Trauma Culture
Trauma Culture
There’s a lot to this topic (and it’s something I’ve only recently started looking into), but the general premise of “trauma culture” is that communities of people, not just individuals, can experience a type of individual suffering and psychological weight that is connected to (and often caused or amplified by) larger-scale issues.
This, on its face, isn’t a huge or controversial claim.
Of course going through a war, being colonized, being oppressed, being conquered or demolished or tormented by other people or the weather or other environmental conditions (including a dramatic change in previous conditions) can cause stress, anxiety, fear, and other often chronic issues in many of the people impacted by these variables.
But the issue often left out of these conversations—and this is what the folks who use this term are trying to point at—is that collective senses of trauma are often the consequence of systemic, infrastructural flaws and decisions, not just military conflicts or sudden upticks in hurricanes and earthquakes.
And often, because of the way we “perform” our relationship to these more fundamental, chronic issues, they tend to remain invisible and unaddressed (at least compared to more sudden, shocking, overt problems).
That performance, at times, includes creating narratives that allow us to see a path out of our traumatic circumstances that also serve to perpetuate the very things that spark or stoke these issues (one common example of this type of story is that poverty is a natural thing, not something we’ve created artificially and decided to collectively accept, and thus the process of working hard within our current economic system—the one that allows and causes and sustains poverty—is the good and correct approach to elevating ourselves and escaping poverty).
This is a very big, at times somewhat complex topic, but it’s an idea worth considering because of what it implies about individual suffering and the possibility that we’re telling ourselves unproductive stories about what suffering represents, and what might (and should) be done about it.
Here’s a good, recent piece on the topic if you’re interested in learning more: https://www.noemamag.com/the-problem-with-trauma-culture/
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