"ptsd is the reaction, not the event" oh yeah its all in my mind again. thanks.
it makes me feel so alone that this type of blatant bullshit isn't immediately clocked by everyone else.
oh i just realized the actual thing is "trauma is the reaction, not the event" not ptsd. well either way thanks it turns out its just my fucked up brain no matter what. natural disasters dont happen etc. fear is a lie and suffering is a choice and the root of the problem is my negative thoughts! very christian science of me.
Idk what context people say this in so idk if they are saying this to deliberately minimize the harm. But every single experience we have is a result of the interaction of external and internal factors. Just because trauma is something that happens inside your brain doesn’t mean it’s less real.
Anaphylactic shock is the body’s reaction to an external stimuli, and it’s often a reaction to something typically seen as nonthreatening, like a peanut or a shrimp. And yet it literally kills people, very rapidly and painfully. This goes for all pain and suffering and injury. It always happens because you are a creature that is built a certain way and experiences harm in certain scenarios. I hope that makes sense, I hope you can see what I’m trying to say. If we came across a creature that feels immense pain whenever it hears someone playing piano, it would be evil to knowingly expose them to piano music. There’s no such thing as a trivial cause of suffering. There’s just things that are commonly taken seriously and those that aren’t. If your trauma comes from something that’s rarely recognized as a potential source of suffering, that doesn’t make the suffering less serious. Even though all suffering is inherently a product of the brain. If someone came up and hacked off my limbs with a dull ax it would only hurt me because my brain is built in such a way that I feel pain and fear when the tissue of my body is manipulated in a certain way. All suffering is in the brain, and it’s always because of the way we’re constructed, and the experience of suffering and joy within an animal’s brain is also the only thing that actually matters in the world. So the experience of trauma doesn’t become less serious just because it’s a brain reaction
i agree with you essentially in principle, but the issue i have with saying that suffering primarily exists in the brain (or mind) is that psychiatry takes that to its cruel conclusion which is to say the root of the problem is inherently in the brain/mind. (you can find a good example of this in radical acceptance that says "pain + nonacceptance = suffering". no mention of events or circumstances or causes.)
so instead of acknowledging my mental illness (whether its depression or ptsd) as an understandable reaction to my material circumstances (severe abuse), they dismiss my factual reality and instead use therapy tools to try to get me to stop believing/thinking/feeling the reactions i have, while doing nothing to improve my circumstances (while also gaslighting me about my circumstances)
so you can see why i wish people would acknowledge that trauma is the event rather than say its the reaction, because that falls 100% in line with the regular prejudice and stereotypes about mental illness, that im just being hysterical for no good reason, that theres just something screwy with me in my mind. a belief that all of my mental health care professionals had too even though they arent supposed to. and so they attempt to change my mind with psychological violence rather than make any material difference to my actual reality.
so in short, you can see how "its all in your head" ends up being a tool of violence even if technically true to a degree.
I agree, but I’ve also come to see this as a natural outcome of people using the tools at their disposal. Most suffering is the result of the interaction of external stimuli and your body(including your brain)’s reaction to that stimuli. Therapists and people who focus on mental health are rarely going to say “I can’t help you because the source of your suffering is external and therefore not in my wheelhouse.” Instead they’ll say “well I don’t know how to help with the external stuff but I’ve trained for years on the internal stuff, so let’s see what we can do with that..?”
I’ve learned to expect this sort of thing from therapists and I think ultimately it’s because if you came to them, they take for granted that you want to focus on the areas they specialize in, and they specialize in changing yourself rather than your circumstances.
Like imagine you have some shrapnel embedded in your shoulder and every time you try to do your job as a lumberjack it causes you pain. If you go to someone who specializes in pain management they’ll give you painkillers. If you go to a vocational therapist they’ll try to help you find less physically strenuous employment. If you go to a shoulder surgeon they’ll try to remove the shrapnel. If you go to a physical therapist, they’ll try to help you fix your lifting technique. Everyone tries to solve the problem using the tools they have.
I think this is why so many therapists and psychiatrists hear “I’m suffering in my current circumstances” and react by trying to fiddle with your brain. They’re making assumptions about which approach you want to take based on the fact that you’re talking to a mental health professional. They are usually not trained to assess the situation and say “I can only come at this from one angle—is it the one you want? If not, what do you need instead?”
The best therapist I ever had was the one who heard me out and finally said “I don’t know if I can help because it doesn’t sound like your problems fall under the purview of therapy.” This sort of blunt admission is very unusual. Most of the time, the brain-fiddling people are just going to look at a problem and say “ok how can I fiddle with this brain so the person doesn’t suffer as much?”
It’s struck me that they actually have a lot in common with substance abusers, in that way. Both groups prioritize reducing the individual’s subjective experience of suffering, (often implicitly giving up on changing external circumstances) and they do not make it a priority to leave the brain’s current state intact. So if someone likes themself as they are and just wants to live in a place where they safely be themself, this approach can do more harm than good. Another thing I’ve said to a therapist in a moment of frustration is “if all I cared about was making myself feel better, I’d just do drugs.” But I have values like dignity and justice and freedom and truth and other things that I don’t want to compromise. I don’t want to make myself into someone who is unbothered by cruelty, I want to make my life into a life that does not contain cruelty. And a lot of therapists have trouble admitting that their training hasn’t prepared them to be of use in this scenario.
