PTSD was anything more than incredibly rare in a world where violence was very common.
There are a few theories as to why. I think it might be something along the lines of how violence was considered at least for part of the period - a necessary part of masculinity and a good thing and uplifting, rather than a burden that some must carry for society - but that can't be all of it. Possibly the universality of the experience of combat in peers helped (if you fought, it was highly likely you had a lot of peers that did too that you could relate to), and the positive social status of veterans (no Vietnam war protests in Republican Rome, and again combat was viewed as a positive source of virtue not a pollutant of the soul). Interestingly, they also commonly had rituals for entering and exiting military modes to civilian ones, which perhaps allowed some compartmentalization. It might also be the nature of modern combat - artillery, ambush, IED, long periods on the front in danger but not quite sure when, but this is also difficult to be certain on - sieges had a fair amount of the above and were the modal form of warfare for periods. We kind of just do not know why it was so low.
However, I do think it's very interesting in general - I would say that PTSD as a response to trauma is certainly not a sign of moral failing (it's closer to altitude sickness, a bit of a dice roll - I have ancestors who fought in both WW1 and WW2 and loved combat despite repeated wounds), but rates can change and we don't understand so much about it. Pushing people away from it at the margin without returning to a warrior society like Rome seems an achievable goal, but that would require a big change in lots of our thinking - I'm really interested how we might do so though.
Could have just been a mistake on my part! I don't have the historical expertise to weigh in further.
I do know that the concept of "war neurosis" was known to Freud, so the concept at least predates our "modern" (post-WW2) culture.
No no not at all, I absolutely assumed that it must be true that PTSD has been with us everywhere before I read Bret's argument, and maybe someone here has something that in convincing the other way - for what it is worth I am not a historian and I assume that PTSD symptoms must have emerged before WW1 more commonly than reported, but that does seem to be the big break when it became impossible to ignore - followed by later developments like Vietnam that Scott discusses.
In many ways I find its relative absence more interesting in many ways, and it might give us clues as to why people experience it if we can explain the reason it emerged.
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When listening to Daniele Bolelli's podcast on conquest of Mexico by Cortez, he mentioned first hand description of PTSD by conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wrote about it in his memoirs Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. Here is the relevant excerpt from page 115 of second volume:
There definitely are more PTSD-like descriptions of especially brutal fights from history, especially from prolonged fightings. I think it is related to continuous stress such as in trenches of WW1 moreso than just one battle or even series of battles. For instance Jan Sobieski describes sense of hyper-vigilance of people he liberated from Turks in Vienna, who were still on the verge of panic even after the Turks were defeated.
I always love a good conquistador story - in some ways they're the closest thing we have to experiencing actual alien invasions and both Mexico and Peru saw stories that are better than most fiction. I would advise everyone to read the Peru one for sure - literally a few hundred men with a few horses soloed tens of thousands of soldiers with no native support - it's fairly wild.
Back to your point, I think this is where the clinical definitions of PTSD come in that I linked to before. PTSD is not being afraid, or guilty, or experiencing agitation seeing your comrades get sacrificed one by one by people you cannot stop and then going to fight them anyway. I am not a psychiatrist, but as I understand it PTSD goes much much beyond that, it's post for a start, and your Spaniard exhibits fear during a multi day battle in the Mexican capital that he masters and fights on to victory in the campaign. He meets critera A - experiencing trauma, but that's kind of a baseline of being in combat. However, the others are clearly not met, remembering an old fear during a multi day battle as a soldier is extremely far from PTSD and I encourage the reader to run down the list for themselves to see the stark differences. I see no "Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning after the traumatic event(s) occurred" exactly the opposite there, he's discussing it and saying I was afraid, it was correct to be, but we overcame. Also, no "Negative alterations in cognitions and mood associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning or worsening after the traumatic event(s) occurred, as evidenced by two (or more) of the following:" for an extended period afterwards, and the same for all the other markers - this is someone overcoming an understandable fear in the immediate term, not PTSD.
I would also caution you to read Bret's admonition again about defining the strength of evidence you would need prior to your search - you are going to see historical evidence of people following battles, near misses, sieges etc. being on edge and jumpy, especially if the danger/war is still present. That is not PTSD, it is being a sensible human, unless it goes into the clinical territory above. Civilians following a siege would be prime material for PTSD, but as far as I understand we do not see it nearly as much as in modern times (Malta being a classic too where it is absent), and the silence is very very interesting. Certainly SOME must have met the threshold for PTSD, the Siege of Vienna would be a prime candidate to cause it and I would assume that rates climbed well before WW1, but there is still a hole where the evidence would be if it was in any way common.
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I had an interesting experience this year on the topic. I'd always thought of myself as a Trauma-free guy, I've had a lot of bad shit in life roll right off my back (now, the cringe moments I remember are a different thing - "hey, remember when you mixed up Colin Firth and Colin Farrell in front of your high school crush? Or when you told a table full of people that Wes Anderson directed Trainspotting?"). But at the start of 2025 I slipped in an ice storm, seriously injured myself, and took about six hours to get seen and fentanyl'd by the doctors, would rate it number one most physically painful experience of my life (maybe in top ten most painful experiences if you include women and hangovers). I didn't think much about the incident for quite a while, since I was focused on rehab, but I found that occasionally, when I passed the place in question, walked down dodgy stairs, or when ice came back on the street and I had to cross it, I'd feel an entirely non-voluntary twinge of discomfort/fear/pain. Never more than a twinge, but a very noticeable one precisely because it was so non-voluntary. I can absolutely see how with other personality types, particularly with more serious traumas, this becomes the kernel of some kind of crippling phobia, if you ruminate on it and let it spiral in intensity instead of shrugging it off. Not saying all Trauma is like that, but now I've seen the involuntary mechanism up close it seems to me a fair bit of Trauma is a bad way of responding to something real in the mind rather than a purely constructed narrative.
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People tend to interpret their experiences in terms of the language they are familiar with. We don't just design our concepts to fit our experiences, but retrofit our experiences to fit our concepts.
Example: some years ago I was in a church group and we discussed this article. The short summary is that it's an article by an evangelical woman discussing her experience of PMS, which she describes in biblical terms as a 'fight with the flesh'. 'The flesh' is a category in Pauline theology that tends to denote bodily urges or impulses, especially impulses to sin, which he negatively contrasts with the spirit. The author suggests (and I tentatively agree) that there is a useful lesson here for everyone, male or female, because even those of us who don't get PMS nonetheless struggle with unchosen impulses that come from our hormones. The group that I was in, however, was appalled by this article, and felt that it was patriarchal, misogynistic, and so on. I was confused. As a man, I obviously can't experience PMS, and for that reason I hesitate to judge someone who experiences it as part of her struggle in the flesh. However, to people without a Christian background, the language probably seems even more bizarre.
(In that specific example I think my fellows were probably just engaged in reflexive sneering at evangelicals. It's not really about the author's experiences, or what she finds helpful. It's about Those People being bad.)
Charitably, I try to interpret young people using 'trauma' in this very expansive way the same way that I would interpret this woman using 'the flesh' in an expansive way. It is language borrowed from a larger meaning-making structure (a mythology, in OP's language; a 'religion', if you must) that they believe in. These people probably aren't thinking of their lives as a spiritual struggle with a fleshly body corrupted by original sin, but they do have a guiding narrative of their own, of a kind of authentic self damaged by psychic injuries or 'traumas' which must be gently coaxed into flourishing.
This narrative might be bad on its own terms, of course. If you ask me, I think it's a kind of generalisation of a therapeutic model of care to the whole life, and that generalisation is bad. Therapeutic care has a place, but it should not be all of life. Even so, understanding that it's part of a whole system or language of belief is useful for contextualising what it is that they're saying with "do you have any traumas?"
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Not so clear-cut, and a major weak link. First of all we really, really don't have a very good sense of what most people think and feel for very much of history, due to large disparities in literacy and record-keeping and record preservation. Although historians like to pretend otherwise, we still end up adding in at least a bit of presentism and tend to extrapolate current understandings of 'eternal' human nature backwards in time. Second of all, I'm not convinced of how good your portrayal of "permanently impacted your ability to lead a tolerable existence" is for these purposes. I like the phrase, but "tolerable" is a notoriously wiggly word. Latent as well is a false assumption that historical humans had no method of permanent-trauma therapy at all. It may well be that modern ways to deal with "Trauma" are worse, or the contextual experience of modern life creates more Trauma naturally. As such I think I'd like a slightly more elucidated definition of what you're considering Trauma?
Otherwise I quite like your post. I tend to agree that broadly speaking there is a class of people who increasingly utilize traumatic moments or memories in their self-definitions and life stories in prominent ways. I also personally think this is a poor mental model and one that generally leads to unhappiness. At the same time, it's worth noting that there's a bit of a neurobiological element lurking around too. It's literally true that repeatedly recalled memories are continuously modified upon recall and moreover that those memories also tend to gain strength as well. The degree to which this is true for more general 'thought patterns' is to my understanding not at all established, so scientifically-rooted approaches to 'therapy' are likewise still in a somewhat infant and crude state (self-evidenced by outright contradictions between various types of cognitive-thought therapy that science finds itself imperfectly situated to assess, if such is even possible)
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I resonate with this and a lot of the replies, being someone who has kind of gone in and out of the trauma narrative. I would characterize the problem we have in front of us as not having a great paradigm for getting people through generations of "my parents are emotionally-distant, lying bullies with/without an addiction problem" combined with "I am emotionally distant, I have to lie/bully others when they say things that confront my weaknesses, and I may/may not have an addiction problem too." I think part of the story is that as life has become more comfortable, these aspects in people are less likely to be aggravated by traumatic external events, and it doesn't seem unreasonable that this could result in people sort of settling into emotionally-distant lives kind of devoid of color, not knowing what they're missing, but raising kids who do feel something missing, finding the trauma narrative, which is directionally true in a sense of putting blame on parents depriving them of something.
And the trauma narrative is seductive via providing victimhood, because these kids are basically looking for relief and via CBT etc. are being told that actually you need to opposite, you need to be more resilient and deal with this as part of life. I think making stoicism attractive is something masculine men and old been-through-hell lady-boss women are better at doing, but those types are basically absent from education and therapy roles in lieu of the "sensitive" types who I feel like subconsciously get into these roles because it benefits the weak-minded to kind of be able to sap energy from children via malformed projections of "concern" and "compassion" that are more like a form of soma than something that would help the kid.
Which is all to say I do think it's a real problem and when people say they are traumatized there is something to be taken seriously there, even if you don't necessarily want to validate their view of it.
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Huh. Learn something new every day.
"An Athenian, Epizelos son of Kouphagoras, was fighting as a brave man in the battle when he was deprived of his sight, though struck or hit nowhere on his body, and from that time on he spent the rest of his life in blindness. I have heard that he tells this story about his misfortune: he saw opposing him a tall hoplite, whose beard overshadowed his shield, but the phantom passed him by and killed the man next to him." - Herodotus, "Histories"
I know "PTSD" used to be called "combat hysteria", then "war neurosis", then "battle hypnosis" and "shell shock", and with one name or another it seems to have been common for well over a century ... but I'd been told it's hard to find under any name in accounts of ancient wars. It was tempting to wildly speculate whether the reason for such a strange interesting fact might be technological (after explosive overpressure we can see physical brain bruising, not just psychological damage; we now experience most casualties from impersonal random explosions, not other humans in direct combat) or cultural (we now see a diagnosis of psychological trauma as a first step toward healing, rather than an insulting additional attack to be avoided; we now see war as a necessary evil, rather than a glorious good) or social (the ancient veterans that historians focus on were often large proportions of the upper class; modern veterans are more likely to be isolated). But it's easy to forget that often the explanation for a strange interesting fact is that false and exaggerated "facts" can go viral if they're sufficiently strange and interesting.
Interestingly this seems not to be the case, which I think perhaps raises far more questions than it closes. See my post above here for the full argument - but on Herodotus:
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If you tell people that they are traumatized they will feel traumatized. It is a tempting framework with which to interpret the world because it grants unlimited unverifiable victimhood, which is the most coveted status of all for whatever reason.
I remember once I was talking to two nice, young, Mormon missionaries out of curiosity. I asked them what spiritual experiences they had which convinced them of their religion’s truth. One described to me that in high school she was in danger of failing her physics class right before the final exam. She prayed about it and felt an intuition that she should go to the professor and ask him for any extra prep materials, she interpreted this intuition as the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Upon visiting him he supplied her with some additional practice tests which she credited with helping her pass the class.
What she had was a normal human experience, 1) Not doing well in the class 2) Ask the teacher for additional assistance 3) Do better. An atheist would have this exact same experience without the Holy Spirit factoring in at all. But as they say, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. When you are given an explanatory framework with which to understand the world, unsurprisingly you find confirming experiences everywhere you go.
Years ago at my first job my manager, an Indian woman, came to me and said in hushed tones “You know Daguerrean, this company has a real problem with recognizing women.” She went on to describe a slate of thoroughly normal complaints that every employee can empathize with, feeling underappreciated, her good ideas and hard work unrecognized, ignored in meetings and so forth. I mumbled something in agreement with her but internally I was thinking, “Uh, don’t you know everyone feels this way?” It’s just that White men aren’t given a framework that says every personal or professional setback is a result of an omnipresent and malicious “ism” seeking to destroy your life.
It reminds me of a TikTok trend, now a few years back, where parents would pretend to bump a baby’s head and fawn over it. Unsurprisingly the babies would often react as if they were experiencing real pain, crying and holding their heads. Adults are no different.
I think we aren’t (collectively) asking ourselves enough if the explanatory frameworks we give people are actually good. Is it better for people to believe that anything good that happens to them is the work of the Holy Spirit? Is it good if every professional setback is interpreted as evidence of racism/sexism? Is it good if people are reinterpreting every negative childhood experience as trauma that has scarred them for life?
How far we have come from St. Paul on the road to Damascus.
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I think this is generally true, but I think a lot of the posts about it on Reddit and elsewhere are astroturfed bullshit to cover for the fact that our collective time perception got royally fucked by the COVID lockdowns. Or perhaps by dark physics weirdness.
I don't know if they're astroturfed, but there is no shortage of written material by people trying to rationalize them getting screwed out of 6 months to 2 years+ (depending on location) of their lives.
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My first thought is that heroic myths often do involve stories of traumatic childhoods. And this trauma is not merely incidental, but is often a key part of what motivates the hero (to seek revenge, or whatever). So, what's new? Perhaps the absence of catharsis? Or the sense that trauma itself is what confers moral worth? (If the Romans honored Romulus, it was not because of his trauma!)
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