written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 3.5 minutes
 
For some years now, progressives dominated the ranks of academia and media and have largely controlled many of the ideas and language we are exposed to. One of the primary ideas upon which many leftist agendas rise or fall is the conviction that human material is highly plastic. This is evident in the old claim by Marx that capitalism oppresses the soul of the proletariat to the new claim of modern neuroscience that trauma alters the self by changing the brain. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself,” i.e., the central progressive belief is that politics ought to be a tool to change individuals, hence, unrestrained government is justified to expand, regulate, and intervene in society.
 
Book Summary
The title of the book What Happened to You? has long been the catchphrase of the trauma-informed approach movement, and it concisely sums up the belief that humans are highly plastic. Perry and Winfrey claimed that if you received love and affection during the first two months of life, your neural development protects you from trauma with resilience. If you didn’t, your brain was permanently altered in many maladaptive ways. These alterations affect everything in your life. Literally. Everything. When you experience trauma without that resilience installed, trauma causes you to have “a different sort of world view,” shapes the very core of ourselves, determines the dosage of medications one can take, creates individuals who commit crimes, and determines personality development. It also causes drug addiction, heart disease, asthma, gastrointestinal problems, stroke, diabetes, and auto immune disease. Trauma is apparently transmissible to children just by watching parents be afraid, and can also be passed to children through birth in their genes by the mysterious and unproven mechanisms of epigenetics. They say trauma impacts “education, mental health, health, law enforcement, juvenile and criminal justice, family courts. It is impossible to find any part of society where this is not an issue.”
 
The book is formatted as a back-and-forth conversation, with Perry in black font and Winfrey in blue font. But it’s obviously not an actual conversation. It’s largely a tag-team swapping of anecdotes to make readers’ heads swivel toward assertions about how trauma is the cause of nearly every bad thing in life. Perry “conversated” nineteen anecdotes to Winfrey’s thirteen.

Analysis
Winfrey provided some of her childhood trauma story involving her demented grandfather trying to choke her grandmother. But if you’re looking for insight into how Winfrey overcame her childhood, you won’t find it here. If trauma shaped Winfrey, as the book claims trauma does to everyone to some degree, how did she become so successful? She must have had other resilience factors in her nature that other people didn’t have.

Perry did not critically examine the research on any claims about trauma. He never described a single research study. Instead, Perry made broad generalizations from skewed interpretations of the science. From their book you would think experts totally agree with Perry and there are no controversies. His claims about the impact of trauma are, however, nearly all wrong. If you’re looking for the science on how trauma is associated with neurobiology, you won’t find it here.

But if you’re looking for an ideology to explain your problems, this book is for you. Perry and Winfrey wield their beliefs to prove again that progressive leftists are not willing to allow empiricism to get in the way of a good theory.

What is the real science? I’ve been a researcher on childhood trauma and PTSD for over thirty years, and I published some of the research that Perry and Winfrey should have read, so I think I can confidently grade Perry an F on his understanding of the science. The truth is that there are indeed many studies that show associations between PTSD with size differences in brain centers, different activations of neural networks, and different autonomic nervous system states. But it was never mentioned that those come almost entirely from cross-sectional studies, which means subjects were studied at only one point in time. Cross-sectional studies have absolutely no power to make causal conclusions. When better studies have been conducted, which are pre-trauma prospective longitudinal studies, the evidence does not support Perry and Winfrey’s extraordinary narrative that trauma can literally change your brain.
​
Perry does have a few good things to say about treatment, but those were not based on science and they’re not new.
 
Why Did This Happen?
The book is another parcel in the trauma-informed campaign that has been spreading these beliefs across the U.S. since approximately 2000. Toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences, and complex PTSD are the main pillars of the beliefs. With Winfrey’s celebrity wattage landing the book on the best-seller list, this is the media-star version of Bessel van der Kolk’s equally wrong book The Body Keeps the Score. As I’ve described in my book, The Trouble With Trauma, I think a motivation for trauma-informed supporters to hold these beliefs comes from a skewed moral foundation that leads them to believe that nurture, not nature, causes many of the problems of most victims in our society, and fighting for victims makes supporters feel worthy. Their intent is to leverage trauma as a tool to achieve culture change, acquire funding for social programs, and alter society to make reality appear seamless with their vision of liberal truth.
 
This is a shortened and revised version of my one-star review posted on Amazon.com in 2021.

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Source: BNN news
Read time: 1.7 minutes
 
This Happened
A government report assessed the status of implementation efforts and new recommendations to advance their agenda for Trauma Informed Approaches (TIA). The 44-page executive summary of the report was released February 22, 2024. The full report is not yet available.
 
Who Did This?
The Safeguarding Board of Northern Ireland (SBNI), which oversees child protection and other safety issues, commissioned the report. In 2017, the government funded new administrative positions to focus on adverse childhood experiences (ACE), which produced the first report in 2019 on efforts to embed TIA. The new report is an update on the first report, and was led by Suzanne Mooney, PhD, professor of social work at Queen’s University of Belfast.
 
The Claim
The report was organized by three domains of implementation: (1) Organizational development, (2) Workforce development, and (3) Service design and delivery.  The sources of data included an online survey completed by SBNI member agencies and partner organizations, eight focus group discussions with managers, and a look at four implementation projects. Because the data were perceptions of whether services had improved, there were no standardized or quantitative measures of child outcomes. The report noted that “outcomes, however, were not always clearly specified in measurable terms and it was not clear whether any current evidence existed to support” the respondents‘ perceptions that services had improved (page 27).
Despite the lack of evidence, the report made recommendations to deploy TIA principles into policies, produce a “government mandate” to change policies, and create a new government agency.
 
Analysis
Trauma informed approaches present insurmountable problems for project evaluators. The concept of trauma is purposefully broad by including non-traumatic stressful experiences of everyday life. Most importantly, the theory that ACEs cause a massive range of health problems is unproven, despite the assertions to the contrary from supporters who claim the ability to find causal relationships from weak, cross-sectional research studies.
The burden of proving that their actions are evidence-based ought to be on the supporters of TIA, but by their chorus of assertions that the ACE theory is fact, they have managed to put the burden on others to disprove that which is unproven.
Organizing the bulk of the report around organizational development and workforce development was revealing about the stakes involved. Most of their attention is on growing the governmental administrative state. In America, this is often referred to as the “deep state," or the unelected “fourth branch” of government that was never granted law-making power in the Constitution but now dwarfs the Congress in size and power.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Attempts like this to implement TIA are derivative of the ACE movement, which is an ideology masquerading as government-by-science. The ideology that human nature is almost endlessly malleable conflicts with the evidence that genetics are highly determinative of personality and health outcomes. The science of ACEs is seriously flawed but the assertions of ACEs have proven remarkably effective for leveraging actions from leftist-leaning governments.
 
 
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Source: WDSU News
Read time: 1.8 minutes plus 1.2-minute video
 
This Happened
Seeds of NOLA Trauma Recovery Center opened in early 2024 to provide free treatment and case  management services for victims of trauma. Their mission: The first-ever service aiming to reduce the chronic violence in New Orleans by preventing intergenerational transmission of trauma.
 
Who Did This?
The program is part of University Medical Center. Some or all of  the funding was provided by the New Orleans Department of Health. The amount and duration of the funding was not announced.
 
The Premise
According to the Center’s website, their mission is “Rooted in principles of health equity and social justice, the center provides wraparound services to people whose lives have been disrupted by traumatic injury and violent crime.” The Center’s “trauma psychologist,” Erika Rajo, PsyD, asserted that much of the violence in New Orleans is due to “unhealed trauma.” She hopes to prevent PTSD, heal trauma symptoms, and prevent intergenerational transmission of trauma, which in turn will reduce violence in the city. 

The Center aims to eventually provide, all at no cost to clients, individual and family psychotherapy, support groups, psychiatric medication management, case management, assertive outreach, legal assistance, and violence interrupters in the community.
 
Analysis
Intergenerational transmission of trauma. This theory postulates that parents who develop psychological problems from traumatic experiences can pass those problems to their children through the interactions of daily living and the children absorb the problems into their own  minds through repetition. The theory is widely accepted despite the only type of research support for it in humans comes from cross-sectional and retrospective studies. There are no pre-trauma prospective longitudinal studies to support it. In addition, the mechanism of how transmission occurs, whether psychological or biological, is speculative and controversial.
Prevention of PTSD. There is little to no evidence that PTSD can be prevented or is even possible. It is a common misconception among clinicians that there is a window of time between trauma exposure and development of PTSD symptoms. Research is clear, however, that nearly all PTSD symptoms begin immediately following trauma exposure.
There is a small amount of research evidence that PTSD severity can be substantially reduced (not entirely prevented) with early intervention, but it comes from pharmacological interventions in burn patients (i.e., morphine). Psychotherapeutic interventions at early intervention have all failed, and some may have worsened symptoms.
 
Why Did This Happen?
New Orleans is among a handful of large American cities that have experimented with so-called trauma-informed approaches to tackle intractable histories of violent crime and racial inequities. The efforts have yet to produce measurable benefits.
 
Should This Be Attempted?
Efforts such as this, plus similar efforts in Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia have originated as orders from executive branches of city governments or from votes of city councils without much public debate. The brief discussions that have occurred at city councils have been from invited local stakeholders who uncritically support trauma-informed ideology. Most citizens are unaware that city funds are being spent on untested approaches with little to no research support.

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Written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 3.4 minutes
 
The understanding of human nature is today under continuous attack by government and culture. This is strange for many scientists, not in the sense of whether nature (genetics) versus nurture (life experiences) determines human nature is a valid question, but in the sense that the attacks from the progressive left are so sure that it is nearly all nurture. Trauma has been increasingly drawn into that arena as perhaps the most important element of nurture, and movies have been a frequent delivery device of that message.
 
The Plot
The 2017 movie, Thank You For Your Service, is a faithful recreation of David Finkel’s 2013 best-selling book of the same title, which followed the real-life psychological aftermath of war for Sergeant Adam Schumann and fellow soldiers. During deployment in Iraq, Schumann was a leader, a problem-solver, the one many of them trusted. Their luck, however, ran out. Men died and were maimed and Schumann blamed himself. 
Most of the movie takes place post-deployment, back in Kansas. One soldier panics when he finds his fiancé has left and cleaned out their house. Schumann is there to take him in.  Another soldier has a traumatic brain injury and cannot remember the day of the week. Schumann is there too to get him out of jams. Schumann is happy to be home with his wife and children, but posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has its grip on him, and suicide looms as an option.
Psychotherapy services at the Veterans Administration are of no immediate help. They are told it will be six to nine months to get treatment. Schumann’s wife tries to help him. A dead friend’s wife tries to help him. Schumann tries to help himself by visiting a paralyzed buddy. Improvement eventually comes, and the gracefulness of the movie is how individuals cope in a human clan.
 
Analysis
Where the movie shines is how PTSD is realistically portrayed as the never-ending struggle it is for so many. These men have a rough landing but they do not blame invented oppressors for their misfortunes. They’re fighters. They make do. They have each other’s backs. Trauma did not change them into bad men. What’s worth watching are their struggles to sort things out.
This contrasts to so many other Hollywood movies where PTSD is a plot device to drive violence or ill-fated, fantastical behaviors of trauma-exposed characters who flip into psychotic murderers.
 
The issue I’m driving at is human nature. The Founders of the United States understood human nature as unchanging both in terms of natural rights and behaviors. As Madison explained in Federalist 10, human behavior inevitably results in factions and conflicts. The Constitution formalized their understanding that the purpose of politics was to cope with the problems inherent in unchanging human nature.
The radical progressive liberal agenda for the past century to rewrite much of the Constitution has been inextricably linked to reframe human nature as highly malleable (the blank slate), thus removing all restraints on how government can grow and control human lives in neo-Marxist and socialist schemes. One can argue that the central impediment to the progressive liberal woke agenda is the idea that human nature is fixed.
 
The progressive liberal belief in the primacy of nurture—including that trauma can change your essential character—is a compelling narrative for movies but has no basis in science. Schumann, in contrast, is the living embodiment of fixed nature; trauma can rough you up but it does not change your essential character, which has a strong basis in science. 
 
 
(This is a revised version of a blog post by the author from 2020 at www.psychologytoday.com.)
 
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Source: KITV News
Read time: 1.3 minutes
 
This Happened
Governor Josh Green signed Executive Order 24-01 on 2/20/24 to make Hawaiʻi a "trauma-informed state." This makes at least the seventh state to promote trauma-informed approaches across all state departments following Alaska, California, Delaware, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
 
Who Did This?
Green, a Democrat, worked as a family practice and emergency room physician before becoming Lieutenant Governor of Hawaiʻi in 2018 and Governor in 2022.
During the COVID pandemic, Green stated that protestors against the vaccine were “people who don’t believe in science.” He said he was a lightning rod for protestors because he was outspoken in support for the vaccine and he was “a voice of reason on behalf of science.”

The Claim
The executive order claims that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) studies have shown that ACEs cause problems with a person’s “health, opportunities, and stability throughout their lifetime.” By implementing a variety of so-called trauma-informed approaches, this will lead to better self-care, wellness, and resilience for state employees and communities.
 
Analysis
In 2021, a Trauma-Informed Care Task Force was created in Hawaiʻi. In 2022, the Office of Wellness and Resilience was created. Tia Hartsock, who holds a masters in social work, was appointed the first Director of the Office in December 2022. These efforts led to the governor’s Executive Order 24-01. All executive state departments now fall under the purview of the Office of Wellness and Resilience.  They must move towards becoming trauma-informed with activities and goals that are to be determined.
 
Each department must identify a Trauma-Informed Care Liaison. Additional activities may include administering surveys to employees about stress and health, trainings to educate staff on how ACEs causes health problems, teaching self-care to staff, and recommending new laws and policies for citizens.
 
There were few details in the executive order, but it did include one rather specific mandate: All state departments must use “trauma-responsive language that supports reducing the impacts of adverse events without re-traumatization in requests for proposals and in-service contracts with providers.”
 
It is unlikely that any meaningful outcomes will be achieved because the premise of ACEs as a causal agent of health problems has never been proven. Since Dr. Vincent Felitti’s initial 1998 ACE study, one hundred percent of the ACE studies have been cross-sectional studies, which have zero power to make causal conclusions. The relationship between adversity and health problems is far more complex than the simplistic ACE narrative. Also, there is no good evidence that implementation of a trauma-informed culture prevents ACEs, reduces stress, or improves meaningful outcomes.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Despite the lack of research evidence, these trauma-informed projects provide a strong sense for its supporters of doing something for the ills of societies. The advantages for politicians include that this provides another avenue for expansion of bureaucracy and for the administrative state to rule by science, and they get to decide what the science is.


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