By Carl Vennerstrom, Public Discourse. (Photo: Unsplash)
Trauma-informed care promises to reveal and resolve the connection between present aberrant behavior and past mistreatment by others. But its political corollary valorizes victimhood, and its questionable logic has the potential to trap rather than free those who suffer from past wounds.
If Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster treatment of Homer’s Odyssey is any indication, the healing of trauma is at the top of the American mind. In Nolan’s retelling, the nymph Calypso acts as therapist to her patient, Odysseus, and through a combination of pharmacological and conversational remedies artfully, and despite herself, leads him to recollect the repressed memories of his traumatic and guilty past. This interpretation fulfills Philip Rieff’s prediction that “modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives.”
Predictions aside, this singular cultural artifact represents a wider interest in discovering and processing trauma in therapeutic and extra-therapeutic settings. I propose that the growing preference for trauma-informed care reflects a political preference for victimhood and conflicts with the healing for which therapy exists.
Therapy’s Role
If therapy is healing for the mind and the passions, then it naturally comes in many forms, only one of which goes by that name: therapy. In therapy’s clinical form, a patient, who is sick of mind to one degree or another, pays money to a therapist, a healer, to apply remedies. The most common remedy is conversation, but there are many others, including at least rapid-eye movement exercises, dream interpretation, controlled consumption of psychedelics, hypnosis, dietary and lifestyle changes, and breathing exercises.
I take it for granted that the clinical form of therapy exists to bring patients to a condition where they can successfully avail themselves of ordinary means of healing. These ordinary means are frequently social, and they usually have ends separate from the goal of mental health. They are, among others, family life, friendship, political life (broadly construed), employment, recreational activities, intellectual pursuits, religious worship, and religious practice. The healing that takes place through these ordinary bonds and practices has the effect of strengthening those same bonds and making people more able to engage in those practices.