Severe trauma? Really? Didn’t see any mention of violence, sexual assault, prison time, or the like. These seem like totally prosaic life choices that more or less worked out fine for him in the end. Maybe the language is a bit overwrought but that could just be to punch things up for the reader.
He was unable to make and keep connections that he found valuable enough to preserve. He wrote a post about blowing up your life and barely concentrated on the biggest reason not to, to preserve your social connections and proximity to the people you love to spend time with.
I would be very surprised if this person did not have an "avoidant" attachment type.
I think you underestimate how severe the trauma of feeling disconnected from other humans can be.
I think the authors blog post conveys that he hasn't come to terms with the idea that "Wherever you go, there you are."
This is off topic but your original comment is from May and super old. I just wanted to say thanks for mentioning Running on Empty back then. It made me get a copy and it explained a lot for me, and I'm really grateful to have found it.
You can preserve connections after leaving a place or changing a relationship. Most people are capable of this. It sounds like the author was as well, since he mentions having an amicable conversation with his ex-wife after his divorce.
Social alienation is very bad, but is not severe trauma. Severe trauma would be something like being held in solitary confinement for months.
The problem with trauma as an explanatory model is is that if you dig deep enough, pretty much anyone has had life experiences that may be characterized as traumatic. And even if you find someone who hasn't, they've clearly lead such a sheltered life that it's a sort of trauma on its own.
Because of this, childhood trauma is a sort of universal explanation that will explain things even outside of psychology, everything from wheat allergy to male pattern baldness. You bet there's trauma in there somewhere causing it.
Surely divorcing your wife, randomly moving to Thailand and telling people they should do the same to get happier isn't a normal behavior. Call it what you want
Normal, perhaps not. But at the same time, if you've been living your life according to what's considered normal and expected of you with no regard for your own wants and needs, then it may be healthy indeed.
Also, if you spend just a few days in Thailand talking to foreigners, you quickly realize that there are tens of thousands of people who moved to Thailand on a whim.
Many of them flame out in tragic (or tragicomic) fashion, some succeed and settle down, others move on to the next thing with some more life experience under their belt, like the author did.
His path is a typical one among young Westerners who move to Thailand. “Normal” is all relative.
If you're living in a place in which you are not happy, with people you don't like, then leaving may be absolutely what you should do. You don't have to put up with relationships that aren't working.
> If you're living in a place in which you are not happy, with people you don't like,
The epiphany happens when you realize it's probably not the place or the people who are making you unhappy, but yourself and your beliefs.
That's what "wherever you go, there you are" means. It means you can't escape your self and you have to confront who you are no matter where you physically are.
This person is avoidant. That means when his wife did things rather than having an "us vs the problem" mindset, he is looking for the door. That means the woman over time will come to understand that she's not good enough, or there's an expiration on their time together. This raises the stakes for even small disagreements and creates a self fulfilling prophecy that ends the relationship.
So he hurt her by not being attached, and she acted in ways that made him unhappy as a result.
It was him ultimately that created his own unhappiness.
> Before psychedelics, I was intensely commitment-phobic, and assumed that either I wouldn’t settle down with anyone, or that I’d be in an open relationship for the rest of my life. I thought this was a philosophical position, based on principled arguments about the drawbacks of monogamy, rather than an emotional defense.
> This didn’t, like, permanently cure my loneliness and alienation, but it did make me appreciate how difficult it is to be a person, for me and for everyone. I felt less alone, certainly.
