My Valentine’s Day article about love, intimacy, and trauma (link below) earned pushback from more than one person who found my definitions of the human experience didn’t line up with theirs.
So it goes with our attempts to model reality. The process of trying to distill an infinity of information down to something that can be understood as “language” results in…well, aesthetic choices. I might choose to look at love as an experience of safety, and you might choose to look at it as a set of emotions. This is why we have to explain ourselves when we start defining things and declaring how things interrelate.
The same problem arose from my reference to the 4Fs trauma typology created by a therapist named Pete Walker: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. The 4Fs system has become increasingly popular in trauma psychology. I see it in trauma memes, pop psych blogs/articles, and webinar advertisements everywhere. Unfortunately, Walker co-opted terminology that’s been used in biological sciences for 100 years. Now people aren’t sure how his model fits with the established…
