Talking About Hidden Child Trauma Gets Creepy Fast
Telling people hidden traumas that they do not know are affecting every decision they make and transforming every part of their being is creepy and should be called out
My writing this article was inspired by a heavily accessed Medium article,
6 Causes of Childhood Trauma That Our Society Doesn’t Fully Recognize: #4 Having a parent who’s focused on appearance.
“6 Causes…” does not stand out as unusually bad among the many articles written on this topic.
The article does a fine job recapping some ideas that so commonly appear on social media that they have become clichéd.
I give the author credit for providing us with a mercifully short 6-minute read. The article manages to include lots of things that very similar articles take much longer to say. I am thus complimenting the author on her succinctness. I am taking aim at many other authors and articles, not just on Medium and not just this author.
I am encouraging readers to stop and think about what they might otherwise gullibly swallow without much thought from this flood of articles.
We can easily let our guard down in the sheer repetitiveness with which we are exposed to these ideas. We do not think very hard if they make sense.
We accept notions of the influence of hidden trauma as some kind of “everybody knows” consensus or as profound wisdom coming from an unknown source.
Swallowing ideas that we no longer know where they originated or where they have been can be hazardous to our health and wellbeing.
The Medium article right off challenges mental health experts who specify that events must be out of the range of normal range of experience to be considered traumatic.
Criterion A of the American Psychiatric Association’s fifth edition (2013) of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) requires:
The person was exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence.
We are being told in this article that we should put this notion aside. We should recognize that we have hidden, silent, and subtle trauma that we have no idea are buried deep within us.
The case presented in the Medium article for our needing to expand our conception of trauma starts off vague. It soon gets clarified with a “For example…”:
*Relational trauma is what happens when a child’s sense of being safe and loved within the family is disrupted — usually because the parents are too self-involved to focus on the child’s needs.
We are entering the fog-shrouded world where the self-absorption of parents proves traumatic to their children.
Pitiful victims of hidden child abuse are wandering among us, like emotional zombies, mostly unaware of who did the damage, who should be the focus of their outrage. That is why these victims need articles like this one.
*Or, because one of the parents doesn’t value the emotional life of the child, which leads them to meet the physical and material needs only — without ever making the child feel emotionally safe and supported.
We are slipping into incitement of adult children to bash their parents with whom they might have been previously content.
We are being told that we were wrong to be content with the bad parenting we received. We are on the way to explain why adults have problems achieving supportive relationships. Blame our self-indulgent parents, not us.
More precisely, we are in the familiar territory of mother-bashing.
The disproportionate burden of early child-rearing falls on mothers in two-parent families. And moms in the single-parent households, where the majority of urban black children in America are being raised.
In real life, there are many times that mothers, particularly single moms, are not at the best in dealing with their children — or dealing with their own life challenges, in ways that impact children.
This author is not encouraging anyone to be charitable to their mothers. The author identifies 6 ways we can blame mothers, where previously we may not have realized the damage that was done to us.
In some cases, it’s the exact opposite: they don’t give the child the space to breathe, to be with their own thoughts and develop their own separate identity. If you’re “lucky” enough, it’s a little bit of everything I just mentioned (welcome to my life!).
Mothers are damned if they are judged by their adult children to have given them too little attention, damned if they gave them too much, and damned if they mostly fell in between.
The author starts getting personal (“welcome to my life!”), inviting readers to reflect deeply on their own life and see if all this resonates.
The accusations are so Barnum. They refer to such commonplace behaviors that surely we can identify one or two, or even a full house of six bad things our mothers did to us.
Imagine tee shirts and hoodies proclaiming “My mother inflicted all 6 hidden trauma on me.”Great to wear when going to single bars, on dating sites, or when you are invited to your new partner’s parents’ house the first time for the holidays.
Then, the author jumps to the larger picture:
These are some of the causes of childhood trauma that our society doesn’t fully recognize, according to clinical psychologist Dr. Nicole LePera.
The author brings in the expertise of a clinical psychologist, Dr. Nicole LePera. I am not embarrassed to admit I do not who she is. I click on the link that is provided and it takes me to a slide on a Facebook Page. I am not impressed.
Whoa! Let’s stop and consider this.
The author has been getting increasingly ominous about things that parents do that are threatening our well-being, but she is still staying vague.
If we are skeptical about where this is going, she dismisses our concerns. She lets us know that these causes of trauma are already established, but society is somehow refusing to fully recognize them.
That is a cheap move in a rhetorical game. She is personifying society and suggesting that all of us living in society must personally somehow take action for something bad.
Faced with these kinds of arguments, I have learned to say:
“Hold on, last I checked, society does not have eyes and ears and so society cannot fully recognize anything. Who are you talking about –Me? My sister, Mental health professionals?
I think it is particularly important not to let the author off the hook. She has not made a compelling case that we should get all worked up about childhood trauma that we cannot seem to remember.
I getting bored and restless than frightened. After all, this is only a Medium article offering us a diagnosis of our problems by someone we don’t know and who does not know us.
I jump to the end of the article to see if what is in between is worth reading.
We don’t want to see ourselves as victims. We don’t want to see that we too have been through traumatic situations and circumstances.
The author knows that we might still be skeptical. She tosses at us we may only be skeptical because we are being defensive.We don’t want to be seen as victims.
Generally speaking, I prefer not to see myself as a victim, even if I may feel victimized –taken advantage of — like now, when this author is trying to sell me something I don’t want to buy. That is not a reason for me to buy it.
Trauma is much broader than we tend to imagine and it leaves permanent scars, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not — but that doesn’t mean we’re doomed.
I do not need anyone to tell me that I am an imperfect guy. I know that well. But the writer is telling me that these imperfections are permanent scars from the inadequate parenting I got.
Did this author know my mother? Would she grant my mother the charity, would se make allowances for how her being a single mom with us living in public housing on welfare?
We were there because my mother decided not to let my disabled brother be sent off for storage at a warehouse state facility where neglect and quick death were assured for such undesirables.
Yup, my mother made tough decisions under duress. This author says my sister and I should blame her. We should feel like victims and somehow seek restitution in our current relationships.
We can always make a conscious effort to understand it, by asking ourselves the tough questions and dealing with the painful feelings that arise.
That is how we heal.
The author then ends immediately with a link to sign up for her newsletter and to get her Guide to Self-Awareness.
She says they are free, but I am sure she is trying to sell us something.
I think we have all been manipulated. I will pass on clicking that link.