What If We Accepted the Prevalence of Trauma?
Promoting mental health is dangerous… for the status quo
In 2019 Dr. Gabor Maté gave an interview for Scotland Tonight on the topic of childhood trauma. I watched it recently, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the journalist was helpfully playing bad cop, resisting knowledge with old clichés, or just seeing life through pink glasses.
In any case, her questions helped me pull together some of the things I’ve been learning as a lower-class queer atheist woman who doesn’t talk to her parents anymore. (Yes, thank you, I’ve been doing my best with intersectionality.)
First, Dr. Maté is a Jewish man born in 1944 in Hungary. Loss, abandonment, and extreme stress marked his early childhood under Nazi occupation. After he emigrated to Canada, he studied to become a general practitioner and worked in general practice and with addicts (including at Vancouver’s Supervised Injection Site). His book When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress is an international bestseller. Most recently, he did an interview with Prince Harry, which caused some controversy.
As for the interview questions from Scotland Tonight that got me thinking, here are some of them:
“Is it inevitable that someone who’s suffered childhood trauma is going to have problems? I mean, presumably some of them don’t.”
“We use this term now, ‘adverse childhood experiences’, commonly known as ACEs. How useful is it to use that term. Is that reductive?”
“But to use this term, ACEs, could it not stigmatize people? And could it not also be self-fulfilling prophecy — that if you had so many ACEs, you’re not going to achieve in life?”
“If you say that people don’t have a choice [in becoming or remaining addicts], does that not absolve them of any responsibility?”
“Are you saying that everybody that gets these [chronic] diseases has had trauma in their childhood?”
“But you’re kind of implying that [since] everybody gets ill, something must have happened to everybody when they were a child, and is that not just… life?”
Life is not good by definition. And c’est la vie is not an argument.
Parenting
If we accept that everyone gets at least a bit traumatized, then we’ll have to admit that every parent is at risk of causing stress to their child or ‘allowing’ stress and trauma in. If we admit that a baby in the womb is not as safe as the mother imagines them to be, that may be painful to her. But isn’t medicine all about informed choices?
If entrusting your child to grandparents, doctors, daycare and school may expose them to trauma, how will you even face life as a parent? It takes a lot of faith in people and in your community to raise a child. Even if you’re healthy and wealthy and have a loving ‘village’ around you, crisis and war could strike.
Bad things will happen to your child. The trick is to not deny them. The idealism that encouraged many into starting a family may become harmful when poop hits the fan. Let’s sit with our kids in the pain for a while, and figure out a way to continue.
Parental shame can get in the way of this mourning process. I’d say give yourself time to shed that shame. You’re a human being living in a problematic society, and you’re coping with your own traumas. Perfect parenting could never have been expected of you. And I say these things as the daughter of an extremely hard-working, caring, intelligent woman who also had a number of unhealed issues and made some really poor life choices.
Oppressed groups
If we accept the research results on the relation between stress and autoimmune disease, we’ll have to say to the average woman that her life (being a wife, a mom, working, taking care of parents) is making her sick. If women make the unpopular choice to heal, there will be consequences for their babied husbands, for their employers.
And I suspect that when word gets around about the traumatic experiences during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum, a lot of women will stop pressuring others into having babies. Right now, discussing those risks publicly, on social media for example, often gets you comments like ‘Don’t talk about this, you’ll discourage women from having babies.’
To illustrate why our healing is an unpopular choice, I’ll offer a few quotes from Maté’s book that I mentioned above, When the Body Says No:
There’s a wonderful feminist book by Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur. It discusses how the exclusive role that women have in early childraising distorts child development.
When the woman is married to an immature man, she is also a mother to her husband, so she hasn’t got the openness and the energy for her kids. So your real rival for your mother’s affection wasn’t your sister, it was your dad.
A woman with irritable bowel syndrome interviewed for the book:
The much bigger problem was my relationship with my mother. I thought it was wonderful and we were best buddies — she was my friend and my supporter and ally and the one who listened to me for hours when I came home from school, and the one that I felt close to and understood by, and all the rest.
It took many many sessions [of psychotherapy] to uncover the fact that this was actually a very poor-quality relationship. With all her protection of me, she undermined me. She left me feeling quite inept socially and within myself, and she didn’t help me grow up and become my own person. She kept me — with good intentions — very immature.
A study on amenorrhea:
Researchers at the Pittsburgh School of Medicine compared the psychological characteristics of women with chronically missed periods — amenorrhea — with women whose menstruation was normal. They were particularly interested in a group with functional hypothalamic amenorrhea (FHA), that is, the group of women who had no identifiable disease or condition to account for the lack of normal ovulation.
The study found that “the women with FHA reported more dysfunctional attitudes, particularly those associated with need for approval. They were more likely to endorse attitudes that are prevalent among persons vulnerable to depression, such as perfectionistic standards and concern about the judgement of others.”
There’s a group smaller than that of women (even though it includes women) that can also shake society to its core with its trauma. If we take the number and causes of LGBT suicides seriously, we’ll be in shock and tears. If we accept that queer people face rejection in their families, schools, at their job, we might lose our patriotism… faced with the fact that a large majority among us is toxic.
Let alone the danger to heteronormativity and enforced monogamy that queer and polyamorous people pose.
The struggle for responsibility
Back to Maté’s Scottish interview. Here’s what I find fascinating: the journalist suggested that pointing to childhood trauma would make addicts feel less responsible. Because it’s true in one aspect, and it’s almost an admission of guilt. An abusive person will think in terms of blame and shame. They will blame their victim for the abuse itself and for its consequences. My mother for example raised me to be a doormat, a people-pleaser, and then in my 30s she got mad, and called me a doormat.
An abusive person and an abusive system will get no benefit from their victim taking responsibility for their own life because that would imply a victim who is growing independent. So, when a medical professional reveals the victim’s trauma and discusses its causes and consequences, the abuser yells, “No! The victim’s guilty!”
I would remind such a parent that their victim was a child. Back when they started throwing responsibility at the victim, that victim was a child. I would remind such an employer that their victim is overworked and poor. I would remind the government that women carry it on their shoulders, risking their health to give birth to its taxpayers.
The perspectives of other groups of people as victims (other genders, racial minorities, disabled people, people with stigmatized conditions) can be added here. The popular emphasis will always be on pointing to their guilt instead of doing the first and basic thing that will allow them to take responsibility: admitting that the abuse happened.
To be fair, I as an individual was able to take responsibility for my life despite my mother’s reluctance to admit her abuse. Because I’m an adult and I can completely separate myself from her. But oppressed and minority groups can’t be expected to completely separate themselves from their abusers, because their abusers have power, and because we’re all one society.
Turns out that promoting mental health is dangerous. If we put ‘trauma’, ‘informed consent’, ‘consequences of stress’, ‘emotional abuse’ in the mouths of more people, connections will be made to patriarchy, misogyny, gender stereotypes, exploitation, and racism.
People will resist their victimhood.
A movement will be born that will show us that all of us are victims in at least one way.
Responsibility will be sought and taken.
Shame, the great oppressor of our species, will be rejected.
