What does it mean to resolve past trauma?
In a previous post I made a reference to the "past trauma construction of personality." I wanted to expand on the idea a bit here. I came across the phrase in a fairly crude meme, but it crystalized thoughts that I had been having for a long time. I cannot host images on BearBlog so I'll just quote it here. The quote itself is in response to the video game, "God of War: Ragnarok", which has become something of a cultural lightning rod in small corners of the very-online. The quote is attacking the cultural values of those who made the game, and is reproduced below:
It's a story of adulthood, growing up, and taking responsibility for your actions. Written by people who never grew up, stayed as old children, scheduled a re-occurring (sic) therapist session til the end of time, and accepted the "past trauma" construction of personality.
It's a story about being strong written by people who are weak and emotional. It's a story written by people who never have and will never have the courage or strength to use force to get what they want.
Now I want to caution, I think this quote is unnecessarily distraction. I don't think culture warring over a video game is really a worthwhile use of one's time, and I haven't played the game, and I don't really have a dog in this fight. But, what jumped out at me was that the commenter had coined a phrase which put a name thoughts I'd been having for a long time. ie, "the past trauma construction of personality."
In recent years, I think the idea that you need to "identify your trauma" or "deal with your trauma" has become nearly ubiquitous. See also, "Therapists and their obsession with root causes"
Accidental Freudians
In principle, Freud is taught in schools only for historical reasons; he founded the discipline, but his ideas have either been debunked or else have been improved upon so thoroughly that there's no reason to learn from Freud. I'm not editorializing here. This is how Freud was taught when I went to college. There is actually a holdout of die-hard Fruedians, but they are in the minority. Despite this, a lot of the old Freudian ideas seem to linger on. I know multiple people who went to therapy, and came back saying something like "I had no idea I had so much unresolved childhood trauma." The emphasis is partly mine, and I think the implication is obvious: they don't childhood trauma is nearly as prevalent as therapists and our wider culture would have us believe.
What I do think is that childhood is a difficult and impressionable time. Your parents stand like giants in your mind. You get quite old before you realize they're only human the same as anyone else. Even when you realize this, they still occupy a large place in your mind. I think going through puberty, and having all your classmates sort themselves into a status hierarchy is really difficult. I don't only think psychology is at play here; puberty is about the time that kids would need to start caring about their status, and I personally suspect that it's no accident that kids become so status-consciousness around the age of puberty.
I would also characterize the majority of teenage drama to really just be about vying for status. The ancestral environment was one where children grew up earlier, and where people tended to live in the same place they grew up for a very long time. What would your reputation be if you had stayed in the same town, and nearly everyone else had stayed with you? If your middle-school reputation had followed you into high school, your high school reputation had followed you into college, and so forth. If you were not given the relatively-new and modern multiple chances to reinvent yourself just by changing locales. In a world like that, those early battles for status could have outsized effects, metaphorically like compound interest.
I think it would be fair to say that this a traumatic time in some general sense. But, but I don't think it's "trauma" in the same way that something like parental divorce, physical abuse, etc is trauma. Nothing "went wrong" -- vying for status is meant to be stressful, and that felt stress is part of what motivates someone to vie for status. Falling towards the bottom of the hierarchy is of course also stressful. Outcomes in vying for status can be stressful. And of course, quite a bit of life is stressful. I think a lot of childhood can be quite stressful: learning how to share, how to compromise, forming your identity, dealing with your parents and their flaws. All of these are difficult, and I can really see why you would even want to talk to a therapist about these things.
But for most of us, in normal circumstances, I would not really characterize these as trauma.
Accidential Freudians are accidentally utopians
When I say that the normal difficulty of childhood is not trauma, that does not mean that I'm saying it's not difficult. I don't even think there's anything wrong with talking to a therapist about it. But I do think the accidental Freudians are accidentally putting the normal stresses of adolescence on a pedestal.
The accidental Freudians seem to believe you should have been able to get through childhood and adolescence without any stress. They seem to believe that unhappy childhood memories are proof that something has gone wrong. We must resolve the trauma for those who exist now, and prevent the trauma for those who exist in the future. So, the accidental Freudians are also accidental utopians. There's no world where childhood is not stressful. If you smooth the edges for children too aggressively, you introduce two different problems: you merely defer the stress until later, and you also set a much lower bar for what counts as stressful.
The accidental Freudians implicitly believe that you can resolve past trauma. I do wonder what they really mean by this. If your girlfriend breaks up with you, you may be very upset. If you have never heard of psychology and have very poor introspection, you will still feel better about this breakup over time. You'll think about it less, you'll miss her less. etc. The same is true for stupid middle school drama. It feels quite important at the time, but you've forgotten most of it by the time you're 30. You probably don't think about it at all. Again, this true even if you have never gone to therapy or done real introspection. Psychological "wounds" do just heal on their own over time.
The accidental Freudians seem to believe that this is not possible. Your trauma "lives" and festers in you until you "resolve your trauma." But what happens to a fight you had with a friend in middle school, and forgot about decades ago? There is some middle school drama that you could not even be prompted to remember; ie, it's not an obscured memory. It's full and truly gone. Does the trauma remain and help shape who you are? Is it a hidden memory, waiting to be recovered (ie, built anew) with hypnotherapy? I'm being a bit facetious here, but I think the accidental Freudians hold onto some of the old mysticism here. Some old wounds really do just fade away into the past.
Recall comes with risk.
What I think therapists do, often by accident, is to find the most meaningful events in your life, and put them under a magnifying glass. Much in the same way that you can get hoodwinked by a psychic, I think a therapist can accidentally wade into the same territory. It feel incredibly powerful to speak about the vulnerable, emotional times of your life with an accepting stranger. The emotional weight of that situation can make it feel more meaningful and true than I think a lot of people realize. My opinion here is probably controversial: You're getting an emotional high because you're sharing a deep moment with somebody; not because you're doing anything to resolve past trauma. Worse, what you may be doing is focusing on old, past wounds. Replaying them in the mind, enlarging them, refreshing them, and probably reinterpreting them. The deep emotional vulnerability in these situations lends itself quite well to reinterpretation. The emotion is a prompt that helps you rebuild the memory from a different (ie, more traumatic) frame of mind.
I've often wondered as a thought experiment about why some people are viciously racist when they live in racially-homogeneous areas. Just imagine: a stereotypical redneck, living in the country, mostly around other white people. If exposure to black people made people more racist, then you'd expect racist attitudes to be most prevalent in big cities. But, this is not really what we observe. Usually, people only want to fixate on the moral failing of racism. They're correct to describe it that way, but it ignores the obvious question. What is keeping the racism alive in someone who basically never needs to meet their perceived fear? The answer that I've arrived at is that they keep revisiting the racist thoughts in their head. They imagine some situation / problem / stereotype, and it upsets them. Upsetting thoughts don't fade as easily; they're reinforcing. My theory would be that for some racist people, their minds are on a bit of loop; constantly replaying their emotionally visceral racist fear and anger. Refreshing it, keeping it front of mind.
I would argue that it's possible to do the same thing with trauma. At least some people are not resolving it; they're refreshing it. They're keeping it top of mind. They're taking a memory that would have faded on its own, and continually reliving it; adding more color and more angst as the memory experiences slight permutations after years of recurring, emotional recall.