After the blizzard that was a flurry of midterms, I decompressed by debriefing its pressures with a friend, to which she said of them, “I have a bad memory.”
“I have the attention span of a goldfish, so same,” I responded.
“What?” she asked. There was a long pause, during which I scrambled to piece together the disjointed fragments of my puzzlement. Her dry laugh relaxed the tension before she clarified, “I remember the test. I meant that shit started going down and I remember hating it and I still hate thinking of it.”
“Oh! Not amnesia or —”
“The way I said it was confusing,” she said. Profuse apologies followed, but in my mind, there were a few thoughts left behind …
It was not so long ago that the wording of “bad memory” lended itself more ambiguity. At one point, it was a turn of phrase with multiple possible meanings. In one sentence, “bad memory” was an inability to recollect past experiences. But in another, it was the actual, particular past experience that was characterized by its dispiriting.
One meaning represented the subject’s skillful inefficiency. The other meaning represented the subject’s emotive intensity. In one, there is lack, and the other, presence.
But now, “bad memory” seems to have only an operand — or meaning — and it’s not emotion. Today, we decamp the definition previously housed in emotional anguish to another word — “trauma.”
“Trauma,” with its etymology being the Greek word for “wound,” is clinical. On the physical level, trauma urgently begs for the syringe and the scalpel at the risk of losing a limb or one’s life. On the psychological level, trauma urgently begs for sedation at the risk of losing one’s sanity. Unlike the “bad memory’s” loss of meaning, trauma’s original meanings have survived … with the catch of having an additive meaning.
The subjective agony of a bad memory is justified through the event’s contextualization or its embedding into commonsense ethical frameworks. The validity of its affliction is consistent with the sufferer’s understanding of what powers may afflict them.
This is not the case with trauma. The subjective agony of trauma may not always be justified through social reasoning. Even if the event’s justification as debilitating is uncontested, the trauma response itself is ego dystonic (inconsistent with their identity). A person with clinical trauma will never identify with, or feel as if they have “earned,” the degree of their reactivity.
The sudden dissonance of the self that always occurs with trauma is itself a bad memory.
The intellectual recollection of a memory aligns itself with the memory’s sensorial stimuli. However, in a trauma reaction, there is no sense but sense itself. This can be seen through what is known as “traumatic non-concordance,” in which a person will experience pleasurable sensations, such as warmth or arousal, during an excruciating episode of trauma remembrance.
One can combat the lawlessness of traumatic sense by attempting to make sense of it, perhaps by pre-emptively identifying the common corollaries of episodes — “triggers” — and formalizing them into predictive blueprints for functional preventatibility. While useful, studies in therapeutic rehabilitation imply that mechanically exposing oneself to triggers can, at times, fail to produce the expected response. Additionally, episodes may be triggered without sufficient reason.
It is already evident that traumatic sense defies the idealizations of reason, but it is also known that trauma is physiologically and clinically measurable.
The frequent and sincere discoursal misuse of the word “trauma” to refer to bad memories implies three things of significance — 1. further marginalization of trauma sufferers, 2. the hegemony of all neuroses in which post-traumatic stress is considered the most socially competitive and desirable, and 3. the growing, reductivist pathologization of our emotions.
In our generation, our backgrounds do not furnish us with emotions. Our pasts have no presence. Our memories become symptoms through which we identify ourselves in relation to them through conditions. We identify ourselves wholly with psychological models as we are poised to network capital and absolve ourselves of responsibility through diagnoses.
The whole of our culture values competition, and owes necessary progress to competition as its fuel. This is perhaps best and most obviously represented through our competitive free market economy. The consequences of widespread medicalization and biopolitics in such a competitive culture include the assignment of discriminating monetary values to neurosis. It is one reason why some who claim the model of major depressive disorder, which is characterized by emotional torque without a determinant cause, may lament post-traumatic stress — because post-traumatic stress’ misinterpretation as “making sense” is implicitly more valued by our cultural ideology that celebrates models, causation and (having a) reason.
But, in my personal experience, the people who use “trauma” liberally are the same ones who offer (at best) only conservatism to clinical trauma responses. This is because their usage occurs due to a misunderstanding of what trauma truly is. For a disorder named for the impression of a “wound” on survivors, the misunderstanding of post-traumatic stress itself wounds.
There is still a way to misuse the word “trauma” without prejudice or greed. When you fall in love, call it heart disease. When you are grateful, say it is cancer. The lack of meaning in one word is only logically consistent if meaning is devoid in all words.
Or, of course, you can just admit that you have a bad memory.
