Seemingly everywhere you go these days, you are expected to divulge your personal history, the sadder the better. College applications ask you to trauma dump and then show how you overcame it in your personal statement or essay(s), organizing meetings often devolve into bickering over who has the most relevant oppression to whatever is being organized, and the phrase “as a [insert identity here]” is used the world over to give people social and political validity.
Catherine Liu, the famed professor of culture studies, and the author of the new book Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering believes that’s because the concept of trauma has been weaponized into a tool of social control.
Liu isn’t saying our traumas are unimportant, but that we have to be aware of how our trauma narratives are used by capitalism—as a way for our conservative, increasingly unequal, and increasingly individualistic society to offload collective responsibility for people’s mental health and general wellbeing. It is, as she told me, our new Horatio Alger story: if you just keep divulging your trauma enough, you’ll win the race we’re all competing against each other in and gain power over others.
“The configuration of trauma and identity during the age of reaction was ideologically expedient, especially as trauma culture suppressed any discussion of class and material conditions in favor of an allegedly therapeutic individualism,” Liu writes. “The trauma script has become a tightly choreographed performance of suffering, healing, and revelation that has isolated us from each other, and made us less creative, less trusting, and more demanding of others.”
Liu was nice enough to speak to me about how we can move past this trauma script and towards a more material politics.
[This interview has been edited]
When I was reading your book, the first thing that came to mind is a friend who’s going to college and being denied financial aid for various reasons, and having to fill out a million forms. The system seems designed to break her. And then meanwhile my first instinct was to be like, “you have a lot of stress maybe you should go to therapy.” And then I realized this is such a perfect encapsulation of the problem you outline: that therapy and our own emotional regulation is a “solution” to what are actually material problems; that she should just react better to her problems instead of there being a systemic fix to them.
LIU: Right, as if she could just do self-optimization to adjust herself to the absurdity of the bureaucracy, that that’s how she’s going to get through it, or adjust herself to the economic situation she’s in. Therapy has become just self-optimization. I really don’t envy therapists right now, because I suspect a lot of them are confronting a demand for self-optimization, a denial of transference, and a lot of preconceived notions about diagnosis and remedy. These are all forms of resistance against real healing or change.
Yeah that’s something I’ve seen a lot in my own work and reporting and talking to people—it’s not even top-down anymore, it’s normal people asking to be optimized, or diagnosed, and wanting to believe these simplistic narratives and definitions that ignore the context and problems of their worlds that are actually causing them trauma or grief.
That’s right. And there’s just this demand for recognition of this very reified trauma script. I wonder what happens when a therapist doesn’t comply. Do they drop them and move to a new therapist?
It’s kind of a big question but how did we get to this place, where it’s not even psychiatrists or therapists diagnosing and “optimizing” people primarily, but largely normal people believing in this need for a trauma narrative, and only feeling validated if that’s given to them? How did we get to this place that everything being a trauma is the only valid way of understanding oneself?