Get Over Your Trauma!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Trauma does not give you power, or, at least, it shouldn't.

It’s a meme everyone knows by now: your nonbinary roommate Sock won’t do the dishes because of their trauma. It’s funny because it’s true. We’ve all met these kinds of people—people who excuse their behavior by claiming trauma prevents them from acting like everyone else. I’ve lived with a Sock. I’m sure I’ve also been a Sock at certain points in my life.

This image has become so common because, I think, we have become very sick of the way people use trauma to privilege themselves above others.

Well, the bad news is that just as we get sick of this ruse, state powers have caught onto our little game. As the Israeli government commits war crimes in Gaza, many, including the Israeli government itself, have turned to the weaponization of trauma to give themselves a rationale for their horrific actions. 

It’s an attractive thing! To have an explanation for why you want to do something bad. 

But we must separate feeling from action.

It’s legitimate to feel traumatized. The world is traumatic. My grandparents’ families were murdered in the Holocaust. I grew up with lots of trauma based around our Jewish identities. I even, to an extent, empathize with Jews from older generations who feel so insecure about their safety that they believe we need a Jewish state to protect us. I think they are very wrong, but I understand where the feeling comes from. They are scared. They are traumatized. 

But that’s exactly the point: as much as one can empathize with people who’ve struggled to deal with the effects of trauma, trauma cannot become the rationale for one’s actions or beliefs. Simply put: if you are an adult, you are allowed to be traumatized, but you must also get over yourself. You must realize that no matter how bad you feel, your actions and beliefs are still your own, and you must own them. 

We live in a society obsessed with trauma, because we believe it gives us meaning and power. Books about trauma constantly top the best seller list. The Body Keeps the Score has sold two million copies. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this—it can be good to have guides through our own healing. But it points to a society that has become obsessed with trauma as the main guiding force in our lives. 

As Parul Sehgal writes in The New Yorker, we’ve become so accustomed to trauma narratives that these days that, “to question the role of trauma, we are warned, is to oppress.”

To have more trauma is to have more power than others, and to have less trauma is to therefore have less power. So, of course, this sets up a trauma arms race: we must constantly explicate (and, probably, often exaggerate) our own trauma in order to have legitimacy. This often works. I can’t count how many situations I’ve been in where people have been shut down by someone because they say, “well, I am trans,” or “well, I am Jewish,” and thus have more of a right to speak or have an opinion. We live in a world in which we often feel powerless, and trauma becomes a way to reclaim some of that power.

But in this arms race we lose our humanity.

“The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority,” Sehgal writes. 

Sehgal is speaking specifically to literature, but I think this applies equally to the narratives of our lives as well. By insisting on trauma as a guiding force, we flatten, distort and reduce ourselves and our complexities, and, at the same time, insist we are morally righteous for doing so! So, we are not only being stupid, but then insisting on our stupidity as good and morally correct!

At a societal level, the trauma narrative traps us in the past. In Harper’s, Will Self writes: “And what is all of this world-girdling reflecting and re-reflecting, if not the compulsions of a collective psyche condemned to remember rather than forget—to remember not the grand narratives of human redemption, but the trauma by a thousand blows that descends on the human psyche by reason of its occupying these sorts of environments?”

If we continue to see our lives solely through the lens of trauma, then we cannot move forward, only backward. We become destined to repeat the very things done to us that made us feel traumatized in the first place. That’s part of what’s so upsetting to me about the state of Israel: it has weaponized legitimate Jewish trauma to carry out the very same kinds of actions we as Jews claim to detest. 

Look at the above slides. It’s no coincidence the terms trauma and abusive relationship are used—that’s what gives the post authority. It’s not simply a disagreement anymore. It’s that you are the traumatized one, and thus are the morally righteous one. There is no argument to be had once someone throws out the trauma flag. 

But, the thing is, some people have more trauma flags than others, not because they are more traumatized, but because they have more power.

This is the most crucial thing: because trauma has become a narrative about authority and power, it privileges those who already have access to narrative power. The media and most governments are already on the side of Israel. And so it is that trauma that gets amplified over the trauma of the countless Palestinian lives ended or ruined by living in a constantly-bombed apartheid state. 

So, we have two choices: either we reconfigure how we weigh the traumas of various peoples, giving a kind of Trauma Affirmative Action to those whose trauma we’ve for decades delegitimized. Or, we dispense with the trauma narrative; we dispense with the idea that trauma gives us any powers or rights, and instead focus on the material realities of peoples and the effect our actions have on them. The choice is yours. Are you ready to grow up?