The Trouble with Trauma
A while back I had a few realizations. First, that trauma therapy was sort of becoming a buzzword in the social media spaces. All over TikTok and Instagram I was seeing people, both qualified and unqualified explaining away a ton of behaviors as someones trauma response. Having trouble concentrating? That’s a trauma response! Want to scream into the void for no reason, well don’t worry about it, it’s your trauma response. But what these takes fail to account for and provide, is a nuanced awareness of what helped create this trauma in our lives.
Second, I realized that my understanding of trauma is vast, but not perfect. Having a Masters in Counseling Psychology and working as a therapist, I certainly have a more nuanced set of knowledge than many about how trauma manifests in our lives. But I don’t know it all; there are so many lived experiences I have have yet to encounter, or more truthfully have not sought out to deeply empathize with and understand.
And lastly, I realized that trauma work is extremely white. I didn't come to this awareness by myself, it was while watching a TikTok video posted by @queeringspaces. This was when things really hit me over the head; that so much of how I’ve been engaging my clients in healing from trauma work has involved lessons from the system and structural framework that continues to traumatize them. While The Body Keeps the Score and other important books have been incredibly helpful to folks no doubt (including myself), these white male authors have frankly failed to remove themselves from inflicting trauma while also being the experts on how to heal it. I would like to be a contributor to better distributing the power in healing spaces back to Black and Brown bodies, who understand that the ancestral trauma we experience lives in both mind and in body.
This past December, I read What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma by Stephanie Foo. Her retelling of the generational and personal re-traumatizing of herself and her family cannot be truly understood from a traditional white lens. Her wonderful memoir is what galvanized me to seek out other books to deepen and enrich my understanding of trauma and the ways we can heal from it and heal the ways it’s perpetuated in therapeutic spaces. Ways that aren’t profoundly white.
So this is my call in to myself. I’ve decided for 2023 to read the following three books (as a start). I encourage you to read along with me, or at the least, to ask yourself the deeper question, why is there only one demographic, one expert, one monolith describing and prescribing trauma work.
