Trending trauma.

For the last seven years or so, I've had an interest in "trauma." It started at a teacher Professional Day workshop at the school where I worked in Agassiz, British Columbia, perhaps in January of 2015. Although I don't remember what the presenter himself said, his comments moved me to do some thinking and reading. At the time, I tried to talk through my feelings in a video that I posted to Twitter and YouTube (now deleted). The presenter suggested some reading, so over the few months that followed I read two Peter A. Levine books, In an Unspoken Voice and Taming the Tiger. These books comforted me during a tumultuous time in my life: the year preceding the my separation from my wife. Since then, I've tried to pay attention further professional and personal work mentioned trauma as a concept. 

Levine's books argued that trauma was a natural response that lived in the body. At this time, the idea that "trauma lives in the body" was an appealing one to me because it felt comfortable: it comforted me to think that these mental roadblocks I felt in myself rested in places that I couldn't really think through. The Levine books described it as a thing you sort of shake off, like you might after an attack from a predator. As somebody who always felt rather disconnected from his body, it was nice to imagine that there was stuff going on that I couldn't quite access, that is was natural and ok, and that there were clinical ways to work through these roadblocks.

Since then, like I expect many people who've gone through the divorce process have done, I've been in and out of therapy with both counsellors and psychologists. Within the two years after the separation, I had two separate psychologists voluntarily tell me that I had numerous "symptoms of PTSD." I understood that this was not a diagnosis, that they were just adding things up in an observation they made based on their experiences with me in the therapy room. It wasn't a diagnosis, but it showed that there was important, consistant stuff for me to work through.  These psychologists' comments scared me at first, but as time went on, I identified less and less with those comments.

In the years that followed, in articles in mainstream publications, I read more and more that "Trauma lives in the body." It seemed like therapists appealed to trauma as a concept and experience that many people endured. I started to hear teachers and counsellors in schools make references to trauma. I started to hear the word used more and more in the news, in relation to the presidency of Donald Trump, for example, or perhaps after the death of George Floyd, and of course through the Covid-19 pandemic.

I don't have references for these observations/reflections, but the phrase that most comes to mind is "collective trauma." It seemed like our whole society was experiencing trauma all at the same time, and people wanted to write about it. To me, the fact that The Body Keeps the Score stayed near the top of the Amazon best sellers list through most of the pandemic shows that a good portion of the population wanted trauma to be an answer to the questions they were asking through the pandemic experience. Trauma seemed to be everywhere. Trauma was trending—trendy, even.

Each time I heard or read the word "trauma" outside of clinical settings, it irked me a little. It made me think things like,

• If trauma lives in the body, then does that mean everybody in the world is carrying some sort of Covid-19 trauma in their bodies?
• If I had two psychologists suggest it about me, are all psychologists talking about trauma with everybody else?
• If trauma should be dealt with in these clinical settings and with precise strategies, should everybody be going through this process to deal with their own trauma?
• If trauma lives in the body, where in the body is it?

The best I could justify it, it seemed as if, perhaps, trauma lived in those long, stringy nerve cells that connect your body to your brain. But if that was the case, what was the information that they held? These sorts of questions, unfortunately, did not lead to breakthroughs or clarity.

It just didn't seem to work. I started to feel like contemporary trauma was a concept that wouldn't exist without rhetoric, analogous to the "apologetics" that sent me reeling for my teenage years and early 20s as I tried to justify a faith I didn't really believe in, or analogous to education fads that cross the pseudoscience boundary, like Brain Gym or "learning styles." To me, "trauma" got to be too messy. So over the last year, I kinda' let my thoughts about it slide. 

But over the last month, the word reappeared in ways that alarmed me. I can't professionally describe those events here, but I can say that these events brought set my skepticism-feelers on high alert. I couldn't quite figure out what was wrong about it, but I knew something was wrong about how people around me were treating trauma as a concept in my professional sphere.

And then I serendipitously heard this episode of Oh No Ross And Carrie, titled "Carrie Talks Trauma, Pseudoscience, and Social Media: Trauma Trap Edition." (embedded below)

I've listened to "Oh No Ross and Carrie" on and off for over a decade. I love their work. This episode is a talk Carrie Poppy made for the Merseyside Skeptics, and it got my mind rolling with new ideas and perhaps some clarity.

I feel that Carrie's conclusion about "suffering" creates a far more coherent concept than any of the descriptions of trauma I've heard or read over the last many years. When I realized this, it was as if a weight slid off my back that I'd carried since those psychologists mentioned the word to me years ago. I can handle suffering, and I can see suffering all around me, and I as a non-professional can work with suffering in my relationships. But trauma, I just don't think we're using the term in a falsifiable way. I think the word "trauma" complicates things where "suffering" would simplify the conversation.

At the end of the podcast, Carrie suggests a book: The End of Trauma, by George A. Bonanno. I've started listening to it on Audible. My ideas about trauma continue to evolve. I'll write more about my new thoughts another time.

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