If we’re honest with ourselves, we know if a relationship isn’t working, if it is abusive or hurtful, or if it has run it’s course. We can ask trusted family and friends for their opinion if we’re confused or unsure.

Not long ago, words like “triggered,” “gaslighting,” “narcissist,” and “neurodivergent” belonged almost exclusively to therapists’ offices and psychology textbooks. Now they’re everywhere; in workplace training sessions, community organisations, TikTok comment sections, and casual conversation between friends over coffee. That shift has brought some genuinely important changes. But it’s also introduced some problems worth taking seriously.

The real wins

It would be unfair to dismiss this cultural shift outright. There are meaningful gains. More people today can identify manipulation, coercive dynamics, and emotional harm than any previous generation. Mental health conversations have been destigmatised in ways that would have been hard to imagine twenty years ago. People who were historically silenced, particularly those from marginalised communities, finally have language that validates their experiences and gives them permission to leave harmful situations. That’s progress

But then there’s “concept creep” (pathologising the ordinary or “diagnostic inflation”)

Psychologists use the term “concept creep” to describe what happens when a word originally defined by strict clinical boundaries starts expanding to cover increasingly ordinary experiences. And that’s precisely what happened with “trauma.”

Clinically, trauma refers to experiences that overwhelm the nervous system i.e., genuine threats to safety, severe harm, events that exceed a person’s capacity to cope. These days, the same word is regularly applied to being disagreed with, having a relationship end, receiving criticism, or simply feeling uncomfortable. Events like relationship breakdowns, job loss, or failure can be genuinely devastating, and for some people, under some circumstances, they absolutely do meet the clinical threshold for trauma. The distinction isn’t really about the type of event. It’s about the impact on the nervous system and the person’s capacity to integrate the experience.

When everything qualifies as trauma, the word stops doing useful work. Worse, it can actually undermine the resilience people need to navigate a genuinely difficult world.

The nervous system problem

Here’s where it gets important. In actual “clinical” trauma, the brain’s threat-response systems activate intensely. Memory processing is disrupted. The body mobilises for survival in ways that can leave lasting marks.

Discomfort is different. It involves real emotional activation, it’s not pleasant, but cognitive flexibility remains available. The capacity to think, reflect, and choose a response is still intact.

When people learn to label ordinary emotional discomfort as trauma activation, the consequences compound. If discomfort feels equivalent to harm, avoidance becomes a logical response. But avoidance prevents the gradual building of tolerance. And without tolerance, the world gets smaller.

Trauma as identity and social currency

In some online communities, there’s an uncomfortable dynamic worth naming: being “highly traumatised,” “chronically triggered,” or “deeply misunderstood” can confer real social benefits — belonging, validation, moral authority, and attention.

This doesn’t mean the experiences aren’t real. But when distress becomes central to someone’s identity, letting go of that distress can start to feel like losing themselves. Recovery, paradoxically, becomes threatening.

The fragility trap

In certain environments, fragility functions as a kind of protection. If I am highly sensitive, others must accommodate me. Challenge becomes inappropriate. Accountability becomes unsafe. The person is shielded, but the cost is enormous.

Resilience, both psychologically and biologically, develops through graded exposure to stress. We become capable through encountering difficulty, not by avoiding it. Systems that never face adaptive pressure weaken over time. This is simply how human development works.

Why this moment matters

Several things are converging right now. Social media algorithms reward extreme emotional narratives. Identity formation increasingly happens in digital spaces that amplify distress. Institutions have frequently overcorrected towards protective language in ways that, whatever their intentions, can inadvertently signal that discomfort is dangerous. And while there’s been important growth in awareness of systemic injustice, the corresponding emphasis on individual agency has sometimes been lost.

We’ve swung from “suppress your emotions entirely” to “your emotions define reality.” Neither extreme serves people well.

Holding the middle ground

What good support actually looks like isn’t dismissing people’s experiences, it’s deepening them. The distinction that matters is between trauma-informed practice and what might be called trauma-indulgent practice.

Trauma-informed means understanding that harm genuinely impacts nervous systems, avoiding shame, recognising power imbalances, and creating safety. It’s grounded and necessary.

Trauma-indulgent means treating all discomfort as harm, reinforcing avoidance, allowing emotional reasoning to override reality, and quietly removing personal responsibility from the picture. It feels compassionate in the moment but tends to leave people worse off over time.

In practice, holding the middle ground means validating what someone feels while gently asking whether something was truly unsafe or simply hard. It means acknowledging difficulty while also reinforcing capacity. It means introducing a reality that doesn’t get much airtime in online spaces — that we can’t always control how those around us speak or behave, but we can build our own tolerance and capacity to regulate.

The question underneath everything

There’s a deeper ethical question running through all of this: are we reducing suffering in the long run, or just distress in the short term?

Protecting people from discomfort today, if it increases fragility tomorrow, is not a kindness. But exposing people to challenge without adequate safety and support risks re-traumatising those with genuine wounds.

The balance isn’t complicated to describe, even if it’s genuinely difficult to hold: safety, combined with graduated exposure, combined with a genuine sense of agency.

Anyone supporting others through difficulty needs a calm nervous system, a high personal tolerance for distress, and the capacity to sit with being perceived as insensitive when holding a difficult but necessary line. Clear values and genuine boundaries aren’t optional extras — they’re the model.

The world remains economically uncertain, socially polarised, and digitally relentless. People will encounter disagreement, rejection, imperfect institutions, and others who handle things badly. Preparing people for a world where everyone is perfectly considerate is not just unrealistic — it’s a disservice.

Hello readers. I hope you are well. I imagine some of you are struggling and some of you are flourishing. Life consists of both. As humans, we relish pleasurable feelings and experiences and we tend to dislike uncomfortable emotions and experiences. I get it. I am just like you. We share this. I hope that provides some comfort.

What is human development?

Human development can be described as “systematic changes and continuities in the individual that occur between conception and death, or from “womb to tomb”” (Sigelman, De George, Cunial, & Rider, 2019, p. 3).

Human development involves the continuities (i.e., what remains consistent across time) and the systematic changes (i.e., patterns of change that are expected to come in order across time) that one experiences throughout the lifespan. Based on my education, there are three domains of continuity and change: 1. The physical and biological, 2. Cognitive (i.e., mind processes/thinking), and 3. Psychosocial and emotional. Let’s open these one at a time.

Physical development includes:

• Physical and biological processes (e.g., genetic inheritance).
• Growth of the body and its organs.
• Functioning of physiological systems (e.g., brain).
• Health and wellness.
• Physical signs of ageing and changes in motor abilities.

Cognitive development includes:

Perception: the sensing of stimuli in our environment (internal and external), sending that information to the brain to be identified and interpreted in order to represent and understand our experience of the world and give it meaning. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system.

Attention: the ability to actively (and often, involuntarily) process specific information in the environment while tuning out other details. Attention is a very interesting cognitive process because when we bring mindfulness to our thoughts we become open to the direction and attention of our mind. Remember this: where attention goes, energy flows.

Language: very broadly, Language is a communication system that involves using words (i.e., sounds arranged together) and systematic rules to organise those words into sentences and meaning, to transmit information from one individual to another. I was never very interested in language when I was studying at university however that has changed. We used language and concepts to talk to ourselves, about other people, and it is open to misinterpretation, error, and oftentimes language can be used as a means to hurt people or … bring us closer together.

Learning: very broadly defined as a relatively permanent change in behaviour, thinking, and understanding as a result of experience. Experience is everything from formal education to unique personal experience. We learn from each other, the world around us, books, movies, self-reflection and education etc. All of which are experiences.

Memory: Memory refers to the processes that are used to gather, organise, store, retain, and later retrieve information. I’m sure you’ve all seen a tv show or read a book about a person with Amnesia or Alzheimer’s disease. Imagine what your life would be like if you didn’t have the function of memory. I wouldn’t be able to type this very well, I don’t think. I wouldn’t remember my loved ones or what was dangerous in my environment. I know we all have unpleasant memories too and that may feel like a negative evolutionary by-product – however it is actually designed to protect us. Memory is finite – we actually forget a lot of stuff, or perhaps more accurately, we do not have the capacity to store and recall everything we experience.

Intelligence: I would like to reframe intelligence from what might be a common belief. Intelligence does not mean academically gifted as is considered valuable in Western society. I think Olympians and caregivers/parents have an intelligence that I do not because I haven’t learned their skills. Intelligence involves the ability to learn (i.e., sport, academics, the arts, swimming, survival, interpersonal skills), emotional knowledge, creativity, and adaptation to meet the demands of the environment effectively

Creativity: I consider creativity to be an evolutionary gift of our imagination, providing humans with the ability to generate and recognize ideas, consider alternatives, think of possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. Creativity can be stunted when we are struggling or caught in reactivity to external pressures or perceived stress.

Problem solving: is a process – yes, a cognitive one but also a behavioural process. It is the act of defining a problem; determining the cause of the problem; identifying, prioritizing, and selecting alternatives for a solution; and implementing a solution. Problem solving can be both creative or stress driven. I like to say whenever I am solving a problem I am also making a decision. A decision of mine is a choice. At university, our problem solving lessons were coincided with decision making which is why I think of it that way.

Psychosocial development involves:

Aspects of the self (i.e., your identity – which may change over time), and social and interpersonal interactions which include motives, emotions, personality traits, morality, social skills, and relationships, and roles played in the family and in the larger society. This is a huge area to be explored. I will endeavour to elaborate on our psychosocial development in later blogs.

In the late 1950’s, a German-American developmental psychologist named Erik Erikson created a theory for human psychosocial development across the lifespan. His theory suggests that human personality develops in a predetermined order through 8 stages of psychosocial development. See the table below:

Multiple theorists and researchers since Freud have independently converged on the same concept of psychological defences because of the potential utility of the concept.

Alfred Adler, known for emphasising the importance of overcoming feelings of inferiority and gaining a sense of belonging in order to achieve success and happiness, developed a similar idea which he called psychological “safeguarding strategies.”

Karen Horney, who believed that environment and social upbringing, rather than intrinsic factors, largely lead to neurosis, described “protective strategies” used by children of abusive or neglectful parents.

Leon Festinger developed the well-known concept of “cognitive dissonance,” proposing that inconsistency among beliefs or behaviours causes an uncomfortable psychological tension leading people to change one of the inconsistent elements to reduce the dissonance (or to add consonant elements to restore consonance).

Carl Rogers, who was one of the founders of humanistic psychology, known especially for his person-centred psychotherapy, discussed the process of defence as “denial and perceptual distortion”.

Albert Bandura, known for ground-breaking research on learning via observation and social modelling, and the development of social learning theory, conceptualized defences as “self-exoneration mechanisms.”

The influential psychiatrist George Vaillant organized defences on a scale of immature to mature, defining them as “unconscious homeostatic mechanisms that reduce the disorganizing effects of sudden stress.”

Current discussions of coping mechanisms and emotion regulation embody the idea of defences as well. Is a defence mechanism merely a learned internal process manifested in our behaviour to protect us – or our ego – from pain? Is a defence mechanism a merely a coping mechanism to resolve internal stress?

Whatever you believe the answers to be, we can cultivate, learn, and practice adaptive, context-specific and generalised coping strategies that will aid self-development that can improve our health, relationships, self-esteem, workplace performance, and stress management skills.