11/4/2022 0 Comments Trauma meme“Somebody does something to you, and you blame yourself. “Trauma is usually about shame and secrecy,” he says. He says that he is too embedded in the trauma world to ask about how perceptions have changed, but likes the memes I read to him. Twitter user wrote in March: “Kindly asking my body to stop keeping the score” – a tweet which garnered 22.7k likes. I’m reading memes to the psychiatrist and best-selling author over Zoom, including one that makes reference to his pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score, which explores how trauma reshapes both the body and the brain and has been back in the bestseller charts thanks to the pandemic. ‘Trauma is about shame and secrecy’īessel van der Kolk is laughing. “I think it’s beneficial for people to know they’re not alone … often people don’t have friends or family talking about abuse, neglect, domestic partner violence or feelings generally,” says Taylor.Īt their best, these memes help sufferers process the things that have happened to them in a safe way, helping them to confront difficult issues without being exposed or triggered – like a visual diary, or even a form of exposure therapy. “The main motivation was healing myself, but I think ultimately allowed others space to heal themselves, too.” “I used my meme page as an attempt to process what was going on with my life, from cutting out my father to processing childhood trauma,” she says. Many accounts tend to be knowingly subversive and ironic, such as this meme from mental health meme queen “Being mentally ill is a full-time job and I’m getting employee of the month.” “I feel so seen,” I think, when I log into Instagram and am confronted by a meme about self-sabotage. And with this new enthusiasm for mental health memes come questions: Does their proliferation risk watering down the terminology? Should we worry about people self-diagnosing online? And do we risk opening up the mental health conversation to cynical commercial interests? Memes as exposure therapy Though I am mostly recovered, seeing words that once were used clinically to describe my illness splashed all over the internet is certainly an adjustment – especially when they are used thoughtlessly. It has now become so ubiquitous that it’s been co-opted by the political right as an example of leftwing oversensitivity – see Donald Trump Jr’s book of the same name. The most obvious example is the use of the word “triggered”, which was originally used to describe the way the brains of people with PTSD react when re-exposed to something that recalls the original trauma and puts them in fight-or-flight mode. You’re as likely to find references to PTSD on Instagram as you are on a medical website, and mental health memes in particular have been on the increase in fact, their preponderance has been unmistakable during the pandemic. Fast forward to 2021 and the word “trauma” is everywhere.
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