A decade ago, if someone behaved selfishly in a relationship, we would clearly say that they were “selfish.” Today, you will most likely hear that this person has an “avoidant bond” or that his or her behavior is a “response to past trauma.” That is why today psychology has come to explain absolutely everything, but there is a problem: we are pathologizing everyday life.
A new idea. The psychologist Ángela Fernández recently threw a dart at the center of the debate: “not everything is trauma or anxious attachment; sometimes it is simply a lack of education.” And this phrase is not just an unpopular opinion; is the summary of a growing concern in the scientific literature about how the “trauma culture” is blurring the boundary between pathology and character.
“Overpathologization.” The concept is not new, but it has never been so relevant. Scientific literature already warned about the tendency that exists to look for an illness in every action we do inappropriately in daily life. In this way, modern psychology runs the risk of turning normal activities or reactions, such as sadness after a breakup or work stress, into a medical problem.
This increase in diagnoses has a rather dangerous side effect: it trivializes serious disorders. When we call any emotional wound or inconvenience “trauma,” we are eroding the perception of human resilience, and in the process, downplaying those who truly suffer from PTSD.
If everything is trauma, nothing is. In the Anglo-Saxon clinical field, the term “Trauma Culture” has been coined. Publications in Psychology Today They warn that this trend of seeking a clinical explanation for each emotional reaction can be counterproductive. Far from helping, it pushes people toward therapeutic interventions that do not fit their real problem, preventing grieving or learning processes that are simply part of growing up.
This is something that is added to by different psychotherapists who emphasize that considering each conflict that exists in a couple as a “response to trauma” mixes everyday stress with pathological conditions that are truly very complex. All this does is create a generation of people who consider themselves “broken” by default, instead of understanding that frustration and conflict are inherent to human interaction.
It is selfishness. One of the most controversial points of Fernández’s criticism is the mention of “lack of education” or maturity, and the bibliography seems to agree with him. Works published in ScienceDirect on the “egoism-altruism spectrum” suggest that certain harmful behaviors are not explained by a “dysregulated” nervous system, but by personality traits such as lack of empathy or manipulation. Something that is innate to a person, and that can hardly be treated.
In this way, we have subclinical psychopathic traits: people who do not have a mental illness, but who show excessive interest in their own well-being. In these cases, the clinical diagnosis acts as a “cloak of invisibility” that exempts the person who causes some type of harm from personal responsibility.
An excuse. That is why if I have had bad behavior, it creates an “invisibility cloak” effect that exempts me from personal responsibility. This way, I can blame this behavior on the parents or my own personal past, as if it were an “attachment trauma.”
But the reality is that, often, these are unempathetic patterns that should be treated from ethics and education, not from the psychiatry manual.
The danger of labels in infancy. Different scientific reports suggest that we are labeling normal variations in children’s behavior as mental disorders. This means that what was once a restless child or one who had difficulty following rules, today runs the risk of being quickly diagnosed and medicated.
By turning behavioral problems into psychopathologies, we are missing the opportunity to teach discipline, limits, and frustration tolerance. As experts point out Birchwood Clinicthe extensive use of these labels increases anxiety and medicalization, creating a dependency on the health system for problems that, historically, were resolved in the social and family environment.
The verdict of science. Social media has created a market of “pocket diagnostics” where selfishness is disguised as “self-care” and rudeness as “emotional limit.” However, clinical psychology insists: for something to be a disorder, there must be significant functional impairment. That is why being inconsiderate towards others does not make a person a psychiatric patient, but sometimes you simply have to grow up.
Images | Vitaly Gariev
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