Language is mutable, and definitions change over time. But what we’ve witnessed in recent years—especially on campuses—is a profound form of concept creep that goes beyond mere language and labels. The ordinary challenges of life now are being reinvented as trauma, and words are conflated with violence. It is all part of our ongoing cultural embrace of the “untruth of fragility: what doesn’t kill you, makes you weaker,” as illuminated by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind. Debates, lectures and even ordinary conversations now can be brought to an end when one party declares checkmate by asserting that this or that argument serves to “deny their humanity” or makes them feel “unsafe.”
As someone who has experienced nine of the 10 most studied Adverse Childhood Experiences, who lives with chronic physical pain from violence-inflicted injuries, who spends three hours a week with a therapist specializing in trauma, I can attest that such claims strike me as dangerous gibberish. Can words do damage? Of course. But the difference between words and violence is that mentally competent adults nearly always have a choice about how much damage words can inflict, whereas the damage caused by my father’s belt—like all physical abuse—didn’t rise or fall depending on my psychological state at the moment of impact.
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The sight of a man’s belt used to trigger me. I would avoid the men’s department in clothing stores for this reason. Standing in a line with a man both in front of and behind me would give me physical anxiety symptoms for hours afterward. To resolve this trigger, my therapist told me to buy a man’s belt. I cried in the car and used up a lot of Kleenex in my next therapy session. Then I brought the thing home and hung it on the doorknob of my bedroom door. It hung there like a poisonous viper, giving me nightmares.
Then something beautiful happened. Its power started to fade. After a few weeks, it went from a dark artifact with the power to bring back my traumatic past, to a hunk of leather fashioned to hold up some guy’s pants. The experience made me grateful that my therapist didn’t take his cue from the culture around him. Teaching people to react to words as if they were weapons is teaching them to fetishize their damage—or even to create new damage. How will a generation trained to brew up their own cortisol on any pretext experience life if every off-colour joke knocks the legs out from under them?
When I enrolled at my university as a mature student trying to piece her life back together, I knew there was a chance that I might need some kind of special accommodations. But the university’s disability officer offered me so many accommodations that it was embarrassing. If I wanted to, I could have remained deeply mired in my mental debilitation without even the slightest spur toward recovery.
Self-pity is an addictive drug; and students who come to campus looking for ways to avoid stress, instead of deal with it, will find dealers in every office and classroom. We can’t force students to fight their demons. But at the very least, we shouldn’t be encouraging a policy of immediate surrender.
- More Here
As someone who has experienced nine of the 10 most studied Adverse Childhood Experiences, who lives with chronic physical pain from violence-inflicted injuries, who spends three hours a week with a therapist specializing in trauma, I can attest that such claims strike me as dangerous gibberish. Can words do damage? Of course. But the difference between words and violence is that mentally competent adults nearly always have a choice about how much damage words can inflict, whereas the damage caused by my father’s belt—like all physical abuse—didn’t rise or fall depending on my psychological state at the moment of impact.
[---]
The sight of a man’s belt used to trigger me. I would avoid the men’s department in clothing stores for this reason. Standing in a line with a man both in front of and behind me would give me physical anxiety symptoms for hours afterward. To resolve this trigger, my therapist told me to buy a man’s belt. I cried in the car and used up a lot of Kleenex in my next therapy session. Then I brought the thing home and hung it on the doorknob of my bedroom door. It hung there like a poisonous viper, giving me nightmares.
Then something beautiful happened. Its power started to fade. After a few weeks, it went from a dark artifact with the power to bring back my traumatic past, to a hunk of leather fashioned to hold up some guy’s pants. The experience made me grateful that my therapist didn’t take his cue from the culture around him. Teaching people to react to words as if they were weapons is teaching them to fetishize their damage—or even to create new damage. How will a generation trained to brew up their own cortisol on any pretext experience life if every off-colour joke knocks the legs out from under them?
When I enrolled at my university as a mature student trying to piece her life back together, I knew there was a chance that I might need some kind of special accommodations. But the university’s disability officer offered me so many accommodations that it was embarrassing. If I wanted to, I could have remained deeply mired in my mental debilitation without even the slightest spur toward recovery.
Self-pity is an addictive drug; and students who come to campus looking for ways to avoid stress, instead of deal with it, will find dealers in every office and classroom. We can’t force students to fight their demons. But at the very least, we shouldn’t be encouraging a policy of immediate surrender.
- More Here
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