The Splinter

As a splinter wounds the body in a way that can't be healed until it is extracted, so trauma wounds the psyche until properly addressed.

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I was born in the Southern Tier of Upstate New York. When I was little, my dad was in retail management. Mostly department stores at first, then later, contractor supply. He was always being transferred, every six months or so. We moved throughout New York and Pennsylvania, never staying in one place for very long. Johnson City, Philipsburg, Morristown, St. Mary’s, Tyrone, Middletown. I don’t know the order. I only know that every time I got used to a place, or made a friend, we left.

Finally, when I was about 5, we moved to Stafford Springs, Connecticut. We lived there for 8 years. It was the closest thing to home I’d ever felt.

But in the late 80s, Connecticut had gotten too expensive for my folks. After the Apostolic Center my extended family had moved to Connecticut to be close to turned out to be a scandalous fraud (I wrote about that in the second half of this piece), everyone began migrating back to Upstate New York, where my grandparents still lived. My family, which moved to be close to other family members more than the little cult they got mixed up in, was among the last to go.

In the summer of 1989, we went house hunting. My parents, who had never owned their own home before, settled on a little 1,920 square foot, 4 bedroom, 1 bath brick home in Kirkwood, NY. The house was set on nearly 2 acres of land, backing up to hundreds of acres of state-owned forest, and was built in the 1930s.

It was a simple home with few luxuries. The competition for the single bathroom in the morning meant I often wound up going out to the woods to relieve myself after I woke up rather than writhing around with a full bladder while I waited. There was no dishwasher, no air conditioner, not even any insulation to speak of in the fourth bedroom, which was located downstairs over the garage. Winter nights could be brutally cold in that room — you could see your breath in there as well as you could outside — but in college when I came home for breaks, it was my preferred place to stay, rather than trying to squeeze in with my two brothers in my old room upstairs. I would bundle up in sleeping bags and blankets and keep a bottle of whiskey by my bedside to take a couple of swigs to “warm me up” before I’d try to snuggle in and get some sleep.

Of course, it didn’t really warm me up; that was just an illusion. But I had learned, by that point, that alcohol helped numb my pain. My constant, gnawing anxiety.

One year, when I was home for Christmas, I was walking in my socks on the old, beaten up hardwood floor in the upstairs hall on the way to the bathroom, when the fabric of my sock caught on a splinter of wood in one of the worn floorboards and directed it straight into the center of the ball of my right foot. It felt like an electric shock going in. I immediately pulled off my sock and tried to assess it, but it had either broken off too deep to see, or the floor had simply stabbed me and then pulled clean, leaving a wound.

It happened the week before I had to head back to Steubenville for the Spring semester, and although it hurt, there was no way to know for sure if there was something lodged in there, or if it was just a slightly ragged puncture wound from a rough piece of wood. Nobody asked if I needed to see a doctor — unlike the time one of my mom’s sewing needles had gotten lost in the carpet and went all the way into my big toe, requiring an emergency room extraction — and I was the reigning champion in removing splinters in my family, so if I couldn’t get it out, nobody at home was likely to do better.

I returned to campus with a bit of a limp, and a hope that the damn thing would just heal.

Well, days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into a month. My foot ached. It got increasingly tender to the touch, and there was a day when I distinctly remember driving down the main street in front of campus and feeling so much pain while braking that I was worried I wouldn’t be able to stop the pickup I was driving, which belonged to one of my friends.

Not being a very proactive person, and not being a fan of doctors, I held off as long as I could, but finally caved and brought myself to the little on-campus clinic. The doctor was unable to find anything in my foot, and wanted me to just continue to let it heal. I left annoyed and dejected. The pain had become constant, and it was a distraction. It made me miserable. I’m certain it made me surlier than I already was by nature. If it was going to heal, it should have done so already. I was getting a bit desperate.

Finally, someone told me to try something called Ichthammol ointment. I went to the local Kroger, and was surprised to find that they had it in stock. It was cheap, too — only a couple bucks, which was something that even I, a broke college student, could afford.

If you’ve never handled the stuff, it’s kind of disgusting. Black and goopy, it’s a viscous gel that smells like burning. According to Wikipedia (which didn’t exist at the time), Ichthammol is “a medication derived from sulfur-rich oil shale (bituminous schists)” that is also known as “drawing salve” because it is believed to have “drawing properties to help draw foreign objects from the skin like splinters.”

“Dermatologists,” says the article linked above, “say there’s no evidence for that ‘drawing’ application in humans.”

Oggogg, Ichthyol-Salbe, CC BY-SA 3.0

Well, those dermatologists are wrong.

I started applying that black salve the afternoon I got it. After a day or two, when I was changing the dressing, I pressed on the swollen, sore area around the wound, and a splinter about half an inch long popped out.

I cannot describe to you the relief I felt. I was so amazed at the sheer size of the thing that I scotch taped it to a piece of paper and put it in my wallet so I could show it to people when I told them the story. It was an impressive visual. I couldn’t believe something like that had been so deep inside me for so long, and that nobody could even find it.

I had tried living with the pain, but as it got worse, so did my attitude about everything else I was doing. I had tried going to the doctor, but he couldn’t fix it. I had tried to simply give myself time to allow the wound to heal, but it couldn’t. The foreign object causing the wound was still lodged inside, doing more damage every time I stepped on it. I did a lot of walking in those days. There was no way that thing was ever going to heal on its own.

The thing that fixed it was unexpected. Some experts believe it shouldn’t work. But it did, and soon I was right as rain and walking normally again, free to live my life without the pain this little monster was causing.

Psychological Splinters

This anecdote about the splinter was something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. But I was reminded of it when a book by journalist Abigail Shrier called Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up started making the rounds recently. My friend

Kale Zelden

, for reasons we’ve not fully discussed yet, has been pushing back on therapy culture while promoting the ideas in Shrier’s book:

Now, I get that Kale is an educator, and encounters high school students (other than his own kids) every day. He sees the downstream effects of bad therapy up close. Effects that Shrier described in a recent podcast she did with Joe Rogan:

One of the hardest, most worrisome parts of this generation is that they have the lowest sense of efficacy. They report an external locus of control, meaning they don't think they can improve their lives. Millennials thought they could do anything; they are the Mark Zuckerberg generation. That's why we had so many tech founders in that generation. We're not seeing that with these young people. They don't want to be in charge. They're afraid, and they don't feel up to it. I talk to a friend of mine, a research scientist, cell biologist, every year on her birthday. She invites top kids, med premed graduates from college before they go on to med school, to her lab for an internship. She said to me in the last decade, this year for her birthday, "I can't believe you're writing about this generation. They are so different." I said, "Tell me why." She said, "I'm seeing the smartest, most prepared kids, and they're afraid to run their own experiments. They tell me they're getting ready, working on their skills, they're not yet up to it, and they constantly report to me about their mental health, how they're feeling today. They can't just take a chance and go with it."

I understand and accept that this is a problem, and it doesn’t bode well for our future as a society. But I also know from my own experience that unaddressed trauma is the psychological equivalent of that damned splinter. Once it gets inside of you, if you think it’s going to just heal without you doing anything to remove it, you’re going to be disappointed. Instead, you will most likely wind up in constant, distracting pain as the foreign, malign thing inside you tears an even bigger wound. Pain that makes you miserable, not just to yourself, but to the people around you. As you go about your daily business, trying to function normally, you’ll find that it flares up — like it did with my foot on the brake — until you can’t perform normal functions normally.

In other words: it’s not something that can just be safely ignored. Childhood trauma is, in essence, a kind of embedded, metastatic fear. And fear is something that can only be overcome by facing it.

Shrier counters that thinking overly much about your problems can make things worse:

The number one symptom of depression is what they call rumination, this pathological obsessing over your pain. Yeah, that's why stuff like exercise, that's one of the reasons, aside from chemical reasons, one of the reasons that doing anything, you know, that running errands is good for your mental health, getting out of your house and accomplishing anything, yeah, is good for you. But sitting around talking and thinking about your problems, that's a bad habit. And the best cognitive behavioral therapists and others, you know, the dialectical behavioral therapists, the ones who do really well with depression, the first thing they do is try to break that, that bad pattern. But a lot of therapists just indulge it.

[…]

And what we should be telling kids is that the amazing story of human history is of resilience. It used to be the case that people lost a sibling; that was common. People lost a parent; that still happens, right. These things still happen, and the amazing story of human history is that doesn't mean it's not painful, but of resilience. They get on, they aren't permanently suffering with mental illness or mental problem. They form families, they are responsible in their jobs, they show up for work, they can be depended on by their friends. That's the story of human survival and resilience.

And unfortunately, we're telling kids, "No, you've had trauma. Yeah, yeah, you've had trauma, and you need to work through that trauma." Right. It's not just, this is just a part of life, and you know what you need to do is just go out there and live your life, and you'll get over it. And you know, the thing is, the truth is that most kids and most people did. In other words, that didn't mean that Dad didn't lose his job, and they were forced out of the, you know, they had to lose their house. Or these things happen. They've happened in every family. And I think one of the many reasons that kids don't know this today is we've cut them off from extended family. The story of their grandparents is a story of resilience in almost every case. Right. You think you hear about your family history, and you're going to hear a story of pain and survival, and resilience and overcoming. But today, you've got teenagers who say, "Oh, I can't drive past my middle school where I was bullied because of my PTSD." They don't have PTSD, but they think they do.

I understand the point she’s making, but I think she’s in real danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even Rogan, tough guy martial artist and man’s man that he is, pushed back on the idea that childhood bullying doesn’t create real trauma. And trauma demands to be looked in the face and exorcised.

As someone who carries around a laundry list of psychological acronyms — ADHD, OCD, CPTSD or “complex trauma” — I can tell you that it’s very easy for me to get caught up in ruminations and intrusive thoughts, and sure, dwelling on any of it doesn’t help. I could do an entire post about the interplay between intrusive thoughts and the analytical torture that an OCD sufferer puts himself through trying to figure out why he had those thoughts and what they mean. If you’ve experienced it, you know that it’s special kind of hell. If you haven’t, be glad you have no idea. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone…except maybe the people who downplay how utterly debilitating it is. I’d like them to get to spend just a few days with it and see how it changes the way they look at people who never get a break from it.

(Nota bene: If you suffer from OCD and related anxiety, I’ve found Nathan Peterson’s YouTube channel really helpful. Here’s his take on rumination for those who are interested.)

But I propose something more functional than rumination. As I’ve written before, Dr. Jordan Peterson advises that we cannot hide unwanted things in the fog:

The fog that hides is the refusal to notice—to attend to—emotions and motivational states as they arise, and the refusal to communicate them both to yourself and to the people who are close to you. A bad mood signifies something. A state of anxiety or sadness signifies something, and not likely something that will please you to discover. The most probable outcome of successfully articulating an emotion that has accrued without expression over time is tears—an admission of vulnerability and pain (which are also feelings that people do not like to allow, particularly when they are feeling distrustful and angry). Who wants to dig down into the depths of pain and grief and guilt until the tears emerge? And voluntary refusal to take notice of our emotional states is not the only impediment to dealing with them. If your wife or husband (or whomever else you are tangled up with, unhappily, at the moment) says something that comes too close to the painful truth, for example, then a sharp and insulting remark will often shut them up—and is therefore very likely to be offered. This is partly a test: does the person being insulted care enough about you and your suffering to dig past a few obstacles and unearth the bitter truth? It is also partly, and more obviously, defensive: if you can chase someone away from something you yourself do not want to discover, that makes your life easier in the present. Sadly, it is also very disappointing if that defense succeeds, and is typically accompanied by a sense of abandonment, loneliness, and self-betrayal.

Peterson, Jordan B.. Beyond Order (pp. 101-102). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The fact is, a crazy high number of people grow up in dysfunctional homes with some form of abuse — and yes, emotional abuse is as real and sometimes even more damaging than physical abuse — and they don’t just get over it. They internalize it, and they go on to cope with it or act it out in ways that are often deeply unhealthy for themselves or those around them. And these people need tools that allow them to diagnose, assess, and heal the childhood wounds that continue to plague them in their adult lives.

Shrier has a less empathetic take:

There are things in life that are very difficult, but there's a great reward in doing these difficult things. The problem is not that we're not saying "suck it up"; it's that no one ever says "suck it up," no matter how minor the scratch is to these kids. And sometimes, being told "you'll live," like when dad used to say it, or "shake it off," can be helpful. We never hear "shake it off" anymore; no one says it. So, they don't know they can overcome even minor injuries. The truth is, they can. But there were studies done on coping techniques taught to thousands of teenagers in Australia, in a program called the Wise Teens program. The point was just to help them with emotional regulation, but it turned out it made the kids sadder and more anxious. This was measured. Regularly ruminating on your bad feelings can make you feel worse.

I’ve spent the past few decades thinking I was supposed to just to suck it up and shake it off. Trying to pretend that things were normal. Living in denial that my problems were significant enough to warrant attention. The results have been nearly catastrophic, and no doubt resulted in the total breakdown of self-identity and belief I experienced several years ago.

I grew up at a time and in a family where seeing a mental health professional was considered something only crazy people did. I remember my mom threatening me with it one time when I was about ten years old and emotionally out of control: “If you don’t stop, I’m going to have to take you to a psychologist!” From that moment on, I saw it as a negative thing to be avoided, not a positive one to be embraced. The larger conservative Catholic world I inhabited, too, often looked at psychology as a dangerous pseudo-science and competitor to what were believed to be more beneficial spiritual practices. (By the time I was married, if a priest in the confessional recommended counseling because I confessed losing my temper or fighting with my wife, I’d roll my eyes and ask for spiritual counsel instead. I was an idiot.) Thus, from an early age, I learned to distrust and avoid psychology. The adults in my life were completely unable to regulate their own emotions; there was no chance they were going to be able to help me regulate mine, let alone seek professional help for me.

That didn’t work out so great for me. Problems I should have faced and healed decades ago are still here, plaguing me and the people I love.

The idea that you’ll eventually outgrow the problem if you just stop thinking about whatever it is inside of you that is causing you to react abnormally, to lash out, to be overly defensive, to resort to harmful coping mechanisms, etc., is just as absurd as the idea that if you just ignore the splinter, your foot will heal.

There’s something in there that’s doing damage, and it’s not going to stop until you excise it.

And while it’s true that people in the old days dealt with unimaginable hardships and had to keep on trucking, I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that things were better back then. People lived with enormous unresolved trauma. Parents were often incredibly harsh to their children, habitually resorting to both physical and emotional abuse to “keep them in line.” Parents completely abandoned or even sold off their children. Alcoholism was a common means of dealing with the hardships of life or the memories of war. Sexual abuse was kept quiet if it was dealt with at all — an attitude that contributed to the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.

Podcaster Chris Williamson recently shared some historical correspondence he came across. It was a letter to a young Winston Churchill, from his father, Lord Randolph Churchill:

In September 1893, Churchill was admitted, on his third attempt, to the Sandhurst military college.

He wrote to his father, “I was so glad to be able to send you the good news on Thursday.”

His father, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, wrote back a week later:

You should be ashamed of your slovenly, happy-go-lucky, harum, scarum style of work. Never have I received a really good report of your conduct from any headmaster or tutor. Always behind, incessant complaints of a total want of application to your work. You have failed to get into the 60th Rifles, the finest regiment in the army. You have imposed on me an extra charge of some 200 pounds a year. Do not think that I am going to take the trouble of writing you long letters after every failure you commit and undergo. I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say. If you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life you have had during your school days, you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence. You will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes.

…

Your mother sends her love.

Williamson reflects on the letter:

Churchill was 19.

This story hurts me a lot to read.

I don’t know the inner texture of Churchill’s mind but I’d bet that even after defeating Nazi Germany and winning WWII he almost certainly still didn’t feel good enough.

One of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, trapped in insufficiency purgatory.

And yet we can't deny that something drove Churchill to become the man that the world needed, perhaps it was his father.

What is the point of success if there’s no satisfaction in the succeeding?

Beware of envying successful humans. The price you would need to pay to be the people you admire is often one you would not foot the bill for.

Generation X — my generation — grew up in the liminal space between the time where it was normal, and at times even romanticized, for kids to get screamed at, belittled and shamed, or receive beatings for acting up, and the advent of therapy culture, where we were taught that some things we experience as children are hugely psychologically destructive and drive toxic, self-sabotaging behaviors.

A friend of mine used to (almost proudly) tell the story of how his dad beat him with a 2x4 for doing something stupid. Another two of my friends — brothers — would laugh as they recounted how their father had “punched our oldest brother in the face so hard his head went through the drywall” for mouthing off. My late father-in-law told us how his father wacked his arm with sharp blade of a butcher cleaver for speaking during a meal, cutting him. He grew up and went on to beat his own daughter, my wife, with the wire end of a flyswatter. Meanwhile, her mother used to chase her around with a butcher cleaver of her own, leaving my wife no choice but to hide out in the homes of neighbors or friends.

For my own part, I was routinely screamed at and spanked in anger — hard. Sometimes, I got thrown around, or called names — “lying sack of shit” was my personal favorite — and I was even carried down the hall by my throat at one point. There were times when I thought I was going to have even worse violence done to me. It didn’t happen, but the fear of expecting it is an experience in its own right. Sometimes, I got tripped so I would fall for no reason other than the tripper’s personal amusement. Or crushed in a wrestling match I didn’t want to have, just to prove I was powerless. This was when I wasn’t being berated, criticized, told “what my problem is,” and so on. I spent most of my childhood living in fear of my father’s temper, which was often explosive and usually directed like a laser at only me. My mother, who walked on eggshells in fear of upsetting my dad, would use guilt and shame to suppress behaviors she did not want from me — or that she thought would anger him. She did not make the distinction between the person and the action. “You’re a naughty boy!” was a regular refrain, and it had a much different effect than, “This behavior is unacceptable. I know you’re a good boy who knows how to behave, and I want you to act like it.”

Is it any wonder that my default sense of self is that of someone shameful, bad, worthless, and so on? Is it any wonder that, lacking an internal sense of worth and validation, I always seem to seek it from others, in the hopes that I can be convinced?

As Brené Brown writes, “Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.”

What is shame? Shame is…

…the fear of not being worthy of connection and belonging. It is the fear that you are not enough and will be rejected for your weaknesses. It overtakes the prefrontal cortex and initiates your fight or flight response. Instead of being able to think critically or analyze the legitimacy of a threat, you are thrust into survival mode. 

Once the shame cycle begins, you really only have three options: fight, freeze, or run. In terms of human behavior, this might look like aggression, numbing, or people pleasing. Being in this type of survival mode prevents you from connecting meaningfully with yourself and others, which impedes your ability to live wholeheartedly. 

To my great regret, I repeated some of these kinds behaviors with my own wife and my oldest kids. I never wanted to become this person, but it was so ingrained it felt normal. I couldn’t see that it wasn’t even when my wife was pleading with me to recognize it. I hurt the children I love because I acted out the behavior imprinted on me when I was too small to know better. I have tried to change, and to talk to my kids about how wrong I was to do those things, but I fear that they will repeat at least some of them with their own spouses and children.

Breaking generational cycles is an extraordinarily difficult task. If things were so great in the old days, why would any of us have generational cycles to break?

How many of us have these stories but never discuss them, either to protect those who did it to us from suffering the embarrassment of their shameful actions, or because we know others who had it worse and feel stupid and petty about complaining?

Complex trauma (CPTSD), in particular — the kind most commonly associated with childhood abuse or neglect — actually causes physical changes to your brain. It hijacks your limbic system and hardwires you to overreact to minor stimuli. It leaves you in a state of perpetual fight or flight.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts and author of the book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, explains in this video that

The nature of trauma is that an experience enters into your ears, into your skin, into your eyes, and it goes down into a very primitive part of your brain that automatically interprets what's going on. Is this dangerous or is this safe? An event becomes traumatic when there is nothing you can do to stave off the inevitable and your body starts automatically going to the state of fight/flight or collapse. The lingering effect of trauma is that you continue to react to mild stressors as if your life is in danger. And so you tend to become hyperreactive. Somebody may irritate you in the supermarket. You may develop road rage. You may have a difficult time putting up with misbehavior from your spouse or your kids. And most people actually are barely aware or not aware at all that their reactions that they're having right now are actually rooted in experiences that they've had before. That event itself is over, but you continue to react to things as if you're in danger. So the big challenge of treating trauma is how do we help people to live in bodies that feel fundamentally safe?

If you really want to understand complex trauma and the kind of daily, unrealized emotional dysregulation it produces, the following is one of the best I’ve found, and I’ve watched quite a few. The main portion of the presentation is about 40 minutes long, but it’s worth your time if you want to understand complex trauma and its effects. I’ve already watched it twice, and will likely do so again:

For me, this is all very personal. Although I’ve mostly gotten my temper under control, I have been forced to confront the fact that I suffer from CPTSD-derived emotional dysregulation, escaping, coping mechanisms, codependence, people pleasing, and even unintentional dishonesty, which comes from a habituated need to disguise the abnormality of your interior state or hide the dysfunction in your home.

These things are incredibly damaging to relationships. They inhibit your ability to do normal tasks like make a phone call, set appointments, pay bills, deal with stressful situations, and so on. If there’s a person in your life who is capable and confident — people like me seem to be drawn to them for having what we lack — they can wind up shouldering an unfair burden as they take on the responsibilities the trauma-sufferer does not know how to handle. They can take on a quasi-parent role in a marriage because you never emotionally matured beyond the scared little child stage. They also wind up “walking on eggshells” because you’re always scanning for danger and overreacting like your life depends on it. Or you’re so worried about conflict (or worse, so habituated to it) that you may actually subconsciously create it yourself just to have some control over it. When you grow up in a conflict-heavy home, a lack of conflict actually feels abnormal.

I find myself only now, at 46, actually confronting these things. Some of the questions I ask myself may be familiar to some of you:

• Why do I sometimes explode in rage before I’m even conscious of the fact that I’m angry, or even after I tell myself I won’t get upset no matter what happens?

• Why am I so sensitive to criticism and rejection, in a way that makes me feel weak and pathetic?

• Why can’t I stick with a job without getting bored? Why am I so distractible? Why can’t I focus on things I don’t like doing without being under extreme pressure?

• Why am I responsibility avoidant?

• Why are many simple, real world tasks like pulling teeth for me?

• Why do I need constant, sustained, external validation?

• Why do I believe that I’m worthless, useless, shameful, and bad?

• Why do I always feel a need to self-medicate, whether with drugs or alcohol or other dopamine-inducing activities?

• Why do I never feel actually happy or satisfied with anything?

• Why is my stress response either to blow up in anger (usually a manifestation of fear) or to shut down completely and be unable to deal with the problem?

• Why is it that once I’m emotionally dysregulated because of an argument or other stressful interaction or event, I become completely non-functional for hours or even days?

• Why do I lash out when I feel cornered in a disagreement, or distort the facts of what is being said in my mind? Why do I forget things I say or do in moments of heightened stress or anger?

• Why do I feel like I’m an introvert when my personality test says I’m very extroverted and experience tells me I actually don’t do well without human interaction?

• How am I supposed to function when that same test says I score as high as is possible on neuroticism (negative thinking/emotion/catastrophizing), volatility, and withdrawal — all deeply antisocial traits?

There are no simple solutions to any of these issues, but as it turns out, there are some explanations as to why they happen. There are links between certain kinds of negative experiences that happen to you habitually in childhood and how your nervous system becomes primed to react and/or protect you, which carry over into adulthood. Very rarely are these coping mechanisms and maladaptive behaviors something you’re consciously aware of, but that doesn’t make them less destructive. In fact, they can make you incredibly difficult to live with.

There are identifiable “trauma personalities” that people tend to fall into without even realizing it. Those with this kind of trauma often self-sabotage, or sabotage those around us, because we’re still fighting a war that isn’t happening. Like the soldier with conventional PTSD who suffers a flashback at a fireworks display and dives for cover because he believes he’s still in combat, the sufferer of complex trauma/CPTSD has something called an “emotional flashback,” where they react to a situation they’re in as an adult as though they are still a child back in their abusive situation. The person they are reacting to is often completely perplexed as to why they are reacting so strongly to a small disagreement or perceived slight, not having any idea that the person is actually reacting to something that used to happen to them long ago that the current situation has merely reminded them of.

I am still seeking the best methods to heal these kinds of wounds. Suggestions I’ve seen include practices that get you into an awareness of your physical body like exercise or yoga (which combats the temporal displacement of flashbacks), art and theater therapies, clinical use of psychedelics, neurofeedback, and EMDR therapy.

The Upshot

If Abigail Shrier is offering a necessary corrective to an overemphasis in children on therapy and mental health, it should be noted that for many of us who are currently in middle age, we never got even a little of this emphasis, and we have not been equipped to deal properly with the traumas of our past.

We are the parents who are most likely to overdo it on “gentle parenting” or overly therapizing our kids, inasmuch as we don’t want to repeat the same mistakes or see our kids suffering from the same kinds of wounds we did. But many of us, like me, only reached that conclusion after repeating some of the abuses common in our own childhoods.

There are certainly many cases of children being asked to dwell overly much on the things that make them sad. There are cases of people attempting to recover trauma memories through things like hypnosis, only to conjure up false events that never actually happened. Unscrupulous therapists can be the catalyst for adolescents to explore the insanities of gender dysphoria. In addition, therapy is an industry, and it transacts a lot of money. Therapists often fail to offer a concrete roadmap to resolution, instead providing an indefinite service that nets them an indefinite paycheck. Shrier discusses with Rogan how some clinicians she has spoken to limit the number of sessions to create a sense of urgency and purpose in their treatment and not simply milk their patients of hard-earned dollars in perpetuity.

In my own attempts at therapy, I’ve been deeply unsatisfied. I’ve worked with three different therapists over the past few years, none of whom seemed to have a real game plan for understanding what was causing my issues and how to systematically correct them so that I could become whole.

Ironically, it’s only because I can’t actually afford therapy at the moment that I’ve resorted to books, podcasts, and YouTube videos to find the answers that I need. And what I’ve found is that the speakers and authors of this kind of content have an incentive to get to the point and offer helpful, actionable information because they’re not selling ongoing weekly sessions, but single, fixed pieces of information that are only monetizable if they are useful enough to get lots of views or sell lots of copies.

I don’t want to spend the next five or ten years of my life dwelling on my childhood issues. I don’t want to get stuck in a cycle of rumination, or fall into the mentality of victimhood. I don’t want to float through life blaming everything on my parents, or the spiritual abuse I received from a number of people in the Church, or on anything else.

I want to take radical responsibility for my own life, because that puts me in the driver’s seat, and nobody else.

I want to identify the causes of the harmful behaviors I don’t understand. I want to heal them and tear them out at the roots. I need help to do that. It’s almost impossible for a broken man to know how to fix himself without a guide. In virtue of the way trauma skews our perspectives, we are perhaps singularly incapable of accurate self-diagnosis and healing unless we are given the tools to do so. For many of us, that could mean therapy. For others, it may mean therapy-adjacent materials like the books and podcasts and talks and lectures I’ve mentioned.

These things, if done well, can act as the “drawing salve” that removes the splinter. Only once the splinter has been extracted can healing actually begin.

If you suffer from complex trauma, I urge you not to wait to address it. It doesn’t go away on its own. And it has a high cost not just for you, but for the people you love.

You owe to yourself, and to them, to find healing, and wholeness.