By Chris Satullo

My mother grew up poor in England during the Depression, daughter to an abusive alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job and moved the family frequently. She served in the Royal Air Force as a teenager during the Blitz and lost a fiancé to the Battle of Britain.

Mom never took the ACE survey documenting “Adverse Childhood Experiences,” a latter-day invention that is a hallmark of our modern focus on “trauma-informed care.” She died the year it was invented.

If she had taken it, though, she would have racked up a whopping score.

The term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder didn’t exist when I was a kid, but my mom likely suffered from it. Her war-spawned PTSD manifested in panic attacks, sharp mood swings, migraines, and explosive rages. The sexist medical establishment of her day didn’t respond effectively or empathetically to her issues. Its big ideas: electro-shock therapy and a hysterectomy.

It’s only much later in life that I’ve come to understand my mom – and the loving but episode-filled home she was able to give my brother and me – through the prism of trauma and PTSD. That prism helps me understand her – and my own childhood – much better, to be far kinder when thinking about her. And to be more vigilant to squelch the bad habits and bad behaviors in me that are a residue of growing up in her household.

I say all this to indicate I do get the value of admitting and paying attention to past trauma.

 Let me also add that I’m married to someone whose own ACES score is pretty darn high, and who worked in trauma at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for nine years, dealing daily with the heinous child abuse, horrible accidental injuries and gunshot wounds that befall the young and innocent of our community. In our household, we know trauma.

So, that said, let me get this out: I’m fed up to here with our society’s current habit of trauma-mongering.

It’s a common pattern in our society: A new insight, new term, new tool, gains currency. It fosters new understanding, allowances, therapies for certain problems. It’s a good thing. It’s progress. It really is.

But soon, hordes want to grab a bit of that currency. They want to claim the latest hip form of victimhood, to leverage it into some advantage or some permanent indulgence of their failings.

This broad, pell-mell dash to claim the currency of the latest definition of victimization ends up, inevitably, debasing that currency, causing others to doubt even legitimate claims.

It happened with physical disability. It happened with racial bias. It happened with workplace harassment.

And it’s getting out of control with trauma.

Once claiming trauma started to earn one attention, empathy, and accommodations, it was almost inevitable that the popular definition of trauma would expand so that almost anyone could claim it, so that it verged on the meaningless.

We now see students claim “trauma” from hearing a teacher say something in class they don’t agree with.  People claim it from hearing an obnoxious epithet used somewhere in their presence, even when not directed at them. They claim it from the fact of someone they disagree with being allowed to speak somewhere, even if they are not required to attend the lecture and in fact don’t. Millennial workers have been known to claim trauma from getting critical feedback on their work from bosses whose job is to provide such input.  

We’ve lost a vital distinction. Something obnoxious, upsetting or mildly painful to endure does not equate to “trauma.” It’s simply part of daily life. It’s part of the shit that happens that you need to learn to deal with – if you’re going to be a functioning, helpful adult in the world.

The blurring of the distinction between “big-T” trauma – the deeply painful, scarring, life-altering events – and “little-T” trauma – the daily annoyances or burdens that can be upsetting or transitorily depressing – might not matter so much if some people didn’t demand big consequences for those whom, whether justly or not, they choose to blame for their garden-variety emotional distress.

The vogue for hyping “small-T” trauma includes calls for people to be silenced, reprimanded, and even fired for things that formerly would barely have qualified as an offense, if at all.

 An example: The Black students at a business school who claimed to have been traumatized and made to feel “unsafe” by an instructor who used in class a Mandarin Chinese phrase that, to an inattentive ear, sounded like the N-word (but was not).  The students, many of whom weren’t even present at the class in question, made such a fuss the man was suspended from teaching.

Other students, in the name of trauma, demand that texts be bowdlerized or banned, facts be stricken from the record, and the English language be revised to make it less precise and useful.

Once the judgment of whether a “small T” trauma has been inflicted is left solely to the self-interested feelings of the allegedly traumatized, we have entered a looking-glass world.

Beyond the conflation of merely being upset with being traumatized, the voguish rhetoric around trauma sometimes has an even deeper flaw: It treats trauma as fate.

I maintain that no person is merely the sum of the traumas they’ve experienced. These traumas need not define a person, nor doom them. Some people who experience a trauma are not incapacitated by it; are not trapped in a doom loop of pathologies. This observation does not (as is sometimes claimed) dismiss or discredit the sadder experiences of others who suffer such lingering impacts. To the contrary, it offers them hope.

The stories of those who’ve processed traumas then surmounted their impact, who’ve used them as fuel to do good, should be told and studied every bit as much as tales of those whose traumas hobble them. 

I don’t understand a rhetoric that tells people who’ve suffered a trauma: It’s hopeless; you’ll never get past it, never get better. All you can do is deploy your traumas to demand endless accommodation.

Nor should criminal offenders’ past traumas be used to excuse behaviors that harm others. They should be understood – to help the offenders forgive themselves and build a self-understanding that can prevent recurrence. Keeping that distinction in mind is vital to maintaining public support for trauma-informed responses to the deeds of young offenders in particular. These responses need not become the soil of alibis; they can become tools to help build a safer, healthier society.

My mom was a good, loving parent, even if at times her emotional problems got the best of her. She did the best she could, and her flawed best was better than the parenting so many other children of my generation got. 

She suffered real, Big-T traumas; they did shape her, scar her, set her up for struggles. But they did not incapacitate her. They did not define her. No, what defined her was her intelligence, her vivacity, her fierce love.

Being a trauma-informed son now, I understand her, and myself, better.

 But that makes me far less eager, or likely, to claim trauma for myself. I leave that to the kids and families who endured the kind of traumas that my wonderful wife helped them work through. To seek to put my life experiences into the same pot as theirs, to claim some empathy or benefit I don’t deserve, would do them a grave injustice.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia