Source: European Journal of Psychotraumatology
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
This Happened
A study to rank the barriers to treatment for complex PTSD was published in the most recent issue in the leading European journal on trauma, European Journal of Psychotraumatology [1].
Who Did This?
Martin Robinson, PhD, is a psychologist at Queen’s University Belfast. He has first-authored 14 peer-reviewed papers, mostly on complex PTSD, and been secondary-author on 14 others.
Co-author Christine Courtois, PhD, was one of the earliest enthusiasts for complex PTSD, publishing one of the first books on the subject in 2008.
The Claim
The researchers created a survey of 21 potential barriers to complex PTSD intervention based on expert opinion, and then sent it to over 500 clinicians who were part of a complex trauma mailing list [2]. Only 28 clinicians responded. Not surprisingly, the respondents ranked all the potential barriers as substantial obstacles. The top three most highly rated barriers were:

1. Lack of support for clinicians.
2. Patients’ prior treatments were unsatisfying.
3. Patients perceived stigma and felt misunderstood.

The rationale for this study was not clearly stated. The authors simply asserted there was “a need to synthesize information on barriers to effective CPTSD-specific intervention.”
Analysis
Complex PTSD is not a validated disorder and remains controversial. As noted here and here, there are no reputable diagnostic validation data, which is why it was rejected by both the DSM-IV and the DSM-5.

• In 2011, a survey asked twenty-five complex trauma experts and twenty-five PTSD experts to rate symptoms believed to be part of complex PTSD and what treatment techniques worked best [4].
• In 2013, a survey sent to a self-selected group of clinicians asked them to rate four vignettes of fabricated patients [5].
• In 2016, a survey sent to clinicians asked them to make diagnoses for eleven fabricated patients [6].
• In 2019, a survey asked clinicians to rate symptoms of patients they had seen in the past using only their memories of those patients and their progress notes [7].

Why Is This Happening?
Complex PTSD was invented out of thin air over three decades ago with the radical aim of redefining personality disorders as trauma disorders (see here). Driven by a radical feminist clinician, it was part and parcel of the larger ideological capture of academia by progressive, neo-Marxism that believes human nature is highly malleable and guided by an oppressor-versus-oppressed framework. The continued popularity of complex PTSD is a hoax created by a self-reinforcing echo chamber of believers who conduct these studies and who peer review and edit the journals. Because complex PTSD is not a valid disorder, its supporters have to conduct surveys of themselves to affirm its existence.
 

References
[1] Martin Robinson and Christine A. Courtois. “Understanding barriers in supporting service users with complex post-traumatic stress disorder: a pilot survey,” European Journal of Psychotraumatology Dec;16(1) (2025):2516286.
[2] The Complex Trauma Special Interest Group is sponsored by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
[3] Joseph Spinazzola et al. "Survey evaluates complex trauma exposure, outcome, and intervention among children and adolescents," Psychiatric Annals 35 (2005): 433-439.
[4] Marylene Cloitre et al. "Treatment of complex PTSD: Results of the ISTSS expert clinician survey on best practices," Journal of Traumatic Stress 24 (2011): 615-627.
[5] Julian D. Ford et al. "Clinical significance of a proposed developmental trauma disorder diagnosis: Results of an international survey of clinicians," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 74 (2013): 841-849.
[6] Jared W.  Keeley et al. "Disorders specifically associated with stress: A case-controlled field study for ICD-11 mental and behavioural disorders," International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology 16 (2016): 109-127.
[7] Jonathan DePierro et al. "Beyond PTSD: Client presentations of developmental trauma disorder from a national survey of clinicians," Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy 14(7) (2022 Oct):1167-1174. doi: 10.1037/tra0000532.

Source: European Journal of Psychotraumatology
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
A recent study published in a leading trauma journal claimed to investigate how discrimination experienced by minorities can itself be traumatic [1]. This paper provides a perfect case study of a larger problem: how the trauma field has been ideologically captured by identity politics.
The Claim
Andrew Nicholson and colleagues began with the controversial assumption that “sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) are at an increased risk for developing mental health disorders due to their socially stigmatized identities.” Specifically, discrimination, identity nondisclosure, and internalized stigma can produce trauma-related symptoms.
They recruited 37 SGM individuals from across Canada. The researchers collected self-report data using the Moral Injury Event Scale, then compared these scores with self-report measures of mental disorder.
Their results: moral injury scores were correlated with alcohol use and PTSD scores, but not with depression or childhood trauma history. In diagnostic interviews, only 6 of the 37 participants met PTSD criteria. Despite this very limited evidence, the authors claimed to have produced the first study showing minority stress-related moral injury caused PTSD.
Analysis
The conclusion was dramatic. The evidence was not. The study did not demonstrate that discrimination is equivalent to psychological trauma. Its design flaws guaranteed it never could.
First, ignoring decades of research defining trauma as life-threatening events, the authors made no attempt to determine whether the events reported by participants were actually life-threatening.
Second, the correlation with PTSD scores was meaningless because the self-reports were not linked to specific discrimination events. Participants’ PTSD symptoms could just as easily have been tied to unrelated traumas like car accidents or assaults.
Third, self-reports of PTSD are well known to produce large numbers of false positives [2].
So how did such a weak study pass peer review in a respected journal? The answer: easily. Papers with similar flaws appear daily across psychology’s 2,000-plus journals. The paper’s premise matched perfectly with the progressive orthodoxy that dominates academic psychology, a profession where over 90% of faculty identify as liberal.
The Formula
The structure of these papers is remarkably consistent:

1. Align with identity politics. Frame the study around an oppressed-versus-oppressor narrative—SGMs as a marginalized group. The authors did not even attempt to camouflage this step—the title of their paper was “Identity in turmoil.”
   
2. Recast unpleasant experiences in the most harmful terms possible, i.e., as trauma that can cause PTSD and other mental disorders.
   
3. Reframe existing definitions as false and oppressive. Blame the DSM-5 criteria for excluding minority stress and stifling research on minorities.
   
4. Deploy jargon. Invoke flimsy models with capitalized names (the Minority Stress Model) and pseudo-technical categories (“distal stressors,” “proximal stressors,” and “structural stigma”).
   
5. Obscure weak methods. Hide reliance on self-reports under layers of “intersectionality-informed frameworks” and wordy narratives. They interviewed subjects about their negative experiences as minorities, which filled up nine pages of results while the statistical results fit into one-sixth of a page.
   
6. Ignore flaws, declare success. No matter how fragile the evidence, conclude that the hypothesis was supported.

Once these boxes are ticked, such manuscripts sail safely home through peer review.
Why Is This Happening?
Academic psychology is almost entirely insulated from challenge. With few conservatives on the playing field, there is no counterbalance to progressive assumptions. What emerges is not science but activism dressed in scientific language.
Pulitzer-prize winning biologist Edward O. Wilson once observed that science and the humanities both begin as storytelling. The difference is that science must ultimately be judged by facts.

Source: BMC Psychiatry
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
In February 2025, BMC Psychiatry published a meta-analysis of mind-body treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adolescents.
Who Did This?
Neither the first author, Bianjiang Zhang, nor the three co-authors appear to have previously published on trauma or PTSD.
The Claim
The aim of the meta-analysis was to evaluate and compare the efficacy of various mind-body interventions in alleviating PTSD symptoms in adolescents.
Inclusion criteria were randomized controlled trials involving adolescents diagnosed with PTSD and treated with one of five different mind–body therapies. Twenty studies were identified: 8 involved trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT), 5 involved other CBT, 3 involved meditation, 2 involved yoga-meditation combinations, and 2 involved mindfulness.
Pairwise comparisons immediately post-treatment revealed no significant differences between the five mind–body therapies. The analysis of the follow-up phases indicated that CBT was significantly more effective than the other four in terms of long-term effects.
Analysis
Over the past decade, the most prominent book that has shaped public understanding of psychological trauma—including clinical work and policy discussions—has been Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Published in 2014, it remains on best-seller lists and continues to enjoy widespread acclaim for its alleged extraordinary insights. Its two central theses are (1) psychological trauma produces enduring changes in the brain and body, and (2) certain body-based treatments are uniquely effective. Van der Kolk’s claim—echoed by scores of body-based therapists hawking their interventions through workshops—is not simply that body-based treatments work for PTSD, but that they are the only treatments that truly resolve trauma, because, you guessed it, trauma is embedded in the body.
In The Body Keeps the Score, ten body-based treatments were promoted, and only one of those—yoga—was tested in this meta-analysis.

This does not mean body-based treatments lack value, but rather that the hype of them being superior to well-validated approaches is not justified.
 Why Is This Happening?
Yoga and several of the other body-based treatments are taught in a burgeoning industry of clinician workshops and retreats, where it is highly unlikely that balanced research evidence is discussed. While a few of these approaches have shown promise in preliminary studies, the few studies of body-based interventions that exist are often small sample sizes, lack active control conditions, and have inconsistent follow-up data.
The persistence and popularity of brain re-wiring neurobiological narratives cannot be explained by experts who simply misread the research studies. It seems more likely that the belief that trauma leaves measurable “scars” in the brain and body resonates with broader cultural beliefs of an oppressor-versus-oppressed worldview that advocates for systemic cultural change [see here, here, and here].
While drawing attention to psychological trauma is commendable, the extraordinary promotion of dramatic but unsupported narratives has risks, including misguided public policy and clinical training that ignores best available evidence.
 
 
References
[1] Bradley, R., Greene, J., Russ, E., Dutra, L. & Westen, D. A multidimensional meta-analysis of psychotherapy for PTSD. Am. J. Psychiatry 162, 214-227 (2005). doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.162.2.214
[2] Weber, M. et al. Long-term outcomes of psychological treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychol. Med. 51, 1420–1430 (2021). doi:10.1017/S003329172100163X
[3] Lewis, C., Roberts, N. P., Andrew, M., Starling, E. & Bisson, J. I. Psychological therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder in adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Psychotraumatology 11 (2020). doi:10.1080/20008198.2020.1729633
[4] Xian-Yu, C. Y. et al. Cognitive behavioral therapy for children and adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder: Meta-analysis. J. Affect. Disord. 308, 502–511 (2022). doi:10.1016/j.jad.2022.04.111

Source: Social Science & Medicine
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In the June 2025 issue of Social Science & Medicine, researchers published a conceptual review of the literature with a pre-determined aim to elevate the experiences of minorities to the level of psychological trauma.
Who Did This?
Tanya Saraiya, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. She has approximately 30 peer-reviewed publications, including about 14 as first author, which have focused on PTSD, ethnic minorities, and substance abuse.
Social Science & Medicine has often published papers that assert the existence of woke concepts of decolonizing, structural racism, intergenerational transmission, and racial inequities as toxic stressors.
The Claim
The researchers argued that trauma treatments are less effective for minorities and framed this as a failure of DSM-5’s trauma definition (criterion A). They claimed criterion A reflects historical biases and allege it is “racialized” for excluding experiences such as racial discrimination.
The DSM-5 definition of trauma is life-threat, as in situations where one truly fears for one’s life, involving a moment of intense panic that one is about to die. The researchers demanded a re-examination of criterion A because the “current U.S. sociopolitical climate” involves stressful inequities they believe must receive greater recognition.
To rectify this situation, they proposed expanding criterion A by inventing three new categories:

1. invisible traumas (e.g., neglect, emotional abuse, violent media exposure)
2. identity-based traumas (e.g., racism, sexism, LGBTQ+ discrimination)
3. systemic traumas (e.g., poverty, incarceration, oppressive policies).

In their speculative model, there is a catastrophic ‘iceberg’ effect wherein the vast majority of ‘traumas’ are being ignored. They argued this expansion would make PTSD diagnosis more socially just, and somehow—it’s never explained--improve treatment.
Analysis
None of these new categories involve true life-threat; they are incapable of causing PTSD. The evidence for Saraiya’s model was slim, and what exists is far from conclusive. Saraiya and colleagues briefly cited a meta-analysis of 124 studies in support of their claim but all those studies are highly flawed. The most common flaw is using self-report questionnaires for PTSD symptoms. This flaw, which they never acknowledged, is that self-report questionnaires have been proven to produce high rates of false positives [1].
For example, we once screened an adolescent female for a study and she endorsed the breakup with her boyfriend as a trauma and endorsed enough symptoms of PTSD for the diagnosis, but she most assuredly did not have PTSD.
The studies of racial discrimination are similarly flawed. These studies typically ask respondents to self-report if they perceived discrimination—not corroborating whether any discrimination or threat actually took place—and then ask them to fill out a PTSD checklist. Nearly all symptoms of PTSD that get endorsed are false positives because respondents misunderstand the instructions, and self-selected respondents are biased toward inflating the harm of discrimination.

Saraiya et al. seemed unaware of this evidence. Instead, they advanced sweeping claims and never once considered why equating stress with trauma might be conceptually flawed.
Why Is This Happening?
This paper exemplifies how psychiatry is increasingly recruited to advance liberal progressive and neo-Marxist worldviews. By redefining trauma to include nearly any adverse experience, the authors align diagnosis with identity politics, emphasizing oppression, systemic forces, and group disparities over clinical validity. The effect is to politicize diagnostic standards, expand the reach of trauma indefinitely, and present psychiatry as a vehicle for “social justice” rather than a medical discipline grounded in evidence. If everything from poverty to using the ‘wrong’ pronouns counts as trauma, then the word means nothing at all.
 

References
[1] Scheeringa MS (2025). False positives for Criterion A trauma events and PTSD symptoms with questionnaires are common in children and adolescents and could not be eliminated with enhanced instructions. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, DOI: 10.1089/cap.2024.0126.
[2] Kilpatrick, D. G., Resnick, H. S., & Acierno, R. (2009). Should PTSD Criterion A be retained? Journal of Traumatic Stress, 22(5), 374–383. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.20436

Source: James Cooke Substack
Read time: 2.0 minutes plus video
 
This Happened
In May 2025, Judith Herman appeared on James Cooke’s Substack podcast in a post titled Tyranny & Trauma vs. Justice & Healing.
 
Who Did This?
Herman, a clinical psychologist, is the famed inventor of complex PTSD based on a 1992 paper. Now 83, she is promoting a new book on restorative justice. Cooke, a neuroscientist, launched his Substack in 2024 to explore consciousness.
 
The Premise
In recent decades, claims about trauma have grown increasingly dramatic—describing it as the greatest public health crisis or promoting treatments that are the singular path to personal and societal salvation. These narratives almost always frame trauma as a form of oppression that leaves deep, lasting damage to the mind, body, and self.
Yet, closer examination repeatedly finds little evidence in support and substantial evidence against such claims (see here on complex PTSD, here on The Body Keeps the Score, here on toxic stress, here on ACEs, here on trauma-informed care, here on epigenetics, and here on intergenerational transmission).
 
Shared Traits of Trauma Entrepreneurs

​A similar admission appeared in an interview 25 years earlier, where she acknowledged applying a social justice ideology across multiple issues, perceiving that “oppression takes many forms.” The interviewer summed it up more concisely that this worldview (social justice to right the wrongs of perceived oppressions) seemed to provide the spark of creativity for her psychological work. While complex PTSD was not directly discussed, the connection is clear: her activism preceded and may have inspired the disorder’s creation without supporting empirical evidence.

This pattern of fashioning oppression-based worldviews absent heavy lifting of supporting evidence is typical of the progressive personality. It is evident from the very beginning, in the eighteenth century, with Rousseau, who himself admitted he is exhausted by reasoning power and takes more “pleasure in meditating, in searching, in inventing.”
 
Why Is This Happening?
In my critique of The Body Keeps the Score, I argued that such expansive errors require attention: “the vastness and completeness of van der Kolk’s wrongness demands an explanation. If it’s not ideology, a better explanation has not presented itself. It can’t be that he just doesn’t understand cross-sectional studies. He can’t be that naive.” [1]. For Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and others, ideology appears to be that explanation: a moral framework where empathy for the disadvantaged outweighs all other  moral concerns. Within this worldview, human fragility becomes an assumed truth, forming the psychological foundation of progressive and neo-Marxist thought.

​
References
[1] Scheeringa MS (2024). The Body Does Not Keep the Score: How Popular Beliefs About Trauma Are Wrong. Columbia, SC: Kindle Direct Publishing. ISBN 979-8344969244.

Source: Molecular Psychiatry
Read time: 2.4 minutes
 
This Happened
The academic world’s long-standing romance with the idea that trauma leaves ghostly fingerprints on our very DNA has taken yet another turn—this time via the sperm cells of Finnish men. A new study in this genre found some associations with two types of epigenetic variables.
 
Who Did This?
Jetro Tuulari is an Associate Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland. He has published two prior studies on trauma and eighteen prior studies on non-trauma stress. Much of his work is aimed at finding how stress during pregnancy impacts children’s brain development.
 
The Claim
There has been growing interest in the prospect that life experience—in particular, exposure to trauma and stress—can be passed on to subsequent generations through heritable epigenetic modifications, firmly planted in the lush, speculative landscape called “intergenerational transmission of trauma.” The possibility remains highly controversial, even according to some whose careers are invested in the prospect [1]. A first step in proving this claim is that epigenetic changes attributed to trauma and stress exist in sperm.
Tuulari and colleagues measured the amount of trauma exposure for each man with a self-report questionnaire. They measured epigenetic changes in sperm on two variables: (1) The number of small non-coding RNAs (sncRNA). The abundance of five broad classes of sncRNAs did not differ between high-trauma and low-trauma groups. On analyses at a narrower level, however, 29 miRNAs, 15 tsRNAs, and 3 piRNA clusters were lower, and 18 miRNAs, 6 tsRNAs, and 1 piRNA cluster were higher in high-trauma group sperm compared to low-trauma group.
(2) The amount of DNA methylation. Those with high-trauma exposure showed relatively less methylation on three regions compared to those with low trauma. That’s right—three.
 
Analysis
An online supplement reveals (if one hand-counts all their tests) that they tested 509 miRNAs, 266 tsRNAs, 509 piRNA clusters, and 541 DNA methylation sites. Out of 1,825 total tests, seventy-five tests, or 4%, were significant. One must question the random chance nature of these findings.
More importantly, did their findings replicate findings from three previous sperm studies? Overall, the researchers demurely concluded, “We found an interesting overlap with previous reports for miRNAs, particularly miR-34c-5p, although most of our results were distinct from prior reports.”

The Skeptical View: There is no there there. All the findings may be spurious, caused by chance findings in small samples. The sample size of the three prior sperm studies were 28, 34, and 58 men. Tuulari et al.’s sample sizes were 30 for RNAs and 55 for DNA.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Now we come to the heart of the matter.
For decades now, a faction of ideologically-inclined scientists—let’s call them The Trauma Creators—have labored to recast virtually every social ill as the aftershock of some primordial wound. With the discovery of epigenetics, this extraordinary project expanded to an even more extraordinary newer claim that such damage is passed to generations. Their bet is that neuroscience, epigenetics, and a cascade of shimmering brain scans would someday validate their suspicion that trauma not only warps the soul but etches its sorrow into our double helix.
Scientists are allowed their wild speculations. For the time being, however, Lamarckian inheritance of trauma and stress through epigenetics remains a scientific fan fiction—highly readable, emotionally charged, and scientifically unproven.
 
 
References
[1] Nestler EJ. Transgenerational Epigenetic Contributions to Stress Responses: Fact or Fiction? PLoS Biol. 2016 Mar 25;14(3):e1002426. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002426. Erratum in: PLoS Biol. 2016 Jun 7;14(6):e1002486. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002486.
[2] Scheeringa MS (2025). False positives for Criterion A trauma events and PTSD symptoms with questionnaires are common in children and adolescents and could not be eliminated with enhanced instructions. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, DOI: 10.1089/cap.2024.0126.

Source: Journal of Psychiatric Research
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
A meta-analysis was published examining the possibility of a causal relationship between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD).
 
Who Did This?
Arum Lim is a PhD student in the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. This is her first publication as first-author and her only one on trauma.
 
The Premise
Many cross-sectional studies have found a statistically-significant association between PTSD and CVD. Nearly all of them inferred that PTSD caused CVD, thus purposefully creating a sense of crisis in the public. But the causal relationship has always been inferred and is factually unclear.

The result was that authors found the usual cross-sectional association between PTSD and CVD, but, when more specifically analyzing for causation the authors concluded woefully “Evidence of a causal relationship between the two diseases was insufficient.”
 
Analysis
It cannot be overstated that the striking anomaly of this review is the authors’ attempt to find a causal relationship, as opposed to the enormity of studies that found cross-sectional associations, assumed it was causal, and called it a day. For those wishing to perpetuate the sense of crisis, this study might be an example of the old maxim for researchers who want to keep getting their shaky propositions funded: Don’t test things for which you don’t want to know the answers.
 
While this was a noteworthy effort, it was not, however, the best type of evidence that could test causality because the studies encompassed in this literature review were all cross-sectional. Their statistical technique inferred causality based on software modeling.
The best type of evidence to prove causality comes from pretrauma prospective studies in which PTSD and the biological variables are assessed prior to trauma exposure and a second time following trauma exposure. There is only one known pretrauma prospective study involving a cardiac factor [1]. That study (conducted in my lab) failed to find a causal relation between development of PTSD and heart rate variability in young children.
 
So, if there is an association but not a causal relationship, why is there an association? The authors dodged this question, instead doubling down in science-speak and suggesting that “complex networks are involved” and implying that the association still must be causal.
There are two alternative possible explanations. One is that the association finding is spurious (and tiny). A meta-analysis is only as good as the original studies. If the original studies were poor quality samples of convenience, a meta-analysis cannot improve upon that. Garbage in, garbage out. Another is that various profiles of genetic susceptibility to develop PTSD also lead to unhealthy lifestyles that sometimes lead to CVD.
 
Why Is This Happening?
For several decades, PTSD researchers have claimed that psychological trauma causes permanent damage to brains and bodily organs. Many researchers working in this area are deeply committed to the trauma-to-illness hypothesis, both intellectually and emotionally. They are the ‘trauma creators,’ fabricating a false worldview that trauma is the source of nearly all suffering. This commitment may shape how evidence is interpreted and which questions are prioritized. Institutional incentives, including funding priorities and publication trends, may reinforce a narrower focus and limit theoretical diversity. As a result, literature reviews that outright question the trauma-to-illness link are rare. 


References
[1] Mikolajewski AJ, Scheeringa MS (2018). Examining the prospective relationship between pre-disaster respiratory sinus arrhythmia and post-disaster posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in children. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Vol 46(7), Oct, 2018 pp. 1535-1545, DOI: 10.1007/s10802-017-0396-0.

Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
The trauma-informed concept has spread like a virus through academia. Having been invented as a term since only 2001, the number of papers with "trauma-informed” in the title or abstract is over 130,000.
 
Who Did This?
A subset of scholars in academia, numbering in the thousands, made this happen, most of them sporting a range of Leftist progressive and neo-Marxist beliefs. An illustrative example is one of the most frequent writers on the topic: Jill Levenson is a social work professor at Barry University who conducts workshops all over the world as a “SAMHSA-certified” trauma-informed care instructor. She has published at least nine papers on trauma-informed care since 2014, explaining how it can be incorporated into work with sex offenders, family members of sex offenders, correctional systems, LGBTQ+ clients, and general social work practice. She also promotes the extraordinary idea that Adverse Childhood Experiences can cause individuals to become sex offenders, and gently refers to pedophilic sex offenders as “minor-attracted persons.”
 
The Premise
In 2001, the concept of trauma-informed services sprang into being absent an empirical base or pedagogical lineage (see here on its birthing and here on its moral basis). The call was for all social service agencies to revolutionize their practices so that trauma victims would not feel frightened to use their services. All staff must upgrade their consciousness towards the permanent Leftist agenda of transforming humans through sensitivity training. All consumers must be considered potential trauma victims who are a unique class of emotionally disabled individuals and who require special treatment no matter how such treatment violates common sense or other people’s rights.

Why Did This Happen?

“Cultures fight wars with one another.
They must do so because values can only be
asserted or posited by overcoming others,
​not by reasoning with them.”
​(Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind)

What is really new about the trauma-informed movement is that being a consumer deserving of trauma-informed care represents a value judgement in creating a new identity that never appeared in American culture before 2001. It joins a lengthy list of other aggrieved factions that relatively recently posited new identities based on sex, race, ethnicity, and other oppressed status claims.
Being a bone-fide trauma-informed scholar or trainer is yet another new identity.
These are part of identity politics, which gains its currency by identifying oppressed groups that demand redress from society. The process usually goes by woke, critical race theory, or anti-racism. While driven mostly by the radical Left, these have become the dominant positions of the Democratic party.
The rise of identity politics is one of the main factors cited by many critics as the source of destroying American civility, if not American democracy. With new identities, comes new rights and new powers. It is a new kind of power, different in kind from most traditional politics in that there is no common ground.
 
References
[1] Lewis NV, Bierce A, Feder GS, Macleod J, Turner KM, Zammit S, Dawson S (2023). Trauma-Informed Approaches in Primary Healthcare and Community Mental Healthcare: A Mixed Methods Systematic Review of Organisational Change Interventions. Health and Social Care in the Community, Volume 2023, Article ID 4475114, 18 pages. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2023/4475114
[2] Chin B, Amin Q, Hernandez N, Wright DD, Awan MU, Plumley D, Zito T, Elkbuli A (2024). Evaluating the Effectiveness of Trauma-Informed Care Frameworks in Provider Education and the Care of Traumatized Patients. J Surg Res. 2024 Apr;296:621-635.  doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2024.01.042.
[3] Mahon, D (2025). A Systematic Review of Trauma Informed Care in Substance Use Settings. Community Ment Health J 61, 734–753. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-024-01395-z

Source: New Jersey Education Association
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
This Happened
The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) held a four-day summer workshop in 2024 on Culturally Responsive Teaching with a Trauma-Informed Lens for kindergarten through fifth grade teachers in Atlantic County. The workshop was funded by local nonprofit the Atlantic County Collaborative for Educational Equity.
 
Who Did This?
NJEA is a public school employee union.
The leader of the workshop, Tamar Lesure-Owens, is a teacher and is involved in NJ-Heart, an activist teacher group that is “Helping educate anti-racist teachers.” Lesure-Owen holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminal Justice with a certificate in African American Studies.
 
The Premise
Day 1 began with an introduction to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as the backbone of the workshop’s intellectual framework—stressful experiences are permanently damaging children’s brain and bodies. This included how perceived racism is transmitted through generations as “historical trauma” in minority communities. 

On Day 2, they explored Jewish studies, the Holocaust, and how to integrate cultural celebrations such as Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa into lesson plans.

​Analysis
Lesure-Owens’ teachings are consistent with the Leftist progressive ideology of human fragility, i.e., the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed. Since life experiences can allegedly damage and permanently mold human psyches, then any perceived cultural oppression is a public health crisis.

​Overall, the workshop was euphemistically described as, “In a time when teaching is becoming increasingly multifaceted, educators are searching for innovative ways to connect with and uplift their students.” In reality, the workshop goal was to transform teachers into therapeutic presenters of new interpretations of history and culture, not simply to add a tool to their academic skill sets.

​Why Did This Happen?
Workshop trainings on ACEs are common across the country, but they are usually public awareness campaigns (see here) and stand-alone workshops (see here and here) that focus only on the public health danger of ACEs. The most noteworthy aspect of this training, however, was how ACEs were tied into the progressive cultural narratives of diversity, equity, and inclusion. If there was any doubt about the underlying motivations behind ACEs, this helps make it clear that ACEs is part and parcel of the radical, neo-Marxist agenda to install a public consciousness. It is anything but a public health campaign based in science. This is cultural transformation, not public academic education. 

Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
Scholars and activists have never tried to argue for trauma-informed reforms based on empirical evidence, because there is none (see here). Instead, from its inception in 2001 to the geometric growth in publications today, it has always been advocated on qualitative grounds as morally good. But who selected the moral concerns and how were they defined?
 
Who Did This?
The trauma-informed concept was invented in 2001 by two clinician activists Maxine Harris, PhD and Roger Fallot, PhD. Since then, it has been leveraged by thousands of scholars from a wide range of disciplines.
 
The Premise
According to Harris and Fallot, systems that serve trauma survivors can cause “inadvertent retraumatization” by insensitivity [1]. Individuals who experienced trauma are portrayed as permanent victims who are at the mercy of being bombarded by environmental sensations, and interpersonal behaviors that can trigger them at any moment into fear and dysfunction. It is implied that preventing their distress is morally right.
One of their hypothetical examples was a woman who had suffered domestic violence and was seeking help for her drinking problem. She felt the attitude of staff at the addiction center was confrontational, which made her feel ashamed and frightened, so she dropped out. The solution is that staff have an obligation to treat her more gently even if it violates the staff’s empirical expertise and business model, or creates unequal treatment for other patients.
Harris and Fallot did not use the term morals, likely because they were trying to disguise their agenda in the science language of trauma.
 
In Harris and Fallot’s multiple hypothetical examples, nothing illegal or unprofessional happened. 

Analysis
Ever since Socrates, Western philosophers have written about the morals involved in how society ought to balance needs of human groups against personal freedoms. A recent iteration is “moral foundations theory” formulated to describe the evolved, innate virtues that guide human behavior. Morality is a range of different moral concerns consisting of five main foundations: care/harm, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, purity/sanctity, and ingroup/loyalty [2].
 
Trauma-informed theory is built on only one foundation of care/harm. Caring for the disadvantaged and oppressed eclipses all other moral foundations. The unspoken aspect of trauma-informed care is that it creates a class of people who are deemed emotionally and cognitively disabled. When considering other classes of people who have problems, none of them are deemed to be so fragile. For example, individuals with cancer are not considered emotionally disabled as they face death. Receptionists have never been mandated to take a special training workshop on how to coddle cancer patients.
 
Why Did This Happen?
In the book The Trouble With Trauma, I described that a large proportion of humans think in fundamentally different ways by being hyper-focused on the care/harm foundation. It starts with the normal search for self-inflation through satisfying a moral concern. In a subset of individuals, this search veers off course when propelled by skewed moral foundations of unbalanced caring for the disadvantaged. This skewness dictates warped views of human nature as highly fragile and necessitates the trampling of the other moral foundations. Yearning for justification of their moral focus, it becomes a mission path guided by heuristics in which their minds “must find something for which to battle” no matter how untrue.
 

References
[1] Harris M, Fallot RD (2001). Envisioning a trauma-informed service system: A vital paradigm shift. New Directions in Mental Health Services 89, Spring:3-22.
[2] Haidt J, Graham J (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20:98-116.