Trauma is Always Self Inflicted

<p>In this insightful episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss new research showing childhood trauma is caused more by one's perception of events than the events themselves. People with verified abuse who don't see their childhood as bad show minimal ill effects, while those with no abuse who believe they were mistreated exhibit high rates of mental issues. Malcolm reflects on his own unusual upbringing, arguing he avoided PTSD by seeing challenges as adventures. They explore why women tend to recall more childhood adversity. Malcolm contends trauma comes from random negative events, not predictable ones. Ultimately, it's community narratives that frame events as traumatic or not. Avoiding "trauma creation" will be key for their parenting.</p><p></p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> [00:00:00] all these people complain like, well, as a boy, I, I was never allowed to cry and I was never allowed to feel bad.</p><p>And I was never allowed to confide in people and they're like, and that was all bad. That was all bad things that happened to me, but it's not a bad thing. It actually makes your life better. When people are hard on you, when people are hard on the way that you frame your life, In the moment, it doesn't feel awesome.</p><p>In the moment, when you want to be vulnerable, it doesn't feel awesome. But in terms of life outcomes, it is demonstrably and dramatically better. And, and this is a very, very, very obvious from these various research data points.</p><p>Would you like to know more?</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Its so great to be here with you today. You had just sent me this study where you're like, this is so fascinating. Mm-hmm. , and better than that, [00:01:00] it confirms our preexisting beliefs. And isn't that just the, the best kind of studies, right? Yes.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> That's, that's what, that's why people read studies to, well, for confirmation bias of, so this study, is by Andrea Denny's and Kathy Spatz Widom.</p><p>Gonna get their names wrong, of course. It's called Objective and Subjective Experiences of Child Maltreatment and Their Relationships with Psychopathology, published in Nature Human Behavior, which is a very respectable journal. And basically they found... I'm just going to quote them. We found that even for severe cases of childhood maltreatment identified through court records, risk of psychopathology linked to objective measures was minimal in the absence of subjective reports.</p><p>In contrast, risk of psychopathology linked to subject report, subjective reports of childhood maltreatment was high, whether or not the reports were consistent with objective measures. So, so dumbed down some more words.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> In simpler language. Basically [00:02:00] what it means is that if you had a really traumatic, in the way that modern society would frame trauma, childhood, like you were systemically abused in ways that were verified by the court system, but you don't believe that you had a difficult childhood, you will not have any negative effects from your childhood.</p><p>However, if you had a perfect childhood, but you believe you had a terrible childhood, you will have all of the effects that we associate with childhood trauma. Now, this is something that confirms with other studies that we've talked about on this show. You know, we've talked about the study of sleepers that showed that People who believed that they had had bad sleep, but hadn't actually had bad sleep, had all the effects that we as a society associate with bad sleep.</p><p>People who verifiably had bad sleep they didn't have any of those effects. Yeah, it's how [00:03:00] you</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> see it. If you think that you slept poorly... You're going to show signs of fatigue that day, you're going to struggle, and even if you slept like s**t, but you believe you slept really well, you're going to be like, oh, I'm perky, I feel good, on average.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> This is so critical within our, because what this actually means, you know, you can, you can say, oh, this is like interesting or quirky or whatever. It actually means that as a society, when we say something like, childhood trauma causes adult issues. That is just verifiably untrue. It's the belief that you were traumatized in childhood that causes adult issues.</p><p>Yet, often these two things are pretty correlated, right? Often somebody who is traumatized in childhood will have the belief that they were traumatized in childhood. But what's critical to remember is when the left, Yeah, it's usually the left who does this, invents new types of [00:04:00] traumas that somebody can go through, or they frame something as particularly traumatic that previously people wouldn't have thought of as traumatic.</p><p>They create the symptoms of trauma in that individual. Where that individual previously wouldn't have had those symptoms. And this is, you know, we have seen this have such negative effects on individuals lives. Recently we were interacting with someone and they were just absolutely riddled with like</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> all sorts of</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> diseases, you know, neurological issues, pain, all these sorts of very spoonie like issues. If you go to our spoonie episode and, and we had a friend who was like that as well, you know, but what was really interesting is she was only like that when she was a progressive.</p><p>So when we first met her, she was like deep into the progressive sphere. And so if you want to talk about what happened, because she's a better friend to you than me.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Yeah, I mean, she, she had some severe health problems and they included, you know, [00:05:00] seizures, severe allergies. I mean, this was a fairly limited life that she had to live.</p><p>She couldn't, you know, computer screens.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Yeah, yeah, there was imagine your life not being able to look at computer screens. It was, it</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> was really rough. And then yeah she, she shifted some things. She got in a really good relationship. So she sort of changed her standards and values and sort of the way that she was going to prioritize things in her life.</p><p>And then like, One day she called me and she was like, yeah so I don't have seizures anymore.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Well, so it wasn't just that. So, I mean, the guy who she married is a Texan guy. You actually have seen this couple in some of our after video credits playing with the kids at one point. Yeah, we really,</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> really</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> like them.</p><p>They're awesome people. Yeah, yeah. And then the Fourth of July party, they, they hosted this. But yeah, so, so Texas guy, very religious, you know. And actually not at first. So he and she had known each other for years. He was also in [00:06:00] this far progressive movement. And then they started hanging out more with us than their other friends.</p><p>And then they became like, really, like, like, they, they went along with sort of the way that we were going, but they went further than us. And, and now, you know, they're really into Jesus and all that, and very much structure their lives as a very religious, Conservative couple and they focus on this real</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> trad athletic.</p><p>Yeah, I would, I would say that you almost like implied that like we had some influence on them. No, like they, they very, very introspectively thought through their lives and their values and they came to a very. Religious and more traditional conclusion. Do you really</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> think that would have happened had they not known us?</p><p>Hold on. Do you really, we were there only like non ultra progressive</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> for it. We, we may have nudged them slightly, but I think many, many factors nudged them slightly. Okay. I'll agree with that. I'll agree with that. Yeah. And, and, and, but anyway, I thought like that is really interesting. And I think, you know, we, we see this effect of recontextualization [00:07:00] on real world health outcomes, but what also makes this, this nature.</p><p>Study really interesting to me is, is Ayla also recently released some interesting research on basically how women remember their childhoods differently than men. And, and basically she looked through her massive amounts of data at how people viewed their childhoods and whether they thought they were neglected.</p><p>Never, rarely, sometimes often, or very regularly. And whether they were verbally abused, whether they were physically abused, and how often they were spanked. And then she also asked them, like, you know, what was the social class of your upbringing? And, and...</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Oh, you're taking too long to get to the</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> point.</p><p>The point was basically... Girls reported more physical abuse, more verbal abuse, more, basically more hardship and trauma in childhood. And it almost implied also that their social class was lower. I think actually they reported that their social class was lower. So basically like girls saw their childhood as much [00:08:00] worse than boys did.</p><p>Even though typically when you look at punishment, Boys are getting more punished. Take</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> a step back. It was very obvious from the data sets that this was an equal data set in terms of boys and girls. Women were not being punished more than men. They were objectively remembering every aspect of their childhood is being worse than the men.</p><p>Now, what we don't know is, is it could turn out that men are just misremembering their childhood and, and, and the, the women actually are remembering everything or it could turn out that the women are inventing. trauma that didn't exist in their childhood. And there's many things that could lead to this.</p><p>But I probably think the biggest factor in this is that our society does not reward men for experiencing and contextualizing things is traumatic, whereas our society does reward women for doing that. And this is really [00:09:00] important in the context of this other study as well, because it means that through doing that, you know, all these people complain like, well, as a boy, I, I was never allowed to cry and I was never allowed to feel bad.</p><p>And I was never allowed to confide in people and they're like, and that was all bad. That was all bad things that happened to me, but it's not a bad thing. It actually makes your life better. When people are hard on you, when people are hard on the way that you frame your life, In the moment, it doesn't feel awesome.</p><p>In the moment, when you want to be vulnerable, it doesn't feel awesome. But in terms of life outcomes, it is demonstrably and dramatically better. And, and this is a very, very, very obvious from these various research data points. And so that when you have these people who try to shut down these sorts of [00:10:00] conversations about well, you really shouldn't, as a man, indulge in these sorts of emotions.</p><p>These people are helping you be more mentally healthy. And when people engage with us, they often are like, Wow, you guys really don't allow yourself to, like, fuel those emotions. And, you know, that's really gonna cause damage over time. And I'm like, well, I've been around you. I'm obviously a happier person than you.</p><p>So, like, that's not true. But anyway, it continues to</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> that one. Well, I just, it's also really interesting the cultural role that that plays. You know, that I think we do live in a culture now where women are more allowed to have trauma and encouraged to have trauma. But it also is scary to me how, especially in progressive circles, people gain status by...</p><p>Typically showing some form of victimhood which seems to encourage people to lean into their past, find something that was wrong with it, and then turn it into drama, which will, in turn, yield all these mental disorders [00:11:00] and problems, and so it's no wonder that we're seeing mental health epidemics and it's, it's really sobering also to know that there's research that shows that how you contextualize things really matters, I guess.</p><p>Well, I want to go over</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> how forced people are to contextualize their childhoods this way. Mm, go on then. No one has seen this as me. So just as an example, I don't know we're how many hundred episodes in at this point and, and people are just now learning this about me, but I grew up in the prison system.</p><p>So, at the age of 13, I was sent to court appointed prison alternatives. If you have read the book Holes or seen the movie Holes, it's a very good example of one of these camps. It was a private prison system for children that was related to the troubled teen industry, but it was like the court appointed iteration of this.</p><p>And from that age until college, I never lived with my parents again. Full time. And there's a lot, there's, there's a lot more to this journey than that, but when I'm talking to reporters, you know, they're always like, where did you come from? What's your [00:12:00] origin story or whatever. And when I say this, they're always like, Oh, that explains why that explains so</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> much.</p><p>Right. So it's just his trauma. He, all of this is to deal with his trauma. His</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> trauma. And I'm like, well, no, you know, like, like I don't. That's not really that relevant to my current world perspective. And they will not accept that answer. You've seen this. They just refused. You can see that they're like, Oh yes, little traumatized child.</p><p>I see you, you know, Good acting tough, but that's only because of the trauma and I'm like, no, culturally I was taught that this isn't the way you relate to what's hard in your life because you know, worst case scenario, you create this rags to riches narrative, which is really plausible. Like it's one I could really indulge in, but If I'm being honest my parents were both really smart people [00:13:00] and for generations, my family has had a very easy time making money and I inherited that.</p><p>And yes, I may not have inherited wealth directly or inherited their social circles or connections directly, but I did inherit. The capability of life, not being that hard for me, just from a mental perspective, like, whether it's the way I like, like sociological profile aspects or, or, or IQ or whatever you want to call it.</p><p>And so I don't really. I personally contextualize my childhood as being that hard at all. Now it's funny now that I think about it, most of the people I knew committed suicide before they hit their 20s. So, that's an interesting fact. Not most, but like a large chunk. Not great. Yeah. Maybe that means it wasn't that good.</p><p>But it just shows how much you can twist your reality. To just [00:14:00] be like, nah, it was awesome. It all turned out great. You know,</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> I do want to talk with you about on this front. Right. It's like, you know, cause we need to think about how we're going to handle this with our kids and how to, you know, encourage them to deal with things that are genuinely traumatic.</p><p>Right. I mean, he went through some stuff and other people went through some stuff. And, and so there's, you know, we know that the way you contextualize things can significantly impact how damaging or not something is. But then we also know that there are things like PTSD, which are real. And which are almost, not almost, which are fairly mechanical and sort of the way they work and need to be fixed.</p><p>And where's the difference, you know, because you need to admit that you have PTSD to be able to deal with it. And I feel like, you know, part of this view</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> is, I've talked about this before, it's really misunderstood. Trauma does not cause PTSD. PTSD is caused by a very specific psychological phenomenon.</p><p>Happening repeatedly, and it comes down to, I call it the Houdini phenomenon, right? Houdini famously died [00:15:00] because he had this trick where he would tense his muscles and then somebody would punch him in the gut. And one day after an event... Somebody sucker punched him in the gut. He didn't have time to tense his muscles first, because he didn't know what was happening.</p><p>The guy was just like, well, are you really invulnerable to this stuff? And he died from, you know, internal injury. And this is obviously a really sad death, but it shows what actually causes what we call PTSD. If you are in a family in which somebody is reliably abusive, i. e. if every day your dad comes home and beats you, you will not develop PTSD.</p><p>You only develop it if your dad is good. A lot of the time, but occasionally he beats you. And you don't expect it. It comes out of nowhere. There's no way of predicting when this is going to happen. A, a wife who is always mean to you won't cause PTSD. A wife who is mean to you randomly and without the ability to predict it [00:16:00] will cause PTSD.</p><p>So you're saying</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> it's like the sort of evil twin of operant conditioning?</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Exactly. PTSD is the evil twin of Operant Conditioning. Where if</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> something very unexpectedly bad happens to you, it's like the opposite of the addiction that you get with positive Operant Conditioning. you mean by</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Operant Conditioning so people can understand.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> So Operant Conditioning is a form of sort of like feedback training where when you do not predictably offer rewards, but very unpredictably offer rewards. Examples might be slot machines, gambling various types of mobile games, et cetera. Like it's built into everything these days. You actually have a very you can have a very, a very addictive response.</p><p>Like the dopamine reward for when you do get that unexpected reward is incredibly high. And so it seems that PTSD, as you describe it, is the opposite of that. That when very unexpectedly a really bad thing happens. the reaction that you have also is like on overdrive, but in the [00:17:00] negative, like panic sense.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> So yeah, that's exactly it. And it can cause like visible changes in person.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Okay. So why, why then do people come back classically from war with PTSD if they like expect</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> to be, because war is not every day people are shooting at you. War is sitting around doing nothing. for months and a half, and then in one day, half of your friends die.</p><p>Why</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> did you not get PTSD from getting, like, thrown into the desert and having, like, kind of boring days and then really, really, really bad things happening to you? Like some kid trying to kill you with a shovel in the middle of the night.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Oh, like me? Because I didn't contextualize those things as</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> bad, I guess?</p><p>Do you still think contextualization? No, because I think you've argued in</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> these moments. If somebody went into war and they contextualized it as this honorable thing and everyone who died was in it as this honorable event, as I think a lot of people did historically, even though wars were similar, I doubt you had as much PTSD</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> back then.</p><p>Do you still think that contextualization has [00:18:00] something to do with PTSD? Yeah,</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> but it's about in the moment contextualization because, because PTSD is not something that's caused by the way we remember the events it's caused</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> by the unexpected, but also</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> the negative nature of the events in these moments growing up these.</p><p>Bad things happen. Simone was talking about a few times people tried to kill me. I starved at times. I had to eat ants to not die. I had to learn what insects I could eat in the area, what plants I could eat. It was hard because I was allergic to something they were using in the foods that they were giving to the kids and they didn't believe me.</p><p>And so, yeah, so a lot of stuff happened, but I just saw it all as an interesting challenge. Like, that was genuinely the way I engaged with it. I was like, oh, this is a really interesting challenge. I suppose this isn't the way a lot of people engage with things like this that happen to them in life.</p><p>But that's how I contextualize it. I, you know, I just saw it as an interesting challenge and I engaged with it like that. And I [00:19:00] think that all events, every, everything that comes into your brain in the same way that everything that comes into my eyes is filtered through the lenses I wear is filtered through the lens that you create, which is the narrative for the events around you.</p><p>And. Maybe it's being an as a guy situation, you know, you're talking about as a guy, as a girl, a society that frames women as victims, you know, the princess and the tower or whatever, and guys as the heroes. Well, this was just all part of my heroic journey. Yeah. And I</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> guess, you know, if you were a girl, you know, as a guy, you were maybe thinking like, Oh, like I'm, I'm being rugged.</p><p>This is like an adventure survival thing. This is making me stronger. Whereas maybe a girl would be like, Oh my God, I'm abandoned. I'm in love. Like they might see it as very different because there aren't very many like heroes journeys for women that involve this level of survivalism.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right.</p><p>I just, I guess I don't have anything to say other than yeah, you're probably right about this. Well, I have</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> one additional question for you because I don't think it was just you contextualizing masculine heroes [00:20:00] journeys while going through this as a kid that helped you not contextualize it in a way that did give you PTSD or other forms of trauma based on your contextualization.</p><p>I, I'm wondering if your parents modeled this, like, where did you get, where do you think? Because obviously everything's going to be a just so story. This is all speculation. We can't know why we thought what we thought or why we did what we did, but your best guess, where did you get this attitude of like, Oh, this is an interesting puzzle.</p><p>How can I work this out? Like, was this from books you read? Was this how your parents behaved? Like how was this? This given to you is like the evoked reaction instead of some other reaction. Well,</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> I think that this is a very important thing about raising kids. And we had done another video on this on the Jordan Peterson raising kids thing.</p><p>And we're like, we really disagree with his parenting strategies because they are focused on breaking the child's will. And getting them to obey authority, whereas ours are focused on stoking a child's will and getting them to resist authority and even gain like emotional fire and [00:21:00] happiness from the moments where they successfully resistant unjust authority.</p><p>And I think that there's a final form of child rearing, which is narrative focused child rearing, where and this is the most common, where you teach a kid to engage with mostly just narratives about themselves and about society and about their role in that society. Narrative focused child rearing always leads to really negative outcomes, right?</p><p>And I think it's really important that we don't allow our kids to engage in that because that's what progressive society uses right now to really f**k kids up. Because every cult historically, this is just the way cults work. It's a very effective strategy. If you can convince people that their close support networks, their family and their culture were abusive to them as kids, you know, then you can separate them from their support networks.</p><p>And then they, they become much easier prey and they become much less likely to deconvert. So, Yeah, there's a reason that these institutions target individuals in this way. [00:22:00] It's because it's a really good source of prey, but you should know, I think, so there's two things here. One, as a parent, you know, and we'll do a video on, like, how to be a good parent, because I think that's a good one.</p><p>Like, all the things we're trying to focus on. But you really need to focus on, or one of our core things that we focus on as a cultural tradition, and I would encourage other people to consider, is stoking their will and internal locus of control and, and sort of, desire to know what's right for themselves and fight for that.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Did your parents do that?</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my mom told me, oh, they don't care what the teachers say. They're idiots. They're losers. You know. Well, that's not something a lot of parents would say, you know, but it really, it really worked for me. You know, my parents never being like, I will sit and punish you until you accept X thing that I'm telling you.</p><p>I couldn't imagine them doing that. Yeah. Yeah. No, they just locked me in our room [00:23:00] and be like, look, if you're having a moment right now, you're having a moment. We'll handle you later. So. So I think that's really important in terms of dealing with situations like this, because then when you deal with hardship, you're not looking at who's to blame or anything like that.</p><p>It's just a challenge for you to overcome because so much of the world depends on you overcoming it. And I also suppose that's another thing with kids. You know, I was really taught to view protecting the world as my responsibility and as something that I needed to do and everything else was just sort of a challenge on my way to achieving that end state.</p><p>It was just like, well, this is just what you have to do as a member of this family. Your goal is to fix things. And no one else is gonna do it, and the entire world's gonna work against you. And I think that those sorts of framings are really useful. And I think that these are ones that Christians often do.</p><p>You know, they see people attacking them. It's a sign [00:24:00] that they're more likely to be right, and this is actually part of what creates susceptibility within more religious communities, I think, to MLM scams, because when they see people being like, look, can't you see this is a scam? Can't you see these statistics?</p><p>They're like, oh well, the fact that people are attacking it means they must be on the right path. So there, there are negatives to this as well.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Interesting. Okay. So, gosh, I mean, like, how are we going to impart this to our kids in a way that doesn't, I don't know.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Well, I think the easy part is stoking their will.</p><p>But I think the hard part is providing external challenging situations that they have to overcome.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> I mean, my, my theory on this has, remains the same in that I really think. It's, it's clear that when you have siblings, like a lot of siblings in a family, you have already artificially created that hardship because there's not always going to be a parent who's ready to do what you need right away because they may be helping someone [00:25:00] else.</p><p>And there's just more limited resources. And there's also more people around who are going to make your life complicated and who may want your help or need your help or possible for you to get help right away when you want it. So I actually think just having siblings is enough, like enough hardship in life too.</p><p>Solve the problem, you don't think so?</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> If we have enough. Well, that's the plan. I mean, if we get to like 12, sure.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> I don't think you need</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> that much. I don't think 7 counts, that's a normal number of kids. You need like a reasonable</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> amount. Malcolm, that is not. That is not a normal number of children, that is not a normal number of children, none of this data.</p><p>Come on, like, even, even people in the past, you know, they may have, have birthed 10 kids, but they had like four or five, like this is. You know, I'm just saying, like, let's be reasonable with what is, is a, a hardship level [00:26:00] of, of having kids. But yeah, I mean, I think between us giving them siblings and us also not being, well, us being inherently very frugal people is enough to create limitations that force some creativity and resilience.</p><p>If that makes sense.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Yes.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> But I do, I do think this is really interesting and actually we've received some, some emails actually from people who follow this podcast and thank you by the way for contacting us guys. But many of them actually are surprisingly riddled with this culture. With this like, well, you know, yeah, I, I have this thing that's running against me, like, I just, you know, I just can't do it by</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> telling us their narratives.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Yeah. Like what we're seeing a lot of like learned helplessness or like, determined what's the word fatalism. And like, well, I'm just not going to try. Cause it, there's no point. And I</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> get that narratives are difficult to break. Yes. But if you're [00:27:00] starting with one of these narratives and you realize yourself as having one.</p><p>The most important thing is to change your friend group and change where you're living and change what you're doing every day. If you change your environment, it is, and you go into this new environment like dead set. Okay, well, now I'm going to live this like trad conservative lifestyle and I'm going to go out there and I'm going to be industrious.</p><p>The amount to which you can change as a person is really difficult to oversell. Mm hmm. I totally agree. Like it is, it is, the, the, the, the core study on this that I always cite is people coming back from Vietnam who were addicted to heroin, something like 86 percent of them, the addiction basically immediately disappeared when they came back.</p><p>And the question is why? Because their context was so different that even really deep seated neurological phenomenon could be reset because your brain basically is running different modes for different environments. [00:28:00] Well, this has been spectacular, Simone, and I hope it helps some people and really... The, the biggest takeaway from this I would say is when somebody comes to you and they try to tell you that your childhood was traumatic or your parents did something traumatic or oh here's this problem you have that you didn't know you had.</p><p>Now if you're like, no, I guess I always sort of knew that this was something that was troubling me. I just didn't have words. No you didn't. That's not a thing. That is, that is people writing things into your history. That is the way, if this wasn't every morning you woke up and you're like, this is my big problem today, then it was created for you.</p><p>And I hate to say it, but this is one of the big issues we have with the trans movement. In that, I do think that there are some people who are genuinely born trans, but I think for a lot of people who join the movement, it's more like, This is something they were convinced was a problem for them, and if they hadn't had people selling this to them, they never would have [00:29:00] known that this was a problem in their life.</p><p>And so this level of pain that they're experiencing every day is created by people pointing out the problem and contextualizing the problem and then framing the problem as really bad. You know, one of my favorite things that I mentioned as a study, and I've never been able to find this study, but it was mentioned when I was doing my degree in college.</p><p>At St. Andrews, by the way, right now, ranked the top university in the UK, by, above both Oxford and Cambridge, by both The Times and The Guardian, for the last two years. Hey, I gotta take pride in my alumni honor. Anyway. It was a study that showed that women who grew up in environments where unwanted non consensual sex was common.</p><p>Didn't have any negative effects from it, but people who grew up in environments where unwanted non consensual surprise sex was uncommon like, you know, the West really faced negative reactions to it. You create your society, the [00:30:00] people who your friends was, they create what's traumatic for you by what they contextualize as traumatic.</p><p>And I guess you could say everybody gets their sort of. Wisdom saving score. Yeah, I'm sorry, I've been playing a lot of Balders Gate 3 recently. So, it's a, it uses the DND engine and it's, you know, you roll the dice every time to see if you get a saving throw against this. But if you have a community that's constantly trying to tell you, people not recognizing this, people not seeing you this way, this is traumatic.</p><p>It becomes traumatic in the way that trauma is meaningful. And by that, what I mean, Is all trauma is really just due to these sorts of contextualizations. And no matter what happens to you, the things that happen to you aren't what create the trauma. It's the way your community and yourself choose to relate to those things.</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Yeah. So, yeah. If you, I think a lot of people in the world,</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> because they will tell them it's such a cheat code. I think a lot of people</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> who follow this podcast think that they have this view, but don't. So [00:31:00] next time you find yourself believing that, you know, you, you can't solve the problem. That's probably a sign that you might be subject to these views.</p><p>So there's</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> that. Sometimes one of the fun cultural differences between Simone and I is every time something bad happens, she's always like. I didn't even realize that looking for a solution to this was possible. She grew up her entire childhood, like not knowing about mucin X because like her family, like they'd be sick and they wouldn't, I'm like, you're sick.</p><p>I'd be like, well, you're sick. Google solutions. But what do we do about this? She'd be like, I've been feeling really bad today about X. And I was like, okay, go to Claude, type that in. That's an AI, that's the anthropic AI. And let's find a solution. He goes, Oh, there probably isn't one. I'm pregnant.</p><p>And I'm like. I'm sorry, just try. This was gas recently. And it was like, actually there's this really easy solution that doesn't hurt pregnancies. And she's like, like, why did you have so much resistance to even trying? [00:32:00]</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> Yeah. I think part of like a lot of it's how I grew up, that like there, there was no attitude about like, Oh, like take cold medicine when you have a cold.</p><p>It was just like. Drink chamomile tea.</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> Problems require solutions and that's a cultural attitude that</p><p><strong>Simone:</strong> you can bring into your day. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not exempt from this. That's why I really recognize it as a problem. So go home and think about it, people. But Malcolm, thank you for helping me think through it all the time because I really appreciate it.</p><p>I love</p><p><strong>Malcolmm:</strong> you. to death, Simone.</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe</a>