*\[Disclaimer: There is a strong association between pwBPD and honest-to-god trauma. If you’re someone who has experienced extreme privation, physical/sexual abuse, violent crime, or some other threat to your life or safety, please stop reading. This post is not for you.*

*This post is for the rest of us who, as a community, need to take a hard look at the technically imprecise way in which the word “trauma” is thrown around on this sub. Why do we call things “trauma” that don’t meet the strict definition of trauma? What purpose does an appeal to trauma serve? Why do we find it attractive? What are the unintended consequences of our casual use of the word – especially for those whose honest-to-god traumatic experiences end up trivialized by our over-use of the term?\]*

**What is trauma?**

Psychiatric professionals and researchers don’t understand trauma the same way that users of this sub seem to. They use a very constricted definition that excludes things like mean parents, bad breakups, or social embarrassment. For example:

&gt;[“The DSM-5 definition of trauma requires ‘actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence.’ Stressful events not involving an immediate threat to life or physical injury such as psychosocial stressors (e.g., divorce or job loss) are not considered trauma in this definition.”](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5371751/#:~:text=The%20DSM%2D5%20definition%20of,considered%20trauma%20in%20this%20definition)

Notably absent from this definition is the subjective perception of the patient. Put differently, an experience *feeling* traumatic is insufficient evidence that the experience *is* traumatic.

\[If this fact feels invalidating, maybe just sit with that for a little while. I don’t make the definitions; I’m just reporting what researchers say.\]

**Why does it matter how researchers use the word?**

Researchers are interested in trauma because of its potential to cause adverse psychological sequelae. That is, traumatic experiences can cause psychological dysfunction in vulnerable individuals. So the presence of a past trauma can, in some instances, be offered as an explanation for a patient’s troubling behaviors in the present. For example, 4th of July fireworks might cause a war veteran to experience a panic attack. The past experience of a life threat leads to dysfunction in that individual’s stress response system. We can say with reasonable certainty that this happens, because there’s a robust body of research on this topic.

There is not, however, any research into whether your high school breakup can cause similar chronic dysfunction. There is no evidence that a parent’s *perceived* indifference to your needs rises to the threshold of trauma such that it will impact your psychological functioning for the rest of your life – at least not in the way that trauma does. Neither is experiencing an invalidating environment during childhood, strictly speaking, trauma.

This all matters, because if you want to say, “I was *traumatized* and that explains my lack of emotional regulation and the bad behaviors that go with it,” your definition of trauma had better match the research definition of trauma. Otherwise, you’re making an appeal in the absence of research or evidence. To repeat, researchers do not consider your high school breakup (for example) a trauma. They’re not doing research into whether that sort of experience can lead to the kind of serious emotional dysregulation that pwBPD so often seek to explain. You can’t draw a line from the *perceived* trauma to the sequelae that follow *dictionary definition* trauma, because there’s no research and no evidence.

**But my experience felt traumatic!**

If you’re on this sub, there’s a good chance that you’re a pwBPD. And as a pwBPD, lots of things are going to feel traumatic. That just goes with the territory. But as we’ve discussed above, serious researchers don’t consider the *subjective interpretation* of the patient when deciding whether or not an event *is* traumatic.

Think of it this way. Real trauma is of interest because it can *cause* psychological dysfunction. That is to say, the traumatic event comes first and the dysfunction (emotional dysregulation, panic attacks, whatever) proceeds from that event. The chronological order is trauma first, dysfunction second.

However, if you’re a pwBPD, you’re already primed to be hypersensitive to negative emotions. The chonological order is reversed – dysfunction first, prompting disproportionate (trauma-like) feelings that a pwoBPD would not experience under the same circumstances. The breakup (sorry to keep going back to this well, would appreciate more examples) *feels* traumatic not because it *is* traumatic, but because pwBPD are hypersensitive.

**Why are appeals to trauma attractive to pwBPD?**

Appeals to trauma (again, perceived trauma rather than trauma that meets the above DSM definition) are attractive to pwBPD because they serve a purpose.

One of the hallmark features of BPD is splitting. Frank Yeowmans, a psychiatry professor at Cornell and expert in BPD, explains splitting as an inability of a pwBPD to integrate the positive and negative aspects of individuals into a complex and coherent whole. To a pwBPD, people (and institutions or ideas) are either all good or all bad - often varying from day to day. Marsha Linehan gets at some of this in the “dialectical thinking” portion of DBT. It can be hard for a pwBPD to accept seemingly contradictory claims – that a good person can sometimes do bad things or that someone who loves us can also sometimes be mad at us.

Here’s where things get sticky. This isn’t only true for our relationships with others but also for our relationships with ourselves. If I have bad behaviors (fits of rage, for example), and I’m a pwBPD who engages in splitting, I have two options when it comes to reconciling my rage to my identity. I can split negative and see myself as all bad – and sometimes we do this! Or, I can split positive, see myself as all good, and look for a means to distance myself from the ownership of my bad actions.

This is really the crux of the way that appeals to trauma get used on this sub. An appeal to trauma (and therefore the sequelae of trauma) allows a pwBPD to rationalize their bad behavior, to explain it without taking full responsibility for it, to vindicate themselves and preserve their positive self concept without having to do the hard work of integrating both their positive and negative traits into a coherent whole. “I have fits of rage but it’s not my fault, because I had a *traumatic* childhood. I’m still a good person.” Telling ourselves these stories is highly reinforcing, because it not only preserves our positive self image, but it also assuages the discomfort of guilt that comes when you accept responsibility for your bad traits or bad behaviors.

Incidentally, I think pathological lying (and sometimes lying about trauma!) in some pwBPD stems from the same motivation.

**What are the unintended consequences?**

When we use appeals to trauma in this way, we’re throwing up a big barrier that blocks a major therapeutic target – helping us to overcome black-and-white thinking and to develop a consistent sense of self. We have to accept our bad traits and bad behaviors as part of ourselves if we’re ever going to come to terms with who we are as messy and complicated (but not all bad!) people.

To the extent that we use appeals to trauma to avoid responsibility for our bad behaviors, to say that those behaviors are somehow beyond our control because we are victims of some past circumstance, we relinquish the sense of agency we need if we’re ever going to get those behaviors (rage, for example) under control.

If we’re going to use the T word on this sub, it needs to be with the kind of gravity and seriousness with which psychiatric researchers use it. If we continue to use it for things like the loss of our childhood pets, we risk trivializing the word. And that would be deeply unfair to those who have faced the kinds of traumas that do meet the high standard of the technical definition. As a courtesy to survivors of child abuse or sexual assault, to refugees, to war veterans, and to all those others who faced devastating threats to their lives or well being, we should be more careful with our language.