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Sept. 28, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:49
The Three Types of Trauma
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Alright, so this is worth a solo response.
The question is, what's a fast and effective way to undo old, destructive programming like the pessimist in the last call-in show?
So, that's on freedomain.locals.com.
So, I'm going to...
Well, first of all, I'm going to tell you I don't know because these are just things that have worked for me, approaches that have worked for me, and they may be helpful to you.
Of course, you'll have to take that under your own recognizance, but...
I want to give you a framework for working this out.
And the framework is to figure out what kind of trauma you experienced as a child.
Now, as a child, no matter how wonderful society is, we're always going to experience trauma.
You learn to ride a bike.
You fall down. You get your strawberry knees.
There's some trauma. You're going to get rejected by someone you care about.
That's just, you know, you ask a girl out in your teens and she's going to say no.
So there's going to be upset.
There's going to be trauma. That's part of life.
And trying to live without that is like trying to live without a heartbeat.
It's just not going to work. So what worked for me, what helped for me was to look at three different kinds of trauma and to try and figure out which one is still haunting you.
And I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the third kind.
So the first kind of trauma is just physical trauma.
Just physical trauma.
You learn to climb a tree.
You fall. Maybe you break an arm.
Maybe you twist an ankle. This is just going to happen.
When I was 19, I disco danced myself down to the ground and didn't get back up again because I'd really hurt my knee.
So that's a kind of trauma that's going to happen simply through exploring the world.
And it's not trauma that lasts.
So what is the point of pain?
The point of pain is to teach you not to do it again.
That's the point of pain. I remember being told this story when I was a kid.
Which is that a man climbing a tree who can't feel pain, he's going to feel, he's not going to feel the bees stinging his back if he disturbs a bees nest or a wasp nest or something like that.
So he climbs higher and higher and higher and then what happens is the poison overwhelms him and he falls down and dies, right?
So that's why you need to feel pain so you can change the Of course, pain teaches you a kind of caution, and that's fine.
I have a little scar on my thumb from tripping over a dishwasher while I was carrying a plate of dishes.
The dishes broke and gashed me to the bone.
And, you know, just teaches me to be more careful around dishwashers and make sure that you know if the door is open or not, if you can't see it because all the plates are carrying.
So that doesn't leave you lasting trauma.
So physical trauma is something we all experience.
It teaches us caution and we move on with our lives.
It usually doesn't have lasting trauma.
Now the second kind of trauma is emotional trauma.
And emotional trauma is just things that upset us.
It's not physical. It's emotional.
We wanted to get a toy for Christmas.
We didn't get a toy.
I remember having... Great upset when a friend of my mother's was going to go to bingo and she said that if she won the main prize she was gonna give me I think it was 18 pounds like an unimaginable sum of money for me back in the day And I, of course, translated this into my mind that I was just going to get 18 pounds when she came back.
And when she came back, she gave me 18 pennies because she didn't win the main prize.
I was very upset because I had this anticipation of a great reward that didn't actually come into my life until I met my wife.
So that's an emotional upset, no physical damage.
When I was younger, I think as many testosterone-heavy, hyper-competitive males were, I had trouble losing.
I was a bit of a suck. I was a bit of a rage quitter.
And I still remember throwing a tennis racket when I was seven or eight because I missed a shot that I thought I could get.
And as I've gotten older, I've realized that a lot of guys, for better and for worse, just don't get out of that phase.
They continue to rage at themselves if they miss a shot.
Come on! That kind of stuff.
stuff.
It's really kind of startling.
Now, you have to learn to deal with that non physical damage, it's emotional upset, you have to learn how to deal with that.
And what I sort of figured out in my sort of rough, youthful way, was that I like to win.
I'm Everybody likes to win.
But I need to make sure that the winning is real, it's fair, right?
So if you get really mad when you lose, then there may be people in your life who let you win so you won't be mad, and then you don't really get the joy of victory, right?
And so don't rage quit, don't storm.
You know, want to win, but learn how to lose gracefully.
Good sportsmanship was a big thing when I was growing up, particularly in boarding school.
One of the great lessons, along with masculine authority figures, which was probably a lifesaver for me as well, One of the good things that I got out of boarding school.
So emotional upset, emotional trauma.
Some people rage quit the entire competition and say, well, I feel so bad when I lose, I'm just not going to play.
When I visited my mom in an asylum many years ago, I ended up in a ping pong room for some reason and a woman came in and I said, hey, do you want to play some ping pong?
And she's like, no, no, no, it makes me too stressed.
And she just turned and ran out.
So you can't give up the fight, but you also can't have losing make you miserable.
So want to win, be okay with losing.
It's a tough balance. It's a tough thing in life.
And I don't think I struggle with it anymore, but I think for a while, definitely when I was younger, I struggled with it.
And of course... You, for dating, right, you like a girl, you ask her out.
If she says no, you're upset, right?
And so there's emotional upset.
You want a job, you don't get the job.
So there's all this emotional upset.
And what is the emotional upset there to teach you to do?
Well, if people don't want to play with you because you're too sucky a loser, then that teaches you that that's not a good situation to be in.
If you don't find much satisfaction in winning because you fear or feel that people might have just let you win because they don't want to deal with your upset if you lose, then you don't get the high of winning.
The high of winning has to be a clean high.
It has to be a clean win.
You have to win when people are competing against you and not appeasing you because you're upset.
So you want to aim for that clean win.
So trying to find that balance of you really, really want to win but you can't be too mad if you lose, that's part of the emotional maturation of everyone has to go through that at some point.
And of course it's trying to find your right level.
There is a cap on ability that I've certainly hit.
In a wide variety of things with the absence of very few things like philosophy and so on.
There's kind of a cap to ability and I really do envy people who don't have any cap on that ability.
No cap on their athletic abilities or musical abilities or singing abilities in particular or their ability to remember chess moves or learn foreign languages.
I mean, it's just wild to me because there's a few areas where I don't feel like I have any particular caps on my ability.
I've obviously pursued those.
With great energy and success.
And that's sort of what you want to focus on.
The frustration is there to help guide you away from the things where you have a cap on your ability and guide you towards the things where you have no practical cap on your ability, right?
So I would get frustrated, say, in racket sports where I'm above average but not particularly good in racket sports.
And I mean, I've taken lessons and played for a long time.
Again, I'm probably the top 20%, but I can't really get much higher.
And then there's people who can just, you know, wipe the floor with me in racket sports.
There's people in online gaming.
I had a guy I worked with once who just always seemed to psychically know where I was and be able to snipe me out from falling from a helicopter in a cyclone or something like that.
So the frustration there, if you get too frustrated with something, the frustration is there to either help you break through whatever barrier you might have with coaching or training or something like that or practice.
But it also could be there to say, look, this is the cap of your ability, so you want to move to some area.
I've really never been frustrated with philosophy with the goal.
I mean, one particular exception I remember was when I just sat down to figure out universally preferable behavior because I was just so sick and tired of their not being an objective proof of secular ethics.
But that frustration helped me push through something and gave me great achievement.
So the emotional trauma, frustration and anger in someone, is there to help guide you towards where your skills are best.
Because we have our vanity goals and then we have our helpful goals, our productive goals.
So the vanity goals are like, you know, everybody wants to be a social media star or everybody wants to be the singer in the band or everybody wants like whatever the cool, everybody wants to be a model or whatever, an Instagram star.
So there's the vanity goals, which we feel will be good for our egos and people will make us feel good by giving us positive feedback and so on.
And those vanity goals are not the goals that the world needs for you to do or that your soul and your moral striving and virtue and goodness and all.
That's not what those things need you to do.
So and it's funny, you know, people still play the lottery.
which is a vanity goal to win.
Oh, I've had a lot of money. I'll be so super happy without ever looking up the stories of people who've won that money and seeing.
I'm really not very happy.
In fact, there was a guy, I think he was in Toronto, who ended up addicted to drugs after he won the lottery, ended up in prison.
And he was like, man, prison is way better than being out there.
Prison is better than winning the lottery for that guy.
So we've got physical trauma, which teaches you caution.
We have emotional trauma, which guides you towards the most virtuous and productive uses of your time.
Me, I think I've tried to follow the emotional trauma to what's best for the world and best for me.
On the other side are emotions.
I don't know, the Kardashians or something with all vanity projects, right?
So you can navigate those things fairly well.
If you continue to stick with a vanity goal rather than a healthy goal, something that's...
And it doesn't just mean like moral actions or whatever, right?
But if you stick to a...
Vanity goal as opposed to a truly productive goal, then like if you struggle to become a singer, even when you'd be far better off being something else, right?
In terms of like what you can do, or if you struggle to be a songwriter because you want to become famous and you won't give it up, even though you can't write particularly good songs, even after lots of practicing, you know, a lot of people have like half finished novel in their drawer and they won't finish it and so on.
Because they want to be a famous writer for whatever reasons, usually to do with vanity, rather than, is this going to make the world a better place?
And the vanity projects can specifically be characterized by great enthusiasm in the beginning, followed by a particular drop-off in productivity and then a frustration, like this postcard I saw many years ago on a rack in a store.
And it said, so I haven't written much lately.
So what? Neither has Shakespeare.
And so, yeah, vanity projects, your sense of despair or frustration will kick in saying, this is not the path for you.
This is not the path for you. Your talents are clamoring for expression and they're often at war with your vanity.
And I say this as someone who's had that issue, not so much now, but certainly when I was younger for many, many years.
I want to be a famous actor.
I want to be a famous writer.
I want to make novels and movies and all of that.
And There were some decent goals.
The acting was very much a vanity project.
And I was scouted by a modeling agency in my teens and thought that could be my life.
But, oh my God, is that a messy world.
Anyway, a story for another time.
Or the vanity project could be dating the prettiest girl or sleeping with lots of men or lots of women or whatever it is, right?
So the emotional trauma is there to guide you, I think, to a better place, to treat your vanity with caution and to have you strive for greatness That is lasting and positive rather than selfish and destructive, right?
Because there's the vanity project like I'm better than you, which is where other people feel less or smaller after interacting with you.
And then there's the productive project called let's all get elevated together, which has really been kind of core to what I do.
I hope anyway, I think.
So... We got physical trauma, we got emotional trauma, and last but not least, and this is where the real muscle of the conversation is, we have moral trauma.
Now, moral trauma is the one that generally lasts the longest.
It's when you've been subjected not to an accident, not to a foible or weakness of your own, but an evil or immoral action from another, right?
So the typical example would be a parent who hits you, a parent who puts you down, verbally abuses you, who neglects you, who ignores you, all of these kinds of things.
It could happen in school where you're, you know, taught to hate yourself if you're a boy, you know, you just, you know, You're a broken girl.
You've got to fix that. And so all of this emotional or physical abuse is a moral trauma.
And those are the ones that are tough to shake.
The moral traumas are the ones that are tough to shake.
So you want to differentiate these things.
So I'll give you sort of three examples from my own life.
Not because I want to talk about me, but I think examples can help illustrate the concepts.
So as far as...
Physical trauma goes...
Gosh, what would I talk about when I was a kid?
Oh yeah, so when I was 16, I was jogging through the woods.
I leapt off some rocks into what looked like a whole bunch of...
But it turned out that under the leaves were very sharp rocks and bent rocks, and I twisted my ankle.
This is shortly before I flew to Africa, although fortunately, because I was 16, it resolved in a matter of days as opposed to months when you're in your 50s.
No particular trauma.
I learned to look before I leapt, right?
I mean, and I had been running, gosh, cross-country running at this point for years and years.
Never had any injury like that before.
Just a bit of bad luck and a bit of lack of caution.
Can't do much about the bad luck, but you can do something about the lack of caution, so that's never happened to me again.
So it didn't leave any lasting trauma, no big upset, no big problems, right?
So that's a physical trauma.
And there are accidents even that come outside of yourself.
An emotional trauma for me...
I was maybe four or five years old.
I was wandering alone in the woods for whatever reason.
God knows what. It was the late 60s, early 70s.
So I was four or five years old.
I was wandering in the woods, and a giant Great Dane bounded up to me and was growling at me.
And of course, I'm looking up. This thing's the size of a horse to me.
It at least feels that way. And the dog had me, I basically backed up to get up against a tree and the dog kind of came up close to me in this like one third of a Cerberus guardian of hell kind of way and sniffed me.
I can still vaguely remember its breath.
I think it smelled of rabbit for some reason, which is probably just my panic.
And every time I tried to move, the dog would growl at me, and then eventually someone whistled or called the dog, and it just shrugged in a sense and just loped away.
So that was emotional trauma.
I wasn't physically injured, but I was very, very scared.
But this didn't lead to any lasting trauma for me.
I love dogs, always appreciated the company of dogs, and I have some caution around, you know, if you're in the middle of nowhere and some dog comes up and is aggressive, yes, you have caution, of course, because you don't know.
What kind of dog? Could be a wild dog, could be an injured dog, could be a sick dog, could be some Cujo scenario.
But it didn't leave me with any particular lasting trauma.
Did it teach me some caution?
Yeah, I think it was probably a little while before I went wandering in the woods on my own at that age.
And I think at that age that should not have been occurring for me anyway.
So that's more on my mom than on me.
So there's emotional trauma.
I learned my lesson. I didn't reproduce the issue.
Another emotional trauma.
I remember climbing very high up in a tree with some friends when I was probably seven or eight.
And I could neither climb further up nor could I come back down because it's easier to climb up than it is to climb down.
It's like one of those spikes in the rental car parking lots.
One way is good, the other way is bad.
And I remember, of course, being very upset and crying because I had to cling on to the tree, so eventually you run out of strength and you're just going to fall.
So my friends were great.
They really helped me.
They gave me shoulders to stand on to get down to a place where I could climb down from there.
So... And did that teach me some caution?
Absolutely it did. I made sure that there's a way back down when you climb up, which is a pretty good lesson.
Have an exit strategy for whatever it is you're doing.
That's a pretty good lesson.
I certainly wish I'd learned that and applied that lesson to some of my dating scenarios.
So we've got physical trauma, emotional trauma, some examples, and of course the moral trauma is being beaten up by my mother as a child or being caned in boarding school.
So those are moral traumas.
And the reason why moral traumas stick around so long is that they're the hardest to shake in your adult life.
So you can stop doing physically reckless things as an adult, and generally people do.
It's always a wild irony that the people who have the most life to lose, the longest amount of life to lose, tend to be the least careful in their physical activities.
So you can say, look, I'm going to be more careful or give up on sort of crazy things, and then that keeps you safe from a lot of the physical trauma.
With regards to emotional trauma, you know, you can, you know, hopefully if you find the person and you settle down, you know, I don't have emotional trauma about being rejected by women because I live with the woman I love I've been married to for 20 years and will spend the rest of her lives together.
So there's no real emotional trauma when it comes to that.
Hostilities and rejections on the internet has never particularly bothered me too much, except occasionally in clusters.
So I don't really deal with much emotional trauma.
You can do a lot to sort of deal with that.
But moral trauma?
I mean, there are always going to be, at least for the foreseeable future, evildoers, immoral people, malefactors in the world.
You go to work, there could be some crazy boss or some mean co-worker or something like that.
So there are going to be these kind of moral injuries.
Now, hopefully, they're not moral injuries combined with Because if you get moral trauma, you also get emotional trauma and physical trauma for the most part.
And I include neglect in physical trauma for children because as a social species, we need our parents.
And if we don't get our parents, it's a form of spiritual starvation.
It's very destructive. So if your father beats you up, you get the moral trauma of him initiating force against you, you get the physical trauma of the injuries, and you get the emotional trauma of the breaking connection and the rejection and the just mess of what you're dealing with.
So that's a triple layer cake from hell.
Some physical trauma comes with emotional trauma.
Emotional trauma on its own doesn't come with any physical trauma.
So these are the sort of layers that you have to work with.
So it's the most traumatic to have a moral trauma.
And it's the toughest to shake when you become an adult.
If you have people who did you evil as a child, then...
It's very hard to shake those habits and those patterns.
Now, what is the moral trauma there for?
Well, the moral trauma, the upset or the negative feelings associated with moral violence or betrayal against you, is to try and keep you safe.
It's to try and keep you safe.
So, you know, physical trauma, be more cautious.
Emotional trauma, find a better path.
Moral trauma, Find better people.
Find more moral people.
Be surrounded by more moral people.
That's a tough one, man. That's a tough one.
Maybe it's a little tougher now that society's going fairly rapidly around the bend.
But find better people.
That's a tough one to sort out.
So... Improve or remove, right?
The moral trauma is saying if you have immoral people around you who betray you, who spill your secrets, who badmouth you behind your back, who bully you, who verbally abuse you or put you down or whatever or deny your experience, who gaslight you, just immoral people who are harming your interests for the sake of their own selfish preferences or of their own avoidance of negative stimuli such as self-honesty for wrongdoing.
So Physical trauma, be more careful.
Emotional trauma, find a better path.
Moral trauma, improve or remove.
Improve the people around you, convince them to be better people, or remove them from your environment.
I think that's what the moral trauma is saying.
And so, of course, with regards to moral trauma, the big propaganda is, well, you can't possibly remove the immoral people from your life because they're whatever, family or whatever...
Well, philosophy recognizes that as a category, but not as a moral category.
It's a biological category and a historical category and a category of how we evolved as a species to pair bond and to need 20 years to raise our kids or whatever.
So family is not a moral category.
And of course, people who are bad or immoral within a family want to turn family into a moral category so they can drape themselves in that moral mantle and say that you owe obligations to a concept Not to individuals, in the same way that kings would say, you owe allegiance to God, not to me.
You owe allegiance to the country, not to me.
You owe allegiance to some collective concept of the people rather than me.
So people want to infuse the word family with a morally positive status so that they can say, well, I'm part of your family, therefore I get that penumbra of moral virtue that I've infused the concept with, and it's a fundamental method of gaslighting and social and physical control.
So, all of that stuff, I think, is really essential to understanding how to overcome this kind of trauma.
Physical trauma, we all understand.
Be more cautious. Be more careful.
Don't take unnecessary risks.
And, of course, you have to take some, right?
Every time you go and play a sport, you could get injured.
But if you don't play any sports or don't do any exercise, you're going to get injured by attrition.
You're going to get injured because you're not doing anything.
And in the same way, moral trauma is just part of being in society.
I mean, even if you were to go live in the woods completely on your own, okay, you may not have moral trauma, but then you have the trauma of isolation and loneliness, and loneliness ages you faster than smoking.
I mean, it's really not good for you.
We're a social animal. So maybe you could find some kind of community that's going to last, and so all of these are very doubtful and difficult things to try and achieve.
And of course, the more successful your community is, the more people are going to want to join it and the more chance you're going to get malefactors coming in.
So you just have to kind of grit your teeth moving your way through the world and recognize that there's going to be a certain amount of moral trauma that is, again, trying to get you to improve or remove the people from your life.
So if people are really destructive towards you, work to improve them.
If it's a safe thing to do, if you can improve them, then remove them from your life.
Again, that's not my order.
That's what I think the pain of moral trauma is trying to get you to do, in my opinion, right?
Because trauma is there to get us to change our behavior, to remove the stimuli or the potential for the stimuli that causes us the destruction, right?
I mean, if you unwisely bike without a helmet and you fall and bang your head, then you're going to bike with a helmet.
Or maybe you won't bike at all.
So the purpose of the pain and the trauma is to get you to change your behavior.
If you are...
you want to be an actor, but you continually get rejected and nobody wants to hire you and so on, then that's painful for you.
And part of the pain is to get you to change your behavior and pursue something that's better in line with your talents or abilities or what the world needs for you.
Like if the world keeps rejecting you at some point, you have to accept that the world has a point.
And whether that point is right or wrong, there is still a marketplace out there.
And if you don't fulfill people's requirements, I mean, I cast about doing a whole bunch of things.
I had good success in academia.
I had okay success in the art world.
I had great success in the business world and ultimate success in the world of philosophy.
So again, it's all just guiding your way through to find a better place and a more appropriate place, a place where you can really shine and you can't shine if people are verbally abusing you and you can't shine if you're doing something for a vanity project because you'll be too concerned with rejection to really push through and pursue it to its a place where you can really shine and you can't shine If you're doing a thing for the thing itself, right?
For like, I didn't do philosophy because I wanted to be a well-known or thought of as smart or anything like that.
I I did it because I really, really wanted to help the world and I felt I had a huge mantle of obligation to do so because of my particular skill set.
So that's just the way it was and that allowed me, of course, to continue to pushing through some fairly steep obstacles, to put it mildly.
How do you overcome the trauma?
Well, you listen to what it's trying to tell you.
If you're around someone, let's say you've got a cousin who just keeps putting you down, or insulting your girlfriend, or whatever it is, right?
Okay, so you've got, I mean, that's mean, right?
That's a moral trauma. It doesn't have to be violent, right?
It's a moral trauma. So then you sit down with your cousin and say, hey, like, what's your issue?
What's your issue with me? Like, why do you keep putting me down?
Oh, I don't keep putting you down. Yeah, you do.
Like, I made a couple of notes. Here's what you did.
Boom, boom, boom. Oh, you just can't take a joke.
Well, it's not funny.
You know, like, if you're a comedian and nobody's laughing and everyone's getting offended, you just get to yell at them that they can't take a joke?
no, maybe you should reevaluate your jokes and try and figure out if they're funny.
Because nobody's really laughing when you make these jokes, right?
Oh, you know, you're just too sensitive.
It's like, well, okay, let's say I am too sensitive.
Then if you care about me, shouldn't you try and work about that?
You know, like if you have a sore back from a sunburn, I'm not gonna go up and slap you on the back if I know you have a sore back from a sunburn because I care about you and don't want to upset you and hurt you because you're sensitive in that area, right?
Or let's say some permanent sensitivity, Let's say you've got some hyperacuity or hearing disorder in your left ear.
I'm not going to go up and make loud noises in your left ear because it's upsetting for you.
So even if I am, quote, sensitive about these issues, why would you keep doing it?
Well, I'm just trying to toughen you up.
It's like, okay, well, I guess I'm trying to toughen you up by saying have some self-control and self-restraint and stop doing things that upset me and stop doing things that...
Inside my girlfriend. Or you can start doing the same thing back to him.
And if he gets upset, say, well, wait a minute, you keep doing these things to me.
Why would you get upset about me doing them to you?
So you'd work to try and improve the person and figure out why they're doing what they're doing.
And it probably is because they're jealous or they think your girlfriend's really attractive and they can't get a girl like that or whatever they could be doing.
So you'd work with that and you try and improve him.
And if he continues to do these negative things, what's your trauma telling you to do?
Improve or remove? I think that's what the...
So why is it that trauma continues?
I would assume it's because you've not taken on the mantle of improve or remove.
And again, I'm not telling you what relationships to have, what relationships not to have.
This is my particular framework of working with what worked in my life.
I think that there's good philosophical reasons and emotional reasons behind it.
But of course, it's absolutely your choice what you do with your life.
I'm just trying to give you a framework to understand.
So why does trauma last?
Trauma lasts because the stimuli hasn't gone away.
My trauma lasts because the negative stimuli has not gone away.
And, of course, people who abuse you will always tell you that it's your responsibility to stop feeling negative.
It's your responsibility that you're too sensitive, that you've got to man up, you've got to toughen up, you've got to have a thicker skin, it's all in fun, blah, blah, blah.
So people who are abusing you will always tell you that, yes, there's negative stimuli, but it's not coming from me.
That's your craziness that's misinterpreting things to create this negative stimuli.
Now, I mean, that's ridiculous, right?
I mean, if you do clap your friend on the back, and it turns out he's got a sunburn he didn't tell you about, and it's covered up by a t-shirt or something, and he's like, oh my god, that stings, you'd be like, oh my, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, gosh, I didn't mean, right, blah, blah, blah, right, I didn't mean to, you would feel really bad for inflicting negative stimuli, even if it wasn't your fault.
And then you sure as heck wouldn't clap him on the back again, right?
Even if it absolutely had nothing to do with you, it was all about him, he didn't tell you, it was completely nothing to do with anything bad you did, you'd still apologize if you're a decent person and not do it again, right?
So you wouldn't keep clapping him on the back and just say, ah, stop being such a baby, it's just a sunburn.
I mean, I assume you wouldn't because otherwise you'd be a total jerk, to put it mildly.
So if you look at this physical trauma, emotional trauma, and moral trauma, you can get all three, and it can even be self-inflicted.
So if you do something terrible, like you drive drunk, and you get into a car crash, and you injure someone, well, you have moral trauma because you did something immoral.
You have the physical trauma of the car crash, and you have the emotional trauma of harm to yourself and others, right?
So it can all layer. I have seen it occur that if somebody has unresolved moral trauma, then physical trauma can bring it back out.
So if you were physically abused as a child and you get into a car accident, then sometimes the moral trauma that may be unprocessed is triggered by the physical trauma of the car accident because it reminds your body of injuries and so on.
So I think these things can occur that way.
I think that if you look at the difference between, say, World War II and Vietnam, just to take a very macro level, this is all very general statements, tons of exceptions, right?
But if you look at the people who came back from World War II, they had physical trauma, without a doubt.
They had emotional trauma.
They didn't have as much moral trauma as the Vietnam veterans did because World War II was generally considered a good war.
You were fighting the bad guys and you did an honorable thing that was dangerous and difficult and you got ticket tape parades and you were considered a hero and you got a pension and a medal.
And there were all this sort of positive feedback.
Now, without getting into the moral complexities of both of these wars, if you look at the Vietnam veterans, they seem to suffer from a lot more PTSD.
They seem to suffer from a lot more emotional trauma.
They certainly had the physical trauma.
And I would say also that they had the moral trauma of being viewed as baby killers and all of this negative view of them when they came back.
So I think these kinds of issues are ways to understand why it could be the case that moral trauma tends to linger on in your life.
Look for the stimuli around you.
Are you still in an environment where you're subject to that kind of moral trauma?
And then I would say, again, what's worked for me may work for you is to work at sitting down, having candid and honest conversations, if it's safe, with the people who are causing you moral trauma.
And improve or remove seems to be the way that it's worked for me.
Maybe it'll work for you too.
So it's a great question. I hope that this framework helps you out.
And please let me know what you think.
I'm always dying to get your feedback on these conjectures.
Lots of love. Take care.
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