Is Everyone Traumatized, or No one?

Trauma Culture, Therapy Speak, and the Healing we need

Art by Daniel Popper

The Double Narrative of the Trauma Trend

Therapy speak has taken over social media. Everyone is either autistic, ADHD, or carrying a cluster of personality disorders. Everyone’s ex is a narcissist. Oh, and everything is a trauma response.

There are two dominant narratives about this.

On one side, conservative thinkers argue that the word “trauma” is being overused. People are not in pain, they’re just “chronic victims”. Some of their critiques are valid - there IS a trend of overidentification with being the victim - but their lack of empathy and understanding for genuine suffering is where they lose me.

On the other hand, left-leaning thinkers like Gabor Maté offer a different perspective. Much like Krishnamurti's quote, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society,” Maté argues that trauma is both widespread and misunderstood, that our baseline of “normal” isn’t quite the ideal symbol of peak psychological well-being.

That people may seem functional, perhaps they have a family, they own a home, they seem “successful” to their peers, but they might still carry unresolved, yet normalized, symptoms of trauma.

As Mate and others like Laurence Heller and Pete Walker point out, trauma isn’t always about one big event; like being in a war, but can include a culmination of smaller events occurring consistently over a period of time, like consistent physical or emotional abuse, inconsistent caregiving, what we now know as developmental trauma or complex trauma.

I believe that both perspectives hold truth: trauma is more widespread than we realize, but we must be careful not to turn it into an identity or use it to bypass responsibility.

Even Bessel Van Der Kolk, one of the pioneers of the modern trauma movement, once said, “When trauma becomes your identity, that’s a dangerous thing.”

---

The Birth Of a Prozac Nation

I am an elder millennial. I wasn’t even a pre-teen when Prozac Nation hit the shelves. SSRIs were a normal part of my family, and many of my peers were on Ritalin. It was the moment when getting a psychiatric diagnosis became “cool”, not “weird”.

Because I lived through the dawn of this hyper-identified mental illness culture, but also saw the limitations and issues, I feel I can speak to a nuance that gets missed on both sides of the conversation.

Yes, psychiatrists were (and still are) over-diagnosing people. I was misdiagnosed myself. But now, young people are self-diagnosing, via TikTok videos and 60-90 second clips from influencers.

I’ve watched people identify with their diagnosis, cling to it, and then use it as an excuse for their behaviour. These days, it goes even further, where people will list in their Instagram bios various mental illnesses they hold like badges of identity.

People are suffering, and I don’t believe that most people are “faking it” for attention. We are a culture starved for meaning, connection, and understanding. The hunger for a diagnosis is often just a hunger to be seen.

---

When Therapy Replaces a Parent’s Love

When I was around 6, I saw my first therapist..

My mother, a psychiatric nurse, thought that the messy, conflict-ridden divorce that she and my father went through would have an impact on me. She was right - it did.

So my brother and I were sent to therapy. After our first session, he made a joke that the therapist looked like “The Incredible Hulk”. I spent the rest of the sessions laughing, cracking jokes and not taking him seriously. I coped with humour. I was six. I didn’t want to be there; I wanted to have fun with my friends.

Let’s unpack this. Yes, I needed support. But I needed support from my mother, my father, or any loving, attuned family member—not a random stranger who apparently looked like the Incredible Hulk.

I needed someone who could sit with me, ask me how I felt, and help me move through the difficult experience of having my family broken apart. But my parents were too busy fighting, with each other, over assets, over custody, and triangulating us, their children, in their divorce.

Most of all, I needed my parents to be something they weren’t - emotionally mature.

But in the absence of that, I was handed off to a therapist instead. A move that was more uncommon in the 90s than it likely is now.

That early rupture set the stage for a pattern that continued for years: not having family, but instead being handed off to professionals.

---

A Generation Diagnosed

Flash forward. I’m a teen. My friends and I listen to emo music, live in a state of emotional chaos, and have an endless addiction to mayhem and cigarettes.

“I’ve been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder,” a friend tells me proudly, as she drags on a cigarette. It gave her an edge. A shield. It was worn like a badge of honour: “See how crazy I am?”

Most of my friends were like her. Parents outsourced their care to therapists. There was an absence of love in the presence of privilege and money.

I remember around the time I got my first diagnosis. It was around 9/11. I was at a friend's house, who was in fact a drug dealer, watching people fall from the buildings in New York City at the tender age of 15. I was already so miserable, I thought to myself, “See? The world is as bad as I feel inside.” Watching that tragedy only affirmed my worst views of the world.

Shortly after, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and given my first SSRI.

Later came a bipolar diagnosis. I told the psychiatrist how I could not regulate my emotions. I was either annoyingly manic, a couldn’t-stop-talking, unhinged creative, or deeply depressed and hardly able to function.

The truth is that I was mimicking what I saw growing up: intense emotional immaturity. Screaming and yelling were how you got your point across. Hiding out, depressed, was what you did after. My prefrontal cortex was not fully developed, and my emotional brain was going haywire. I could not regulate my emotions because neither of my parents knew how to regulate theirs.

---

Handed Pills instead of Empathy

At 20, after a series of traumatic sexual experiences, I moved back in with my mother. She booked me to see another psychiatrist.

When I entered his office, he didn’t even look up.

He asked me what the problem was. I told him I was terrified of men. And since men were everywhere, I felt intense anxiety everywhere I went.

I didn’t tell him why I felt that way, because he didn’t ask.

He scribbled onto his pad for the whole appointment, which lasted all of 5 minutes. Didn’t look at me once. I was given an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, a lot of benzodiazepines, and a sleeping pill.

Things went from bad to worse after that last visit. I developed a severe drug addiction that ended with an addiction to opiates. Illicit drugs seemed to kill the emotional pain in a way that psychiatric drugs couldn’t. I wasn’t even as interested in getting high; they just made me feel normal. Most of all, they helped me regulate my emotions in a way I didn’t know how.

Eventually, I gave up hope that any therapist or psychiatrist would offer me any real support. Being handed a prescription and a diagnosis in the absence of empathy or concern left me disillusioned with psychiatry.

---

The Epidemic of Bad Therapy

I also saw firsthand the epidemic of “bad therapy”, where unskilled therapists tried to project their world view onto me in an attempt to help me.

Today, this world view is often leftist and political. Back then, when I was dealing with drug addiction in response to sexual abuse, the therapist wanted to focus on my “eating disorder” instead. Because that’s what she specialized in, of course.

Sure, I wasn’t eating that much, but that was because I was addicted to drugs.

I didn’t feel seen, heard, or understood. She hardly inquired about my inner world, what had been happening in my family, or even what had happened in the years leading up to my arrival in her office. Instead, she forced a perspective onto me.

She suggested documenting what I ate. I was given certain cognitive reframes and behavioural changes as a cure. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist handed me the medication I would need to blunt and stop those pesky emotions I couldn’t seem to deal with.

---

When the Labels End

“You’re not bipolar,” a therapist said to me plainly, over a decade later, after I described to him the experiences above.

“I know”, I answered.

Being shuttled from therapist to therapist, getting different diagnoses, in the absence of stable parents, created a wound I had to heal on my own, outside of the mainstream psychiatric paradigm.

I didn’t want pills. I also didn’t think there was anything fundamentally and biologically “wrong” with my brain. I just wanted to do what I could to improve myself, heal the emotional wounds of the past, and live and become the person I wanted to be.

I wanted to have healthy relationships, but I had no template for this.

Most of all, I didn’t need a diagnosis. I needed empathy. I needed an explanation for why I was like this so I could understand that, despite my deep desire to have stable and healthy relationships, I wasn’t capable of having them, and instead kept repeating the chaotic relationships that I saw with my parents.

---

---

Trauma is Not Just The Event

Perhaps everyone has experienced wounding events, but not everyone is traumatized by them.

My experience showed me that it’s not just about the event that happens, but also what happens after. It’s about the response to the event from those around you. When I was suffering, I was handed off to therapists, psychiatrists, diagnosed and medicated. This left a deep scar that solidified the event as traumatic, because I was alone with the pain.

By age 27, I was clean but had intense flashbacks where I felt like I was reliving traumatic events, I was chronically dissociated, and I had violent and recurring nightmares that would make me scream in my sleep.

Later, I learned that these are symptoms of complex PTSD. According to some conservatives, this doesn’t exist. You only experience trauma if you’ve been to war or been in a natural disaster. People like me need to need to get their shit together, and stop playing victim.

But this mainly happened after I did get my life together. I found a new job, new friends, and found new meaning. I didn’t cling to a diagnosis, nor did I believe the lie that my issues were due to biological factors, like a chemical imbalance in my brain. Yet, my past still haunted me, despite my best efforts to move on and pretend it didn’t happen.

---

When Labels Stop Self-Inquiry

I think what’s happening with therapy culture and therapy speak is that people are desperate for an explanation for their suffering. The diagnosis becomes validation. It becomes their way of making sense of what they’re experiencing, of giving it a name. Since a lot of this is happening online, it also helps them feel seen and understood by a community that shares the same issues. That, in itself, is very healing for most people.

However, there are also problems when people begin to identify with the diagnosis rather than work on the symptoms. They forget that the label is not who you are and that there are many parts of who you are that cannot be neatly explained by a diagnosis.

Therapy speak has also been weaponized by many who don’t want to look within.

You don’t need to look at your patterns in relationships when everyone around you is a narcissist.

You don’t need to learn how to regulate your emotions, because it’s just a trauma response.

You just need more safe spaces where you won’t have to ever get triggered.

These are ideas that I disagree with.

Therapy speak risks bypassing the pain and instead intellectualizes it into a concept. The labels people assign can stop people from inquiring further and instead turn people and experiences into a dehumanizing set of psychiatric diagnoses.

---

Seeing the Suffering Beyond the Symptoms

There are probably many people like me who don’t actually have the personality disorder they’re being labelled with, and in the presence of attuned, empathic relationships, where they are given room to feel and explore their emotions, it’s likely the symptoms of the mental illness would go away.

However, the answer is not just in critiquing the rise of therapy culture rather understanding the need it fulfills. Becoming anti-therapy is not helpful when it bypasses how it fulfills a real need for people to address their suffering, and it’s especially not helpful when the alternatives people have to offer instead are often overly simplistic and shallow.

Therapy culture arose in response to a real need - young adults wanted understanding for the difficult things that they experienced.

If you told me to “get your shit together” “find something meaningful in life” when I was a drug addicted teen living in chronically unstable conditions and embroiled in a series of abusive relationships, I probably would have rolled my eyes at you. Rightfully so. Because such a view bypasses the real pain that is underneath the symptoms.

We need to acknowledge the deep fracturing of of a generation who are growing up increasingly online and isolated from face-to-face relationships, and invite them towards relationships and healing rather than fixating on their psychiatric diagnosis.

The label is not meant to be a be-all-end-all to your understanding of yourself. When we replace labels with emotional literacy and accountability, we can tackle some of the symptoms of mental illness.

The cure for the pain is in finding safe places to explore your pain, rather than numb it away with psychiatric medication or other drugs.

The diagnosis also won’t heal. But connection to our bodies, our feelings, and healthy relationships do.

We don’t need more labels, especially when the label serves as a way to end the exploration of the intricacies of our own inner worlds or others. We need spaces where we can speak about our pain, without someone trying to fix it with medication, or trying to pretend that it’s “all in our heads”.

---

A Conservative Approach with a Liberal Understanding

Conservatives emphasize resilience, personal responsibility, and strong families. I agree that taking responsibility for what I could change was integral to my healing.

Victim narratives that centred on the ways I had been “oppressed” only made me feel much worse and kept me stuck in a state of disempowerment, blaming others instead of taking accountability myself.

But those with these views tend to gloss over legitimate suffering. They also tend to ignore the fact that “strong families” are not the default for many—that many of us came from quite dysfunctional family systems instead, and unless we examine the ways that impacted us, we are doomed to repeat these same dynamics in our own relationships as well.

They also tend to be focused on optics. A strong family is a man and a woman with children attending church. They tend to ignore that an image of a “happy family” may differ from the reality behind the scenes. And that often, behind a perfect picture, many families are not held together by love and emotional maturity, but by control, silence, and performance. In narcissistic family systems, for example, children are not loved for who they are but for how they make the family look. These families fall apart easily during conflict because they are based on presenting an image of a happy family in the absence of a genuinely loving relationship.

Liberal or more progressive thinkers often advocate for collective, community-rooted healing. There’s often an emphasis on systemic roots of trauma, like poverty, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism. They argue that individual suffering cannot be separated from the context of our society, and true healing requires transforming those systems.

There is wisdom here: trauma doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and social conditions make a difference. But sometimes these perspective leans so far into external causes that it becomes political and disempowering, focusing on victim - perpetrator - rescuer narratives, and risks neglecting the vital aspect of personal responsibility, inner work, and changing ourselves instead of trying to change the world.

Through my own experience, I’ve arrived at a different conclusion.

My deepest healing took place when I embraced the conservative mindset of personal responsibility, and yet coupled it with a genuine understanding of trauma, not an overly simplistic one. When I emphasized my own personal responsibility and resilience, while also not bypassing how I and others have been victimized by certain cultural norms (without that experience becoming a new disempowering identity), I started to heal, and my relationships finally began to change.

If we apply the idea of personal responsibility to trauma, you are not responsible for what other people have done to you, but you are responsible for the way you respond to your pain.

I also don’t think the concept of coddling teens and young adults with safe spaces and trigger warnings is an solution either. Often, these environments feel forced, get co-opted by specific political agendas, and quickly turn into places where people are policed for not adopting the dominant language or worldview, rather than being a place where different perspectives can truly be heard. Ideally, it is a child’s parents who should prepare them to encounter all sorts of upsetting things we may encounter in the world, and give them guidance how to handle it.

We create safe spaces with more emotionally mature, safe people, scattered around our communities - people who understand their inner worlds, are mature in how they respond to their emotions, and can teach us how to regulate ours.

I’ve also hardly met anyone who wants to make trauma an identity. Usually, I have found that people with symptoms of complex PTSD suffer with its symptoms long before they realize what they mean. Some of the experiences I lived through destroyed my capacity to function like a normal human being for over a decade, but I lived in denial, hoping it would go away if I ignored it. It didn’t. I couldn’t just “get my shit together”. It only went away when I turned to face the pain, acknowledged what happened, the impact it had on me, and took responsibility for what I could heal and change.

Healing can’t happen when we deny our suffering, nor can it happen if we cling to it.

We should instead see suffering as an essential component of life. No one in life gets out of this unharmed. We will lose the people we love, we will get sick, and we will die. It’s about facing it, naming it, and holding space for it.

In Buddhist terms, we can see that many of us are circling the essential truth: suffering is a part of life. And that having compassion for suffering is the only way to transform it, and in doing so, we can also help transform the suffering of the world

When we are stronger, more emotionally mature, and self-aware as individuals, we help build resilient families and communities that protect future generations from carrying the same wounds.

The generation raised online could be defaulting to identifying with their diagnosis because it fulfills a need: to be seen in their suffering and to belong to a community that is suffering too.

It also helps people make sense of their lives and what has happened to them.

In many ways, it’s become the dominant language of millennials, who are, by no coincidence, astrologically primarily part of the Pluto in Scorpio generation (1983-1995), a generation here to bring more awareness to both trauma and the healing of it. The Pluto in Libra generation (1971-1984) preceding them is here to shine a light on attachment, codependency, and relational issues. We’ve lived through this and struggled with the impact, and we are here to shine a light by bringing both awareness and healing to these issues. Doing so helps the collective evolution of consciousness.

---

Trauma Comes to Consciousness for Healing to Begin

Carl Jung says that when an archetype comes to consciousness, it is an opportunity to integrate it.

The archetype of trauma, attachment, and mental illness has come up for us to address.

Whether you call it trauma or you call it suffering, what breaks the cycle is compassion, extended first to ourselves and outward to the world.

In the battle over the rise of trauma culture, the right says we’re becoming coddled victims, the left says we’re finally seeing the wounds of a sick society, both miss the point. That trauma is more common than we think, but healing won’t come from diagnosis or politicized solutions. It comes from developing a deeper relationship with ourselves, with others, and with nature. Something that we have lost—creating a spiritual vacuum in which mental illness culture has taken root.

We need emotionally literate spaces, not to be coddled, but ones that demonstrate genuine care. Places where we can name our pain, be witnessed, and learn how to hold it without letting it define us.

We need elders, mentors, and parents who have walked through the fire and healed themselves, broken ancestral cycles of pain, and can guide the next generation with humility and hard-won wisdom.

We need strong communities rooted in compassion that can hold us to a higher standard of accountability without becoming cults that deny our individuality.

Healing begins when we take responsibility for our own inner work and tend to the collective pain around us.

Ultimately, it isn’t a diagnosis, a political ideology, or a perfect-seeming family that will heal us—it's our willingness to be with our brokenness, to face ours and others' suffering with an open heart without pathologizing it.

We don’t need more labels if the label is a way to end the conversation.

We need the presence and attunement to understand ourselves and others.

Because unprocessed pain doesn’t just disappear; it gets passed on for generations until one of us stops and does something different.

---