Can We Rewrite Trauma?

Welcome to the Human Reason newsletter reboot. The newsletter has migrated to a new server on beehiiv.com, and the publication is pivoting towards topics on the inner-self, interpersonal relationships, learning, and our relationship with work. Hope you enjoy it.

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Can We Rewrite Trauma? (< 3 min)

“Trauma does not exist.” The protagonist in the book “The Courage to Be Disliked” posits this statement to a young man who has come to seek his perspective on life. The protagonist is a philosopher and psychologist who has spent years studying the work of the Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler.

The statement is getting at the fact that not everyone who goes through a threatening event experiences symptoms of trauma. For example, the U.S. office of Veteran Affairs estimates that 30% of Vietnam war vets exhibit PTSD in their lifetime. What makes them different from the 70% of Vietnam vets not diagnosed with PTSD? According to Adlerian psychology, the group with PTSD ascribed traumatic meaning to their deployment experience and the group without PTSD did not.

This is where I get concerned that the implication is in danger of being misunderstood and oversimplified--just tell people to re-write the meaning of events, and viola! PTSD cured. But we're not talking about reinterpreting slimy snails as being tasty French cooking by calling them escargot. We're talking about reinterpreting our basic beliefs about humanity, what it means to be good, and our capacity to feel safe in the world. These kinds of reinterpretations span a tangled web of conscious and subconscious assumptions that can take years to untangle. This is why telling a vet with PTSD to change the meaning they ascribe to the realities of war is about as useful as telling a person with depression to cheer up. Re-writing meaning is a personal, complex journey that we cannot shortcut.

There is yet another obstacle on the road to reinterpreting traumatic beliefs: we often need them in place to avoid feeling something far more terrifying.

When working with my own trauma in therapy, I realized that the traumatic belief "it was all my fault" was protecting me from something. Blaming myself propped up an illusion that I was capable of doing something (but didn't) when something painful happened that I couldn't stop. If I did not have this belief, I would experience a deep terror that I had no control in a very scary situation. To let go of the belief, I had to address and process this terror first.

This is why attacking traumatic beliefs haphazardly without taking the time to understand how they function can result in trauma symptoms getting worse or more suppressed. Whatever tide the beliefs are holding back needs to be gently let out in a trickle. This takes patience, gentleness, lots of listening, and respecting the fact that there is a reason you formed the beliefs in the first place.

Take care,

-Mariya