i sort of regret using the word "trauma" so much on twitter in the past, i ran into friction as a result which i think partly came from assuming "trauma" involves really *bad* experiences. the thing i want(ed) to talk about is more about really *confusing* experiences
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confusing as in "what did this mean? was this good? was this bad? which parts of this were good or bad? what even is meaning? what even are goodness and badness?"
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Modern man has had too many experiences.
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gaslighting is a particularly pernicious example because it involves someone else actively trying to confuse you but lots of other kinds of experiences can be confusing. often experiences are confusing when they happen too *fast*
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you start a whirlwind romance and it ends before you've even gotten a handle on how it began. you start a company and it takes off faster than you can adjust and then it crashes and burns or whatever. you uh. go to burning man and do drugs with your cult or y'know, whatever
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it's not exactly about pain and suffering. the sound of confusion is less "ow" and more "what the fuck? no, seriously, what the fuck?"
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focusing on the badness can get you stuck when you keep being like "but it wasn't that bad" - whether that's true or a defense mechanism or whatever, badness *per se* is not what fucks you up
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I was having this exact discussion with my therapist this week like what I'm dealing with now I keep caveatting as "not that bad", and they really weren't that bad but there was just *a lot* and it were *all over the place* and *confusing* so it still adds up to *issues* twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/st…
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relatedly i think a big way a bad but charismatic therapist or meditation teacher or guru can fuck you up is by projecting a truthiness field ("i know what's real / true / important"); it really gets in the way of you assessing your own beliefs and confusions on your terms
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from
"Perfectibility (asymptotically) includes solving all your problems on your terms, in your words, until there is nothing left that is bad."
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the phrase "solving all your problems on your own terms" has been quietly doing a lot for me in the background. thanks mark 🙏
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The equivocation between trauma and weakness has bothered me for a long-time, I think it's part of what's poisoned the word
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Don't let yourself get roped in by the trauma-weakness equivocation.
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it's tricky because i think some people explicitly or implicitly want the weakness connotation for like, sympathy points or something? and then i think i kept running into people who assumed that that's what i was going for? maybe???
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