Today, Explained - Is everything trauma now?

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

Psychologists are worried that "trauma" is losing its meaning. A trauma survivor says they shouldn't be. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. On the show today, we're going to talk about trauma. Lexi Pandell recently wrote about trauma for Vox. To start, it's important to say that trauma is real and PTSD is a real diagnosable disorder. But with that said, there's a huge appetite for trauma right now.

There's this one book called The Body Keeps the Score, and it isn't light reading. It's a very serious book that discusses horrific traumatic events in great detail and argues essentially that trauma can change brain and bodily functions. And so a lot of people still think that trauma is something that happens to you that is a story about the past so it really is a trauma is that your brain gets changed and you see the world differently and you live in a different body you live in a different world so that book was published in 2014 but it has hovered around the number one spot on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback nonfiction since February 2021. And as of this conversation, it is currently back in the number

one spot. So in addition to that, there's tons of podcasts about trauma and there's television shows about it. I think particularly of shows like Yellow Jackets. I know what you want to hear, but the truth is, the plane crashed, a bunch of my friends died, and the rest of us starved and scavenged and prayed for 19 months. I May Destroy You and Station Eleven. So you ran away,

and you let everyone believe that you died. The Matrix Resurrections features trauma therapy as a key plot point. You ever wonder why you have nightmares? Why your own brain tortures you. And trauma is all over social media. So there's influencers talking about their trauma and so-called trauma experts espousing what trauma responses may look like. Most overdoing anything is typically a trauma response from a deep fear of rejection or abandonment. Examples include over-explaining, over-achieving, over-preparing.

And it's really become a word that's casually thrown around. Literally traumatizing. And in that way, the sort of true meaning of trauma has been watered down and kind of adopted as a cultural touchstone. And in some cases, it's even kind of being used as a joke. Oof. Where are the trauma jokes? There's one trauma expert who I spoke to who said things like, you know, people refer to it like, I've run out of cookies. That's so traumatic. Or my favorite football team loss. That's so traumatic. Those aren't even funny jokes. They're not even funny. And the language of trauma too has kind of been co-opted. I think we see that a lot with the word triggered, which has become

pretty common. Hi, everybody, and welcome to our fantastic live book signing of already bestseller. Congratulations, Mr. Trump. Thank you, princess. Yes, a trigger. All right. We've definitely reached like a kind of interesting cultural point here. Well, I want to get more into the sort of language of trauma and how we ended up there. But why do you think this word is having such a sort of crescendo right now? It's the jokes, the popular culture. It sounds like it's on social media, the books. What's going on? So there's been a lot of talk about trauma in connection to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns. You know, it has been a tough year and the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns. You know, it has been a tough year, and the COVID-19 pandemic has provided potential sources of trauma,

which can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. And we've kind of reached this high point of trauma discussion, I think, because of that. But what's surprising is that if you look at it over the years, trauma's really been on the rise since the 1980s. God, what is your childhood trauma? And that reflects kind of an expansion of the formal clinical understanding of trauma as well as cultural shifts. So that second point, we've really entered a point of overwhelm in our culture. People are incredibly stressed out and there are social structures that are not working for everyone and a lot of big, scary questions that we don't know

how to deal with. And trauma has become one way that we've tried to frame that narrative. Okay. And how does the understanding of trauma evolve over time? So trauma, let's go all the way back to the start. Trauma is derived from the Greek word for a physical wound. And we still see that today in hospital settings, for example. But the emergence of our current understanding of trauma goes hand in hand with the rise of psychology in the late 1800s. Freud's work on, quote, hysteria was considered particularly foundational. Okay, everybody, that's it for today. Thanks. We'll see you Monday. We'll be talking about Freud, why he did enough cocaine to kill a small horse. Thank you.

And it was at this point that psychologists began really investigating how traumatic events could alter memory, change behavior, and cause lasting harm. Jump forward to World War I, soldiers began to be diagnosed with what was known as shell shock. I'm sorry. It's all right, Mr. Lund. I'm sorry. You're all right. Is it any wonder when he's been to hell and back? Symptoms included things like nightmares or impaired sight, but it was controversial and often considered a sign of cowardice. And some soldiers were accused of simply trying to get out of fighting. Sir, I only meant to say that Lieutenant Courtney is depressed.

I will not leave wounded soldiers freezing or sweating under canvas because one junior officer is depressed. A big turning point here was research on veterans of the Vietnam War. And that proved to be critical in our understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And studies on those veterans and of others who experienced horrific events around that time informed the definition of PTSD, which was added to the DSM in 1980. Hmm. Where does the term even come from? The sort of clinical definition, we can start from there, of the DSM-5, which is the standard

in American psychiatric diagnosis, currently defines trauma as an actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence, something you've experienced either as the victim of it or as a witness of it. Being a witness can either be a direct witness or if you're, say, the close family member of someone who experienced the trauma. You could also be traumatized if you are repeatedly exposed to details of traumatic events, like a police officer working with children who were victims of sexual abuse. Which is subjective, I guess? It can be subjective, yeah.

And that's actually something that's changed with the clinical definition, too, because a traumatic event to one person may not be traumatic to another person. So there's been more weight placed on sort of the person's experience of it. Okay, so it sounds like PTSD and before that trauma start to get really used because of the experience of war, which is one of the most grotesque human experiences around. But how does trauma start to get associated with other experiences? So in the 1980s, Americans were emerging from the civil rights and women's movements of the 60s and 70s. And there was this push to think about trauma as it related to things like racial injustice, violence against women, and child abuse. And at that point, a traumatic event was still considered to be something that

was a singular event, a threat to life or limb. But soon researchers began looking at what effects long-lasting or systemic abuse might have. And that's where we started to see terms like cultural trauma and generational trauma, particularly as they described, you know, issues like genocide or enslavement. And really, the casual use of trauma started happening around 2005. 2005? What happened in 2005? So trauma was better known at that point. That's one thing. But one expert I spoke to pointed to how our online lives were expanding at that time. So there was a huge rise in internet culture. We saw a lot of blogging and sharing of personal experiences on websites like MySpace and LiveJournal. And this was really new and widespread

like never before. People were posting candidly about their struggles, specifically with mental health. And trauma, which had been a pretty clinical term up until then, started to be used as a way to frame those hardships. So even for people who hadn't experienced what might be like clinically considered trauma, the word provided a tidy narrative. one where they were the victim to circumstances outside of their control. And one researcher I talked to said that she started seeingging saying, I've experienced this and that trauma that isn weather is bipolar or that you're so depressed because you missed the bus, it could minimize the experience of people who have experienced trauma and may have PTSD. I spoke with one expert who said that misrepresenting trauma could stop those who have suffered from trauma from getting the right type of treatment for them. And I talked to others who said that it could undercut human resilience, that essentially overusing the word trauma flattens every negative event into a catastrophe that leaves us helpless and unable to move on. I mean, who gets to decide? Who gets to decide what is a real trauma and what

isn't? Is there like a bouncer at Club Trauma? In terms of like, what is trauma? What isn't trauma? Researchers are really divided on this. There are some researchers who say, yes, like we should have this really widespread view of what trauma is. And if something bad has happened to you and there are lasting effects of that, then that's trauma. There are other researchers who are much more conservative in their view, and they are essentially saying that trauma is something that happens to you in an incident that is a threat to you in some way. And then that is the only thing that can be considered clinically traumatic. So it's really to be decided. And I think that there's some really interesting research being done on

this exact topic. What do we gain if we tighten the definition of trauma? So to be clear, of course, this doesn't mean that we should stop talking about trauma, but taking care with language is always a good thing. And doing so could avoid some potentially harmful outcomes, like I mentioned earlier. It's important, I think, too, to identify that there's something really beautiful that's happening and overdue for our culture, which is the recognition of mental health challenges, the recognition of trauma, and also the recognition that negative effects can have lasting harm. And that's huge. And it's an incredibly positive thing. I think too, we're dealing with world events that are incredibly overwhelming, which make us feel small and helpless.

For example, the COVID-19 pandemic. For some, the pandemic has been traumatic. For example, those people working on the front lines as doctors. But many experts say that, by and large, the pandemic is not a collective trauma. However, we are now dealing with these really extraordinary circumstances, which feel in many ways akin to trauma. So if what we're experiencing is not quote unquote clinical trauma, it's still really important to uncover what it is we are experiencing. I think that we have sort of encountered a limit of human language here, and we need to really look at that and see how we can broaden our understanding of the human experience.

Over-relying on trauma can really undercut this aspect of human resilience, which is to say that we may in fact be stronger than we think. And there's researchers I spoke to who basically said that flattening every bad experience into a trauma really takes that away from us. And that it's important to recognize that humans are incredibly resilient and that we don't have to be sort of necessarily bogged down by only viewing ourselves through the lens of being victims to situations outside of our control. In a minute, the counter-argument.

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We just heard from Lexi Pandel. She wrote this piece for Vox all about how trauma became the word of the decade and especially of the pandemic. And she talked about the potential risk of the term trauma losing its meaning. This got me thinking about my friend Stephanie Fu, who actually just wrote a whole book about trauma. So I sent her Lexi's Vox article and asked her what she thought about it. Let's just say she had some feelings. So I invited her on the show to talk about them. We started where Lexi and I left off. I asked Stephanie what she thought about this expanding definition of trauma that some psychologists are worried about.

I think it's great. As a person who has experienced the more quote-unquote traditional textbook definitions of trauma, I think it's a good thing. And I think trying to minimize that is pretty dangerous, actually. So you, as someone who has experienced more traditional forms of trauma, whatever that might be, aren't concerned that someone next to you on the subway or someone on the street while you're walking by might be saying, you know, I have trauma.

Last week, I couldn't find my keys in my apartment and it took me three hours and I missed all of my plans and I feel traumatized. You're not saying, bro, that isn't trauma. No, I think it's a little bit silly. As a person who goes out and lives in the world, I don't really hear people using trauma in that way that often. Usually it is something a little bit more serious. I mean, I suppose that can be mildly irritating if someone were to say, like, I have actual PTSD from losing my keys but the word trauma no not really it is out there though Stephanie I gotta say I mean Miles and I when we were preparing for this episode we discovered

that there's like there's a whole subculture of of TikToks trauma TikToks oh yeah like do you spend any amount of time on TikTok because they have people saying ridiculous opinions about everything. So of course, if trauma very legit traumas, opening the conversation up to have people feel less insecure about revealing their own traumas. Like I see people on there talking about their sexual assaults, you know, openly and shamelessly. How do you show love to a partner who has gone through sexual trauma? Talk about sex while you are both fully clothed. And I see people in the comments getting in there and being like, oh, me too, me too. Or people talking about, you know, their tendency to dissociate and making really funny jokes about it, actually. What do you mean? You can just turn your brain off? How the hell do you do that? Oh, yeah, it's super easy. I just...

Turning something that could be really depressing and heavy into something that's really light and where you go, oh, me too. You wrote a book called What My Bones Know, and it's a memoir about healing from complex PTSD. We didn't really talk about that much earlier in the show. Can you explain what complex PTSD means? I guess the quote-unquote traditional post-traumatic stress disorder, you can get PTSD from a single traumatic event. Say, you know, you were hit by a car and severely injured. Like, that could make you have PTSD and be sort of anxious when crossing the street, for example. Complex PTSD is, let's say you were hit by the car three times a week

for many years. Complex PTSD is when the trauma happens over and over and over again over the course of years. So that could be people living in a war zone, that could be people surviving domestic abuse, child abuse. My complex PTSD comes specifically from extreme physical and verbal abuse and neglect. And I didn't mention this at the top, but you were a reporter at This American Life for years. You were a radio reporter for years before that. And after that, since you've written for Vox before about your complex PTSD, you wrote about it around the beginning of the pandemic. And while you said it was something you've been working on recovering from, you also called it a superpower. How come? Yeah, I mean, I don't want to minimize the effects of complex ptsd just to be totally clear

it can be excruciatingly painful it's not super fun to have but um i absolutely do have side effects from my trauma that are tremendously helpful having complex ptsd has made me really empathetic very eager to help others like healing from trauma really is like walking through fire. And you really learn how to help other people get through as well. I'm really good about working hard and staying on deadline. And I'm really good in a crisis because PTSD is essentially hypervigilance, right?

It keeps you on your toes and ready for the absolute worst to happen. And during the pandemic, the worst kind of did happen. And I felt so emotionally prepared for it. Like when I knew all of these other people who were sort of crippled and couldn't function because they were so fearful, I was really fine. I was able to support others. I was helping keep our family safe. What might have been hypervigilance or paranoia before was me taking proactive actions to keep our family safe. And I felt really like I could hold space for everyone around me who was feeling as anxious as they did because I felt so stable. You know, there are a lot of people, and I think Lexi mentioned this earlier in the show, who refer to the pandemic itself at this point as a kind of trauma. I think part of this sort of cultural crescendo we're seeing around this word has to do with the fact that a lot of people

have been through the emotional ringer in the past two years in any number of ways. Have you noticed that in your life? Oh, absolutely. For me, I think there was a sense of, before the pandemic, I had more shame almost about having complex PTSD. I was like, I'm a freak. I'm weird. I have these behaviors, these hypervigilant, fearful behaviors, and they make me like paranoid or strange. And then after the pandemic, I'm like, oh, all of a sudden I am perfectly normal. If anything, I am kind of coping better than most people because I saw those behaviors I was very used to in myself with everyone around me in a way that was tremendously shocking. And that felt comforting? Yeah, it felt comforting.

So many of us lost people we loved, including myself. And like me, so many of us weren't able to properly say goodbye to our loved ones because of COVID. We weren't able to grieve in the same ways, not to mention the racial reckonings, not to mention the fear and loneliness that especially immunocompromised people had to endure, or the fact that domestic violence was way up, or that so many relationships fell apart. Any teacher will tell you that their students have struggled so much and endured trauma during this time. And why does acknowledging this

as a collective trauma help? Well, when we acknowledge that there's a real problem, we can get resources to solve those problems, like more mental health funding, being able to change our broken mental health care system so anyone can get quality help, like affordable health care, more support for kids who are struggling in school right now. So there's a difference between suffering versus pain, right? So pain is the legitimate pain that you should feel, the grief that you should feel,

like, let's say somebody you love dies. And suffering is when it's been whatever, six months, and you're saying, why am I still grieving over this person? Why am I still unable to function? Why am I still upset? I shouldn't be, I should be fine. So that suffering is actually really debilitating to our abilities to heal and minimizing trauma and saying it's not valid. That increases suffering in everyone. I think anyone listening to this can relate to the pain and loneliness and depression and paranoia and fear of this pandemic. And I guess what's unclear in the science or what's unclear to maybe people like me or Lexi or maybe even you is where those words lose their weight and and trauma becomes the word we're sort of allowed to use to to describe our experience does anyone have a concrete answer for that no i don't think that they do and i think

that's the problem like what is the definition of trauma that you're going by and isn't our society are society one in which words can take new shape and evolve over time? Consider like racism, right? So if someone says they've experienced racism, are you just going to say, okay, lay it out for me exactly what racism have you experienced? Justify it for me. So I, as an outsider can judge whether this has hurt you or not. It's probably not that big a deal. You should be able to get over it. Or are you going to say, hey, maybe I should listen and consider why this has hurt you so much, and maybe we should pay attention to it.

Like, if there's this real pain in our society, right, what can we do to try and address that? For years, I thought this idea of, oh, my trauma isn't serious, whatever, I'm fine. It's not like I'm a combat veteran, you know. I went through really extreme trauma. But because of this societal pull-yourself-up-from-your-bootstraps-it's-not-that-big-of-a-deal idea, I was like, well, you know, I didn't live through war. I didn't have a gun to my head. So it must

not be that big of a deal. So if my trauma is making me depressed or anxious, nope, forget about it. Dissociate. Be a workaholic. You don't get to feel these feelings, which really prevented me from acknowledging, hey, what I went through was serious and valid, and I really need to take healing from it seriously. Like, I need to find the right therapist and work on self-soothing and boundaries so I'm not putting myself in the way of more abuse. So feeling that tendency to minimize what I was really going through, it really slowed the healing process down. And once you get rid of the suffering, it speeds up the process of grieving so you can be ready to do the work of healing. Stephanie Fu has a book about trauma coming out on 2-22-22. That's a Tuesday. Let's call it Super Tuesday. It's called What My Bones Know, and you can pre-order it now. Earlier in the show, you heard from Lexi Pandell.

You can read her article, which inspired this episode, over at the highlights section of the Vox website. It's titled How Trauma Became the Word of the Decade. Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matthew Collette, mixed and mastered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It's Today Explained. Thank you.