Interesting, this is not really how I think about trauma at all! Or if it is you've framed it in a way that I never would have.

I tend to think of trauma as things that happened in the past that led to stuck memories that are strongly immune to updating. When things happen that will create stuck memories it's not very clear that that's what's going to happen; it's only well after the fact that it's clear something is stuck. Thus there's no sense to me in which these things have to be processed, they just are.

There's something else, which I don't really have to deal with any more, that looks more like what you're talking about: new stuff happens that violates my expectations and meta-expectations about the world, and then I have to spend time letting my mind work through what the new evidence means and maybe deal with some emotional stuff caused by those expectations being forced to change.

(To be fair, though, I'm a bit weird in that I've meditated a lot and that's changed me in important ways such that you might say I've mentally refactored away lots of my technical debt. Memory reconsolidation was also really useful here for clearing out traumatic things so that they were no longer stuck.)

(I also note that I use trauma just to refer to these stuck memories, and not to big things that are supposed to be Traumatic.)

Thanks, I appreciate you writing this, and I appreciate you sharing about this in public. I'm somewhat excited to see how this conversation might develop more centrally in rat discourse. I think there's currently some major incommunicable cruxes surrounding these questions, and I've had a lot of conversations about this domain with people who are squarely rats, but mostly auxiliary to rat discourse in a way that's frustrating.

I have some critiques:

• I think this is a plausible contour of how things might go for people who started out relatively healthy, who experience a substantial disturbance and then work to return to something about as stable as their previous configuration. I don't think this is a good point of reference for people who began this process quite disturbed and have been so for quite a while. 
  • Indeed, you refer to people trying to address a morass of confusing and illegible motivational/emotional/etc issues, whose situations I don't think are described well by this sort of story. I currently have the most weight on Mark Lippmann's work in this domain, over any other framework, traditional or modern. (Warning: I don't actually recommend his writing to almost anyone, unfortunately.)
  • There's some very important questions around how or why people are apparently getting stuck on this emotions/trauma stuff, and whether they should actually be regarded as stuck. This also trades off sharply depending on whether they're doing vital work otherwise: I hold people working on x-risk in an almost unique category in this respect, where to me even if they might seem to have tons of un-worked-out stuff, I lean towards preferring they continue their work rather than investing hard in healing.
• My impression, from <20 conversations with you ever, is that you have obvious-to-me stuff, that probably remains largely untouched by the emotional work you describe having done. To be clear, this is completely blameless, and should not be a source of shame. However, from my perspective this mostly negates your judgements about what is right or advisable in this domain.

Lastly, and I think you're not much to blame for this either: 

• It's not clear to me how we should be having these conversations in public. I'm pretty frustrated by a bunch of "Works On My Machine™" posts about this topic all over the internet (and just as well in print), and I'm pretty confused how these conversations should even work, especially in our discourse. 
• There's some problematic epistemological questions relating to claims about phenomenology and psychology, and I don't think that the existing literatures (modern western psychology, or any of the traditional contemplative schools) have resolved them. For that matter, the techniques and models from the existing literatures mostly aren't great either, so I'm hardly saying something like "there are established models, please go read these textbooks and stop posting quack physics."

Did you ever figure out whether any parts of your new ~3 traumas were somehow in fact downstream of past unprocessed traumas that you didn't understand? Or was this really just new stuff happening to you, and you were correct to believe that the 2018 trauma advocates weren't talking about anything related to your life?

I really appreciated how this balanced your personal experience with the model building. I like the model a lot more than a model that arrives seemingly ex nihilo. (On no, this is why self help books are written this way isn't it? I'm also just now realizing that the biggest thing I dislike about most self help books is that the author does this pattern but usually exclusively with other people's problems and not their own).

Samskara theory from classical yoga traditions is (partially) the idea that by default people spend a lot of extra effort reacting to a mashup of the present and the salient bits of the past that are trying to do transfer learning but in practice winds up with a traffic jam of competing constraints. One of the big ideas is that digesting experiences fully is a skill that can be trained like any other and that with such training you eventually hit an inflection point where you process things faster than they come in and will eventually hit what's being referred to here as emotional inbox zero. The constraints idea is also why you wind up with this limit where tangles get exponentially worse when added together. The wicked tangles paralyze you along exactly the degrees of freedom you need for processing.

Also from Yoga we have the idea that a lot of this processing can be done purely physically/somatically, which can be dramatically less tangled than engaging with all the mental contents. I've taken to calling the endless therapy loop as the Integration Trap, and liken it to whack a mole. If you aren't improving your digestion skill then you are constantly firefighting rather than actually decreasing the rate of new moles popping up.

I think there's often a language/terminology challenge around these areas. For instance, at different times I had a grade 3 ankle sprain after endurance training, and a grade 2 wrist sprain after a car crash - those are clearly acute trauma (in the medical meaning of the word) and they do require some mix of healing to the extent possible for recovery of physical function. 

But I've always found it tricky that the same word 'trauma' is used for physical injuries, past bad experiences, and as a broad description of maladaptive patterns of thought and behavior. 

It's a broad word that people use in different ways.

Two things I've found useful.

(1) Highest recommendation for Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By (1980) which looks at conceptual metaphors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By

From Chapter 7, "Personification":

Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities. Here are some examples:

- His theory explained to me the behavior of chickens raised in factories.
- This fact argues against the standard theories. 
- Life has cheated me. 
- Inflation is eating up our profits.
- His religion tells him that he cannot drink fine French wines. 
- The Michelson-Morley experiment gave birth to a new physical theory. 
- Cancer finally caught up with him.

In each of these cases we are seeing something nonhuman as human. But personification is not a single unified general process. Each personification differs in terms of the aspects of people that are picked out. 

Consider these examples.
- Inflation has attacked the foundation of our economy. 
- Inflation has pinned us to the wall.
- Our biggest enemy right now is inflation. 
- The dollar has been destroyed by inflation.
- Inflation has robbed me of my savings. 
- Inflation has outwitted the best economic minds in the country.

I think a lot of discussion around the word "trauma" follows these characteristics — the challenge is, a lot of times people move between a literal well-scoped definition of trauma, say the medical one, and a more metaphorical/ontological description. People often do this without noticing it.

For instance, I can talk about the acute trauma of the wrist injury from a car crash, and everyone will largely understand what I'm talking about. But the same word 'trauma' will often be used if I had described some fear or aversion of getting into cars going forwards. I don't have one, but if I did, people would refer to both the wrist injury and the thing which caused the aversion to cars as 'trauma' — which seems somewhat confused to me. Clearly a wrist injury needs healing, in the biological and medical sense of the word healing. 

Does an aversion to getting into cars need "healing" in the same way? I mean, maybe, if you've got a definition of "healing" from neuroscience around how incoming information is processed and how chain reactions of synapses firing in response to a stimuli that produces a maladaptive behavioral pattern is classified as "healing." But - like, probably not. "Healing" in that context is a metaphor.

For my part, and just speaking for myself, I think the term "extinction" — though less in line with the current cultural milieu — is a much better word than "healing" for removing maladaptive emotional and behavioral patterns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)

In my way of thinking about it,

• A traumatic wrist injury is repaired by physical healing.
• An irrational aversion to getting in cars is repaired by extinction of the behavior.

How to do the latter — talk-oriented therapies, exposure therapy (which is typically recommended for phobias), practice and training on implementing good patterns in similar situations to ones where you've displayed undesirable patterns of behavior, cognitive behavioral therapy if you're ruminating too much, etc - well, unfortunately there's no consensus currently on what works the best for any given case. 

But I think starting with a model of "I need to heal" is questionable. Relatedly, I'm also skeptical of using the word "heal" for biochemical imbalances — for biochemical-based depression, for instance, I think "I need to get my hormones and biochemistry better-regulated to remove depressive symptoms" is a a mix of more actionable, more accurate, and more subjectively empowering than "I need to heal from depression."

Anyway, this goes strongly against the current cultural milieu - and I haven't been maximally precise in the comment. A lot could be nitpicked. But I think extinction of maladaptive thought patterns and maladaptive behavior patterns is more easily accomplished (and a more accurate description of reality) than healing; likewise, "regulating" seems more accurate than healing to me on biochemical based phenomenon. 

It's been useful for me to think about it this way, and sometimes useful for other people. Though, different things work for different people - so add salt liberally. Regardless, Lakoff's Metaphors is extremely relevant the topic and highly recommended.