“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is an outdated statement that has no basis in reality. I don’t think damaging someone’s mind with something like trauma is making someone stronger but impairing them for the rest of their lives. Stress eventually does kill people because it weakens a person’s body by increasing their heart rate and weakening their immune systems making them more susceptible to infection or other diseases like cancer, teeth decay, etc. and that sure isn’t making anyone stronger.
The truth is that what doesn’t kill can either eventually kill you in the end or leave you mentally damaged for the rest of your life. I know the statement is a manipulation tactic that is forced upon the population to try and make everyone the same by making having emotions and being upset and hurt by something as a weakness due to toxic masculinity, misogyny and racism that was created by cis white straight male supremacy.
Honestly a lot of our social “norms”, like not holding people accountable, and stuff like this all can be pinpointed back to cis white straight male supremacy and as an Autistic who’s also Hispanic (I’m half Puerto Rican so not only have I dealt with discrimination for being gay and Autistic, I have also had to deal with racism), I see this a lot more clearly than allistics, neurotypicals and even white Autistics that a lot of ideologies in both the UK and the US (where I am from) come from white colonizers who forced their way of thinking onto those who didn’t conform to what they think is how people should function.
Indigenous and Hispanics have pretty much had their history erased. With Puerto Ricans, for example, our original Indigenous ancestry has gone extinct due to colonization by the Spaniards so there’s no way to know how Indigenous people of the Americas once lived before being forced to live with cis white straight male supremacy ideologies on how a society should be. For all we know the indigenous people of America held people accountable for their actions and had them make things right.
I mean seriously when you look throughout history with cis white straight male supremacy its always about not holding cis white men accountable for their actions, whether that’s colonization, the enslavement of an entire ethnic group, forcing their religious beliefs on everyone and so on and so forth.
My point is a lot of our “social norms” are cis white straight male supremacy ideologies that have always been for the benefit of anyone but minority groups, things like “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” has a deep ties to racism and misogyny when you look at our history. Think about it, before women had to be married to a man and couldn’t divorce him at all for any reason, regardless of if they were r*ped, beaten, cheated on, etc. women had to be “strong” housewives and sit there and endure and conform to that despite the mental harm and trauma they endured and I wouldn’t be surprised if many ended up dead because of it, whether by murder or stress eventually killing them.
So yeah the whole “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is just outdated and has heavy ties to cis white straight male supremacy. As an Autistic person who’s also two other minority groups (gay and Hispanic), particularly one that has to deal with racism and white supremacy, this gets used to justify racism, homophobia and even the bigotry and mistreatment of Autistic people, and they can lead to other mental health problems such as anxiety, depression due to low self-esteem, fear for ones life, mistrust in authority figures like police or the justice systems in majority white countries, most, if not all, are rigged against BIPOC and mentally disabled people, and when you Autism into the mix, yeah just none is a good combination to deal with…