QC@QiaochuYuan• over 1 year ago

when i first got interested in trauma and healing and all that stuff it was in response to feeling deeply helpless and powerless in my own life. i constantly found myself unable to do anything i wanted to do, hemmed in on all sides by invisible barriers i didn’t understand. for several years in grad school i kept a spreadsheet logging how i spent my time by the hour, inspired by some trendy quantified self stuff, and highlighting each hour green, yellow, or red according to whether i thought i’d spent that hour well, okay, or poorly. i regularly saw myself logging weeks of mostly red and mostly being unable to budge this. nominally i was supposed to be working on my thesis but i was almost never able to do that - it was too overwhelming even to think about - and instead i wasted years watching anime and playing video games and other dumb bullshit like that, in a state of constant freeze, wracked by constant but deeply buried guilt and shame. i didn’t know how to talk about any of this, so mostly all i could do was suffer in total silence. i was unable to maintain friendships and would frequently go weeks without talking to another person except to order food. i wouldn’t wish this experience on my worst enemy in the last few years the concepts of trauma and healing have somehow become much more mainstream - i don’t have a clear sense of what drove this and would love to hear thoughts about it - and have also correspondingly received significant pushback. the part of the pushback that interests me has to do with the way conceiving of yourself in traumatic terms can *reinforce* a sense of helplessness and powerlessness. to me the point of thinking in terms of trauma is to find leverage points - as in, ah, maybe i can make progress in my professional life by dealing with unresolved feelings about my parents, that kind of thing. but there’s another way to use trauma and healing concepts which is to crab bucket yourself: ah, i can’t do these things because of my trauma, therefore i’m off the hook. short-term i guess this is a defense against guilt and shame, but long-term it risks being a recipe for stagnation, especially if you’re in a community of similarly-minded people, and double especially if you believe that trauma is real but that healing is inaccessible. we also can’t ignore the way social media rewards you for focusing on things that are bad, scary, outrageous, disgusting, which synergizes in this awful way with trauma discourse to encourage the formation of communities of similarly traumatized people who perpetually micro-retraumatize each other while convinced they’re addressing the most important issues in their lives the way out of this trap appears to be variations on @visakanv’s “focus on what you want to see more of” - shifting attention towards desires, values, dreams, visions, asking what sparks joy, moving towards rather than away, finding stories that move and inspire. there’s a lot of richness to this circle of ideas and over the last few years i’ve grown to appreciate them more and more. this is not a luxury that would be nice to have, this is about how to get out of hell in the lewisian sense, the hell whose doors are locked on the inside, and back onto earth, or maybe even into heaven at this point i’ve been on twitter for long enough that patterns are emerging of people who’ve been stuck on the same thing the entire time i’ve known them and people who’ve successfully gotten unstuck and are doing what they want. i put myself in the stuck category so i have a lot of sympathy. if i had to name one shared trait all the stuck people seem to have, including me, it’s that they all seem lonely, and in a way that maybe has something to do with pride. when i started tweeting about healing on twitter i had this crazy idea that i could do it all by myself, and the most important thing i’ve learned in the last 4 years is that i was wrong. i was never supposed to do any of this on my own, and neither were you