Trauma Smells

I'll use the word "trauma smell" to refer to a big cluster of things which, well, kinda smell like trauma. The term is a (shallow) riff on a concept from software engineering. This term is helpful to refer to a lot of stuff that looks like trauma, but which is both uncertain in particular and also nebulous in principle.

I've already said that trauma is nebulous, but still I'll talk about some distinctions here.

At mininum, I probably want to reserve the word 'trauma' at least for phenomena that are caused by some experience, rather than due to something like underlying natural variation. It's then often unclear what we're actually looking at. There's quite a lot of variation which we still probably want to call "pathological," both in medicine outside of psychiatry, and in psychology/psychiatry. "Natural" variation and adverse experience also interact, of course.

For a lot of what I'll describe as trauma smells, these are ambiguous whether they're caused by adverse experiences, or "only" "due to" "natural variation." In any case, my regarding something as a trauma smell means that I believe that I have enough evidence more broadly to regard that phenomenon as likely caused by some adverse experience, even if it's not definitive in any given case.

More broadly for pathology, lots of nebulosity here. So, is aging pathological? Once again, see disguised queries—to a large extent this question is either unhelpful or irrelevant, but it's fine to say "well, this seems bad, and it has some causes, and it's preferable not to have it," and leave aside the metaphysical question. In any case, re trauma smells, there's quite a lot of stuff that sure looks pathological, and which looks like it has its cause in adverse experience. Partly also, "trauma smells" doesn't quite rely on assumptions about the etiology, mostly I'm saying "here's a big cluster of things which smell bad, and which seem to be pretty common."

As I said, the word trauma often stands as a disguised query for "what deserves special privileges," but I'm not trying to make some rhetorical move by using the word here. That's part of why I'm using this silly word "trauma smells," and that's also why a lot of my friends often literally use the word 'stuff' rather than try to litigate this or that as trauma.

Smells in particular (not exhaustive)

First, two methodological points here. One, these are in general something like "heuristically informative," or maybe just only weak to moderate evidence. Partly they're also a useful cluster to be able to talk about, regardless of how strong of evidence they are for "trauma proper," or whatever. Secondly, these mostly come from vibes-level, "energetic" (see below) intuitions on my part; though not just mine, and I expect my meditator friends are mostly nodding along at this section.

There are three main clusters of traumatic symptoms and trauma smells, namely, distortion, rigidity, and dissociation. I'll weave in and out of talking about each of them.

One grouping of trauma smells, which cuts acoss the three clusters: how readily is a breadth of ways of seeing and of ways of being available to them? What kinds of psychological factors and states do they have access to? What seems to be forbidden to them?

• Do they have access to a breadth of both positive and negative affect?
  • to ease and relaxation?
  • to dreams and hopes?
  • to excitement and exuberance?
  • to devotion and sacredness, agnostic of the source?
  • to love and intimacy? To sexual arousal?
  • to feel fear?
  • to feel anger?
• Do they find it okay/safe to behave in a full range?
  • to sing and dance?
  • to dream and to hope?
  • to be angry?
  • to be loud?
  • to be harsh and unkind?
  • to show fear?
  • to feel or show weakness?
  • to feel or show strength?

These are all very common and fairly indicative trauma smells.

Often when something is "forbidden" to a person, rather than them explicitly saying "oh I can't do that," "I mustn't do that," etc., they will encounter internal resistance when they incline towards some way of being, or they will find that domain of meaning blank, empty, irrelevant, or they'll say that they "never got it," "never experience that," etc.

There's at least some evidence of extreme positive affect within "natural variation," or more often extreme lack of negative affect, eg. those with the FAAH OUT mutation (leaving aside some nuances here, and maybe some conflicting evidence). There are of course lots of reports from mystical traditions of people having variously "conquered" or "purified" anxiety, anger, lust, etc. I'll talk later about whether I think this is even good or desirable, agnostic of whether the reports are accurate. In any case, even in the 98th percentile case, if someone reports "I don't experience xyz," for things broadly in the list above, I think that's a moderate to strong trauma smell.

Adjacent to this, my intuition is that in general the full breadth of human meaning should something like "work," for most people. Again when some domain "doesn't work," for a person, that is, tha thtey seem restricted in the breadth of meaning that they're able or willing to access, that's a trauma smell.

Sometimes this looks like a person having foreclosed that domain, regarding it as certain that it will only give rise to negative valence, or will certainly give rise to negative valence in the long term. Often this is not salient to the person themselves, and so it appears in their experience as again simply unavailable, blank, etc., rather than negatively valenced, without substantial introspection or healing work.

In particular, commonly reported among meditators and practitioners otherwise are stories like, "I did lots of meditation for a while, and then discovered in some domain which had previously been unavailable, or which bothered other people but which didn't bother me, that I had some structure obscuring it, and now I have access to that domain in a way that's rich and intense," whether pleasant or unpleasant.

Trauma smells can also sometimes be associated with positive valence and affect, in some different forms. This can both mean that positive valence specifically arises, but more saliently that a person experiences a need to present positive affect:

• Generically, "I must have positive affect," "I must be cheerful, positive, etc."
• Intense need for positive input in ways that seem out of whack. (distortion)
  • Intense need for approval
  • Intense need for reassurance
  • Intense and exaggerated sexual drive, so called "hypersexuality"
• Often, that a person feels a need to sustain effort to achieve some otherwise normal affect, relationship, etc.
• Demands/requirements for things about gender performance
  • This is obviously contentious. There's obviously some range third-wave feminist views here which see gender in general as a widespread cultural trauma. I'm sympathetic to some substantial chunk of this take, though it's not clear how far it goes.
  • In any case this can be variously extreme, and the strongest versions feel like pretty clear trauma smells.
• Similarly demands for things about class or intelligence

One note re hypersexuality: to be clear, the baseline is that young people, and really people in general, are pretty fucking horny, and that both the desire for sex and especially the experience of sex and quite intense. Again, nebulous, but what I'm referring to is something like the extremes of "socio-sexuality," [[as well as something something]]

In many of these cases, "must," self-demands, etc. don't necessarily mean that a person will insist that they must, if asked, which is a pretty transparent trauma smell. Often "must" (whether "must do" or "must not") can be experienced as "inconceivable," "impossible," or again unavailable or opaque. In a different but similar shape, a person might have some affect or way of seeing that's always "online," in a way that's insensitive to the external circumstances, wether positive or negative.

Additionally, a common shape of trauma smell takes the form of being unable to notice or update on evidence that some behavior is not necessary, is ineffective for its nominal goal, or has negative consequences for others. Another form of this is being unable to notice that others do or don't hold one in positive regard, or that some plan or fantasy is unrealistic or impossible. Again this can be positive or negative. A common explanation for the cause of this sort of thing, which I mostly buy, is that these are due to a some tight knot of contraction with respect to an unresolved trauma, which has sort of "metastasized" into an object level goal or fantasy. Still, this shape is maybe moderately weak evidence of an "actual" underlying trauma, but is still an important kind of trauma smell.

Briefly on energy signatures and vibe reads

See much more on "energy," especially trying to tease apart how or if such phenomena might be compatible with materialist-reductionism.

In addition to overt and fairly legible qualities like the ones I described above, there's a broad class of trauma smells which are "energetic." Energy is used to refer to (what I would regard as) the perceived quality of a person's emotional, psychological, and sometimes physiological state. Energy is also believed by many people to be something like ontologically distinct and stable, existing outside of perception. Energy is variously also regarded as being the perceptible reflection of a person's somatic phenomenology. Again note that the more energy-credulous believe that the perception of energy is more like directly apprehending some pervasive energetic stratum.

I'll say seriously, if any of this turns you off, please read the page linked (both are to the same page) above.

Anyway, conditional on one agreeing that the relevant perception occurs, I think this is at minimum pretty useful analytically. One angle on this might be: we don't really have a robust ability to externally inspect a person's emotional/psychological state except through our naive mammalation (and I suppose specifically primate) emotional perception, and "energy" refers to the phenomenology of that sort of perception, agnostic of its ontological status.

FWIW some people claim to be able to do this sort of thing purely "analytically" but I'm somewhat skeptical, and I mostly expect these are post-hoc explanations on top of energetic perception. I'm still basically a materialist here, and I expect that whatever the perception is based on shows up on a camera, as indeed you can perceive someone's energy through video or photograph (or even voice recordings), but that the energetic gestalt is a much much richer intuition pump than all of the fine-grained movements, postural qualities, affective patterns, etc. that might be able to be described "objectively."

In addition, reports of energetic perception of others often line up pretty well with reports of internal perception of somatic phenomenology; separately this all lines up with my experience fairly nicely. There are pretty out there reports that I get into in the page linked above, which I mostly don't take very seriously.

For those who are sensitive to energy, there's commonly reported a variety of energy "signatures" correlated both with various clusters of trauma smells, as well as with officially diagnosable trauma.

Below are some energetic qualities which are common trauma smells: (not necesarily aligning nicely with the lists above)

• Fragility, frailty, or thinness
• Baseline fear and activation, also contriction or tightness in general
• Exaggerated, played up charisma, warmth, or humor
  • Note that sometimes this is a result of conscious deception, but sometimes it's more like an energetic contortion.
  • As a trauma smell, it's informative if there seems to be ease in their charisma, and conversely if there seems to be activation in that quality—some people are just flamboyant, gregarious, and charismatic, which is not by itself a trauma smell, imo.
• Resistance in a person's baseline energy, and especially in specific moods or relationships
  • Does their system seem to be fighting itself?
• Ease that seems in contradiction with other qualities in their energy
  • Eg., "okayness that doesn't seem to be okay" or "relaxation that seems tight."
• Exaggerated social dominance or submission
• Blockages in general
  • This can look variously either like dissociation or blankness, or like contraction or contortion

Some energetic qualities which are sort of anti-trauma smells:

• Groundedness
• Robustness
• Richness, both of positive and negative valence, and both high and low activation

One important point to stress: negative valence, and energetic contraction in the moment are not really trauma smells at all. An important heuristic for me here would be something like, "does this seem to be a context-appropriate negative valenced response?" (agnostic of whether it's "healthy" or "adaptive") vs "does this seem to be a baseline part of their energy, and does it feel contorted or blocked?"

What informs categorization as a trauma smell?

So I'll repeat, much of this is intuitive, "on vibes," though informed by the reports and claims of many practitioners and teachers I've encountered or read. I'm personally definitely getting both false negatives and false positives, but I'm fairly confident in this broad shape.

In any case, more specifically my basic heuristic for inclusion is, "does this seem to correlate with undesirable consequences of adverse experiences?" and more specifically "does it smell like everything else I currently regard as trauma-like?"

The point here is not to say that "untraumatized" people are simply right, and have everything in order psychologically and spiritually. There's real content that trauma relates to, which an un- or at least just less-traumatized person might be ignorant of, willfully or not. Nonetheless, looking at the broad patterns of variation and distortion present in known-to-be-traumatized people, it feels fairly straightforward to say, "hm, yes, this seems to be off, or wrong, from the way that a human mind an experience feels like it ought to be."

The claim here is also not that the median person in a given culture (or median worldwide? whatever that would mean?) is untraumatized, but just that comparing the median person to a variety of different sorts of traumatized people is informative about what sorts of effects trauma has, and what the directions of variation are that trauma leads to. Additionally, if you look at evidence from a culture that seems to carry a low traumatic load, and notice how that culture as a whole as well as its members individually are different from other cultures and their members, I think that's especially informative about what a relatively untraumatized psychology looks like.

More on natural variation, "neurodivergence," and pathology

"Well, maybe they're just neurodivergent!"—so, I think first off there's better and worse versions of this take.

A lot of the "claim," or at least rhetorical stance of "neurodivergence" is that some kinds of pathologized psychological variation should be regarded as something like natural variation and therefore not pathologized. Once again, see disguised queries. Narrowly as a kind of rhetorical/discursive move, my response is 👎.

I think some versions of this take are fine, and some are nebulous, which is often absent from the discourse, but still I'm mostly fine with this stance. Obvious examples here of things previously pathologized and now regarded as natural variation would be left-handedness or (with some holdouts still) homosexuality. Once again, nebulosity, blah blah, and I think this applies to eg. autism at least to some extent.

Still, this kind of discursive stance is trying to resolve the harmful memetic effects of pathologization, by mostly-arbitrarily defining some protected category out of pathology. Once again, hence my 👎. I largely endorse destigmatization but I don't believe you can usefully determine pathology by fiat.

Now, I think a better question would be: pathology aside, how do you know if some psychological cluster is causally downstream of adverse experiences, vs. endogenous, and specifically maybe genetic? This is I think a much more interesting empirical question, and I don't have a great answer here.

First thing again, substantially this is just on vibes. Beyond that, most of the pathologized "neurodivergence" correlates with enough of the psychological, behavioral, and phenomenological patterns of really-probably-actually-trauma, including also life histories of lots of adverse experiences! Additionally, there's some sparse introspective reports that some kinds of "neurodivergence" can be ~"healed."