"The human experience itself now carries a pathologizing label. The current trauma culture has replaced complexity with fatalism-the belief that whenever we feel pain, it means the nervous system has been activated and therefore we are damaged, traumatized, and powerless. This reductionism hides an important fact: the human system contains just as many-if not more-preventive and reparative mechanisms as it does survival ones."
"The modern use of the word began with the inclusion of PTSD in the DSM-III (1980). Its first diagnostic criterion was clear: a traumatic event was one outside the range of usual human experience, involving threat to life, serious harm, or witnessing death. Trauma had a specific and bounded meaning. Soon after, clinicians observed that people exposed to chronic threat-rather than a single catastrophic event-showed similar symptoms. This led to the emergence of the concept of complex trauma, which broadened what could be considered traumatic."
Trauma is a genuine and important phenomenon that can overwhelm the nervous system and is not a moral failing. Contemporary discourse has broadened and commercialized the meaning of trauma, producing a trauma era that often pathologizes normal human experience. This culture fosters fatalism by equating felt pain with irreversible damage and powerlessness. The human organism also contains preventive and reparative mechanisms alongside survival responses. Three confusions sustain current distortions: semantic overuse of the word trauma, conflation of safety with threat and danger, and blurred distinction between trauma and ordinary emotional pain. Historical shifts expanded diagnostic boundaries from DSM-III PTSD to complex trauma.
Read at Psychology Today
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