“It has become a popular idiom tossed around without meaning.” “‘I have trauma,’ just becomes like, ‘I’m depressed’ or, ‘I’m addicted to cookies,’” says Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist. The word hasn’t simply been watered down, but adopted widely as a kind of cultural touchstone. That’s the way it’s used in our culture.” My football team lost: That was traumatic. “I was stuck in traffic: That was traumatic. “Trauma is one of those words that can mean anything,” says Michael Scheeringa, a medical doctor, professor at Tulane University, and author of the upcoming book The Trouble with Trauma. Some who study trauma, however, say current cultural references to the word have become a mess of tongue-in-cheek and casual mentions, mixed with serious confessions and interrogations of the past - of definitional misunderstandings and the absurd and the trivial and the profound and the sincere. Growing attention to the term has pushed forth a larger acknowledgment of the indirect and long-lasting consequences of violence, certainly overdue in American culture. The DSM-5, the standard in American psychiatric diagnosis, currently defines it as “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence,” either as a victim or a witness. Trauma is real, and can result in real disorders, though its meaning is ever-evolving. The TikTok hashtags #traumadump and #traumadumping, a trend where creators describe their various traumas via sound memes or “story time” retellings, have a collective 31 million views. Trauma “therapists” (accredited and not) are there for you on color-coordinated Instagram grids, espousing views on triggers and flashbacks, and trauma “experts” (accredited and not) are on TikTok, too, posting 60-second skits about what trauma responses look like. The internet’s favorite yogi, Adriene Mishler, has a “ Yoga for Post Traumatic Stress” class on YouTube. In a GQ profile last spring, Justin Bieber alluded to “trauma stuff” affecting his first year of marriage. “Dress this story up or down: on the page and on the screen, one plot - the trauma plot - has arrived to rule them all,” she wrote. In an essay last month, The New Yorker’s Parul Sehgal criticized what she called “ the trauma plot” trope - essentially, when trauma discovery or revelation acts as the story payoff. The Matrix Resurrections features trauma therapy as a key plot point. Trauma is on our screens, too: Grey’s Anatomy, Succession, Fleabag, I May Destroy You, Yellowjackets, and Station Eleven are just a few examples of shows whose characters are haunted by the past. The Listen Notes podcast search engine lists more than 5,500 podcasts with “trauma” in the title. The Body Keeps the Score is a part of the zeitgeist. Maybe you’ve seen influencers pose with their copies. The singer Phoebe Bridgers declared it her favorite book. Men’s Health named Bessel van der Kolk’s opus one of the best mental health reads of 2021. Though it’s occasionally been dethroned - recently by bell hooks’ All About Love and, later, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in the wake of their deaths - it keeps rallying back to the top. The Body Keeps the Score wasn’t a newcomer to the NYT bestseller list - though it was published in 2014, it crept onto the list in 2017, where it has remained for 168 weeks, selling almost 2 million copies worldwide. 1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction paperback bestseller list in February 2021, at the start of the second year of the pandemic. Part of the Memory Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.Ī preeminent book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, rocketed to the No.
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