We're All Mad Here

“Big T Trauma”, the logic goes, is for things that are “actually bad enough’, like war veterans or rape survivors. Or people who survive natural disasters or terrorist attacks or car accidents.*  “Little t trauma” is said to be for things like “interpersonal conflict”, infidelity, divorce, “financial worries or difficulty”, “legal trouble”, “death of a pet”, “bullying or harassment”, “loss of significant relationships”, or emotional abuse.*

And it’s bullshit.

*Examples taken from various articles on the subject I just looked up in preparation for this rant.

Plenty of people survive car accidents and sexual assault and war without lasting mental health issues.

The perceived severity of the traumatic event doesn’t actually matter. What matters is how your brain reacted to it.

You can have PTSD or other serious traumagenic disorders from bullying at school, or “just” emotional abuse, or neglect, or just from not having your needs met. If you’re marinating in stress long enough, it causes SO MANY problems.

Poverty is extremely traumatic! Your brain doesn’t necessarily understand the difference between “someone is routinely causing me serious physical harm” and “we run out of money for food by the third week of the month”. It just knows to interpret these things as threats to your continued survival. They cause you to produce stress hormones and other physiological responses. I’ve probably known people who have severe, ongoing issues due to just about everything on that list!

Your brain is trying to make sure you don’t die, and all the fucking logic in the world about “Well I wasn’t ACTUALLY in danger” or “Well she wouldn’t really have hit me” or “it was just kids being kids” doesn’t change that.

Every single trauma survivor I’ve ever known has thought that what happened to them Wasn’t Bad Enough to Count, because Other People Have it Worse. Every single one.

I think we’re so close to starting to realize that, as it turns out, a whole metric FUCKTON of people have experienced traumatic events and it’s affected a LOT more people than we initially believed. We’ve started to understand that it’s not just war vets who get PTSD.

But it’s like we’re desperate to come up with a reason that no, actually, it’s not that the systems we have in place routinely damage people severely - or that a lot of very common parenting techniques cause serious harm. We have to subdivide it further into little categories, and you should stop being so dramatic. OBVIOUSLY it that wasn’t bad enough. To be clear, I understand that this terminology was PROBABLY well-intentioned. “Look, a whole host of experiences can be trauma! We should acknowledge that!” - or at least I hope it was. But it’s that implied “[but obviously it’s not as bad as the people who have REAL problems. Don’t you know some people had to deal with TERRORISM!?]” that makes it bullshit.

People who are really struggling with awful, serious things already have enough trouble being taken seriously and taking their own pain seriously.

if something bad happens and you can step away from that situation and get immediate support from close people or mental health professionals, trauma can be overcome - but if it’s a situation you can’t easily escape, and/or you never get access to help processing what happened, that stuff can dig in and stay there your entire life, tainting all your choices

I was in an abusive relationship for 4 years and was lucky enough to get really great support when I was ready for it.

I had a really horrible upstairs neighbour for a year and even though I eventually moved to a lovely new flat the trauma from this affected me for far longer and far more severely.

"Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion."

and

"There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem."

Well, that tracks for a Nolan film -

"The couple have no chemistry and nothing in common. Throughout his wanderings, the uxorious Odysseus clings to a little doll figure, intended to represent his wife (like the spinning top clutched by Leonardo di Caprio in Inception); the real woman is barely more interesting."

Yikes -

"If you’re not going to compose a script in Homeric Greek, or even in metrical English verse, you might as well use something like conversational American English. But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat."

The lines she calls out in this section will probably make a least a couple of my friends laugh incredulously -

"I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script."

....oh my GOD, EMILY -

"The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt."

I cannot express to you how FAST it has gone. I grew up in a world that does not exist now. We're starting on the path to reverse it, globally. You might not know how much solar has EXPLODED in the last decade or two. It's gone from a side thing, a weirdo novelty that was just Not Viable... to whole countries investing in infrastructure. but we have to keep fighting big oil and fascism everywhere we can in order to keep on this road to a new better less scorching burning earth.

Except they’re not giving actual valuable feedback, because being critical of something does not actually mean having constructive critical feedback.

Being able to offer constructive feedback is a skill. It doesn’t mean “having a negative opinion.”

You don’t need to be a professional writer or editor, but you do preferably need to have a basic understanding of technical writing skill, an understanding of the genre you are critiquing and a very basic grasp that just because you do not like something, does not make something objectively bad.

Messaging me to tell me you find something “cringe” isn’t valuable feedback. That’s you going out of your way to make sure a stranger knows you don’t like them.

Doubling down and emailing me back to tell me you “just wanted to help,” like help where? Where was the feedback?

What am I supposed to do with that except feel bad and stop writing?

You knew what you were doing and I will hold that mirror up. If the reflection you see makes you uncomfortable, that’s on you.

- -

Also, as a wider note: don’t do this in general, don’t tag or email authors in negative reviews.