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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 pheno
Published on 2 years, 4 months ago