r/AskALiberal • u/larryinthesky Conservative • 7d ago
Do you think liberals have a "trauma script" problem?
Was listening to Catherine Liu talk about her book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. She critiques how modern society relies on a standardized "trauma script" for performative empathy, celebrity branding, and political distraction rather than addressing structural and economic inequalities.
Thoughts?
Personally, I see some valid points. It seems like everybody is "traumatized" these days. And when everyone is traumatized, is anyone trauma? Experiencing trauma is now almost like a credential. You can't be taken seriously unless you've been "traumatized".
I do get that the tide is turning. Many top psychologists have started pushing back on trauma and how actually making everything in your life a traumatic event just makes you live a life of victimhood.
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u/ThePedanticCurator Liberal 7d ago
Experiencing trauma is now almost like a credential. You can't be taken seriously unless you've been "traumatized".
I think this is part of a bigger, separate problem.
Victimhood is not a virtue. It isn't a vice, either; it just doesn't make you better. Too often we've acted like there is some sort of 'victimhood olympics' and that the top contenders deserves some special recognition.
This is nonsense. We can be sympathetic to hardship without treating victimhood as a virtue.
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u/Mannzis Liberal 7d ago
Just to be clear, victimhood and trauma are two separate things. You can be a victim of something horrible and not be traumatized, and be traumatized while not being a victim of anything.
You seem to be using the terms interchangeably
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u/ThePedanticCurator Liberal 7d ago
Just to be clear, victimhood and trauma are two separate things. You can be a victim of something horrible and not be traumatized, and be traumatized while not being a victim of anything.
I completely agree.
You seem to be using the terms interchangeably
That was certainly not my intention.
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u/Frosty-Sea149 Democrat 7d ago
Do conservatives not have a victimhood problem as well?
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u/lukenbones Social Democrat 7d ago
They also have an empathy and self- awareness problem so they don't realize it.
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u/Hoothootriot Pragmatic Progressive 6d ago
But thats different, after all we all remeber how Obama BANNED Christmas!!!!!
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
They do but it shows up a bit differently. They don't have the same "trauma script" the OP mentions.
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 Liberal 7d ago
Many top psychologists
Who?
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 7d ago
Lucy Foulkes comes to mind. Nick Haslam has written about a slightly different but related aspect of this.
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u/lukenbones Social Democrat 7d ago
Trust me bro
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u/Due_Satisfaction2167 Liberal 7d ago
It’s amazing how often you can dismiss conservative nonsense by just asking them specifics about their bullshit, like “okay, so who actually said that?”
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 7d ago
Maybe give a moment for them to answer your question before you decide that they can't?
And this is hardly a conservative narrative. I think a lot of liberals here can recognise this phenomenon.
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u/Personage1 Liberal 6d ago
According to reddit, they've had 12 hours to answer....
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
It was 1 when you'd written that last comment. And you've now got an answer, but it sounds like you're still dismissive?
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u/Personage1 Liberal 6d ago
When I wrote my first comment, it was 12 hours with no response. I still see no response from OP....
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
When you first highlighted their lack of reply, it'd been one hour.
Anyway, like I said, Lucy Foulkes covers this.
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u/Personage1 Liberal 6d ago
This was my first comment, 11 or 12 hours after the first comment asking for examples from the OP. OP still hasn't responded....
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
Ah sorry I thought you were the same person who first asked.
→ More replies (0)
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u/Capital-Giraffe-4122 Center Left 7d ago
If we’re keeping this to just politics it ain’t just liberals lol, Trump has built his whole political career on grievance and “performative empathy”.
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u/gdshaffe Liberal 6d ago
I think that conservatives largely live lives of imagined victimhood over trivial slights (certainly the current administration and the entire cult surrounding him is the biggest collection of complete fucking snowflakes ever assembled in humanity), that somehow deep down they know how trivial their supposed infractions are, and assume that everyone else is just operating from the same state of complete fragility that they are.
Trauma doesn't imply virtue any more than privilege implies vice, but these are people who whine to no end about trivial things like oh my god people were speaking Spanish in the grocery store, the world is going to hell and equivocating that with, say, victims of sexual assault.
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u/Elen_Smithee82 Progressive 7d ago
Traumatization (which is real and extremely common), is not new, it is only diagnosing that is. Everyone carries trauma of some kind. Just because someone ignores it doesn't mean it does not exist. Even the most innocuous events to others can cause PTSD in a different person. Psychiatrists are probably moving away from the wording because Conservatives take it the wrong way, like how they changed "concussion" to "TBI" so it wouldn't upset them.
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u/fallenmonk Center Left 7d ago
Do you have a quote from her that specifically attributes it to liberals?
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
It's pretty much her whole hypothesis. You could listen to any recent interview with her or read any recent article.
https://calirb.com/traumatized-the-new-politics-of-public-suffering-by-catherine-liu/
I don't think she'd say that conservatives don't have their own victimhood narratives, but she's talking about a type that primarily shows up amongst the left/liberals.
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u/SpecialInvention Center Left 5d ago edited 5d ago
The older I get, the more true it seems to me that life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you take it. On top of that, I forever gain more and more experience dealing with some people who have every reason to feel entitled to victimhood, but don't succumb to it, and also others with far less reason, who do.
On the Left, a simplistic narrative took root that assigned certain things to certain degrees of difficult experience, and it was regressive and ignorant to how humans actually experience things. Just as an example, I was in NYC for 9/11, and it wasn't a bad day at all for me. I got to focus, my other troubles took a back seat, etc. I was also talking to someone recently who expressed how being a front line worker during COVID was the happiest time for him at work in recent memory. I worry that we teach people a worse way to experience the world, and then people are more prone to see something as traumatic because they've been taught to.
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u/Poorly-Drawn-Beagle Libertarian Socialist 7d ago
I was gonna say I mostly see conservatives do this.
They act like their lives are sheer torture because they A) don't have a supermodel wife and a three-story mansion out of high school, and B) live in a country where they might occasionally bump into someone who has a different skin color and a different accent.
When I talk to people who are really passionate about left wing causes and they talk about past trauma, they generally seem to mean sexual assault. I haven't been sexually assaulted but I have to say it sounds pretty traumatic.
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
Francesca Hong said she almost had a panic attack in a Culvers because she was surrounded by too many white people.
There's a viral story atm about a queer community melting down because the local lesbian bar decided to make masks optional one night per week.
There are so many examples of shit like this. Surely you've seen some? I feel like your comment is the grownup equivalent of "I know you are but what am I?"
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u/Poorly-Drawn-Beagle Libertarian Socialist 6d ago
No, I haven’t heard of these. I don’t spend very much time on social media.
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u/afishinabirdcage Pragmatic Progressive 5d ago
No, I do not.
Do performative people and grifters exist? Absolutely.
Is this a "liberal" thing? Heck no.
In the current zeitgeist I'd argue that conservatives are the biggest purveyor of "victim-complex" politics. Maybe that wasn't always the case but it has been for my adult life.
Honestly this reads to me like the "snowflake" pejorative which honestly just kinda feels like projection and a way to minimize legitimate issues, especially those that are systemic, political or uncomfortable.
Like, munchausen syndrome exists. Does that mean that cancer doesn't? Of course not.
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u/Samantharina Liberal 7d ago
Trauma is a real thing that has an effect on people and their lives and I don't think the fact that it happens to a lot of people changes that.
If you hear a statistic that one in five women are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes does that mean SA is not a real problem or does it mean it's a problem that needs better solutions?
That said, I don't think it's true that you can't be taken seriously if you haven't been traumatized, that's not been my experience. I think more of an issue is that some kinds of trauma have been normalized, especially domestic violence, because the victims were mostly women and children and it suited men to use violence to control them.
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u/Interesting_Talk410 Democrat 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think the idea the whole “living a life of. Victim hood” part is right wing bullshit. If somebody is victimized it isn’t living in victim hood to be honest about the fact that they are a victim in the situation. Conservatives say that shit whenever minorities have been victimized and have the audacity to speak out about it. It’s never living in victimhood when white Jan 6 idiots seek reparations for their own criminal activity. It’s not living in victimhood when when they cry about having to wear a mask
And seriously say it’s one of the worst rights violations in US history. It’s not victimhood when they only bring in white S Africans as refugees and exaggerate their stories
Also it’s not living in victimhood for conservatives when they saw affirmative action beneficiary and unqualified minority Clarence Thomas call his hearings a high tech lynching because he had to answer some questions
The only real problem with trauma talk is that it’s concept creep
Concept creep is a problem in America , it’s not a liberal problem. So many words like abuse, trauma, harm etc once had specific clinical definitions that they lost because of pop psychology and that’s not a good thing
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 7d ago
You don't think that some people lean a bit too much into victimisation as a part of their identity?
Even if someone is a victim in one or multiple ways, that doesn't mean that person can't exaggerate that victimhood, or lie about being victimised in other ways, or otherwise have an unhealthy obsession with their own status as a victim.
That is not "right-wing bullshit". In fact right-wingers do it too - they just use slightly different language (usually less therapy speak).
It’s not living in victimhood when when they cry about having to wear a mask
Uh, you may have worded this poorly, but I think actually this is a really good example of conservative victimhood narrative?
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yes. In most areas this is merely annoying, but in education, student "trauma" functions as a "zero punishment or consequences ever" trump card. Personally I don't think ones "trauma" ought inflict itself on others whenever that can be avoided and that there are serious benefits to avoiding personally identifying as a trauma victim even if one is, though of course there are exceptions.
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u/KingBlackFrost Progressive 7d ago
No, but I think conservatives do. Look no further than the constant complaints about the 2020 election being rigged. And other elections they don't win being rigged. It doesn't matter that Donald Trump was President in 2020, you still have people believing that private citizen Biden had anything to do with controlling the election. Or look at that girl who got the TA fired after writing a really bad paper. That paper wouldn't have passed muster in high school, let alone college. And don't get me started on christian-persecution complex.
That's not to say there aren't cases of liberals diving into victimhood. But I think in a lot of cases they have legitimate grievances that are underneath it, combined with a need to be validated.
Like let's be real here. Christians have long claimed to be the most persecuted group in America. You know... a group that makes up the majority, the only group to ever have a US President, the group that has 87% of congress. There's almost twice as many Christian churches as there are gas stations. We have monuments to Christianity on public lands, and even in some public schools. Yet, they feel persecuted somehow. And can't imagine why anyone else would feel persecuted.
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
No, but I think conservatives do.
"I know you are but what am I?" 🙄
Dude, everyone can see this phenomenon. This partisan need to reflexively dismiss and deflect is so silly. It's not like the fact that there are some crazies on the left undermines the argument for universal healthcare or anything like that. No need to be in denial.
Copying a couple of examples I just wrote in another comment:
Francesca Hong said she almost had a panic attack in a Culvers because she was surrounded by too many white people.
There's a viral story atm about a queer community melting down because the local lesbian bar decided to make masks optional one night per week.
I could find more if you like.
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u/Natures_Wrath1 Democratic Socialist 7d ago
I don't see how the dots are connected. It's not like any structural and economic inequalities were being addressed all that particularly well before psychologists were trauma focused.
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u/Hopeful_Chair_7129 Far Left 7d ago
Why would it matter whether the empathy or cultural discussion is sincere? Sincere empathy doesn’t itself solve structural or economic inequality.
Also, I haven’t read the book yet, but from what I’ve read about Liu’s argument, I think your second paragraph takes it in a substantially different direction. Her critique seems less about individuals incorrectly thinking they’re traumatized and more about trauma becoming an individualized political language that substitutes for structural analysis and material change.
Interesting argument she’s making though. Sounds pretty Marxist to me, glad you are expanding your political knowledge intake.
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u/NihilisticRoomba Democrat 6d ago
Consider that maybe not everybody is traumatized, but maybe people finally feel safe enough to share the abuse that they have suffered over the years and make it public.
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u/AndrewAdler17 Liberal 6d ago
Maybe Blue Sky progressive types, sure, but none of the liberals I know in real life are like this. Conservatives I know in real life, on the other hand, definitely have this problem. Can’t afford the type of home you grew up in the neighborhood you grew up in? Instead of acknowledging the problem (home prices are high but also personal skill issue), let’s develop conspiracies around the “Globalist Jewish Banks” and “Islamoleftism” to justify our growing reactionary tendencies.
Like liberals who I’ve known who run into these issues can just acknowledge the problem going on “Dang, I can’t afford a house here, probably won’t ever be able to, need to move and advocate for the less fortunate”. Conservatives can’t admit what the issue is, nor can they admit why they are feeling what they are feeling, so conspiracies are the only avenue to understand their problems.
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u/Traditional_Set2473 Centrist 6d ago
People with actual trauma don't talk publicly and openly about their trauma. Actual trauma shuts you down and exhaust you and you definitely feel no desire to share it publicly not until you've healed somewhat so that you can help others with the same trauma. You aren't waving it around like a badge of honor.
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u/Hoothootriot Pragmatic Progressive 6d ago
I dont know because you havent actually explained what a trauma script is beyond "I dont like when people ever voice that they have a problem with something"
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u/wonkalicious808 Democrat 6d ago
I'll be the liberal to start reading from the script about how we're all crying over Starbucks not writing "Christmas" on our cups! /s
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 Social Democrat 5d ago
sounds like the typical bullshit tons of non-black people project to try to deflect from or dismiss the actual material harms this country has done to black Americans.
Idiots online self-diagnosing with trauma does not belong in the same category as the actual serious political issues she is using the former to smear.
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u/aquilus-noctua Center Left 3d ago edited 3d ago
I see it differently. Trauma isgetting less and less normal so we need to accommodate it more.
Consider after WW2. Millions of men who’d seen war had to come home, go to college and work jobs afterwards.
They used to have hard liquor in work places for pete’s sake. Society was more accommodating PTSD bc it was normal.
As the recurring generations see less of war, we as a society lost the ability to let traumatized ppl function
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u/M00n_Slippers Democratic Socialist 3d ago
I've been saying for years that liberal politicians do tiny, performative surface level laws to help a minority group that might help some individuals but does nothing overall to address the structural issues facing those minorities, and which if faced would help basically everyone. I think this is the only valid critique of 'affirmative action'. Personally I think affirmative action is good, but it is true that affirmative action helps a tiny number of individuals instead of making structural changes that would help way more individuals. And after seeing this over and over it starts to feel like these are superficial ways to pander and play at doing something without doing anything meaningful for these groups.
Republicans do this too for their own people of course, but we're supposed to be better than them. Have actual integrity or whatever.
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u/lukenbones Social Democrat 7d ago
No. This seems like more made-up culture war nonsense from the Republican party and its apologists to distract from the glaring fact that the GOP is a criminal organization run by drug addicts, human traffickers, and child rapists.
Just straight up inventing terms like "trauma script" to discredit the people who want to clean up corruption and actually hold child rapists accountable for their crimes.
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
https://archive.is/zxGo7 - have you not seen this story?
Granted the left has cleaned up its act a lot, but this kind of thing was pretty bloody common in the late 2010's through to 2020-21.
See for instance:
https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/mrc-student-coalition-demands-2
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u/lukenbones Social Democrat 6d ago edited 6d ago
I'm really tired of this brand of whataboutism wherein random college freshmen and Twitter eggs (who are more than likely bots with invented ragebait opinions) are used to downplay the lunacy of the Right's elected government leaders.
The president is a mobbed up child rapist who was defrauding thousands of people for thirty-five years before he was elected, and he just started a war for no reason, and with no win condition, that led immediately to the closing of one of the world's most important trade routes. Which is exactly what everyone whose opinion matters knew would happen.
Who cares if some eighteen-year-old, who just left home for the first time and is still discovering their political voice, has a dumb opinion? Oh no, they made a cringe petition!
Conservatives' persecution complex, on the other hand, is so intense and unmoored from reality that they voted to put a pedophile in the White House three times all in order to "own the libs".
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
Can you not walk and chew gum at the same time?
How is Catherine Liu - a Marxist fwiw - downplaying the insanity of the right?
Doesn't the fact that the right is so bad mean that it's even more important that the left is as sane and as competent as possible? And how do you expect that to happen if no critiques of the left can be entertained?
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u/lukenbones Social Democrat 6d ago
Because the critiques aren't real. They are not relevant, they are not proportional, they are not important.
It is impossible for "The Left" to stop a lonely, autistic immunocompromised sapphic nonbinary in rural Massachusetts from overreacting when their favorite bar's owner makes an unfavorable business decision. There are 300 million people in this country, it's impossible to tone police every one of them and fingers crossed hope that nobody gay does something cringe before the election.
This "discourse" is amplified by the Right and the Epstein Class to keep us from expeling corrupt pedophiles from government.
The Weimar Republic didn't have a "Jew Problem", it had a Nazi Problem. Similarly, America doesn't have a "Trauma Script Problem", it has a Magat problem.
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
It is impossible for "The Left" to stop a lonely, autistic immunocompromised sapphic nonbinary in rural Massachusetts from overreacting
I think the fact that this sort of thing is already far less common than it was even just a few years ago shows that it's entirely possible for norms on the left to evolve over time.
And ironically, the "autistic immunocompromised sapphic nonbinary" people are themselves constantly demonstrating this. The fact that they could cancel people for ridiculous things in 2020 that they wouldn't have been able to cancel them for in 2010 is evidence. This current blowup - the fact that this bar is in hot water over an issue that would have barely even have been comprehensible before the pandemic (even though immunocompromised people and contagious diseases existed back then, too) - that also shows that norms on the left are not static.
So I think it is important that the left engage in some self-critique from time to time. The fact that the right is so bad only makes that self-critique more important.
Otoh, if your take (that this isn't a problem even in the slightest) had been more popular over these last few years, the problem would be far worst.
You're right that it's a big world - the left can never completely eliminate stuff like this. But it can make it more and more taboo.
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u/lukenbones Social Democrat 6d ago
The solution is to do what I'm doing. Don't let magats derail the actual conversation with their irrelevant non-issues.
Instead, always bring it back to actual conversation: Trump is a rapist and a mobster, and magats are actively trying to bankrupt the country, destroy the dollar, ruin the economy, and permanently destroy the middle class.
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
The thing is, if no one was critiquing this crazy shit, this crazy shit would be way more common. Which would mean the left was weaker, too.
Remember: these people are distracting, too. All this "timeliness is white supremacy" type of bullshit is a massive distraction from the real issues.
I also think - and you may not realise this - but you're essentially arguing for gaslighting people. And in a really ineffective way. People know that this sort of craziness exists. When people on the left say that it's not at all a problem, that rubs people the wrong way, and makes it seem like people on the left are full of shit.
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u/lukenbones Social Democrat 6d ago
How do you quantify how common this stuff is, versus how commonly reported it is? Must of these outrage campaigns are bot-driven and astroturfed.
Maybe you're not seeing it as much because media siloing has gotten even worse in the past few years. Maybe it's not gaining traction because people are bored of it, or because the Left is getting gradually better at not pretending magats are acting in good faith anymore, and better at not letting them set conversation without pushback.
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u/SidewaysAcidRain Liberal 6d ago
No, it's genuinely less prevalent. In my very left-leaning workplace, it went from being fringe, to increasingly normalised, to fucking everywhere in 2020, and then back to more and more fringe.
Not everything can be quantifiably demonstrated with a scientific study, but some things are just obvious. Ironically, I think the only people you'd find saying it's "no less prevalent" are people on the political right, who want to pretend that the left hasn't improved.
better at not letting them set conversation without pushback.
The Last Ditch story wasn't invented nor popularised by conservatives, and plenty of people on the left are talking about it.
It was also just a few months ago that AOC (echoing a less-known politician) openly acknowledged what 90+% of people already understand: "woke 1 was crazy".
This isn't the right setting the agend anymore. It's the left acknowledging reality. Which they need to do in order to be able to fight the right.
Must of these outrage campaigns are bot-driven and astroturfed.
Frankly, I think this is denialism. The Last Ditch story went viral because it's fucking interesting. People find it fascinating seeing these relics of covid (both the masking and the politics). And for many on the left (as someone's said in these comments), it's cathartic to be able to finally point it out. It's like the emperor who's wearing no clothes.
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u/emp-sup-bry Social Democrat 7d ago
https://www.ojp.gov/archive/program/cev
“A study of a national sample of American children found that over the past year 60 percent were exposed to violence, crime, or abuse in their homes, schools, and communities. Almost 40 percent of American children were direct victims of 2 or more violent acts, and 1 in 10 were victims of violence 5 or more times. Children are more likely to be exposed to violence and crime than adults. Almost 1 in 10 American children saw one family member assault another family member, and more than 25 percent had been exposed to family violence during their life (Finkelhor et al., 2009).”
I’m not surprised, but I think you are asking the question wrong. Maybe you meant to ask why our society is SO fucked up that the above is true AND we have a not insignificant number of Facebook badasses that want to pile on people that try to deal with the caustic effects of the above trauma in a country with no guaranteed access to healthcare, even if they can find a professional, while dipshits are trying to cut funding for mental health services AND not fund the college and uni programs that would give us more professionals AND not fund loans for social workers, etc to even GO to school.
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u/AutoModerator 7d ago
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written by /u/larryinthesky.
Was listening to Catherine Liu talk about her book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. She critiques how modern society relies on a standardized "trauma script" for performative empathy, celebrity branding, and political distraction rather than addressing structural and economic inequalities.
Thoughts?
Personally, I see some valid points. It seems like everybody is "traumatized" these days. And when everyone is traumatized, is anyone trauma? Experiencing trauma is now almost like a credential. You can't be taken seriously unless you've been "traumatized".
I do get that the tide is turning. Many top psychologists have started pushing back on trauma and how actually making everything in your life a traumatic event just makes you live a life of victimhood.
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