Not Everything Is Trauma
Now that I'm 52-years-old, I get to... Whoa, whoa, whoa...wait just a minute! How old? Did you say 52, Boss?? Did you forget to carry a one, or something? Huh? Hold on...1962, 72, 82. etc...go to the other hand...Ah, 62, right! Ran out of fingers there for a second. My bad. Idiot. Moving on...
So I'm talking to Dorothy from Kansas the other day (Dorothy from Kansas! Alright!! She's back!), and we got to talking about, believe it or not, trauma. I had been hearing a lot about trauma the last few years and how you couldn't swing a dead cat...Easy, my bi-pedal hero...without someone yelling that they were going through some huge traumatic experience. I told Dorothy I was going to write about it and could she answer some questions and offer any thoughts on the matter. Personally, I thought it a tad overblown, but that's just me. Dorothy, who is galactically smarter than I am, works in the field of medicine, and was happy to help, if for no other reason so as to help me not make a complete fool of myself. No easy task. That's right...I have really smart friends. You need them. Here's what we came up with. Anything that might sound stupid in the following paragraphs, can probably be attributed to me.
We started talking about the idea that as a culture we once avoided talk of mental health like the plague. However, now we seem to openly celebrate people who speak candidly about their psychic wounds—even or especially when they are the type of people who are known to us all because they perform labors that seem somewhat superhuman. I like to call it the "Oprahfication" of America. Nobody shuts the hell up about their personal lives and crises anymore. Which is why every kid is majoring in Communications these days in the hopes of getting their own talk show! And nothing is private anymore. When Olympic gymnast Simone Biles abruptly withdrew from several events at the 2021 Tokyo games, she cited the ongoing suffering she has experienced as a victim of sexual abuse. Nearly all the stories about her decision praised Biles for taking a mental-health break, even though it likely cost the Olympic team gold medals. Likewise, when (at the time) the number-two ranked women’s tennis player in the world, Naomi Osaka, withdrew from both Wimbledon and the French Open a couple of years ago, claiming mental-health challenges, she was lionized for speaking out.
The word that is used to describe their pain is “trauma,” which Dorothy told me is classically defined as a "lingering and haunted response to a terrible experience such as assault, natural disaster, serious accident, or some other deeply disturbing event."
Experts praised both Biles and Osaka for putting “emotional wellness” ahead of everything else, but rather than acknowledge that athletes like them are the exception—since they had chosen to take on the mental and physical challenges that elite competition poses—experts used their experiences to argue that similar kinds of trauma were pervasive and growing. Trauma “has nefarious and wide-spread tentacles,” Margo Lindauer, associate clinical professor at Northeastern University, told one news outlet. “The impacts of trauma are ongoing and unexpected and can rear up in all sorts of different ways.”
Today, at least based on what I've read, trauma diagnoses have moved far beyond the realm of individual clinical expertise to take on outsize significance as an explanation for a broad array of social, cultural, and political problems. A popular book about trauma, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, had been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 150 weeks back in 2022. In it, the author explores the physiological and neurological impact of trauma on patients who had been clinically diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and he claims that therapies such as mindfulness yoga, art, and dance are effective in treating them.
Van der Kolk’s work relies on the relatively new and growing field of “epigenetics.” The central idea is that an individual’s genes can be altered as the result of life experience and that those changes can be passed on to future generations. Do our genes express themselves (without permanently altering the underlying DNA code)? That could provide insight into the possible existence of intergenerational trauma.
“The idea of a signal, an epigenetic finding that is in offspring of trauma survivors, can mean a lot of things,” Rachel Yehuda, director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the author of a study of intergenerational trauma among Holocaust survivors, told the BBC. “It’s exciting that it’s there.” (Isn't it cool what excites some people as opposed to others? I mean, I get excited when I reach a par-5 in two! However, I digress...) But researchers caution that this study was small (studying only 32 survivors) and assessed only one generation of offspring. The findings would have to be repeated across more generations to prove epigenetic certainty. Also, as the BBC noted: “There is a big stumbling block with research into epigenetic inheritance: no one is sure how it happens. Some scientists think that it is actually a very rare event.” (To say nothing of the fact that nearly all the experiments on epigenetics have been performed on mice, not people.)
Other scientists have been blunter in their criticism. “These are, in fact, extraordinary claims, and they are being advanced on less than ordinary evidence,” Kevin Mitchell, an associate professor of genetics and neurology at Trinity College, Dublin, told the New York Times. “This is a malady in modern science: the more extraordinary and sensational and apparently revolutionary the claim, the lower the bar for the evidence on which it is based, when the opposite should be true.”
Epigenetics exists in the discredited shadow of Lamarckism, the evolutionary theory first developed by 19th-century French naturalist Jean Baptist Lamarck. Lamarck argued for the inheritance of acquired characteristics (e.g., the giraffe’s neck is long because earlier generations had to stretch to reach the leaves of tall trees), and although his theories were discredited by serious geneticists in the early 20th century, they remained popular in the Soviet Union because they fit Communist dogma about remaking society by altering humanity at the root.
Despite the questionable provenance of epigenetics, the idea that trauma is not only widespread but deeply rooted—and passed on—in people’s bodies from generation to generation has captured the American imagination at a time when victimhood is already a dominating force in the culture. Even Van der Kolk thinks things might have gone too far. Asked by a writer for the Atlantic magazine whether it was appropriate to compare people’s experience during the pandemic to the patients in his book (who experienced things such as rape, kidnapping, and combat during wartime), he responded, “When people say the pandemic has been a collective trauma…. I say, absolutely not.” Other scholars, such as Nick Haslam at the University of Melbourne, have also warned about the dangers of the “creeping conception of trauma.”
That hasn’t stopped the demand for its explanatory powers among the public. As one bookseller told Book Riot about the popularity of trauma books, “I think a lot of people are reevaluating their definitions of trauma right now—people who might have believed themselves to be trauma-free before the pandemic are beginning to pay closer attention to their pain and what it means.”
As these books and articles about “inherited family trauma” and, more recently, “racialized trauma” have proliferated, the claims they make for epigenetics, particularly its broader explanatory power as the cause of complicated social phenomena, have gotten way out ahead of the actual scientific research. Resmaa Menakem, the author of My Grandmother’s Hands, claims that “white-body supremacy” (I mean, you just knew that 'white body supremacy' was right around the corner, didn't you?) has imposed multigenerational trauma on people for centuries. “In America,” he writes, “nearly all of us, regardless of our background or skin color, carry trauma in our bodies around the myth of race.” He goes on to claim that “white-body supremacy has become part of our bodies. How could it not? It’s the equivalent of a toxic chemical we ingest on a daily basis. Eventually, it changes our brains and the chemistry of our bodies.” Hmmm... Well, I've been told that everyone's opinion has equal weight and that no opinion is stupid. Or...maybe not.
According to Menakem, trauma is everywhere and is basically anything. Thus understood, it can explain almost any human action, including antisocial behavior. “We can have a trauma response to anything we perceive as a threat, not only to our physical safety, but to what we do, say, think, care about, believe in, or yearn for,” Menakem writes. “This is why people get murdered for disrespecting other folks’ relatives or their favorite sports team…. Whenever someone freaks out suddenly or reacts to a small problem as if it were a catastrophe, it’s often a trauma response.” He even claims, without evidence I might add, that there is a special category of “deeply toxic” trauma “that lives and breathes in the bodies of many of America’s law enforcement officers.”
Thanks to the popularity of such ideas, self-diagnoses of trauma have skyrocketed, racial resentments have increased, and the laudable goal of harm reduction (to prevent trauma) has expanded into incoherence. When everything is considered dangerous and worth fearing, is it any wonder people interpret any negative experience as trauma?
Consider an essay in the New York Times written by Amanda Gorman, the young woman chosen to read a poem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration four years ago (and who received near-universal praise for doing so). Recalling that experience, she describes what in previous eras would have been called stage fright, but in her rendering is traumatic. Extrapolating from her own understandable jitters about performing for a national audience, she makes the sweeping claim that anyone who doesn’t share them is in denial about how much there is to fear in the world today: “If you’re alive, you’re afraid. If you’re not afraid, then you’re not paying attention,” Gorman claims. In an unwittingly apt encapsulation of Americans’ journey from resilience to trauma over the past several generations, she tweaked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous line, writing, “The only thing we have to fear is having no fear itself.”
Indeed, we are moving toward a culture that embraces trauma and fear as the new normal. A book by Dr. Gabor Maté called The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, argues just this. Maté “has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of ‘normal’ as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health.” Which raises the question: If “modern-day living” is traumatic, what isn’t?
Consider the story of Mackenzie Fierceton. As Tom Bartlett reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fierceton was a University of Pennsylvania graduate who won a Rhodes Scholarship after claiming to have been a traumatized and abused former foster kid from a low-income family. In fact, she was the daughter of a doctor, had attended private school (yearbook photos featured her skydiving, horseback riding, and whitewater rafting), and had lied both on her undergraduate application essay and to the Rhodes committee. Now, despite having been found out, Fierceton remains unrepentant (and is suing the University of Pennsylvania): “I have a right to write about my experiences as I experienced them,” she said.
Is it any surprise that her lie was a trauma narrative? As Bartlett noted, “writing about personal trauma in your college application is common enough that there are guides on how to do it.” Elite institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania are “sensitive to the charge that they cater to the wealthy and well-connected” and “eager to show that they’re transforming society rather than laundering its inequalities.” These universities are therefore “always on the lookout for remarkable kids from less-fortunate circumstances.” Fierceton might have lied, but she was not being irrational, given the incentive structures in place in college admissions these days.
Young people aren’t the only recent converts to trauma talk. It’s also become increasingly common to hear professionals in many fields claim to have been traumatized after experiencing the normal slings and arrows that come with the job. Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, the Norma Desmond of Millennial journalism, was more than ready for her close-up when she sobbed to an MSNBC reporter on camera about the “severe PTSD” she claims to have endured for being justifiably criticized on Twitter for her shoddy reporting. By contrast, actress Sandra Oh was traumatized not by failure, but by success; she told a reporter that “to be perfectly honest, it was traumatic” to experience the level of fame she had achieved. Really?
Will Self found a similar trend in literary criticism. Writing in Harper’s magazine, he noted how the focus on trauma does not encourage new insights, but rather a simplistic presentism and narcissism, with a dash of religious fervor. “Part of what gives modern trauma theory its appeal is precisely its covert importation of Judeo-Christian redemptive eschatology: a grand narrative of human moral progress in which suffering is an essential motivation for all the principal actors,” Self wrote. “For literary theorists, psychic trauma is an exclusive sort of stigmata, a wound at once invisible and sacred, the bearers of which become sanctified and thereby able to convey the singular Truth that shines through the miasma of contemporary moral relativism: that of their own suffering.” That is one of the great quotes of all time, people! Thank the gods for Google!
More worrisome than the promiscuous use of the word “trauma” to describe everyday experiences is its growing use as a political weapon among progressive policymakers. As Haslam told the Atlantic, the concept creep we see with trauma is especially appealing to people on the left. It “broadens moral concern in a way that aligns with a liberal social agenda by defining new kinds of experience as harming and new classes of people as harmed.”
Once identified as victims, these people are then seen as “needful of care and protection” by those in power. This is not a sign of increased empathy or moral progress. Rather, as Haslam notes, “by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves as capable of moral agency.” Trauma becomes an excuse for its supposed victims, and evidence of the moral superiority of their saviors.
This sensibility can be found among decarceration activists and progressive critics of the criminal-justice system, who regularly make unsubstantiated claims about, say, the “transgenerational trauma” created by prison sentences for criminals. It also conveniently shifts the trauma narrative away from victims of crime, who might have experienced real trauma, to the perpetrators, who are then recast as the real victims.
Willette Benford, a “decarceration organizer” and former felon, is typical of such activists. Speaking to a local Chicago news station, she said nothing of the trauma experienced by crime victims in her community, most of whom, like her, are black. Rather, she wanted to talk about “going inside [prisons] with trauma just from being a Black woman in America…. Then going inside and being oppressed, because most prisons are in rural southern counties and [employ] predominantly white officers and male officers.” Benford, by the way, was convicted of first-degree murder for killing her girlfriend, for which she served only 23 years of a 50-year sentence.
In schools, trauma has been used by interest groups such as teachers’ unions to resist practices that might reveal the damage that school closures inflicted on many of the nation’s public-school students. As the New York Times reported during the last stages of the pandemic, some educators and teachers’ unions actively encouraged parents to opt their children out of testing, claiming that standardized testing was harmful to students—this at a time when half of schools still remained closed and evidence of learning loss might have prompted earlier re-openings that would have benefited children. “Voices as prominent as the former New York City schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest educators’ union, had encouraged parents to opt their children out of state tests during the pandemic,” the Times reported. Why? “We do not want to impose additional trauma on students that have already been traumatized,” Carranza said.
In public schools, trauma talk is often introduced as part of critical race theory. As Robby Soave reported in Reason, high school students in Salinas, California, were taught about “‘intergenerational trauma’ through an interdisciplinary and critical lens” in a mandatory ethnic-studies course. Now, I'm not the brightest guy in the world, but that sounds like a lot of interdisciplinary bullshit to me.
This kind of trauma talk defines trauma down. Words should matter: As Haslam told the New York Times: “It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re policing the language….But when we start to talk about ordinary adversities as ‘traumas’ there is a risk that we’ll see them as harder to overcome and see ourselves as more damaged by them.”
For progressive politicians, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Consider one of my favorite nitwits, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told her 8.5 million Instagram followers about the trauma she experienced during the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill. Although she was not in the Capitol at the time, she nonetheless invoked her “trauma” as if she had been, adding that it was even more stressful for her because she was also a “survivor” of sexual assault. Such trauma talk is a powerful political tool in the hands of someone like Ocasio-Cortez because it is effectively immune to facts. You cannot question someone else’s experience of trauma; as Sehgal notes, “to question the role of trauma, we are warned, is to oppress.”
This expansion of definitions serves a broader political utility: Whether it's politicians calling student debt "trauma" or the supposed daily trauma (or violence) inflicted on people by the enemies within (racists, readers of George Will, free-speech advocates, landlords) justifies the creation and enforcement of stronger protective measures for the victimized groups, which requires more intervention by the government, etc., etc., etc. In this world, victimhood serves as a kind of privilege offset for elites who are keen on believing they understand the needs of the masses, just as carbon offsets work for private jet owners who want to see themselves as environmentalists.
But it comes with a cost. By diluting the meaning of trauma, trauma talk undermines the needs of real trauma patients. Coopting therapeutic language to promote ideological notions of race or to excuse antisocial behavior undermines social norms by placing trauma trip wires around normal areas of life and generating ineffective and wasteful policies. Last, and worst, it rejects the possibility of renewal and resilience in favor of fear—fear that makes one brittle and consigns one to perpetual pain.
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