Another war!? A reminder: Only one person gets to decide whether you’re traumatized or not
Plus, I've *almost* won a writing contest two years in a row, and I'm trying to be a big girl about it.
It’s been trendy to trash on trauma lately. A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that trauma therapy can lead to a nation of immature, self-centered narcissists. Free Press columnist (and psychiatrist) Sally Satel similarly warned that a trauma victim mindset can serve as a harmful “balm of exoneration that comes with victimhood.” Last year, a New Yorker article posited that trauma plot lines have become so common they are like a “rather generic motel room, with all the signs of heavy turnover.”
Brooks and Satel both argue that the requisites for a trauma diagnosis have been watered down, implying it’s whiny or weak to feel triggered by experiences that are unconnected to what they consider legitimate trauma, notably direct involvement in warfare or abuse.
Suck it up, buttercup?
If you’re one of the unfortunate members of the trauma tribe, all this criticism can feel, well, triggering. First you had to endure your very own version of hell and now you’re being told that your problem isn’t trauma, but boring self-obsession. As we say in Texas, suck it up, buttercup.
Right now—with an already ongoing war in the Ukraine and a new horrific outburst of violence in the Middle East—many of us are feeling unsettled and overwhelmed, even if we don’t know anyone directly affected by either conflict.
That’s why I think a better way of understanding trauma is as an event (or events) that seriously threatens a person’s sense of safety. Note I say sense of safety. When my loved one attempted suicide when I was in my early thirties, I was physically safe. But mentally? My sensory systems were so overwhelmed I experienced significant memory loss.
Sometimes it’s the ‘little’ things that trigger us
Having this framework has been vital for me. It helped me understand why a highly destructive ice storm here in Austin earlier this year was so emotionally draining for me.
The power was out for a week and school shut down for just as long. South Austin had no functioning stoplights and driving became dangerous.
Mid-week, smelly and cold, we decamped to a tiny airport hotel room for a few days, cat included, while we waited for multiple downed power lines to be removed from our street.
But that was all basically tolerable. It was listening to an entire neighborhood of hundred-year-old tree limbs crack under the ice that stuck with me. As my sleepless daughter begged me to reassure her she was safe, I feared for my and my family’s safety, in a very real way, both in the moment and long-term, climate-wise.
Before I understood how PTSD worked, I would have made myself “return to normal” as quickly as possible, pushing aside my feelings. After all, no one in my family suffered frostbite, carbon monoxide poisoning or injury from a falling tree branch.
This time was different: I was done comparing my situation to others. Instead, I honored my emotions. I took a few days off from work, and rested. (For someone with limited paid time off, it wasn't an easy choice, but it was the right one.)
This self-awareness has been possible because of how I changed my mindset: No one but me gets to decide how harmful something is to my sense of safety.
‘You never know what someone is going through’
This all makes me think of my favorite cliché: “You never know what someone is going through.”
Two people watching the same update about the unfolding war between Hamas and Israel will process the experience differently. Person A may not give it another thought and go about her day unbothered. Person B, though, may be filled with a weirdly familiar sense of dread, distracted and depressed, even if she doesn’t know a single person involved on either side of the war.
There can be many reasons for this dread, including the legacy of inherited trauma. And I don’t just mean culturally or environmentally inherited. I also mean genetically—epigenetically, to be specific.
In simple terms, epigenetics is the study of how environmental and behavioral factors affect how genes are expressed, even if the fundamental DNA sequence is not changed. Unfolding evidence shows trauma can be passed down epigenetically, as shown by the work of Rachel Yehuda, PhD, director of the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai New York.
“Research by my group and others has confirmed that adverse experiences may influence the next generation through multiple pathways,” she wrote for Scientific American, in “How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children.”
I first learned about Yehuda’s research from the book It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn.
As he wrote: “with what we’re learning now, from the Yehuda studies and others, about the ways that stress can be inherited, we can begin to map out how the biological residue of traumas your grandmother experienced can be passed down, with far-reaching consequences.”
Some of us don’t need to dig into the science to know this is true. We just need to look back to see how violence perpetuates violence long after the battle has ended:
This is my grandfather Vic. He served as a US Army combat engineer and infantry sharpshooter in World War II in the heart of Europe. When he returned home, he wouldn’t talk about what he endured, except to say he experienced frostbite and “heavy fighting” in France, Belgium and Germany.
The memories of war scarred him, but he never received treatment. He became violent and unpredictable with his three children and wife. He feared crowds and people the rest of his life.
He was twenty when he joined the Army. A kid. It’s impossible to know if he would have turned out abusive and reclusive even if he had not shot Nazis and nearly froze to death, but there’s no doubt that post-war PTSD is strongly linked to domestic violence.
Later in life, he calmed down. He was a doting grandfather to me, until he died by suicide when I was 10, a harrowing event I wrote about in “Lost and Found in the Wild Horse Desert.”
Forced stoicism perpetuates the cycle of trauma
And yet, I don’t know if the aforementioned columnists would consider inherited trauma “real.”
Before I did the work to learn from how I respond to stressful events, I would have needlessly ruminated on this: Are they right? Am I not really a trauma survivor but, as Brooks suggests, “unwilling to assume any responsibility?” I likely would have answered yes and berated myself into exhaustion for lacking what he calls “quiet strength.”
I don’t worry about such things any more. Growth and resilience comes not from dismissing suffering, but facing it and dissecting it. As an American woman, I’ve been acculturated to avoid such work, as it means I’m putting my problems ahead of others. But it’s the learned ability to navel-gaze and self-obsess and declare yes, you know what, I did endure trauma that helped me get better. It wasn’t stoicism, that’s for sure. It was self-compassion.
On almost winning (again!) and trying to be OK with it
Yesterday as I was exiting yoga class at the Y, I checked my email. Oof. The email I had been waiting for — the announcement of this year’s Writers’ League of Texas manuscript contest — did not have my name in the winners’ category.
Instead, just like last year, I would remain a finalist.
“Always a finalist, never a winner,” I joked to my writing feedback group, trying to sound casual.
In 2022, when I found out I had been named a finalist, I cried so much I soaked my shirt. It was the validation I needed to make the pivot from (boring) online health editor to (sexy) creative writer who lacked any credentials to call herself such. AKA an artist. As a memoirist, it also meant my life story resonated — that I had achieved the right mix of personal and universal that book publishers demand. I didn’t win, but wow, I made it so far!
In 2023, when I found out I was a finalist, I shrugged and muttered “cool.” I knew my manuscript was good. I also knew it was “commercial” and that I wouldn’t likely be named a winner this year, either.
I gleaned this keeping an eye on contest-winning books, like the 2020 Graywolf Press Prize memoir, Voice of the Fish, by Lars Horn. I kept thinking, huh, this is creative and beautiful and experimental but also 100% not for me.
I’m more of a Wild Game or Strip Tees kind of memoir reader — and writer. Immerse me, entertain me, enlighten me, but please don’t make me pluck out the plot amid long passages about philosophers.
That said, being a finalist two years in a row is absolutely something to feel good about. Creative writing is dominated by wildly expensive writing programs and insular competitive workshops, and I managed to rank highly in a statewide contest without having access to either.
Like always, I’ll persevere. But first I’m gonna pout a little.
This is good. I confess I have often thought about why trauma is a prominent issue right now but like pretty much everything else that emerges from our understanding of things, naturally we notice more now. And I agree with you, that it's best to face the past or you can't move forward. My varying experiences with trauma have played out with my usual mantra - learn how to live along side it, with it i.e. I live with depression, I don't suffer from it. Getting there is different for everyone. Nice thoughts on this, Joy. Thank you.
“Forced stoicism” mmmm, the anchor of WASPish emotional repression. I’m down for the outbursts. The big feelings. The ones that make people look left and right. Yes. I’d prefer that over a tennis clap any day of the week.