The Democracy of Trauma, the Parliament of Pain

If everyone is traumatized, has trauma just become another word for the human condition?

By Jeannette Cooperman

October 16, 2026

Society & Culture | Essays

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“The gods aren’t really gods, they’re just your guilt and trauma. In fact, everything’s trauma.”

—Sam Kriss, writing about The Odyssey

TikTok used to be pure fun. Now it is flooded with “trauma responses”—which apparently include feeling low or sad, pushing people away in relationships, having a low self-image, overexplaining, being impulsive or defensive, withdrawing in relationships, fawning, and having emotional turmoil trapped in your body because you were sensitive as a child. (Was anyone not?)

When an actress fails to notify her family that she has a nude scene in her upcoming movie, fans slam her for inviting trauma into their lives.

With subtle gestures, a woman plays the part of her rapist, singing lyrics from his point of view—but in one post, the rapist is a father; in other posts, he is a brother or cousin or boyfriend, and I realize this must be performance rather than confession.

A young woman regrets chasing a bad boyfriend, saying, “I blame my dad for everything, because he was the first man that I ever chased.” My heart twists—but then up pops a screen selling her healing books.

A man offers a visualization for facing a hard situation in which “you might lose your words, you might lose your cool, you might lose your truth.” Find your inner child a babysitter, he says, and wait out the trigger danger someplace safe. Then go and pick them up. (This is either creative and wise or a way to further split yourself apart; I am not sure which.)

A young woman suggests a series of litmus tests to find out if your therapist is really “trauma-informed.” Again, maybe helpful, maybe misguidance. Another woman offers her own, unprofessional definition, contradicted by mainstream medicine, of borderline personality disorder. A list of “complex trauma responses” includes hypervigilance, people-pleasing, having difficulty relaxing, and zoning out in the middle of a conversation.

To demonstrate her own trauma response, a young woman bursts into hysterical tears when a guy, slightly irritated, asks her to stop interrupting him. Another announces, “I’m no-contact with my mom” (a popular status) “and today is my birthday. Before we get into this, tell me happy birthday.” She says she will not know if her mom tries to wish her happy birthday because she has blocked her, but her mom is liable to put a post on Facebook wishing her happy birthday, which the daughter thinks is just insincere and narcissistic, but she plans to borrow a friend’s phone to check nonetheless. One commenter applauds and adds, genuinely puzzled, “Why do they always pick our birthday to reach out?”

Some trauma claims are sarcastic, at least I hope so: “Spilling my $8 iced latte on the car seat has traumatized me for the rest of the week.” “Literally traumatized by today’s weather forecast.” Others could be Trojan horses disguising deeper emotional pain, like the awkward photo of a bad haircut in middle school labeled “the source of my childhood trauma.” Or the mordant quip, “I accidentally liked my ex’s new partner’s Instagram photo from 52 weeks ago. I am currently processing the trauma.”

Trauma is real. But this added layer of drama, sarcasm, contagion, and misinformation is insidious “concept creep.” First, a word for “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” was officially expanded to include witnessing or vicariously experiencing such torments. Then academics expanded it again to include collective, intergenerational, and cultural trauma. Meanwhile, therapists, journalists, influencers, and self-help gurus were using “trauma” as a catchall for many other kinds of pain. The popular definition began to loosen. Glib or nervous jokes turned “trauma” into slang for embarrassment, frustration, or inconvenience.

And now we are all getting traumatized all the time.

“Trauma” is mentioned in books six times more often today than it was half a century ago. Between 2015 and 2025, global internet searches for “trauma” tripled. At least 5,500 active podcasts stuck “trauma” in their title. TikTok’s “#traumatok” subculture has amassed, not millions, billions of views.

So what happens when we take a small, hard, energy-charged word and explode it, scattering fragments all over the place? Those who once held that word—gingerly at first, then squeezing it tight in damp palms, letting its warmth ease their pain—are left with nothing to hold.

There are even writers who, for the sake of their own cleverness, insist that trauma is a modern invention, born alongside machines and machine guns. As though Saint Sebastian would not have had flashbacks of that barrage of arrows, and Artemisia Gentileschi would not have been changed by rape and torture. (By sheer luck, her fingers remained intact. Her next painting was her masterpiece: Judith Slaying Holofernes. She never married.)

Trauma changes us; it always has. We take the shock and pain inside ourselves, and they feed on our peace, so ravenous that at times all we can hear is their guttural scream. Assyrian medical reports, inscribed on stone tablets, detailed the altered mental state of soldiers after brutal combat. Herodotus wrote of an Athenian warrior who went blind after watching the comrade next to him be killed.

No one willing to admit our species’ frailty would ever assume that someone could suffer torment or terror and wake up right as rain the next morning. A response is inevitable. What changes is what we call it—and what we think it means.

The ancients had night terrors and blamed the ghosts of their slain enemies (which does rather get to the point). William James described “thorns in the spirit.” Cambodians speak of “broken courage.” In Sierra Leone, the term is noro, a spiritual contamination.

Here, medicine took charge. After the Civil War, doctors spoke of “soldier’s heart,” assuming that combat had damaged war veterans’ cardiovascular system and that was why their heart pounded, their anxiety spiraled, their breath stopped short. World War I changed the diagnosis to “shell shock.” The Vietnam War gave us post-traumatic stress syndrome. Now, TikTok tells us that trauma occurs any time you are “overwhelmed to the point of inability to cope.”

Which makes it really common.

“He supposed people were more forgiving of qualms and panics nowadays, more fascinated by the traumatized victim than the hardy hero.”

—from Akin by Emma Donoghue

A few years back, “gaslighting” came into weird vogue, applied lavishly to politicians’ lies and romantic betrayals. But a boyfriend’s cheap lies are not a systematic psychological campaign intended to make you doubt your sanity. When kids began blurting that they had “social anxiety,” I wanted to hug them. But sweaty palms and a stammered greeting at a big party do not place you on the spectrum. A little nervousness is normal.

Trauma culture pathologizes the normal. Once that label has been slapped on someone’s forehead, nobody looks deeper. Your friends might even decide they have the same problem, writ light. There is, after all, something about mental-illness labels that makes us want to co-opt them. A woman’s new boyfriend is quiet, a little awkward, and one parent murmurs to the other, “On the spectrum?” “I’m OCD about my phone,” a coworker warns cheerfully, or “I’m neurotic about that,” apologizing for needless worry. We call someone “manic” if his high energy is driving us crazy. We toss “narcissist” and “sociopath” like bean bags, aiming straight at parents, politicians, and exes.

Maybe this sloppy, casual usage is our unconscious way of admitting that mental illnesses or disorders exist on a long spectrum, and even the healthiest of us slide around the mild end. The labels can help us decode human behavior, our own included. But what about the people who suffer the full version of these conditions?

“As someone who survived [childhood sexual abuse] trauma and went through an assload of therapy to improve myself/overcome the bullshit, it pisses me off when people throw around terms like ‘trauma’ and ‘triggering’ for everyday, mundane things,” writes a Reddit user. A former trauma therapist says she quit “partly because it was exhausting listening to claims of trauma that weren’t actually trauma.”

In the six months before we married, my future husband was diagnosed with cancer and went through surgery; we froze his sperm just in case; I took my oral and written exams and started a Ph.D. dissertation along with a challenging new job as an investigative reporter; I had my first and only serious fight with my mother; Andrew and I scraped together money and, in the middle of his radiation treatments, bought our first house. One Sunday we took a stress test in the newspaper, and our score sailed off the chart. The only message we took from that was, If we’re still happily in love after all that, this marriage will make it.

Imagine, though, if our list had contained real traumatic events. The Adverse Childhood Experiences test gives people a score based on what they have endured as children. The connection between abuse or neglect and current distress is all too solid, but a numerical score of 0 to 10 feels a little fatalistic. How could you not check the averages, compare your score, and decide you must be broken? In the effort to acknowledge past hardship, we forget to emphasize how it can be transcended. How strong someone is just to have survived that hardship. How its effects can wind up making them wiser, more compassionate, and stronger still.

Until recently, people were urged to shut up, keep going, tough out their pain, “be strong.” Now that we know better, we instinctively distrust any praise of strength. This makes it awfully hard to find the right attitude to take toward someone else’s pain.

I once dated a guy who informed me that every problem was either a catastrophe or an inconvenience—and most were inconveniences. But if inconveniences are branded “trauma”? Beneath the trivializing is an assumption “that distress can be explained by adverse life experiences alone.” Psychologist and professor Nick Haslam, who has written reams about trauma’s concept creep, complicates the current wisdom: “The idea we should move from asking what’s wrong with people to what happened to them sounds humane, but it can lead to simplistic trauma determinism.”

“Life experiences matter,” Haslam explains, “but they’re not all that matters. Only 4 percent of people who experience a DSM traumatic event develop PTSD, for example. Many biological, psychological and cultural factors play a role in mental ill health, not just traumatic experiences.”

Yet I am scared even to type that, because it feels like blaming the victims—those vulnerable to the worst aftereffects. We have done enough of that already.

“The structural reality is that there’s no cultural infrastructure for grief, for healing, for slowness.”

—Annie Wright

A therapist finds that her young clients are “announcing their diagnoses—attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression—almost before telling me their names.” In some cases, their diagnosis is accurate. “In many others, however, the psychiatric label seemed more like a compromise between uncomfortable feelings and the desire for social acceptance.” The label excused, explained, validated, and distracted.

What is the harm? Below the article, a mother writes that her daughters’ friends claim trauma in an effort “to outdo each other on what and why they were special, precious, and in need of sympathy. And then some of them set a limit on their abilities as a result, becoming victims and lacking in any agency to work through it all.”

We are all trauma-informed now. Counselors were brought to the opening of a recent history exhibit to help visitors process an injustice that occurred almost seven decades ago, while down the street, people who have no home are ignored. The political right keeps trying to bat away the necessary irritations of political correctness, which were uncomfortable, accusatory, and forced too fast. Nonetheless, language guides our attention. And we are learning more every day about the damage we do to one another when we ignore real pain.

Here is the irony, though. Understanding damage means you can no longer normalize it. The easiest next step is to pathologize it—which can do even more damage. As British sociologist Frank Furedi points out, “in a culture where individuals are incited to regard themselves at risk, relatively routine encounters are likely to be perceived as potentially damaging.” Good intentions paved this path: to erase stigma, people emphasized vulnerability, and to become inclusive, they emphasized individual identity. But that made it easy for people to perceive “slights as harmful to their psyche,” rather than letting them roll off and evaporate.

Jonathan Haidt calls this a nocebo effect: once society tells you a certain kind of event is traumatizing, your brain learns to experience it as a severe injury. Normal social friction becomes threatening. You feel increasingly fragile. Soon you are pronounced a snowflake or lured into pricey, snake-oiled therapies.

We seem to have lost faith, as a society, in the human ability to recover from adversity, distress, even damage. We admire resilience in historic figures or long-oppressed subcultures. We forget that we might each have the same capacity.

“We are pathologizing people for being affected by a world that is objectively unwell.”

—Nadia Addesi

I ask friends and strangers how they define trauma. Responses come instantly:

“A blow to one’s body, one’s ego, or one’s world.”

An experience “so deeply hateful or hurtful that the psyche is unable—indeed, refuses—to process it.”

“The wound left behind when what happened to us overwhelms what we knew how to carry and then quietly begins shaping how we see ourselves, other people, and the world.”

An experience that “renders the world unsafe…changes and challenges one’s abilities for living their life…[and] becomes a portal through which one must struggle on a regular or unexpected basis.”

“A blow to one’s physical, emotional, and/or spiritual health that refuses to abide by the boundaries of time and stay in the past.”

“Trauma can change your DNA,” one friend says, stopping me cold. I look it up. A traumatic experience can add chemical tags to our genes, changing how our body reads and follows their instructions. This can change our response to stress, inflammation, and fear. Our cells keep an epigenetic diary, and our body rereads it, heightening physical and emotional sensitivity. (The tags can also be gently removed by time, understanding, and good health.)

The fact that so many people, chosen at random, had a ready, carefully thought-out understanding of trauma shakes me a bit. Am I being too glib about it, just because TikTok jumbles the real with the silly? Watching an Almodovar film about the Spanish Civil War, I hear an old woman, a vieja, explain that “something breaks inside you and will never be the same.”

That pain must be honored. But so must the resilience that allows people to go on afterward, to study and work and laugh and love. After surviving the Holocaust and losing most of their family, therapist Esther Perel’s parents “did not just want to survive. They wanted to revive.” They did so by becoming playful and creative and vibrant. They had found trauma’s natural antidote. And their example has helped their daughter help millions of people heal and return to life. Return to relationship, she might add, because true resilience comes from your connections to others.

We changed our language from “victim” to “survivor” to pay tribute to courage. But then we focused so hard on what people had survived, we forgot they were more than that.

“While it’s kind that people are trying to be sensitive, it presumes incompetence,” notes a Reddit user. “My father died sudden and unexpectedly when I was 10. And my entire life I had to sit through movies not only where parents died, but also where loved ones died and then somehow magically they reappear—they secretly aren’t dead, they reunite from beyond…you get to see or hug your loved one again. Not one single trigger warning. And I rolled with it. I learned how to cope, or compartmentalize, or whatever I needed to do to be okay. Presume competence.”

In just about any childhood, “something happened to you that cut you off from yourself,” notes physician and author Gabor Mate, and stopped you from feeling every emotion fully. There might have been “an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self.” If that experience overwhelmed your nervous system, it will reverberate. Every nervous system is wired a little differently, with a different tolerance and sensitivity. The more sensitive you are, the more pain you will feel. We need language to recognize that the damage is a matter of degree, not a hard and permanent category.

I once had a friend who was so angry, all the time, especially at one of her brothers, that I was sure she must have been abused. A knee-jerk assumption, born of worried exasperation. But after years of knowing her, I realized she was suffering from her own emotional reactivity, not from the magnitude of any particular experience.

Some of us yelp at a paper cut; others shrug off major surgery. All of it is pain. There is no hierarchy of suffering, no standard way to measure it or predict its aftermath. All we can guess is that if some do not feel loved, safe, and able to talk about what they have gone through, they still need to be heard. And social media lets them publish a memoir in miniature, a paragraph or two that will win attention, validation, and support.

But how much can anyone know from a paragraph or two, especially if the writers have yet to fully understand their own experience? Are we just triggering one another again and again on these platforms?

“We use the word ‘trauma’ a little too loosely.”

—Gabor Mate, MD

My husband and I tease about our dramatic standard poodle, who expresses his soul’s trials with mute eloquence. “He’s had Trauma,” one of us will remark. The other, channeling the dog, will intone, “I have suffered.”

This usually happens after his anal glands have been expressed. But in all seriousness, when you adopt a dog who had a hard previous life and talk to him ever so gently, acknowledging his trials and fears and bad memories, he will live in the palm of your hand, grateful to be not only safe but acknowledged. It took me two dogs to make my voice soft enough, rinsing away any amusement. (They soak up the sympathy so eagerly, nestling closer and holding your gaze, that it is hard not to smile. Probably because we do not allow ourselves such honesty.)

I happened upon this secret by accident, murmuring to a dog who had lived for four years in abysmal conditions, unloved, his paws splayed by the metal cage, grass a new and terrifying texture. Buddy was reserved and stoic until the day I stroked his head into my lap and whispered his pain back to him. Then his muscles loosened, something in him seemed to settle, and he began, the world’s most avid student, learning how to play.

All any of us really needs is to be heard. It is said that the difference between children who transcend abuse and those who live inside that pain forever, often even repeating the cycle, is simply one witness, one adult who sees what is happening and tells them it is not their fault. So why am I being a hardass about all this trauma talk?

Because it does not always heal you. Sometimes it is only a trap. We are at once desperate to remember and desperate to forget. The trick is knowing when, and how, to do each.

At least we finally understand that, to use the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s definitive book on the subject, The Body Keeps the Score. We feel emotion in every fiber of our being; we carry pain in our spines, our hearts, our memories. After trauma, a natural protective mechanism lets us come to grips, over time, with what has hurt us. Like the immune system, it can overdo this protection, devising padlocks and barricades that trap pain in bone and muscle, adding to our suffering instead of gradually easing it. Ideally, though, the mind rushes to our aid, then slowly steps back.

Trauma culture does the opposite. It tells us to hold on to our defenses, and to the experience that warranted them, long after the danger is past. Forever, in fact.

Any diagnosis can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You read the checklist: mm, yeah, I do that. I do that, too. Oh my God, this is me! A label can clarify what you are enduring and help you recover, find the right care, qualify for insurance coverage. But here is the problem with medicalization: “Seeing oneself as a permanently wounded victim of a trauma may be less conducive to resilience than interpreting the experience in less catastrophic terms.” In one rather alarming study, people with loose, expansive definitions of trauma were more likely to brand a distressing video clip personally traumatic. They experienced more intense, negative emotions, and they reported post-traumatic symptoms afterward.

In this new cottage industry, an array of “experts” offer to release trauma from your body, sure that it is present if you have headaches, chronic pain, constant fatigue, insomnia, restless sleep, gut issues, chronic muscle tension, anxiety, depression, postpartum psychosis, ovarian cysts, autoimmune disease, inattention, detachment, or brain fog—or “can’t bring your knee all the way into your ribs.”

Find your symptom on one of these lists, and you will be sucked into trauma culture. Meanwhile, you will be casting about to find the source of this trauma. Your parents? Your partner? Your ex? “Betrayal trauma” is easy to point to; we all routinely betray someone we love in some small way. “Undiagnosed narcissism”—who could defend themselves against that charge? What about “emotional distance,” or “toxicity”? All are real, but easily overinterpreted. A lazy therapist will listen to your account, the dug-up memory snippets made vivid by your current distress, and nod; this is easy work for them. They might encourage you to discard your parents or ditch your spouse. The real cause of your insomnia or indigestion might never be addressed.

“Being a victim is what’s cool now,” announces a Reddit user. People are becoming obsessed with trauma, insists another. A third disagrees, saying what people are obsessed with is “HEALING and finding meaning.” We have stopped writing pain off to God, fate, or karma, they point out. We have become aware of just how much people suffer, and we are pushing for ways to heal and break cycles and end stigma. The real definition of “trauma obsessed” should be the people glued to violent photos, disaster porn, videos of people dying on camera.

Maybe so. But the word is used like water, and its meaning is draining away.

“We have hollowed [‘trauma’] of meaning by overuse and misuse, by making it a catchall for anything that challenges and disquiets us.”

—Maria Popova

Why do we joke about trauma, make sarcastic claims to it? When you are only a spectator, it is terrifying to realize that some random event could continue to jolt and constrict you for years afterward. Maybe we lighten the name to diffuse that impact, make it less scary for the rest of us.

My husband is kind, caring, and sensitive—but you would never have known it if you had heard the wisecracks he and a college friend used to make in the wake of horrific disasters. They took up humor as armor. I winced, but I was too deeply in love to object. In our talks with the Episcopal priest we had chosen to marry us, I described Andrew’s sense of humor as “quirky.” She was taking surreptitious notes for her sermon—in which she announced that he had a “kinky” sense of humor, sending a ripple through the pews.

We laughed about it, but marriage lowers your tolerance, and I could not laugh at his sardonic jokes. Faced with relentless wifely disapproval, Andrew eventually gave them up. For him and his pal, they had only been a coping mechanism. To me, they sounded careless and trivializing.

So does the dramatic whining about tiny traumas on TikTok. “They’ve grown up online and the internet is the greatest platform for drama to ever exist,” an older user observes. I am grinning at the truth of that when another comment brings me up short: “I remember reading when my kids were teenagers that the kids who were small during 9/11 didn’t understand that the TV was showing the same plane hitting the same buildings. They thought their world was ending, that planes were randomly crashing into hundreds of buildings and were afraid their house, their dog, their family, could be next. And many parents were so distraught they didn’t realize how much their kids were absorbing.”

Now I am the one guilty of carelessness. These kids’ bodies respond reflexively to active shooter drills. They dealt with isolation, fear, and depression during the pandemic. They are told daily that the planet is burning, species are dying off, food and air and water are toxic. They are watching AI steal the careers they were made for, and they cannot find any substitute guaranteed to allow them a living. Marriage is out of style, having children requires a blaze of optimism, and forget the white picket fence; nobody can even afford a house.

Maybe many young people do have a heightened trauma response, and their light references are not so much trivializing as confessional. Maybe we did not make the world feel safe enough. Maybe we do not want to listen too closely to the unguarded response of the young to the problems we have collectively caused.

“Capitalism loves trauma culture.”

—Catherine Liu

Trauma culture might be the last prank of late-stage capitalism. We have branded our own pain.

“The scheme is perfect,” my husband remarks. “The root cause of much of our trauma is economic, so what do you do? Distract from economics, focus on individual trauma, and monetize it.”

The same warning sounds on every page of Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, by cultural theorist Catherine Liu. She even dares to accuse Oprah—along with psychologists and psychiatrists, the pharmaceutical industry, health insurance companies, academics, and the media—of monetizing other people’s pain. Across the past four decades, the impulse to reform has been weakened, she points out. Elevating and expanding the concept of trauma shifted our focus from systemic social change to individual pain and healing. People compartmentalized themselves into identity groups and vied over who had been most hurt. “Every group had a claim, some more objectively valid than others, but the solutions were invariably individual, obtained through pharmacological intervention, positive thinking, self-help gurus or simply public recognition of one’s suffering.”

Liu sees trauma culture as a deliberate distraction. Because the trauma script left out the economic context, it weakened any push for economic reform, and it also gave the wealthy permission to absolve themselves of responsibility to those in need. “Even the richest person in the world can claim the mantle of righteousness woven from a difficult childhood and the ongoing suffering that it causes.”

Trauma culture also commodified confession, and once celebs started opening up, the rest of us followed suit. Often our real problem was “the chronic stress of living in a ruthlessly competitive, exploitative, dishonest, corrupt, and punishing world,” Liu maintains. Yet the 2020 Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma “recognized almost every kind of suffering other than the slow violence of economic deprivation and wage work.”

Born in the 1990s at Yale, trauma studies avoided politics and focused on therapy. Instead of bringing issues into a public sphere where people could take concerted action, academics divided us, “construct[ing] social spheres as different halls of mirrors where different identities could be reflected and ‘seen.’” Revelation took the place of revolution. Its ideals were “small bites of prevention, awareness, and witnessing,” not systemic reform.

“Today’s political class can barely bring itself to pretend concern with the material needs of citizens,” Liu observes dryly. Economic suffering is tiptoed around; individual suffering is “decontextualized, medicalized, pathologized, and commodified.” The old way of coping was noble, tinged with masochism: you “stayed strong” for others’ sake or “offered it up to God,” enduring for the sake of some larger meaning. In a secular society, suffering is not sure what to make of itself.

And that makes it easy to exploit.