Why Does Trauma Make People So Messed Up?

Evolutionary psychology is confusing

[Content note: some of this post may be invalidating to survivors of traumatizing experiences; I also discuss an instance of child sexual abuse.]

I am making a habit of asking more stupid questions, because sometimes they turn out to be good, insightful questions in disguise, and the rest of the time I get to find out the answer and hopefully become less stupid. In the interests of extending this habit to my blog, here is a stupid question I’ve been thinking about: why does trauma make people so dysfunctional?¹

The past was a very traumatizing sort of place. We don’t have figures for a lot of foraging societies, but it seems like they were quite violent, much more so that present-day societies. About half of all children died before puberty, so nearly all parents experienced the death of a child. And of course any number of other traumatizing events were common: child sexual abuse, rape, famine, nearly dying of various diseases, injury, the death of other loved ones, emotional abuse, bullying.²

Does that mean that in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness everyone was traumatized? Is “traumatized” the normal state of a human being, and “not traumatized” a weird aberration modern Westerners are lucky enough to be able to sometimes experience?

Here are some things I’ve been thinking about as potential pieces of the puzzle:

Most people, even people in very traumatizing situations, don’t get PTSD.

Psychopathology after abuse is well-correlated with subjective measures (i.e. whether people identify their childhood as abuse) and not very well-correlated with objective measures (i.e. whether a court identified you as being an abuse victim).³ You could imagine all kinds of explanations for this. Maybe thinking of yourself as an abuse victim is bad for you. Maybe people with mental illnesses look for trauma in their past to explain it, and people who aren’t mentally ill don’t, so mentally ill people overreport trauma. Maybe courts are bad at identifying the kinds of things that really mess people up. For example, maybe having a loving parent who is too poor to buy you enough food isn’t especially traumatizing or likely to be identified as abuse in adulthood. Conversely, maybe it’s traumatizing to have a parent who never wanted kids and doesn’t love you or even like you, even if a court isn’t going to intervene.

I’ve seen some arguments that trauma responses are adaptive in bad situations and not adaptive in the good situations that people later find themselves in. That seems true of some symptoms, like hyperarousal in PTSD or people-pleasing in borderlines. You can definitely tell a story where, in the atomized individualist West, there is a historically unprecedented ability to get away from people who are hurting you. But some symptoms of trauma just seem bad. I don’t think it would help in any situation to have flashback or panic attacks or to be unable to do basic activities necessary for everyday life.

I’ve also seen arguments that different cultures vary in what they find traumatizing. If you know that half of your kids are going to die, maybe you expect that this is going to happen and aren’t as messed up by it. If you expected that your children would outlive you, then your child dying before you is an unbearable tragedy and you’ll never be okay again. For people in modern Western society, a child dying is literally unthinkable. (To be clear, I am absolutely not saying that people should get over the deaths of their kids—the fact that we’re messed up by our children dying is a good thing.)

I’ve also heard people talk about orchids and dandelions: maybe some people (“dandelions”) are naturally more resilient to abuse and other people (“orchids”) are naturally prone to be messed up by it. This brings up the question of why the “orchid” genes weren’t selected against, since being more likely to be traumatized seems like it’s going to be bad for your reproductive fitness, but maybe orchid genes are good for something else. That seems to match my experience: I know lots of people with horrifying childhoods who seem totally fine as adults. You can also imagine that maybe people are “orchidlike” with regards to certain traumatizing experiences, even if they’re susceptible to others. For example, author Samuel Delany had his first sexual experience at age six and, in his seventies, thought of it as positive and enriching. Assuming that we trust Delany’s self-narrative, he is an “dandelion” about child sexual abuse. ⁴

But I’m a little bit unsatisfied by all these thoughts, and I don’t know how to fit them together. You guys have any insight?

1. If I’m very lucky I will get Scott Alexander to answer this question on Astral Codex Ten and not only will I get an answer I will get a whole bunch of new readers.

2. I am setting aside here theories that people are traumatized by “capitalism” or “diet culture” or “the climate crisis” or similar, such that all modern Westerners are also traumatized. While this may or may not be true, it does seem like it’s discussing a different thing than famine or violence.

3. I’m fascinated by the fact that there are, apparently, a lot of people who had a court declare them to be abuse victims who don’t think they were abused as a kid. What is that like?

4. I do want to be clear that “orchid”/“dandelion” isn’t a virtue thing—it’s not that some people are morally better because they can endure more suffering without being permanently harmed. I suspect that if you’re an “orchid” you were just unlucky.