We decide this together: what is healthy or not, stressful or not?
I owe a lot to Elizabeth Stanley and her book Widen the Window for her discussion of the connection between stress and trauma and how we think of them as worlds apart when they really are a spectrum. Though I’ve extrapolated into the healthy side of things for my work. Yes, we have to live in reality, but we shape reality with a lot of story.
What doesn’t kill you…
The fact that some things are good for us and some kill us is not a controversial statement. I think everybody knows that some things make us happy and some things make us miserable, and some things traumatize us and blight the rest of our lives so we end up eating a pint of ice cream made of avocado because that would be healthier at 3 am when we’re convinced we’re going to be fired, our chosen political party will never win again, and humanity will be extinct in a century…
No? Just me?
One note: trauma is a complex, deeply personal illness that requires a ton of support. This note is not about how to heal from trauma. This note is about how we as a society think and talk about it, and how that can make everything better. Or worse.
This is a spectrum of human experience I’ve created for writing fiction but now use it for so much more. Importantly, this spectrum is both how we actually experience events and how we judge we should feel about those events. Those two don’t match sometimes.
Peak experiences: When we get all the happy neurochemicals and hormones and remember these moments for the rest of our lives. For me, hugging my family after a year of working in a grocery store through the pandemic and never coming anywhere near anyone unless they were stressed out of their gourd and complaining about how their chicken was cut. I forgot other humans are warm. No joke. My sister put her hand on my shoulder and I gasped at how hot her skin is. I will remember that moment forever.
Healthy/Positive: We get happy neurochemicals and hormones, but probably not in a dose that is memorable in twenty years. Still, the aggregate usually adds up to whether we look back with any satisfaction on our life. They are deeply personal experiences like a good meal, a good movie, a smile, a joke, or a clear dark sky with beautiful stars. They are also practical things we need from each other: childcare that doesn’t cost as much as a mortgage, work that doesn’t take twelve hours a day, and water and air that doesn’t kill us. A lot of life sucks, but there are rewards.
Neutral/Boring: You’re not being harmed. You’re not being helped. Maybe you’re a little under-stimulated, but life is…fine.
Annoying: I’ve included a special negative category for when you’re peeved, but it wouldn’t rise to the level of actual stress. Lines. Busted zippers. The crazy packaging scissors come in, which would be no big deal if you had scissors. The dude at the front of the turning lane who leisurely pulls into the intersection and takes the slowest, widest arc and.nobody.else.has.timetoturn… So you sit at the light again and wish death on his family to the twelfth generation. You know, not actual problems.
Stressful: You get an unhappy chemical soup and slow degradation of systems not necessary for long-term survival. This state was prehistorically reserved for life-threatening situations, but our brains have creatively co-opted it for anything we think could possibly be threatening: Bad bosses. Bad jobs. Bad paychecks. Bad children. Bad spouses. Bad news. Bad test results. Plus those things we need but aren’t getting from each other, like a city free of pollution, a way to get around the country that doesn’t cost as much as a paycheck, a living wage. Something has gone wrong, and the accumulated cortisol degrades our system over the decades.
Warning: here and going forward, under trauma and unspeakable trauma I name some specifics.
Traumatic: According to our current understanding, which is evolving constantly, two main things turn stress into trauma: the length/seriousness of the bad event and your perceived ability to control it. Remember: this is not objective; it is still all about your own perception. This is where we switch from slow degradation to acute bodily harm. This is where what doesn’t kill you may blight the rest of your life.
Unspeakable/unimaginable trauma: As I’ve spoken to people about this spectrum, I’ve had some people push back on the distinction between a bad car accident (which can absolutely be traumatizing) and child trafficking (which is so far beyond that trauma, it’s hard to fathom). So I’ve expanded to a further category of unspeakable trauma for those things that surpass anyone’s understanding of pain. We don’t generally argue about these. (Or when you do, you tend to lose your career. Or get elected to congress.)
Conflict comes because we define each of these as a culture, but our biology doesn’t care.
One of the biggest things I realized while creating imaginary cultures, is that every culture on earth has collectively decided what experiences fall on the left and right of the spectrum and for whom. This affects how we talk to ourselves, how we talk to each other, who breaks the law, and what laws there are to break.
In the US, here are a few examples of our collective agreement on where different ideas fall in this spectrum. This is far, far from an exhaustive list; plug in your own ideas!
Unbelievably, ridiculously important caveat: this is where the dominant culture collectively THINKS these should go, not where the actual impact of many of them go.
Peak: Religious services (usually involving saxophones and lilies), missionary position especially with a ring on your finger, travel, concerts, sports games, winning contracts, selling a business, winning anything on television, having a kid, having more money than you can spend in your entire life. Any kind of winning, really.
Healthy/Positive: working, working overtime, working on a deadline, working salaried without set hours, working freelance, working minimum wage, working below minimum wage for tips, meetings, productivity, quarterly goals, making money, exercise AND overeating, all sports, all guns, housework, ketchup, kale.
Neutral/Boring: Education, movies in other languages, boiled food, having a disability, being a victim of prejudice (remember – this is according to dominant culture).
Annoying: Car salespeople, spam (literal and metaphorical), construction, traffic, children in public places, subscription software, standing behind someone with a disability doing something 5% slower.
Stressful: Performance reviews, feedback of any kind, honest conversations, owning a business, getting married, computer call centers.
Traumatic: Sugar, fast food, war, natural disasters, assault (unless it’s your spouse), child abuse (unless it’s by siblings), getting called out for assaulting someone.
Unspeakable: torture, child trafficking (unless you marry the child), slavery (unless you’re running for congress), murder (unless the victim murdered someone and the state’s killing them).
This isn’t just subtext and social media. This is text. This is law. Sex with a child is a crime unless you marry, and then it’s totally legal in 44 US states. Hitting an adult is an illegal assault, but hitting a child is acceptable discipline, and hitting a child to drive athletic training is a peak experience. Overdosing on opioids is a disease, but overdosing on heroin is a crime. Who is traumatized and who is not? What is stressful and what is healthy?
A fight in our own minds.
This doesn’t end in the public sphere. We do it to ourselves—all the time.
You go on a diet and immediately half your calorie intake. Your neocortex feels strong, in control, and believes you are finally going to find a spouse, get a raise, and not disappoint your mom.
Meanwhile, your subconscious brain, the part dedicated to your survival, is screaming FAMINE, slowing down your metabolism and hanging on to every ounce of fat, eventually eating your own muscles to survive.
Then you eat enough to feel satiated, and your subconscious says: we’re saved! We have food! Meanwhile, your neocortex freaks out that you will be alone forever, underpaid, and will have to hear your mother talk up your younger brother for three hours at the next holiday gathering while she asks you what happened and to please warn her when you’re eating meat or not because Uncle Hal will be traumatized if you don’t eat his turkey.
I don’t have an Uncle Hal or a younger brother. No family members were harmed in the writing of this newsletter.
That’s a deliberately silly example but it can be much more damaging: A worker takes on sixty-hour weeks and tells themselves that this is healthy, safe, even a peak experience, while their body slowly rots. (Ask me how I know.)
An assault victim chastises themselves for not bouncing back because they asked for it, right? They went out and wore a skirt and had a beer, after all, and it’s not that bad, right?
Members of marginalized groups can discount the prejudice they experience, pushing it towards annoying or neutral, not acknowledging to themselves it’s a very common source of trauma. After a decade of worrying about being pulled over or flying, of whether their marriage will be valid next year, of confronting the assumptions of decreased intelligence and increased threat every day and every night for YEARS, their bodies revolt even if their minds say it’s fine or at least, not as bad as a hurricane.
What do you do with this?
In public, for one thing, I promise you can’t unsee it. For me, this has put context around almost every television or social media fight I’ve not been able to look away from. It is in every confessional. Every political speech. Every law passed. Every jail sentence handed down to a perpetrator. What is healthy? What is not healthy? What is traumatizing? For whom? We seem to have a deep need, especially these days, to correct people on how upsetting something should be to them.
Getting this wrong can be the most invalidating, enraging conversation in which one human tells another: you haven’t suffered. It really sucks to hear this, but it also sucks to realize you’ve accidentally said it to somebody else.
This doesn’t mean we can’t ever have a conversation where we try to adjust the box someone has put someone else’s or their own experience in, but this is a good reminder of how fraught and hard that conversation is and how much trust it requires. “I can’t help thinking, based on my own history, that not getting the table that you wanted at a restaurant should fall a little closer to neutral than unspeakably traumatizing.”
And if there is no trust, remembering this is a way to walk away from the drama without feeling both mute and pissed. I worked retail for a decade; you cannot believe the problems I’ve had to sincerely empathize with: me wearing my name tag the wrong way, a steak being too red, and my tone. Oh my god, tone. People go absolutely nuclear if they don’t think you’ve pitched the correct amount of deference when speaking to them. The most mature people in our society work at customer service counters.
And as for inside my own head, I’m more tentative about where I stick my own experiences, realizing that my neocortex is not the one deciding. I can come out of a fight or a disappointment thinking I should be annoyed, but find myself waking in the night with my heart pounding and realizing I’m much more close to trauma than I wanted to acknowledge. So then I can actually deal with that and not go around pissed at myself for…being human? Or I can plan my perfect day and realize that my fantasies of the perfect day will actually eventually destroy me if I really did all of that every day.
A utopia of respect? Someday?
Even if we were the most mature band of humans in history, we would still have to design our society and laws around where experiences fall. If we have laws against hurting people; we must decide together what constitutes an injury. And we would still not agree. But hopefully, we will get better at matching our expectations of how we should feel after an event with actual reality. And that our laws and policies and unspoken rules also eventually match that reality.
I have found myself on both sides of this conundrum, screaming into the void that my lived experience is stressful and biting my tongue wanting to school someone that theirs can’t really be that bad. And I’ve been right and wrong on both counts, but ideally, understanding the gap helps me get this more right over time and less upset when others get it wrong.