Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My "trauma" frame, published by Raemon on July 1, 2023 on LessWrong.

Here is how I think about trauma. It's packaged in a language intended to be accessible to people who are skeptical of trauma-narratives.

It sort of deliberately skirts over all the actually hard parts and emotionally resonant parts because I don't feel like dealing with that today, and many of them are sort of private and involve other people. I realize that makes it fairly abstract and maybe hard follow. Tough nuts?

Trauma Advocates circa 2019

Around 2018-2019, there was a fairly common set of memes in my local social group around processing trauma. There were some people who had noticed:

They (and many people they talked to), felt very stuck, demotivated, unhappy or unproductive in mysterious ways.

They eventually came to believe that this was downstream of trauma they had experienced awhile ago (often in childhood), in ways that shaped what stories they felt allowed to tell themselves, and what sort of motivations they were allowed to have. Their motivations were a series of spaghetti code built on top of said trauma.

Notably, it had not been salient to them that they were experiencing trauma for most of their adult life. But they eventually hit on a realization that they'd been ignore their emotions, while thinking they were awesome at emotions. Unlocking this realization made them happier and more fulfilled.

They observed at least some other people for whom the above story was clearly true.

They observed that many rationalists-in-their-neighborhood seemed to have at least some things in common with the story (i.e. mysteriously unmotivated, anxious, etc).

They went around diagnosing people as traumatized. Such as me.

And I reflected a bit, and I was like "I... I dunno man. I've thought about it a bunch. I just... really don't seem very traumatized?"

One argument about this resulted in my blogpost Strategies for Personal Growth. I noticed me and a friend were talking past each other a bunch about self-improvement, and I kept talking in the frame of "what skills can I gain and how can I gain them?" and they kept talking in the frame of "how can I heal?". It took me awhile to understand that we were coming at this from two frames, and this made sense because we were in different life-trajectories where (AFAICT) it really did make sense for me to be focused on gaining skills at the time, and it really made sense for them to be focused on healing.

Then, the pandemic happened.

Trauma from the perspective of the Robot Utilitarians

And everyone I know suddenly had to deal with many important pillars of their life getting ripped out at once, and having to make very stressful negotiations with their roommates and coworkers where people had different needs, different epistemics on "how dangerous is covid?" and different preferences on how to resolve disagreements on covid policy.

I had a really intense experience with this. A few months into the pandemic, I found myself waking up once a week crying in the middle of the night. And eventually I was like

"oh"

"this is a trauma. I did not have A Trauma before, but I got one now."

And I queried my Spirit of Humanity shoulder advisor and was like "hey I seem traumatized now. What do I do?" and the Spirit of Humanity said "obviously seems pretty important to work through your trauma so you can be healthy and happy and whole."

And I was like "ugh, that seems like a lot of work." and then I queried my Spirit of Robot Utilitarianism shoulder advisor and was like "hey Spirit of the Robot Utilitarians, what do you think about me having A Trauma? What if I just ignored it and powered through?"

And the Spirit of the Robot Utilitarians said "If you don't process you're trauma, you could bury it deep inside and just focus on getting work done. But, if you ever got a tota...