All Aboard The Trauma Train
A Framework: “No One Person”
This past year, I made the brave (though masochistic) move to a district close to my home to teach middle school. I soon learned that the distrct remained deeply entrenched in their curriculum (a particular type of balanced literacy approach) of Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study and the Fountas and Pinnell benchmark and leveled literacy program. When administrators gifted our team with spirals and boxes full of leveled books and scripted curriculum with covers that appeared stolen from a 1980s teacher supply store, I felt a piece of my teacher soul die.
In the podcast Sold a Story, a series that focuses on how early readers have been negatively affected by both Calkins’ and Fountas and Pinnell’s now (mostly) debunked theories of reading acquisition, Emily Hanford, the reporter who created the podcast, plays a brief audio clip of an online exchange between a Calkins fan and Calkins herself about how to counter naysayers arguing against her philosophy. And, to me, Calkins’ response is one of those one-liners that you never forget, in the way that you can apply the same response to a multitude of concepts by simply replacing one word in it. The phrase, played in the podcast’s sixth episode, “The Reckoning,” is recorded after Calkins responds to a question from a teacher about how to “defend” the growing opponents to their philosophy. Her answer:
“No one person gets to own the word science.”
https://joshuabicknellcom.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/calkins.wavThe phrase stuck with me when I heard it.
Hanford, too, seems struck by this statement, pausing the episode to reflect on the implications of such a bold remark. However, I noticed that I also began to frame my inquiries about the media, society, artificial intelligence, education, and everything in between, through this same lens, because I think this sentiment — that no one person gets to own *insert concept here* — is one that a lot of us believe, albeit with regard to a myriad of other concepts beyond science.
Before I started to almost obsessively delve into these other concepts (most recently in this case, the concept of trauma), I had to ask: Is Calkins right to some degree? In her field specifically, is it possible that science of reading advocates got too ahead of themselves, over-confidently acting as gatekeepers to the role of science in literacy and thus claiming it as exclusively theirs?
More importantly, though, is the question of what else might we be gatekeeping. Is there a healthy amount of guarding misinformation that is justified? What about when it comes to how we identify individuals with the most vulnerable mental incapacities in society as a result of unthinkable, life-altering experiences?
I Knew It Was Confirmation Bias
This summer, I devoted time reading and reflecting on confirmation bias, the “echo chambers” so many of us reside in, and how advertisers, for examples, use complex systems to respond to our behaviors, thought patterns, and social interactions, and therefore acutely aware of our most deeply held convictions. No longer does our data make us simply tell others whether we prefer Cap’n Crunch to Frosted Flakes; instead, they can measure to what percentage we are likely to choose gluten-free and non-GMO cereals, who in the family these choices are primarily made for — a 17-year old born-again health expert son perhaps? — and whether we resent that choice, our likelihood of voting on healthcare issues and attitudes toward candidates and policies, and how vulnerable we would be to believe certain statements crafted specifically for “people like us,” and roughly how many years until a divorce over that same child’s behavior which exposed the deep riffs in the marriage in the first place. and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
An experiment for you: Check out your settings in your internet service provider’s website and request a copy of all your data they’ve aggregated over the years. Prepare to be unsettled. But, of course, we give this information away freely, don’t we? We engage in heated debates, we write blogs, we search for this and reject that, we downvote and upvote and swipe left and right and refresh and shut down. We tell our whole story — the story of us — in a single day with our digital footprint. Now, I’m not a marketing professional by any means, but I would imagine this is an absolute gold mine for advertisers. But who else is this a gold mine for? And what does it mean for us? Perhaps, instead, there’s an inverse relationship, where we are falling into a metaphorical sort of black hole. Or hamster wheel. Take your pick.
What tends to happen is that our belief systems become regurgitated by advertisers and search results, curating for us a view of complex issues that become increasingly simplistic. Issues are defined as either all right or all wrong as confirmed by this recycling of self-validating information. In a recent article published in the National Library of Medicine, researchers noted that “social media platforms facilitate the configuration and aggregation of ‘like-minded’ people and network that reinforce and further empower polarized groups.” I don’t know many people who are against the polarized being given a voice. But does addressing polarity in this way integrate and synthesize ideas in search of a common solution? Or does it just…polarize and isolate? (Cue the echo chamber.)
For anyone who hasn’t experienced this, try this: Intentionally click on an ad (even if you have to search for one) that you would otherwise have little interest in. Interact with it. Like it. Go back to your FYP or your News Feed or search results, and repeat if necessary. It won’t take long to see confirmation bias in real time. Your suggested groups, ads, and friend recommendations, will suddenly begin to have one thing in common: the content of that original ad you clicked. And: you.
These trends are plentiful, and the power of confirmation bias is glaring in this idea of trauma: what it is, what it isn’t, who is deserving of owning it as a part (or whole) of their identity, what the consequences and benefits are of centering it, and ultimately what we do with this single word in a way that rescues it from the dramatic and hyperbolic realms of social platforms, and instead back into the hands of experts and sufferers so that we can work to find a means for non-sufferers to identify and resolve real pain they feel that made them jump on the latest bandwagon; or, the trauma train.
All-aboard. Unless, well, it triggers a trauma response.
The Evolution of a Word
True or false? No one person gets to own the word trauma.
True or false? No one person gets to own the experience of trauma.
The fact that there is a clear distinction between these concepts is telling as it is. Why? Because somehow we’ve started to blur the lines of what trauma really is as an experience. In the digital age, we are all incredibly comfortable being experts on, well, everything.
Admittedly still, and I may be off base, but to answer those two questions, I have the sense that a lot of people at their core would consider both of these to be true. It’s fundamentally a strange thing to say a single entity owns such a broad condition and term. So, then, who owns the word? Typical answers, I’m assuming, might be:
- the traumatized person
- psychologists/counselors/doctors/psychiatrists
- one, some, or all marginalized members of a society (which takes some defining in itself, but here we will assume this might refer to those in poverty, women, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, and perhaps some religious groups)
- veterans, surgeons, first responders, or those living with diagnosed PTSD
Or, perhaps the more popular response lately: you!
To be fair, I don’t have an answer to this question of who “owns” something like trauma either, perhaps because it was never a question meant to be asked, but I think on at least some level, it should be asked.
That said, I think anyone listed above would have some legitimate “ownership,” and there is certainly power in “owning” your story as a sort of radical acceptance. At least on the surface. It would be hard to argue that a Vietnam veteran who returned from war with debilitating PTSD does not hold a stake in the word or experience of trauma.
In fact, tracing the roots of our linguistic use of the word often conjures images of shell-shocked and traumatized veterans. Not long ago, it was a widely accepted belief that trauma was almost exclusively a veteran’s condition. Not only that, but there existed, too, an element of minimizing apparent in this somewhat archaic understanding of trauma, evidenced by the recalling of battle events during the American Civil War as something “nostalgic” — in many ways the antithesis of how most view trauma today, which I’d argue is, for all its flaws, still more reliable and truthful today than in the “glory days’ of extreme suffering as something to “miss.”
Then, as recently as World War II, traumatic responses were considered a sign of weakness, and only in the Korean conflict did the development of talk therapy really begin to take form in a fully acknowledged effort that real trauma was, well, real, and even more notable, that it was composed of feelings and physical reactions that were unpleasant, unwanted, and severely detrimental to one’s quality of life and everyday functioning. Even then, resiliency played an unmistakable role in the long-term recovery from traumatic memories and its subsequent adverse effects.
With this in mind, it could be assumed that war combatants and veterans doin fact have one of the biggest stakes in the term “trauma” but that’s not the case anymore. Now, all you have to do is become an influencer or develop a cookie-cutter mental health app that simplifies the complexity of trauma, and all in a minute or less, and you too can be traumatized, regardless of actual experience.
When “Hardship” Doesn’t Cut It
In the spirit of technical accuracy (which some may argue carries little importance here), the current definition of trauma should at least be brought to light, and perhaps compared against its singular association with war events that it carried in the past. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines trauma as “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning.”2 If there is a single owner of the word, it would be the APA, and I think this fits what I’ve always thought of as trauma.
On the other hand, when removing those previously held ideas, I can easily fit a number of scenarios into this definition which would, by almost any account, be completely dismissed as anything traumatic. What, after all, constitutes a disturbing experience? Horror movies are created with the intent of creating a deliberate disturbing experience for viewers, and many experience significant fear as a result, even staying awake for hours or even days plagued with a fear of shadows and voices that aren’t really there. Is this long-lasting enough?
The Childhood Trauma Test
I’d like to revisit this idea of confirmation bias when trying to solve the mystery of social media’s trauma obsession. If we are constantly fed validation for what we input through social media and search engines, it makes sense that those ads for mental health apps may start as one, but soon flood your feed.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to take a quick glance at a number of these flashy ads to realize that their developers who chose mental health as their niche did so in a manner as happenstance as the flip of a coin. A disproportionate number of them contain fun “quizzes” that, in four questions, or one minute or less, can diagnose your anxiety disorder, your depression, your trauma response, and even your narcissistic abuse victim levels.
These “quizzes” from companies like BetterHealth and Talkiatry, often resemble the same “quizzes” many of us once subjected ourselves to through chain mail messages sent to us on Hotmail or our Geocities websites back in the 90s to early ’00s. I think even then, though, we knew what we were doing was an absolute gimmick. (Wasn’t everything in that time period?) I might even argue that those chain mail quizzes were far more involved and intellectually draining. Forwarding to 19 people was a challenge if you wanted to escape 7 years of bad luck. Buying Prozac is easier, and now comes with much sleeker animated crying people than the random spinning Santa and bedazzled dinosaurs that plagued our Hotmail inboxes so many years ago.
I understand the nostalgia we feel for those days. But this concept in 2023, much less with issues as severe as deep-rooted trauma, might have even been a little much for the no-filter Gen X and Millennial kids.
#ouch#
In July of 2022, BetterHelp’s TikTok childhood trauma test garnered over 2.5 million views with its #childhoodtraumatest tag, with results that Emerald Pellott of In the Know writes, “shocked [users] that their pasts weren’t as cracked up as they remember.” What a statement.
This seems….bizarre. If a person has to take a 45-second fun quiz to tell them that they had a traumatic childhood, is that really trauma?
User @polyamprincess thinks so. They shared their results from the test with a flood of hashtags and the caption “Okay that was a bit of an ouch!” with hashtags like #worsethanithought, #ouch, #oh, and the cutest, from another user: #traumatwinsies.
#worsethanithought
It’s not difficult to see that trauma has been utterly trivialized to the fullest extent here.
And sadly, that’s not the end of it. After the princess had their #ouch moment four questions later, revealing an entire world of trauma they had no recollection of beforehand, they were guided to a revelation that their special traumas are rejection trauma, abandonment trauma, and betrayal trauma. Triple #ouch! They’re like, in their #TraumaEra. *Waiting for the reverse duck-face pout selfie with the peace sign held up and that exact hashtag*
But…there’s more. You can talk to a qualified mental health practitioner via text about all those new traumas you just learned that you had over the course of an entire childhood. (Sorry…insurance not accepted) Even worse, many of the same companies offer antidepressants, some even controlled substances, that they’ll ship to you after a few text conversations so you can live your best #TraumaFab life.
Meanwhile, every 68 seconds, a U.S. resident is a victim of violent sexual assault. Now, that’s an #ouch, and I’d argue: that’s a trauma.
In Good Company
Trauma, along with narcissism, gaslighting, OCD, “toxic” — has made its way up the ranks with these often-abused terms. How did a society go from romanticizing the “nostalgia” of horrific memories of war violence to staged forced tears with adults re-enacting their childhood when their mom yelled at them during playtime as being so serious that every institution — from education to yoga — is now “trauma-informed,” and yet the loose nature of the terminology itself should at least cause one to pause.
But…no one person gets to own the word trauma. Right?
It’s clear that the concept is entirely subjective, and while experts may agree on a set of criteria, the perception of an experience is largely left up to the individual, and cannot be measured with precision.
Herein lies the potential hazards of claiming and using the term so loosely, though. If we are to label things that are within the norm of average human experience as trauma, then the “significance” as noted by the APA is lost entirely, claimed instead by any individual who might just be misinformed, maybe even by a mental health practitioner. In such cases, every experience is a significant one, and who is to say otherwise?
Not your confirmation bias, that’s for certain.
A Sort-of Solution
The solution, I would imagine, is not to create a new definition of “trauma,” nor is it to necessarily shame those who might be aligning themselves with it despite living otherwise normal lives, but instead to be intentional with our words and the context in which we use them. It should involve acknowledging the subjective nature of our experiences and also, even if temporarily, removing ourselves from them, for long enough to examine it in the larger scale of things.
In such cases, every experience is a significant one, and who is to say otherwise?
It is worth noting, too, that if indeed so many have been fighting for a first class seat on the trauma train, perhaps without any real knowledge of who is boarding or where it’s going, such individuals still must be existing within a place of emotional discontent. While “trauma” may not be the word for their experiences, the need to put a name to “that feeling” of a painful experience and to validate their lived experience which may have been trivialized in the past, is still very much real. In a society where our anxiety and malaise continue to increase exponentially, it makes sense that what once was a sufficient means of expressing hardship has grown to a point now where “hardship” just doesn’t seem to cut it.
If Not Trauma, Then What?
So, what are some other ways we can express incredibly difficult and uncomfortable events or feelings without feeling the need to traumatize it?
Here are a couple (very general) idleas of how to re-frame the language we use :
- “This (insert hardship) has been one of toughest I’ve ever experienced.”
vs.
“This (insert hardship) brought up so much unresolved trauma I never knew I had, because why else would I react so emotionally?” - “This (insert unpleasant relationship event) has been incredibly painful. It might take a while to feel like I can trust again.”
vs.
“My girlfriend was so gaslighting me yesterday! She told me she cheated on me, and it’s gaslighting like that which is where all my trauma comes from.”
Better yet — See a therapist! A licensed one, and preferably not from a TikTok quiz.
Of course, this is not intended as a way to silence anyone. By all means, people should own their truth and only they can know if what they’ve experienced is truly traumatic or not. For those that it is, those are the very circumstances for which I think it’s so incredibly important for the rest of us to be mindful of how careful (or careless) we are with the language surrounding trauma. For some, that word might be all they have left to find a path toward healing. We can’t take it from them for a hashtag, a sympathy like, or even a genuine misunderstanding. We have to be intentional.
Final Note: On Gatekeeping (Not Guiltless)
No one person gets to own the word trauma, but no one person gets to trivialize it either.
Here comes the self-deprecation part (not a trauma reaction, though….I don’t think.)
I am not guiltless. Gatekeeping is probably even more frustrating for those experiencing significant trauma. And, that said: I teach high school English, and if I’m being honest, I probably have about as much authoritative credibility on the subject as those in the line leading up to the trauma train itself. So, I guess, who am I to play gatekeeper? Why does the subject even “get to me”? Maybe I’m no better. Maybe I’m the worst kind of gatekeeper. Maybe I’m a pseudo-psychologist pretending to know what I’m talking about.
Or, maybe I’m saying what others are thinking, or even what others already know deep down. I can’t say whether that makes it objectively true or not. I suppose, like trauma itself, you just know.
In reality, the truth likely lies somewhere on a continuum. But ultimately, like all things related to language and word choice: it cannot hurt to think twice before hopping on any train.
No one person gets to own the word trauma, but no one person gets to trivialize it either.
So, here’s to intention, contemplation, and saving. the #ouch for another time. In fact, can we just get rid of the #ouch entirely?
And of course, a shoutout to my girl Lucy Calkins — for providing me a framework for questioning everything in a thought-provoking (even if completely unintended) way.
