The irony of Maté's take on trauma -and to an extent the misappropriations from van Der Kolk-, is that he is right, it is "what goes on inside of you": "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." -Frankl
It's not necessarily what happened to us, but the story we tell ourselves about it.
This is consistent in the literature when comparing objective and subjective experiences of trauma. We also see it in matched events between sexes and the difference in subsequent pathologizing of those events.
Maté's insistence that the wound is some persistent and insurmountable wound, like a laceration to the mind, is where things fall apart and it is a narrative which serves as a net harm to how societies perceive and approach trauma and its care.
Excellent video. Thanks for your courage in addressing this topic. As you were talking I had an image of this DX as being like a soft and cushy cage that holds people who are not aware that they are being held. A good deal of the problems you describe so well are due to our mental health services having become so feminized. It's now all about safety. It used to be that therapy was indeed about safety, but the safety was meant to give the patient a place to re-experience the trauma and by confronting and re-experiencing the problem would lessen. Now safety means the opposite, it is away to AVOID the problem! Coloring books, cookies, puppies.
Go figure. Thanks Hannah for an excellent look at this.
This might shock Hannah, but I actually agree with her >and< Gabor. I think we hafta approach this stuff on two levels: on the one hand, it's important to acknowledge and learn to manage all the accumulated pressure that acts on us over time. On the other hand, it's >just< as important to build up a sense that we're >capable< of managing that pressure. By all means, have a field day connecting all the dots from your past, but then ya gotta still envision yourself as someone who can work through that stuff.
Today, people are being >conditioned< via social reward to be demonstrably fragile. If they were just pretending to be that way , that would be bad enough, but it's even worse because they become internally convinced of the fragility they're acting out. It's like contemporary culture has incentivized people into a mass state of learned helplessness.
I use the words "pressure" and "manage" here on purpose: I have no issue with the concept of trauma, but I agree with Hannah that people are over-using it to the point where it's losing meaning. And people need to re-learn how to >manage< whatever's acting on them, be it an external or internal source of pressure.
The irony of Maté's take on trauma -and to an extent the misappropriations from van Der Kolk-, is that he is right, it is "what goes on inside of you": "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." -Frankl
It's not necessarily what happened to us, but the story we tell ourselves about it.
This is consistent in the literature when comparing objective and subjective experiences of trauma. We also see it in matched events between sexes and the difference in subsequent pathologizing of those events.
Maté's insistence that the wound is some persistent and insurmountable wound, like a laceration to the mind, is where things fall apart and it is a narrative which serves as a net harm to how societies perceive and approach trauma and its care.
This is a great video. Trauma was an interpretive framework in theology for a while, might still be. Absolutely crazy!
Excellent video. Thanks for your courage in addressing this topic. As you were talking I had an image of this DX as being like a soft and cushy cage that holds people who are not aware that they are being held. A good deal of the problems you describe so well are due to our mental health services having become so feminized. It's now all about safety. It used to be that therapy was indeed about safety, but the safety was meant to give the patient a place to re-experience the trauma and by confronting and re-experiencing the problem would lessen. Now safety means the opposite, it is away to AVOID the problem! Coloring books, cookies, puppies.
Go figure. Thanks Hannah for an excellent look at this.
Thank you Hannah, I learned a lot today.
This might shock Hannah, but I actually agree with her >and< Gabor. I think we hafta approach this stuff on two levels: on the one hand, it's important to acknowledge and learn to manage all the accumulated pressure that acts on us over time. On the other hand, it's >just< as important to build up a sense that we're >capable< of managing that pressure. By all means, have a field day connecting all the dots from your past, but then ya gotta still envision yourself as someone who can work through that stuff.
Today, people are being >conditioned< via social reward to be demonstrably fragile. If they were just pretending to be that way , that would be bad enough, but it's even worse because they become internally convinced of the fragility they're acting out. It's like contemporary culture has incentivized people into a mass state of learned helplessness.
I use the words "pressure" and "manage" here on purpose: I have no issue with the concept of trauma, but I agree with Hannah that people are over-using it to the point where it's losing meaning. And people need to re-learn how to >manage< whatever's acting on them, be it an external or internal source of pressure.