I used to think my social anxiety was because there was something (?) wrong with me. That i needed confidence and practice my social skills. So i was prescribed to practice my social skills. I have seen the same advice being given when asked about why teens self-isolate and end up causing troubles in schools. Some like me go the people-pleasing route, others go the people-hating route. They’re both coping mechanisms for similar causes. And what almost nobody realizes is that prescribing “social interaction” is almost like prescribing homeopathy to someone with cancer.
The real cancer is trauma.
Trauma.
We live in an epidemic of emotional trauma and few people see it.
It is trauma that causes parents to neglect their kids, to have low empathy for their suffering and not be able to realize they are not ok. Parents, or whoever is taking care of the kids, with the “help” of “modern” society in fact, cause kids, through action or inaction, not to be ok. Do people think these kids just happened to be born with a “social isolation gene”? Or “generalized hatred” gene? Nobody is that way, they were made.
Traumatized people are usually not very popular. Trauma itself is not very popular and most people have no clue about it, or how to identify someone who is traumatized, because the very nature of trauma causes them to conceal they have it to fit in and be accepted. And the ones who don’t fit in are just seen as “there being something wrong with them”. Kinda reminds me of the state of medicine in the middle ages.
What people need is not social interaction.
They need
- Compassion.
- Someone to listen to them, to hear them, to be with them with their pain. To match their energy.
- To hear their story. Not to be asked “what’s wrong with you?” but “what happened to you?”
- To be told there’s nothing wrong with them. They are this way because it’s one of the ways a healthy mind copes with extreme emotional neglect and maybe abuse.
- To have a secure attachment. Someone they can count on. All the time. Unconditionally.
- A sense of belonging. To a community. To a shared sense of purpose. That they are needed and wanted. That they are valued. Desired.
Unfortunately the way society is right now where we don’t live in tribes with people that know us that care about us and are always there for us and can provide the above, like it happened for thousands of years, and like our brain is made to function for, now for many people there’s only one that can do some of this (if you’re lucky to find a good one) and you have to pay them for it. Therapists. It’s screwed up.
Things have changed so much and so quickly that we’re totally unaware of how screwed up and how much we were not made for this “modern” lifestyle.
We were not made to live with only 2 adults who have to take the role of a village to single handedly raise a child.
We were not made to attach primarily with people of our age. First in kindergarden, then school, then college. There were always several people of all ages who we attached deeply to, who we matured emotionally from, whose more mature behaviors we could emulate and learn from.
We were not made to, if those 2 people fail to provide us a sense of safety, have no backup. There would always be someone who we could chat with. We would always be in the company of other people in the tribe. There would always be a “loving grandma” or an “older brother” we could go to.
We were not made to have to pay someone to give us a simulation of unconditional love, and safety that our group would provide. This person, no matter how much desire to help they have, without a financial transaction most naturally wouldn’t do it. How can we think this is OK and normal and that people are having their emotional needs met in these weird conditions?
How far have we gone the far end to find ourselves proud to conclude, as I’ve seen in recent studies, that social interaction increases longevity? Are we in the future going to be in such a dry environment that people will be proud to conclude that drinking water increases longevity too?
In the conditions we live now it is no wonder emotional neglect and abuse has been rampant. The very way the social foundation is laid is lacking and so easy for trauma to happen and propagate.
The Covid pandemic was on the news and was the biggest topic for quite some time. The trauma pandemic, which is equally transmissible from generation to generation, between romantic partners and friends, very difficult to heal and causes unimaginable silent pain to millions of people… . We blame people for being wounded. We call them lazy, and angry. We give them condescending names like “Karens” to make it seem like they’re different and their own species and not that their extreme sense of entitlement actually comes from feeling worthless inside. Or accuse people of just being unempathetic angry and selfish as if all their life hadn’t been nothing but an experience that would make anyone become that way. With no shoulder to cry on. No motherly voice to comfort them. They can’t be anything but who they became, unempathetic, angry and lonely. There’s a lot of talk about the increase of mental illness. But people are not mentally ill. People are mentally injured.
Why do I use the word ‘pandemic’? Because it is everywhere. In the politicians who seem to only care about themselves. In the influencers who seem so fixated in having people provide them validation in being seen highly by others and in feeling important. In the people who commit crimes. And I mean financial and ethical crimes too. How can they do that? Maybe crimes happened in their childhood and nobody cared. In the bosses at our jobs who seem to only care about maximizing profit as a proof that they’re being the best to compensate for how not good enough they always felt like. In the clerks who seem to enjoy the little power they have over people and exert it to the full extent to compensate for the powerlessness they felt all their lives since they were a kid.
We have been so conditioned in our society to accept trauma as a common and normal occurrence that we hardly pause to acknowledge it. It’s no wonder many people suffer in silence.
And nobody seems to know about this and only talk about social interaction, making friends, focusing on the positive, doing mindful meditation, taking meds for your mental illness, being more out there and looking at traumatized people like they’re some weirdos that came through a membrane from another universe. They didn’t. We caused it, and we are doing it everyday to millions of people.
Are we being so different from the people that in the 17th century burned “heretics” or in ancient Rome sheered for the blood spilled in arenas as criminals were slayed to death and who we now regard as barbarics?
Let’s pass this message and see if we can make people aware of this pandemic and do something about it because it is very much urgent.