Based Camp: The Trauma Conspiracy

Malcolm and Simone explore studies showing contextualization shapes emotions more than events. Believing you suffered childhood trauma causes more adult problems than records showing you endured abuse. Self-identifying as an insomniac impairs functioning over poor sleep itself. They explain how groups like cults leverage contextualization to control people. But individuals can also use it to their benefit through placebos, positive stress mindsets, and custom cultures. Ultimately, you have the power to frame life's hardships as opportunities to grow stronger.

Transcript:

Malcolm: [00:00:00] it is not. being abused, which creates the effects of trauma. It is believing that you underwent something traumatic, which creates the effects

Simone: of trauma.

Simone: It was

Malcolm: really important about this is that it means that anyone can use this to their advantage. It means that whatever happened to you as a child, a group with malicious intents, whether it's a cult or a psychologist or a ideological movement can find fertile ground within about.

Malcolm: Anyone's life to separate them from their family and build real trauma into their childhood. Yeah. And this is very advantageous for these groups because when you're a cult, one of the first things you want to do is to separate somebody for their endogenous support networks. You want to separate them from their family and the other people who care about them.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: Hello, [00:01:00] Malcolm. Hello,

Malcolm: Simone! It's wonderful to be here with you today.

Simone: It is because we decide that it's wonderful, right, Malcolm?

Malcolm: Exactly! And this is a very interesting topic.

Simone: The subject in this case being basically the effect of contextualization. So most recently, a friend of ours shared with us a study called associations between objective and subjective experiences of childhood maltreatment and the course of emotional disorders in adulthood and the TLDR of this particular study was those who contextualize childhood abuse or maltreatment as such.

Simone: It reported and apparently experienced more emotional problems as adults versus those who through government records and other sources clearly were shown to also experience maltreatment in childhood, but didn't identify as being maltreated did not show the same level of mental distress of mental disorders.

Simone: If you word that differently,

Malcolm: it is not. [00:02:00] being abused, which creates the effects of trauma. It is believing that you underwent something traumatic, which creates the effects

Simone: of trauma. Yeah. Or contextualizing it as this horrible thing. So you can still totally have something bad happened to you. I'm sure.

Simone: And be like that sucked, but like to not identify with it, to not be like, that was horrible. How am I ever going to live this down? My life is ruined because of this.

Malcolm: Yeah. So you actually see this when I was a psychology student, there was this case and I've never been able to find the study that this was done in.

Malcolm: It may have been. anecdotal experience from the teacher at the time, but they were talking about how in countries where rape is very common and quote unquote part of normal life that the rates of trauma from rape are very low. And it's only in the countries where rape is contextualized as traumatic, where you really frequently get this Extreme [00:03:00] trauma response to rape, specifically believing, and this is also what you're seeing was the forgetting before remembering phenomenon, which is a famous phenomenon in psychology where a personal go like, Oh my gosh, I just remembered this, like I was.

Malcolm: R word by my uncle, as a kid, right? It was horrible. I'm traumatized. I covered up that memory from my childhood. And then the person they told this to it'll be their spouse or something. They're like you talked about that last week. You talk about this. All the time. You clearly hadn't forgotten this.

Malcolm: And what's happening is they will remember something like my uncle touched me in a weird way that made me uncomfortable, but they won't contextualize it within the modern context that we associate that with, right? And then one day. They will think about it tied to this new traumatizing context, and the new memory of it that they create through that, the new way they're contextualizing this old memory, is so [00:04:00] different, it completely overwrites the old memory, and they don't remember that they had previously remembered this, or that they had never really forgotten it.

Malcolm: But what's really interesting, Is when this happens, then trauma is introduced. They did not have trauma from the old way they were remembering and contextualizing it, but they do from the new way. Yeah.

Simone: And you've seen this also, we've looked at some of the research on long COVID, remember how I shared that one study with you, where they found that people who. Did not know that they had COVID did not report the symptoms of long COVID at the same period but we're confirmed to have COVID. I should clarify. We're not confirmed to, to have the same symptoms or reported symptoms of long COVID as people who who did know

Malcolm: that they had COVID.

Malcolm: Essentially. A number of people went to a hospital, they were diagnosed with COVID, right? But some people were never informed of their diagnosis. Long COVID essentially didn't exist in that group. [00:05:00] If you had COVID but you did not know you had COVID, your probability of getting long COVID was incredibly low, I think almost zero.

Malcolm: Which When you combine that with the fact that long COVID, like number one corollaries were like general anxiety disorder and

Simone: stuff like that. Yeah. Having a history of sort of mental illness or struggle in general correlates apparently quite highly with cases of long COVID.

Malcolm: That largely implies that this is. Probably mostly psychosomatic. Maybe not in every case, but in many cases, it's psychosomatic. But a specific type of psychosomatic, which is meaningfully psychosomatic. So people hear that and they're like, what? That means it's basically nothing. Whereas I would couch that in what we've been saying.

Malcolm: The pain that comes with trauma is

Simone: real.

Malcolm: Basically all of it. It comes from the contextualization of the event, not the event [00:06:00] itself.

Simone: Yeah. But also the pain that is being experienced is very real. It is.

Malcolm: No. But all of the pain. Whenever someone has ever said that they were traumatized, what they were talking about was the contextualization, not the event

Simone: itself.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. In other words, the thing that is causing the harm is the way that you've built a narrative around it. It's the narrative that causes the harm, not the thing. The, not the traumatic thing itself. It was

Malcolm: really important about this is that it means that anyone can use this to their advantage. It means that whatever happened to you as a child, a group with malicious intents, whether it's a cult or a psychologist or a ideological movement can find fertile ground within about.