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On the Weirdness of Trauma
The more I study the trauma response, the more questions I have
This is a story about trauma, but more “trauma as a topic of study” than any overview of traumatic experiences. Still, if discussion of trauma is emotionally difficult for you, please only engage with this story according to your comfort level. As a note, an emotional response along the lines of “People need to shut up about trauma and content warnings are dumb” is, itself, a reaction to feeling triggered, and I invite you to probe it and care for yourself accordingly.
I am not an expert on trauma, not by any stretch of the imagination. To say anyone really has expertise in trauma is a bit of a strange statement on its own. How can you have expertise in a personal experience, in a subjective feeling, in a vast and diverse process encompassing innumerable realms of experience with as many different manifestations as there are moments of subjective life?
When we talk about trauma, just like when we talk about any experience, we invariably make assumptions about what that experience is for others. How do we know that my trauma feels anything like yours? How do we know my happiness is the same sensation as yours, that it’s even similar? These are words that denote categories that have conceptual meaning, and we take as a matter of pure faith that…
