Category: Society

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.

Imagine you are a warrior that just arrived from war. Not a 5 year war, but a decades long war. You came back, not with PTSD but with CPTSD. Not only that, but it didn’t start in your adulthood but before you were born. There is no “before the trauma”. This is all you know. War, in a weird way, feels like home. It hurts like hell, but home. But this has been exhausting. In fact, the word exhausting doesn’t do true justice. For as long as you exist, you’ve been doing barely anything else than surviving – getting by on (emotional) breadcrumbs, your nervous system molding itself into coping with frequent terrors, unpredictability, scarcity (of love). Your thinking changing to better predict all this weirdness. A form of trying to minimize the total pain of the situation. It works, as best as it can, considering there’s no winning this war anyway. Since it’s an inescapable war, you had to adapt. And you did great. You’re still here. And this exhaustion, you don’t even know what it’s like not to have it. In fact, it doesn’t feel like it should be named exhaustion from the inside perspective, it just feels like life itself is extremely draining, always has been, and it’s just part of being alive.

And then the inevitable comparison. The feelings of worthlessness for not being able to be as good, relaxed, light-hearted, full of vitality as the people who stayed home, the ones who experienced no war. But we don’t know that. We were born in war, nobody has told us that is not normal, and so we assume everyone else must have a similar experience well. How can they be so happy? How is it all so easy for them? How are they so light? What’s wrong with me for feeling so awful?

But how can it ever be a fair comparison to see only two groups of people as they are now without taking into account the vast difference in their paths from start to now?

The ones who were lucky to stay home and not go to this war, they have been properly fed. They are full of energy because they were lucky to have been born in a prosperous war-free environment. Oh… how energetic would you be as well had you been in their place… They have all their “emotional limbs” intact and healthy because they didn’t have to deal with emotional mines and beatings.

How many bruises, scars, broken bones, malnourishment needs, do you, on the other hand, carry? So now, when you’re put back into war-free zones, others say you have “distorted thinking”, you have “maladaptive behaviors” and maybe even are disordered. Why not call it what it is: wounds,… injuries?

When you see children who are emotionally deprived, and how their focus quickly shifts from playfulness, creativity, curiosity, optimism and willingness to explore the world to one of caution, fear, protection, pessimism and suspicion, you quickly realize there is nothing and I mean nothing, wrong with you. The difference is not subtle! You are like those children, to a greater or lesser extent. That is the result of trauma. Why would anyone expect that when those children grow up, somehow those severe wounds would just vanish? There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, the only thing wrong here, is the injuries that were caused to you by either emotional torture – abuse – or malnourishment – neglect.

In the present, this is what we are. We are now a wounded adult still living in survival mode marked by, adapted to our mournful past experiences. Our battle scars hinder us, hurt us, a daily reminder of the tormented past we had to endure. There was no escape because we depended on the ones who failed us. How could we have energy to be happy? Our energy is better spent looking for danger, preventing further damage, trying to heal as best as we can. Is it any surprise that someone becomes an anxious hypervigilant adult if they spent their childhood among bombs, explosions trying to find danger and run or protect from it? Our energy has been spent developing defensive strategies, combative strategies, to get some food (love/attention/validation/feeling of importance), otherwise we would die of starvation (and we barely did).

Why would our bodies think all of this suddenly changed, when it’s all we’ve ever known? And our body is tired of fighting, of being on high alert mode, it’s full of scars, full of twitches and automatic reactions to danger. In some cases our body might express its tiredness through sickness and other physical symptoms.

How can anyone be playful, happy or authentic like that?

I used to think normal people were just better than me. That I was defective somehow, lacking in something. Lack of social skills? “Social anxiety”? Introversion? Brain defect? Bad genes? A combination of all of that? I had no idea. But I know now. And I know because it’s only after knowing this that for the first time I actually feel change, even though I tried hard as heck before. Well, how could anyone ever be confident, lively and happy, if they’ve known nothing but being told or shown by actions or inactions how incompetent, wrong, weak, pathetic, worthless or stupid they are their whole lives?

How can anyone who has been born amidst an environment of fear, betrayal, confusion, submission, subservience, invalidation, and where the only constant was inconsistency, feel stable, calm and confident? How can we be full of love that we were never given? How can we feel happy with so much sadness and pain in us? So much grieving need to be fulfilled? How can we have an identity when whenever we expressed ours it was dismissed and mocked? Or another was forced upon us? How can we feel relaxed when there was always an outburst waiting to happen? When the fear of abandonment was real?

Nah. Untraumatized people had it good and easy. And that’s how it should be. So it’s no fair comparison to place both us and them side by side and be surprised they are “better”. It’s not possible to feel and be normal when you were raised in abnormal conditions. It’s like telling a person whose leg was blown up in war to go run a marathon and expect them to perform just as well as fully healthy legged people.

So I don’t see anyone else as better anymore. They, the ones who stayed home and didn’t experience war, are just lucky (or us unlucky). That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. And I’m happy for them. But there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever for us to feel worse than anybody. They would be equally messed up, insecure if we switched places, and we would be confident, happy and authentic.

There is absolutely nothing between us that make one better than the other except trauma. Nothing. We are wounded, injured, tortured or malnourished. It’s just not visible like a missing leg or a huge scar. So please don’t look up to “normal” people anymore or feel inferior, or superior. You are survivor of a severe emotional war and carry the wounds that are the result of living through it, that now drag you down. That is it, the only it.

• Spending hundreds a month on a therapist who is trauma informed plus wasted time and money on previous therapists who weren’t.
• Addictive behaviors to escape the pain, which directly or indirectly cost money.
• Spending parts of your free time and work time self soothing/doing therapy work so you can’t focus properly on career growth
• Not being able to achieve high job positions because being with too many people for too long is exhausting and high positions require a lot of social interaction.
• Lack of networking, so you end up in a job that may be not ideal, or not as good as it could be.
• Because you were gaslighted not to trust your gut feeling and not knowing what your likes and wants are, you end up in a field you actually don’t like. And being good at something you don’t like is very difficult so you end up being mediocre or suffering af. Either way extra costs in psychology or not earning as much as your peers who love their job.
• Because you lack boundaries, managers can overwhelm you with work and it’s hard to say no. End up getting burned out. Extra psychology, health costs.
• Because you’re scared of being mocked, put down, and lack self confident you don’t speak up at your job so even if you’re really good your skills aren’t that noticed. No increase in salary.
• Because you don’t fight for your needs you don’t ask for a raise.
• Paying extra for post costs because you want to avoid getting triggers by going physically to the shop.
• Because you’re so overwhelmed in your mind, you end up not getting energy for tasks that need it, or forget them, and you may end up paying a fine.
• Need to live alone because being with other people can become too tiring – can’t share rent/expenses.
• Because you tend to be more introverted you don’t know a lot of tips and tricks that make life so much easier and cheaper, like getting contact of a good dentist, or a good accountant. End up paying more, for worse service.
• Because you don’t trust your gut feeling, and are people pleasing, it’s easier to get scammed.
• You end up buying stuff you don’t need in hopes of it filling some of the emptiness (and then feel even more empty when that fails).
• Stress, emotional exhaustion and inhibition and so on are known causes of physical health problems. Extra healthcare costs and more stress and another task to think of. May also cost a day off from work here and there. Which in turn makes us even more tired for lack of resting.

I recently read a thread where by far most people were saying that what isolated, lonely teenagers need is social interaction, that they need to go find hobbies, find good friends, not be as needy to not put people off, and let go of their anger.

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 realise 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.

The person you’re replying to is an outlier and very lucky to have found people that were supportive. But I’d say by far most won’t. And there’s a reason for that and it’s not their fault. Traumatized people are 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 seem as “there’s something wrong with them”. Kinda reminds me of the state of medicine in the middle ages.

What these 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 hear their story. Not to be asked “what’s wrong with you?” but “what happened to you?”
• 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 on 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 with, now for many people there’s only one that can do some of this 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 rear 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 and of all ages who we humans 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. We would always be with company of other people in the tribe. There would always be a “loving grandma” or an “older brother” who 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, who we know in the end does it for the money, and to help, but without money they 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 that social interaction increases longevity? Are we in the future going to be so dry 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 happening so much. The very way the social foundation is laid is lacking and so easy for trauma to happen and propagate.

The covid pandemic we hear about it. The trauma pandemic, which is equally transmissible from generation to generation and between romantic partners, very difficult to heal and causes unimaginable silent pain to millions of people… Nah. 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. No shoulder to cry on. No motherly voice to comfort them. They can’t be anything but unempathetic, angry and lonely. People are not mentally ill. People are mentally injured.

And I say 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, being more out there and looking at traumatized people like they’re some weirdos that came through a membrane from another universe.

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.