Not Everything That Hurts Is 'Trauma'

Resistance and reality denial make us sicker in a world where victimhood reigns and emotional strength is uncool

Image by kp yamu Jayanath from Pixabay

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Oh, the ‘fundamental violation’ of Pap smears.

An Eva Kurilova article mentioning female-born, now non-binary Maia Kobabe, the ‘e/em/eir’ author of Genderqueer, made me smile at the phrase. A quote from the book’s description describes the ‘trauma’ and violation Kobabe felt from Pap smears.

Just reading about it made me want to squirm. They ain’t fun.

The Pap smear is the only part of a gynecological exam I dislike. For a minute or so you’re on your back with your hoo-ha spread by a cold speculum while the doctor inserts a lengthy Q-tip and mines for gold or something. It doesn’t hurt but it’s uncomfortable and fundamentally frightening on a deeper level. For just a few moments I’m entirely vulnerable and exposed. I can’t help but think of horror movies.

I get Kobabe’s discomfort with Pap smears but I wouldn’t call it ‘traumatizing’ or a ‘violation’. I consent to it every two years, after all.

It’s all in how you look at it.

A few moments of discomfort on my back is a small price to pay for the much more serious potential discomfort of dying of cervical cancer.

Thank the Gods for modern medicine, and anyway, if I had one cancer prevention procedure I would dispense with, I’d choose the colonoscopy. You wanna talk invasive???

But even then, it’s an annoyingly inconvenient price to pay for avoiding butt-related cancers.

I wonder if Maia Kobabe might make her Pap smear experience worse because she’s already in denial of her biological sex, but it’s still nothing to look forward to no matter your state of personal acceptance.

It demonstrates a truth that eludes many in our modern age: Not all trauma is thrust upon us. Sometimes we create it ourselves.

Trauma is inevitable. How we frame it matters

Human beings can’t avoid trauma. It’s encoded into the human experience.

It begins in infancy and sometimes even before. Stress hormones impact a baby’s developing brain at a deep level by rewiring their neural pathways and priming it for fear. It can even impede development of the cerebral cortex in some cases. Maternal stress hormones affect the fetus during pregnancy.

We can’t avoid mini-traumas or larger ones, but we can control how we handle them. Viktor Frankl’s globally beloved classic Man’s Search for Meaning details his experiences in several Nazi concentration camps. He lost everything: His wife, his family, and his research which the Nazis destroyed. He described the prisoners and how he could identify those who had the will to survive, who didn’t, and exactly when they commended themselves to death. Facing one of the most critical traumas of all time, those who weren’t murdered often survived by choice—with emotional resilience and not giving up.

Frankl went on to publish 39 books, re-build his ‘logotherapy’ research, and framed his trauma in healthier ways rather than allow himself to be consumed by bitterness, hatred, or learned helplessness.

It’s hard to imagine how any of us could survive something like that, raised as we are in comparatively safe North America where our ‘traumas’ are minor compared to those who faced Nazi hospitality. I’ve been friendly with a Vietnamese woman whose family escaped the Communists in the mid-’70s, and a woman who navigated gunfire helping her little brother escape to safety when Saddam invaded Kuwait. A former co-worker escaped Rwanda in the ‘90s. I can’t imagine how I would react in those circumstances. Or even if I would survive.

Traumas are always made worse by human action and inaction. Research shows that people who experience great loss in a natural disaster are traumatized, but not nearly as much as by those for whom the government response is inadequate, like after the incompetent way the Bush administration handled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Depression, anxiety, fear and resentment is compounded following a natural catastrophe in which the government responds poorly. Otherwise, what happened is merely an ‘act of God’, or in modern parlance, ‘shit happens’.

The emotionally resilient look at traumatic events in different ways to reduce the sense of trauma.

Fighting reality makes it worse

The Buddhist teacher and author Tara Brach teaches that ‘Pain x Resistance = Suffering.’ We can’t avoid suffering but we can compound it or relieve it. Reality resistance makes it worse.

I have a friend who hails from a famously warm country. He’s been living in Canada for twenty-seven years but he just has this thing about winter. He’s loved the overly-hot weather we’ve had this summer and mentions mournfully that summer is almost over and how much he hates cold weather. “It’s a pain,” I acknowledge, since I dislike having to figure out every day what I’m going to wear, how heavily I should dress, whether I need galoshes or not. But, I also recognize that I live in Canada, which I chose to move to (as did he, a refugee from violence), and that cold weather is part of the bargain. I pointed out crappy weather is a small price to pay for freedom. While his country isn’t war-torn anymore, conditions exist in which it could break out again. Which is why I assume he hasn’t moved back.

He increases his suffering by resisting cold weather rather than accepting it.

The motivational speaker Louise Hay found a way to relieve the aggravation she experienced from paying bills—a not-uncommon human grievance. She re-framed her resistance by paying them with gratitude that she was able to afford these services, and appreciating the people who trusted her to pay on time. I can’t actually ‘rejoice’ as she does when I pay bills, but it does help to remember that I’m not living hand-to-mouth as others are forced to do, and it makes it easier.

But today, for some, ‘trauma’ has become the cool thing to acquire, and if you don’t have any actual trauma, you can find it anywhere, like images in clouds.

Need some suffering? Ask TikTok!

‘Trauma’ is popular and has become conveniently appropriated to excuse and deflect personal responsibility. One can manufacture it for sympathy, for example.

A few years ago I took interest in a minor celebrity scandal centred around Tony award-winning Broadway star Alice Ripley, who was accused by several fans of ‘grooming’ them, although they couldn’t clearly articulate for what, and ‘using’ them for their attention, thereby sending some into therapy. They were mostly confused young adolescent girls attracted to the popular performer, some of whom might have not been aware yet they were gay. The story drew my attention for two reasons: The fact that someone was getting ‘cancelled’ for nebulous reasons again by the usual culprits, confused teenage girls; and also because I went to college with Alice, and took two dance classes with her although I never spoke to her; I was jealous of her beauty and dance skills.

The Daily Beast ran a lengthy article about the girls’ complaints against her, which mostly involved attention from Alice, but apparently, not enough. Alice didn’t respond to the allegations, although apparently the Beast reached out. I researched further.

Alice’s groupies never accused her of molesting them, although one accused her of an unexpected, but not seemingly unwanted kiss. The fan’s gripe seemed not to be lack of consent, but lack of romantic continuance. Many were clearly hurt by Alice’s inability or unwillingness to spend more time with them; and they took their revenge on social media, trying to make her out as some sort of monster to generate sympathy and hurt her back. Her fans were young, impressionable, starstruck, and infused with genderqueer ideology, which drives and reinforces a victimhood mentality.

The fortunately-unsuccessful cancellation campaign against Alice struck me as exaggerated, such as it was on Twitter and TikTok, ground zero for trauma farming. Imagine going into therapy because a celebrity didn’t pay enough attention to you.

In a Psychology Today article, How TikTok and Twitter Get Trauma So Wrong, a trauma-trained therapist says she’s ‘angered’ by trauma misinformation online. ‘Trauma’ becomes an excuse for everything, she points out, like perfectionism or watching a favored TV show repeatedly. If you don’t know what your trauma is, you can peruse the TikTok library or comb your childhood for reasons to join the club. Picking out one particular cause to explain anything wrong with your life, including habits or personality quirks you didn’t even know were ‘wrong’, is something we’ve seen already with social media’s years-long campaign to pathologize every unhappy feeling a child or teenager has as ‘born in the wrong body’. Before that, it did exactly the same with anorexia.

Hurt feelings and misunderstood connections, once considered normal, now become cause célèbres when one party conflates the two, as we saw in the Aziz Ansari fuss a few years ago.

As Yale psychologist Molly Crockett pointed out in a New York Times article on the rise of ‘trauma talk’, “Algorithms can’t distinguish between what is proportionate or disproportionate to the original transgression.”

Trauma gets clicks, likes, shares, and maybe even turns one into a star or an influencer. Any sort of discomfort one human being feels toward another is explained by trauma or it becomes the trauma.

Trauma has become such a coolness marker among the young that even when they were raised by good parents, they find reasons to label them as ‘toxic’ so they can leave them behind and join the confederacy of pseudo-traumatized dunces.

In Anne Bauer’s Persuasion article America’s Families Are Not Okay, she describes a young woman who cut off her family over genuine abuse and dysfunction, which made her friends from happy homes excited, almost jealous of her. They talked about their ‘toxic’ parents, but their reasons seemed awfully ‘dumbass’, like a dad who disagreed with them on climate change.

Family estrangement is always tragic, but it’s amplified when it’s fake or manufactured. Bad parents often know on some level that they’re the reason their child no longer comes for Christmas; good parents are horribly hurt, trying to figure out why their child hates them so.

One can’t help but wonder what will happen to those generations who have permanently altered their families and relationships, even if they eventually reconcile.

Blinded by the night

What does it say about our society when so many thrive on dysfunction, and reject what is good and loving?

It’s not just young people driving themselves off a cliff who seek dysfunction if it’s missing in their lives; we see it in adults too, as I detailed recently in my article about anxiety junkies. Rather than look for the positive in the world’s news, many prefer the darkness. It makes it more difficult to find healthy responses to global and local conflicts when we believe the worst about others, and do unto them before they do what we fear unto us.

Suffering is inevitable, but there’s still choice. We can’t cancel pain, but rather than seek the dark camaraderie of others, we can resolve to suffer less rather than more.

When I’m not reducing my suffering with hilariously bad movies and the occasional ice-cream freakout, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.