On Trauma and Triggers
Progressives need resilient social movements. Resilient social movements need resilient people.
I have a piece up in this edition of the Atlantic about the way progressive communities in the US talk about trauma, and how we may be undermining the very goals we’re trying to achieve. We’ve gotten much better at talking about the ways in which distressing events, oppression, and pervasive stress can profoundly damage us, which is an unmitigated good. We’ve gotten much better at talking about mental health, and young people especially have gotten much better at seeking out help when they need it — also unmitigated goods. But we only seem to be halfway through the story: We haven’t quite gotten to understanding that human beings are built to persevere, and that the way we talk about trauma, and the long-term impact of racism, misogyny, and other chronic stressors, shapes our ability to both persevere through those adversities, and fight back against them — or not. Because the way we often talk about trauma and adversity now seems like we’re setting ourselves up to crumble.
This is not me saying that we’re all too sensitive, or fuck your feelings (I love your feelings), or that we should grit our way through traumatic events, or pretend that emotional pain and suffering don’t matter.
It is me saying fuck individualism: that successful movements for social justice require building the kind of communal, social, and material support systems that bolster individual resilience. And that requires reevaluating what we think we know, and re-thinking how we speak, about trauma and tenacity.
I hope you’ll read the whole piece, even if you chafe at the beginning.
The piece opens with a reflection on the introduction of trigger warnings on feminist blogs, and specifically the way trigger warnings were used and how their use has become pervasive in progressive spaces and on college campuses has party informed my current views on the question of how best to support human beings so we can build resilient social movements (even though I did offer broad trigger warnings on blog posts, I have long been skeptical of how useful they are in an academic setting, outside of cases where a student asks for a specific accommodation for a specific PTSD trigger).
Unfortunately, at least based on some of the responses I’m seeing, that intro is touching a nerve among the many people who are (rightly!) tired of hearing about trigger warnings and Kids These Days, and it may be distracting from the larger point of the piece, which comes in the second half. And that is: Human beings are social creatures, and how our communities discuss hardship changes how we internally process adversity when we inevitably face it. And it is very, very difficult to create functional movements for social justice (or anything else) if the people who make up those movements don’t have the tools, internal and external, to manage adversity. I worry that some of the ways we talk about trauma in progressive spaces may have the effect of making people — and by extension our movements — less resilient, less effective, and more vulnerable.
The answer isn’t “toughen up.” The answer is to put in place some of what we know actually works to support each other, so that more people have the tools they need to move through a difficult world — and that the way we talk about trauma may be undermining the broader goal of lessening it.
There are three main points I’m trying to get across:
Trauma, and our response to it, is not static. Experiencing a traumatic event — the kind of event where you fear your life is in danger, or that cleaves your life into a “before” and an “after” — does not mean you will have post-traumatic stress disorder. Some people do develop PTSD after a traumatic event; many don’t. And many people manage to recover from PTSD, and can even find that they grow in the aftermath of a trauma. But everything we do, feel, and think as humans is shaped by the words we put on our experiences, the words others put on our experiences, and how our culture understands, describes, and processes the events around us. That doesn’t mean that by using a wide definition of trauma we are traumatizing ourselves, but it does mean that when we are part of cultures or subcultures that refuse to acknowledge trauma or the impact of adversity, we suffer from that dissonance. It also means that if we are part of cultures or subcultures that focus on trauma, and are quick to define a series of adverse or distressing events as traumatic or potentially traumatic, that also shapes our ability to experience adversity and trust in our ability to move through it. A sense of our collective as extremely fragile, in other words, may be self-fulfilling.
At the same time, “resilience” is also pretty poorly understood, and often used as shorthand for being tougher or taking some deep spiritual dive into your own heart. But, one expert told me, resilience is about much more than just gritting it out, or calming your nervous system with meditation, or embracing the power of positive thinking. It’s about agency – not just over your own emotional state, but over the circumstances around you, your ability to change them, and your access to the resources necessary to do so. One thing feminists, anti-racists, and other social justice activists emphasize is that the burdens of this world are not distributed equally — that adversity is not distributed equally. Sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of discrimination can be chronic stressors, and they do wear down our abilities to persevere. The job of social justice activists, then, is to recognize the psychological and emotional impact of the chronic stress of discrimination, and to change the world around us to lessen discrimination, and to shore up individuals’ sense of their own agency. That requires material resources as well as social ones. What can undermine a sense of one’s own agency, though, are narratives that the world is unfair, has always been unfair, and will never be fair. What can also undermine a sense of one’s own agency is the idea that one’s trauma should be central to one’s identity, one’s politics, and one’s activism — that it’s not something that happened and is integrated and moved through, but that the event is a definitional and immovable aspect of you. And finally, it can undermine one’s sense of one’s own agency, as well as one’s sense of oneself as a resilient person capable of doing hard things, if one believes that a claim of “this is traumatizing” or “this is potentially traumatizing” should have the power to shut down ideas, art, images, etc. — or if one believes that any claim of potential trauma should be enough to mandate the issuance of special warnings or curtain off certain imagery. That’s not to say “anything goes.” It is to say that how we talk about what is and isn’t acceptable in the public square, or how we talk about art and literature and religion and politics and culture and difficult or offensive ideas, matters to how we process and understand those same things. And processing them through the lens of trauma or potential trauma can be useful in some very limited circumstances, but may in more cases actually make us feel more distressed and less able to feel discomfort but not suffering.
In a part that got cut from the final piece, Dr. Martin Seligman told me that part of the problem is the loss of what he calls our “spiritual furniture”: Cultural, civic, and social centers where people were able to gather with others who had experienced similar traumas and adversities, not necessarily to have non-stop therapy sessions (although therapy sessions are certainly great), but for purpose-making, and to forge deep connections and the support and resources those connections bring. “Over the century,” he said, “our spiritual furniture has become threadbare. And now more and more when we fail in life, when we have trauma and adversity, we don’t have these large consolations to fall back on. We just have the self. And the self is not a very robust form of spiritual consolation.” Or as Dr. Michael Ungar put it: “Think back to World War II. Men and women had legions, which have largely faded out. There was a sense of, ‘we were all in this together, ‘and it’s not that people didn’t experience incredible trauma as a consequence of what they experienced in war, but they weren’t being told to go sit on their yoga mat and meditate their way through this problem. They were given a place to go drink with their buddies.” I dig into this at the end of the Atlantic piece: What people need to build individual resilience, and in turn resilient social movements, is a sense of greater purpose; social ties that are both deeper and wider (and certainly more in person); and those basic, bottom levels of Maslow’s Pyramid met so that people can direct their energies to connection, purpose, and something beyond themselves.
Men in the post-World-War-II era, by the way, were not exactly excellent at managing their trauma. I’m not pointing to the postwar period as an admirable one for mental health. It’s an undisputed good that we have gotten much, much more open about mental health since then. What I am saying, though, is that when it comes to managing trauma and adversity, the guys in the old days got a lot wrong, but they got one thing right: We need other people, and we need strong spiritual (although not necessarily religious) furniture. We need something beyond the self.
It strikes me that one problem here is a paucity of language. When psychiatrists talk about trauma, they are often talking about the kind of event that is known to cause post-traumatic stress disorder. When most people talk about trauma, though, they might be talking about a whole range of adverse or distressing events. We don’t have great language, unfortunately, for events or ideas that are really really bad and psychologically and emotionally impact us, but that perhaps don’t rise to the level of traumatizing in the PTSD sense. And so without that language, and with understandably wanting to emphasize that this is really bad, many of us (yours truly included) lean into the language of trauma, without necessarily clocking that doing so may lead more to catastrophizing than than to understanding an event or an idea’s weight.
There’s a lot more in the piece itself. And perhaps I am being too defensive about the Atlantic piece in this newsletter. But I suspect that a lot of folks read a headline like “I Was Wrong About Trigger Warning” and assume they know what they’re about to read, and react accordingly. As a person who works in words, and who tries (and often fails) to use those words thoughtfully, this is frustrating. So thank you for reading, please do read the piece itself, and I’m curious to hear what you think in the comments.
xx Jill
I greatly appreciated your piece in the Atlantic. I don't want to jump into talking about it. Still thinking.
But I'm old enough to have experienced an era when feminists of all stripes confronted our traumas collectively and built movements. The traumas are individual experiences, but we once were better at learning that our individual experiences point to collective understandings and solidarities, to movements! I see you trying to revivify that potential.
I haven’t read the Atlantic essay and stopped reading this one to comment when I read this sentence:
“ What can also undermine a sense of one’s own agency is the idea that one’s trauma should be central to one’s identity, one’s politics, and one’s activism — that it’s not something that happened and is integrated and moved through, but that the event is a definitional and immovable aspect of you. “
My comment is that trauma in the clinical sense of the word is not the same thing as trauma in the popular sense of it, and this results in confusion. People routinely describe experiences as traumatic that are not really traumatic in the clinical sense of the word. We know what they mean. It’s hyperbole. That’s fine. In the sentence I quote, the things JF says don’t necessarily apply to trauma in the clinical sense of the term, which, sadly, can be as life changing and permanently debilitating as some physical injuries. If she’s using the term in the popular sense, then trauma, rather than undermining a person’s sense of agency, can be central to their identity and can inspire their politics and activism.