It's often hard for neurotypical people to understand this, which I get. But it really can be traumatic
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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I get that. For other people it can lead to being alienated and targeted for bullying... which really can be traumatic
I can acknowledge that those things are traumatic, for sure.
If everything is a trauma, nothing is.
Not every bad experience is traumatic. Abusing that word devalues the actually traumatizing experiences. Being an outsider in school and being raped by your dad are categorically extremely different experiences. Lumping them into "traumatic" is just not helpful.
When people with a communication disability use a word differently than I might, I have been trying lately to understand what they're attempting to communicate. I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding about what trauma is, but even if you didn't, it might be a good practice.
Anyway, I get why the word use is upsetting, because it can feel like rape and social ostracization are being treated identically when the same word (traumatic) is used for both. But trauma, as I understand it, is more like a broken bone - it's a bad result from an event or events. Me and grandma both fell down the stairs and she fell one step and I fell two flights, and we both broke something - the broken bone is still real, even when the fall was smaller. I fuck up my wrist in a car accident, and someone else fucks it up doing the same small action repetitively for years. Wrist's still fucked.
If you think of it that way, there never was a comparison to dislike in the first place. Trauma is the injury, not the cause. Everything and nothing is traumatic, but some things are almost universally likely to cause injury, and some things aren't.
That's a medical trauma, yes. But the situation described here is a light bruise at best.
Yes, these terms encompass a range of severities, but at some point you have to say "No, Terry, a broken nail is not a trauma, and you can't go to the emergency room because of it".
People love the feeling of being super empathetic if they support this language. And others love the feeling of self victimization.
And the actual victims don't get the attention they need, because Terry cries about having made a bad joke yesterday.
Why are you being dismissive of what's actually being described, which is something happening over and over again? It's not one bad joke the original poster is crying over. It's the "over and over again."
You're saying you can look at the cause of the injury and say what the injury is without checking for symptoms or even listening to the entire cause of injury.
Even if you won't accept that social rejection and isolation over an entire childhood can cause trauma, can you at least give people with a social disability the smallest amount of leeway when describing their experiences and not react so dismissively in a mental health community?
Autistic people get fucked up well into adulthood by being rejected by their peers for reasons they can't comprehend over the course of many years.
It doesn't seem like reason is going to win out here.
Somebody who picks a single narrow definition for a word and then applies that narrow definition to every instance even remotely related ( when other, more contextually correct definitions exist and have been pointed out ) isn't working with a full deck, intentionally or otherwise.
You can't reason somebody out of a position they didn't reason themselves in to.
My experiences being picked on in school and not fitting in warped my entire personality and caused me to have problems with social situations well into adulthood. Some of which I'm still dealing with to this day. Hardly "a light bruise". I'm sorry for whatever happened to you that makes you feel like people that didn't suffer as badly don't deserve to be taken seriously but social issues can absolutely be classified as trauma. It's not a contest.
Gatekeeping is also not very helpful. Perhaps it's better to listen and try to understand other people's experiences, because everyone experiences the world in different ways and intensity. Talking about a trauma is not a competition. It's a cry for help and for empathy, no matter whether it fulfills your definition of the word.
It's not gatekeeping, it's a medical definition.
What's so hard to understand about that?
You're not OCD because you sorted Skittles by color once either.
There are words that are used as scientific terms in one way and differently by common people. The fact that someone doesn't use the word as it is used in science doesn't mean that the information they're trying to communicate is not important. It's necessary to use empathy to be able to understand even those people who use words differently from how they're used in your bubble.
If something was or is traumatic is not determined by the content but by how the person experienced it. You can have traumatic experiences with almost anything.
... And that in turn means the term is practically meaningless - as you can see in the example above.
It's really simple. If someone is traumatized by something, it was traumatic for them. Sure there are different kinds of trauma but there's no need to gatekeep or invalidate people's experiences.
Of course there is. As I wrote above: if everything is a trauma, nothing is.
You can't just expand the meaning of a well defined word just because you like the vibe of it applying to the victim group of the day.
This is a general reply to most of your replies in this post...
Everything isn't trauma. Trauma is relative.
You keep minimizing things, saying stuff like "One joke" or "A bruise."
You are disregarding the context of repetition and time.
Imagine getting 15 quarter size bruises a day over the course of several years. Is that not trauma?
I don't know why this is such a pain-point for you, but a little empathy would probably help.
In the same way you can't apply narrow definition for a word to all situations, when other more contextually correct definitions exist ?
(I mean, you can, but you probably shouldn't)
Also that is literally how languages change over time, so..yes, you can.
Though having a narrow definition of what a language can and can't be does track with your general vibe so far....