Are humans inherently fragile? Mark Makela/Getty Images
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We live in traumatised times. Over the past few years, our social media channels, reality TV shows, and even playgrounds have become saturated with therapy speak. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, people now feel “triggered”; listening to a friend is now “holding space”; ex-partners are labelled as “gaslighting narcissists” on TikTok. And we are all encouraged to examine our “trauma” — even if we’re not actually sure what that might be.
This marks a strange moment in our cultural relationship with mental health. After decades of stigma, we are finally sharing our vulnerabilities. Yet we may be talking ourselves into a new problem. Trauma has become something of a cultural fixation — one of the most overused concepts in our daily lives.
But what exactly is trauma? And why has it come to dominate the therapeutic and cultural discourse? In an attempt to get to the bottom of this new psychology, I’ve been speaking to the world’s leading trauma experts. And I have discovered something unexpected: a powerful contradiction at the heart of psychology that explains why trauma has become one of the most divisive political issues in America.
The problem is that no one can agree on a definition of trauma, let alone how it should be treated. Progressives and conservatives don’t see eye to eye: either you are a Lefty snowflake with self-diagnosed trauma, or else you are getting on with life’s difficulties without complaining about it.
Psychologists are split down similar lines. When clinicians talk about trauma, they tend to distinguish between two distinct but related kinds of human experience. The first is the type researched by Dr George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, who has been investigating grief and PTSD for more than two decades. He explains that in the DSM, the key diagnostic manual used by psychiatrists in the US, trauma has a very specific definition: “It’s a violent or life-threatening event that is outside the range of normal experience.” This might include a car crash, sexual assault or a period spent in combat. However, Bonanno says, “even the term [‘traumatic experience’] is a misnomer, because even those events don’t always cause trauma reactions… I use the phrase in my research ‘potentially traumatic events’, as no event is inherently traumatic”.
In his book, The End of Trauma, Bonanno points out that most people who endure extreme events — or trauma — tend not to suffer from PTSD. But those who do tend to experience a range of symptoms, such as flashbacks and panic attacks, which usually decline over time. So rather than being slaves to our trauma, Bonanno argues that humans are defined more by our inherent resilience than by our fragility.
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SubscribeThis is a really good, well-researched and well-argued article with a sound conclusion. It brings into play most of the issues that currently divide people across the political and psychological spectrum (the two being intertwined) with the author giving due consideration to both sides, concluding that of course the reality of human psychology lies somewhere between the positions taken by those he cites.
What is of most interest to me is why we’ve become unable to hold balanced views, whether it’s in the fields of the psychology of trauma, sexual politics, ecological awareness, or straightforward political discourse. The complexity of human experience, of loss and of growth, has become a battleground over which people are encouraged to take sides, with the internet reflecting and amplifying the effect many times over in a way humans haven’t previously experienced and which we’re only just beginning to even conceive of how we might come to terms with. But come to terms with this new paradigm we must.
That’s why the kind of balance brought forward by the juxtaposition of seemingly entrenched positions in this article is valuable. It’s a welcome and necessary counterpoint – or to use the current parlance, pushback – against the flight to extremes and the necessity to take sides, aided and abetted by most of the media and “welfare” industries, with their specific self-serving interest in maintaining a state of imbalance.
I would argue we have become unable to hold balanced views because, in the west, we have seen a societal creep towards a lack of shared values. As fewer and fewer attend church and fewer and fewer people even consider themselves to be Christian in a loose sense, we have created a vacuum. Furthermore, the attempt to erode a sense of pride in the home nation and focus on small group identities and how they are at odds with one another, divides people from one another. The internet, highways, air travel, these developments have changed the individual’s perception of place and rootedness.
Altogether, these shifts in understanding who we are and how we relate to one another has resulted in people identifying more closely with political parties – and as such, the banal of everyday life has become politicized. So, we can’t talk about mental or trauma or memory or even more trivial things such as what to eat for dinner, without the it being (potentially) politicized.
Yes, the whole concept of “the personal is political” was always some seriously corrosive $h1t. Actually evil, many would say – and I’d agree.
Iain McGilchrist has a powerful analysis of why contemporary humans are increasingly unable to see shades of grey.
Very good essay; presents both sides of the issue in an even handed manner. IMO life has become very comfortable for most people in the west, and we have become disconnected from the hardships and suffering of previous generations. As a result, we become triggered by things that could be considered relatively mundane to previous generations.
I know this saying has been done to death, but I really think it applies to this period in time:
Hard times create strong men;
Strong men create good times;
Good times create weak men;
Weak men create hard times.
I don’t think that we fully understand the human brain. It is has great strengths and yet also great weaknesses in that it’s is so susceptible to suggestion. We hope that the more we learn, the more prepared we become and yet in actuality, we are producing more mental health hypochondriacs than ever before. Being a victim of trauma is fashionable amongst those who have never really experienced trauma and resilience is becoming a thing of the past.
Creating such a low bar for what constitutes “trauma”, and then making it central to one’s identity has become the path of least resistance for way too many individuals and groups in our society; unsurprising given the easing of expectations and attention afforded those nursing said “trauma”. It’s become a form of emotional and cultural infantilisation.
I think this is a good article and very balanced, as others have commented.
Many complain these days of being “too busy” and “having no time”. In general, Western people actually have more time on their hands than they used to. And yet it feels like less. I wonder if this is the result of too much communication. We have normalised over communication, largely peripheral and unnecessary. enabled by the internet.
Its volume and intensity fills people’s consciousness and saps their time to think. Time to think things through is essential for the very essence of humanity. It allows us, for instance, to consider the relative merits and drawbacks of both resilience and fragility…
Very wealthy people seem to acquire a surplus of expensive things but rarely seem content -indeed they are often quite unhappy and badly adjusted. Time is more valuable than money, and if people have so much of it that they are allowing it to be wasted on ephemeral trivia, then perhaps the same paradox applies.
If so, we need to learn to handle today’s technology and to retain our inner balance, because our interconnectedness and the consequent demands on our attention are only likely to increase.
The ‘worried well.’
Cancel culture is based on trauma expansion. It is considered justifiable to impose the trauma of career destruction over a difference of opinion on whether a man should be regarded as a woman if he says he is because not to do so would retraumatise such men by denying the nature of their reality. Just as Elisabeth Loftus exposed as an expert witness in litigation the unreal nature of the traumas implanted by repressed memory therapists we need someone to expose the unreal nature of the theoretical harm to trans people exposed to denial of the reality of their claim compared to the real trauma imposed on cancelled individuals through litigation. The repressed memory movement began to shrink and wither when it was exposed to litigation.
Universities are churning out psychology graduates and they all have to make a living somehow: “Trauma Industrial Complex” certainly describes the big picture.
Yet, ironically, we don’t have enough qualified people to help truly traumatised individuals. Looked after children (actual victims of childhood abuse and neglect) do not get the help and support they need from mental health professionals. CAMHS hasn’t got the expertise required to help these young people and are generally overwhelmed with regular young people who are struggling with basic levels to teen anxiety that has been overblown by internet manipulation into crippling anxiety and depression.
The author’s a bit magpie-ish in his collecting of evidence but broadly speaking, he’s right. There is a necessary tension in psychology between validating trauma and challenging people to move out of where they’re stuck, but this isn’t a new discovery, we’ve known about this all along. Whether we like it or not we can’t harmonise all this stuff into a neat grand theory, but then who cares, practical clinicians aren’t philosophers after all. Validation and challenge, wisely and humanely doled out at the right time may not work in theory, but it does work in practice.
My sense is that the ‘wellness industry’ is more pronounced in the States than it is in my own UK but it does tend to push the idea that normal reaction to adversity is automatically a mental health issue. That’s setting the bar too low, to the detriment of serious mental health diagnoses, and the logic of DSM hasn’t helped in this regard. We shouldn’t come too decisively down on one side or the other, we don’t want to wander into trauma chasing, neither do we want to return to labelling sufferers and simplistically telling them to toughen up.
I agree. DSM has had a significant part to play in medicalising human reactions in a one-dimensional way. DSMV actually classified stoicism as a disorder. That can be perfectly true sometimes. It can also, equally, be a resilient reaction that helps people to deal with whatever provoked it.
A few years ago DSM declared that uncomplicated bereavement was a disorder, that caused a riot. If we become prisoners of a logic that pathologizes more and more things, how big a living space will we be left for us to do our thing without someone telling us we’re a bit nuts? Eccentrics, be very afraid, DSM might be coming for you!
Sometimes it’s useful to go back to etymology/linguistics. Trauma is from Ancient Greek, and means wound, or piercing (of the skin). A mere bruise or abrasion is minor trauma, a hammer to the head, major trauma. It can be caused by accident, on purpose, by external things, other people, or by oneself. So it is with psychological wounds – they range from minor social humiliation to the terrors of war, extreme violence, or tsunamis. Amongst themselves, medics may refer to ‘minor trauma’, but with the general public they’d call it bruises and scrapes. Similarly, psychologists refer to trauma, and generally have a clear, nuanced sense of this; the public however hears the word and freaks out. Actually, trauma ≠ PTSD. Most trauma, after the original event, is self-generated – in a misguided attempt to mange threat, the mind reterrorises itself, through panic, fear, humilition, disgust. The psychic equivalent of scratching an itch so that it never heals. Whilst dogs have a ‘cone of shame’ to stop them doing this, we need an equivalent to prevent us from keepiing wounds open, livid.
There’s a pretty good long read about Van der Kolk here: Bessel Van der Kolk on Trauma, America’s Favorite Diagnosis (nymag.com)
I found this quote to be particularly scary: “It was hard to think of a problem to which trauma therapy wouldn’t be the answer.”
Behold the Trauma Industrial Complex!
“It was hard to think of a problem to which trauma therapy wouldn’t be the answer.”
How about the problem of the over-diagnosis of trauma?
This kind of essay is increasingly common today. An author sets himself as the rational man wondering why everyone else can’t just be like him. If they did then we would be just fine. We would become a healthy society. I am becoming increasingly frustrated by this kind of thinking.
People don’t behave rationally, they behave emotionally. People don’t act altruistically they act in their self-interest. We will never be sophisticated enough. When will our intellectual class realize we don’t need another essay on how we ought to be, but serious practical solutions to problems based on how we really are. The designers of the American system of government tried to create a system where man could be free but have his worst instincts reigned in. They failed. It turns out in a free society it is hard to reign in greed and stupidity for very long. No one has come up with anything better though since Madison et.al., and I am tired of people thinking things can get better if we just wait for the human race to come to their senses.
Only fools keep expecting things that don’t and won’t happen.
Wait… isn’t your comment subject to the very critique made in your comment?
The trauma industrial complex, indeed; many therapists will be disinclined to question a basis of their business. Not to be cynical nor belittle actual trauma; rather, to agree with Bonanno.
Ceaseless naval-gazing over our own victimization and wounding becomes tiresome. Life is hard; so stipulated. But most First Worlders don’t experience trauma in the narrow, conventional sense, and many who do (Viktor Frankl comes to mind) find constructive ways to cope. If modern man’s forebears had spent so much distracted time bemoaning lesser life difficulties, predators would have dispatched them. An appropriate result.
We have been here before (trauma locked in the body) with bio-energetics and even as far back as Reich.
The problem is that none of this is easily provable or falsifiable.
No, there seems to be no mechanism by which memories can be hidden in the body.
But…the hidden elephant,,,lots of the abuse handed out to infants happens before memory forms or words are available. Some even before birth.
Is all this ‘remembered’ in some way? Or has it no consequences in life and can it be dismissed as water under the bridge?
Indeed, there are now ‘rebirthing therapies’ to counteract the trauma experienced by babies at birth. As to where such memories are stored? How about in an information-carrying quantum energy field ? Before filing this as ‘nonsense’, look at a theory, called “orchestrated objective reduction” (‘Orch OR’), first put forward in the mid-1990s by eminent mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose, FRS, University of Oxford, and prominent anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, MD, Anesthesiology, Psychology and Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona. A theory which is rapidly becoming, according to Stuart Hameroff, “the most rigorous, comprehensive and successfully-tested theory of consciousness ever put forth. From a practical standpoint, treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.” There is still opposition to it in certain quarters and my conception of it may well be grander than Penrose’s.
As you say, we have been here before and according to many American health platforms, including those on which van der Kolk often speaks (and giving the nod to Eastern medicine) the body as a whole does have an energy field. Among clinicians, as the article says, van der Kolk’s theories remain contentious and Bonanno is unequivocal in his critique. ‘“There isn’t someplace we can hide memories away,” … “and there is no anatomical or neuroscience mechanism to explain how you have a trauma hidden in your body.”’ How about he considers extending the work of Penrose and Hameroff to the rest of the body?
I believe that mind/body medicine and specifically psychiatry has a long way to go. We are of very complex construction. On the other hand, to put things at the level of my own crude brain function, I often snort when I hear : ‘I was traumatised when she said that,’ and declare that we are rapidly becoming nothing but a bunch of pussies.
Many questions come to me while reading your fine informative post.
Memory. Which kind of memory? The kind you can bring to mind by exercise of will. Is that kind mostly a visual memory? Or connected with words as in recalling a speech or an argument.
Or the kind of memory (aural perhaps) where you hear the first few bars and remember the rest of the theme? Or have advertising jingles stuck in your ‘head’ from decades back? Or the first few words of a poem that brings back the rest (words here are remembered more as music).
Or, for instance, the smell of my grandmother’s house which I had forgotten for half a century until I came into an apartment which had exactly that odour?
Or a particular quality of light (often towards dusk) that I have known/lived in once before though when I cannot say?
What is trauma or, indeed, any other event in our lives? How is an event lost to our memory, where has it gone, by what magic is it found again, is what is found what was lost?
Offering a mad hypothesis…
What if the universe has been created and continues to be made by the combined consciousness of all living creatures?
‘Into my heart an air that kills. From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? ….That is the land of lost content …’ I think Housman understood the vagaries and quirks of memory which, as you say, can be provoked in so many ways and on so many levels. We don’t really understand the concept of the unconscious mind that is spoken of so glibly. Does it have neural correlates or is it a quantum field? Most information-processing such as driving a car is mere computation. And for this, firing neurones suffice. The hard problem is the existence of consciousness itself. The same wiring in our brain that lets us enjoy eating an apple also lets us imagine eating an apple when no apple is around. Science cannot explain how. (I forget who said that.)
As to your final theory? I don’t think it’s mad at all. Australian physicist Peter Russell said that we are ‘consciousness looking at consciousness’. If I were to plump for a God, that would be my concept of him. I might favour that as an origin story but, with you, I am predisposed to the idea that we share a collective unconscious with all living things … Just us then? Shhhh….
PS If information theory about the indestructibility of information is correct, the repercussions of this sort of thinking on the concept of inherited trauma etc. (and how to treat it) are rather hard to cope with.
These are great discussions, thanks both. Going back to my earlier point about the internet, what role does that take in our collective consciousness? It’s a form of collective consciousness but disembodied, which may be in conflict with our hitherto “collective unconscious” (getting a bit Jungian without intending to) and therefore causing all sorts of havoc with our sense of self.
In fact, if its our hitherto “collection unconscious” becoming conscious to us, no wonder its causing problems on the mental level.
Thank you for the Housman. Shivers in the skin.
A piece by Rameau ‘Le Rappel des Oiseaux’ transposed to piano by Debussy. Some versions online by pianistic speed freaks. But also a wonderful two minute recording by Emil Gilels with photographs of him in his youth (youtube young emil gilels le rappel des oiseax).
A few years ago I tried transposing i this piece into words while mistranslating the title…
The Reply Of The Birds
He shouts of love; meanwhile we see
beyond his shoulder, in the crook of the hill
a fire rises hungry and free
There is no grief, there is no harm
he cries, only joy.The smoke twists in the updraft and we plunge
to the source of the flame then bank out over bare slopes
of grey mountains that break to scree
The fading wind shall not becalm
us in the absence of being. We who can shriek and wail
and who see the earth with the eyes of the surveyor of time
cannot be still or wait for the arm
of a master who must decree
the directions of the soul’s tides and the strength of the storm
we will instead fly seaward to a far continent even if
there is neither chart nor certainty
The music was good but for me your last few lines said it better!
I can remember being 17 months old after a physical trauma and much after.
Excellent summary. There is no evidence that psychological trauma affects the body in the ways that pseudo-sciences like body memory and polyvagal theory would have us believe. The brain alone can store memories.
This doesn’t mean, however, that trauma doesn’t have a physiological impact. MRI scans have shown that the brain registers rejection in the same way as physical pain, and that trauma can influence the way the brain develops. The impact of trauma on the body is also seen in the heightened involuntary fight-or-flight responses, raised cortisol levels, inflammation and related auto-immune diseases of the traumatised.
These measurable, physical symptoms could show up as an indicator of trauma in a child who had been traumatised before birth, or in the pre-verbal stages of development.
No, the brain cannot store memories and no human being has ever retrieved a memory from storage, because those are computer analogies and nothing in your brain works in any way like a computer. We do not remember, we reconstruct “as it must have been” and those reconstructions are often flat wrong and very vulnerable to suggestion. This is what the whole “recovered memory” malarkey is; a misunderstanding of what memory is.
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
Interesting article, but I agree with the commenters who ratioed it.
Thank you for presenting the complexity without feeling the need to “solve” it. I really appreciate that.
I believe that this is a consequence of women entering the public square starting, say, in 1900. Sociologist Georg Simmel said that women would change the public square to suit “a more feminine sensibility.”
What this means, I believe is that women are not programmed for the thrust and parry of the public square. They are programmed for the domestic culture of women where every woman is the undisputed chatelaine of her home.
It is traumatic for women to have to live in the public square, and that is what the whole “harm” and “trauma” culture is about.
There may be something in this, but traditionally perhaps the “domestic culture of women” has been more cooperative and hierarchical than that – there might well have been a female “undisputed chatelaine” in most households, but there were also maybe subordinate daughters-in-law in multigenerational households, “old maid” daughters, poor-relation cousins and so on, even junior wives in cultures with polygamy, who had to find a way to negotiate their role.
However, it’s probably true that the modern tendency to treat men and women as interchangeable has not happened without harm to both.
That’s hilarious. And demonstrates yet again that if you want a truly fatuous interpretation of society, ask a sociologist.
Trauma seems to have an unspoken association with dreams, to take the German word ‘Traume.’ I say this because the original psychoanalytical approach was to reveal repressed childhood experiences in dream symbolism – traditionally. of a ‘traumatic’ sexual nature.
From this starting point, we then appear to encounter ‘hysteria’ as an universal expression of feminine sexuality. What was arguably interesting is that the Americans subsequently created film noir and the femme fatale by transferring the trauma AND the hysteria to the male threatened by this powerful new female figure.
Trauma was then transferred to the battlefield, and most famously recorded in the trenches of the First World War. I think this is where it seeped back into the culture in the form of Surrealism when an uncanny violence met sexuality to produce a strange new symbolism. It’s no accident that David Lynch first and foremost makes necessarily violent films.
Quiet strength and overcoming adversity was long considered a virtue. Even books with anti-heroes, like the Flashman series, offer examples of bravery, even if old Flash was an admitted self-serving cad.
Bleeding one’s slights, hurts, and “victimhood” all over the internet is fashionable, and, like all fashions, will become laughable “what were we thinking?” embarrassments. None too soon, for my taste.
Excellent article. I particularly liked the clarity of this sentence: “It also marks a dividing line between conservatives, who tend to value self-reliance in the face of adversity, and progressives, who believe we are defined by systems and forces beyond our control.”
There’s a lot of money at stake here: the business of making people permanently not quite well (physically and mentally), but without killing them (a bit like a successful virus, really), is very profitable. You get a guaranteed bunch of customers in the long run. Ideal business model. Social media makes people unwell in this way. Pharma is all about making aspects of the human condition (for example, feeling temporarily down) an illness to be helped by a pill. The fitness and health industries need their target markets to always be just a little unsatisfied. And now we have psychological medicine and therapies: make the patient more anxious, insecure and – crucially – dependent on the therapist. Kerching.
How did Odette Sansom/Hallows GC cope after she had her back burnt with a poker, her toe nails ripped out and survive a concentration camp?
Why did psychologists not question those who survived torture in WW2? Is it because there is no money in curing the well ?
It strikes me that a key way to think about the rise of psychological practices like those described in this article is to understand psychology not as an academic discipline but as form of religious engagement. Perhaps not all psychologists, but these at least are positing ultimate values, transcendent causes, solutions to the human condition, etc. They invoke the language of science just as Christ used the language of shepherding – it’s the cultural context of their audience.
It’s not a bad article but it’s all a bit “he says, she says, who knows who’s right?”
In truth, “recovered memory” is provable nonsense and this has been known for decades. It’s just that the concept is an easy vehicle for making cash, so it persists.
And again, I see discussion of human mental life and memory using computer analogies. It’s really not an improvement on the steam age (“I’m under pressure”, “blow off some steam”, “don’t bottle things up”).
Nothing in your brain works like a computer and no human being has ever accessed a stored memory from the brain or anywhere else. That’s not what remembering is. It is better described as “reconstruction”.
https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
Also, the “liberals believe this and conservatives believe that” is overdone.