Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On February 26, 2025, the body of Gene Hackman was discovered. Many obituaries repeated the story that childhood trauma made him who he was. One story was titled “The Early Trauma That Fueled Gene Hackman’s Singular Genius.”
Trauma Biography Myth
​When 13-years-old, Hackman, his younger brother, and father were living with his grandmother. While playing in the street, his dad drove past and waved casually without melodrama, abandoning his sons allegedly without explanation. The article asserted this was a devastating childhood trauma seared into Hackman’s psyche: “You can see it for yourself in the waves Hackman exchanges with Fernando Rey in The French Connection” (photo above).
Hackman seemed to believe this narrative explained why he became an actor. In 2013, he told a reporter, “I doubt I would’ve become so sensitive to human behavior if that hadn’t happened to me as a child — if I hadn’t realized how much one small gesture can mean.”

Stories like Hackman’s are a ubiquitous form of trauma biography in the backgrounds of famous people in which childhood events, bad or good, caused their destinies. A few examples include Kevin Costner became a daydreamer because his father’s job required the family to move frequently. Marilyn Monroe became an unstable personality which caused her to become an actress because she lived in multiple foster homes.
In the recent biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson wrote, “The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment.” Isaacson simply asserted Musk has PTSD. Several childhood events were described that might be considered trauma (beatings from bullying, verbal rants from his father, and witnessed community violence in South Africa), but Isaacson  neither bothered to specify which event gave Musk PTSD nor asked whether Musk considered any of the events traumatic. Musk has made it clear he has never been to a therapist (and has therefore never been diagnosed). Yet Isaacson was comfortable assuming Musk had PTSD, as if implying, how could any human not have PTSD from that childhood?
 
The concern about trauma biography is the erroneous claim that childhood trauma shapes an individual’s fundamental personality development. Failing to observe the simplest of scientific principles that correlation is not causation, biographers seem oblivious that there is no credible evidence that the hard-wired, genetically-based process of human personality development can be derailed by a handful of life events.
 
Intergenerational Trauma Myth
Another popular belief is claiming that parents’ trauma gets passed down to children. Julian Lennon felt rejected when his famous dad, John Lennon, had little contact with him, and this was somehow an inevitable cycle because John’s father had abandoned him as a child.
Tyler Perry appears to have suffered real trauma as a child when beaten by his father. But Perry insisted that his public telling of it must include that his father had been orphaned and was beaten by the husband of the couple that took him in, and the husband had been mistreated as a slave. Each generation of beating somehow embedded into the psyche and biology to create new involuntary beatings in the next generation.
The son of Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould believes he has somehow inherited intergenerational trauma from both parents. His mother lost her father as an infant and her step-father was abusive. His father’s mother had trauma. The son has stated, “How could that not affect him, and, therefore, affect me? How could my mother’s trauma not, therefore, affect me? It has, even in ways that I’m sure they’re not even conscious of.”
There is no credible scientific evidence in humans that these stories could be true, and the mechanism of the mysterious transmission through generations is completely unknown (see here).

Trauma Dispatch has been documenting how the worldview of this subset is leveraged by activists in academia, media, and politics for policy changes in schools, governments, and social agencies. Popular culture of celebrity lives is another powerful medium for this worldview.

Sources: Mother Jones magazine and Creators Syndicate
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
Within a span of two weeks in December 2024, two national outlets published opposite views on the famously controversial treatment recommendations for trauma in Bessel van der Kolk’s bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score. On December 18, Mother Jones magazine published an article titled “What the most famous book about trauma gets wrong,” noting how van der Kolk’s treatment claims are rubbish. On December 31, the advice column Dear Annie highly recommended van der Kolk’s book to a trauma survivor who was desperate after his previous therapists failed to help.
 
Who Did This?
Mother Jones magazine began in 1976. It was named after Mary Harris Jones, a union organizer and socialist. It currently publishes six issues per year and provides daily digital content. Content is highly progressive leftist.
Dear Annie (Annie Lane) is a nationally-syndicated advice columnist in the style of Ann Landers, “Dear Abby,” and others.
 
The Claims
In the Mother Jones article, journalist and book author Emi Nietfeld explored how trauma victims were portrayed by van der Kolk in his popular book. Upon first reading it, Nietfeld felt “gross and ashamed” after noting how van der Kolk treated sexual assault survivors with disdain. When Nietfeld dug deeper, other scientists she spoke to said “van der Kolk mischaracterizes their research and steers survivors away from treatments that might help them.”
 
In Dear Annie, advice was proffered to a 45-year-old male who had suffered childhood traumas. He wrote that he had sought mental health help for 17 years, and gone through five therapists and as many psychiatrists. None of them could help him. Annie suggested that “the five therapists you saw were probably not trained in trauma. You might try and find a somatic therapist.” She had surmised somehow that talk therapy hadn’t worked because he needed to treat his post-traumatic stress “by releasing bodily sensations.” She recommended van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Dr. Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger.
 
Analysis
Van der Kolk’s book has remained amazingly popular despite his false claim that psychological trauma embeds itself like demon possession into brains, bodies, and souls, as restated in the memorable title “the body keeps the score.” Based on this canard that trauma is entrenched in the body, he advocated ten bodily-based treatments (e.g., yoga, dance, theater, and Levine’s somatic experiencing therapy). Van der Kolk claimed that the best way, nay, the only way to treat trauma is with bodily-based, or somatic, treatments, none of which have decent research support, as I’ve described in detail here.

Nietfeld’s own therapist refused to engage in cognitive behavioral therapy, and cited van der Kolk’s work as one of the reasons.
 
(Disclaimer: I was interviewed by Nietfeld for the Mother Jones article, but I was chopped by the editor for space. I would have been surprised if my criticisms of van der Kolk’s view of human nature as being highly fragile had made it into a progressive leftist, neo-Marxist magazine.)

Source: NBC Today
Read time: 2.1 minutes plus 30-second video
 
This Happened
In a TikTok video in August 2024, social worker Patrick Teahan asserted that there is a definitive sign of childhood trauma.
 
Who Did This?
Patrick Teahan, LICSW, is a clinical social worker who developed a large social media following by focusing on childhood trauma. His claim to expertise is based partly on his own childhood during which he endured a narcissistic parent “trauma.” His YouTube channel has dozens of videos, nearly all on childhood trauma, and 763,000 subscribers. His personal website offers a monthly subscription of $69.99 which provides twice per month Zoom calls for group Q&A sessions, access to his library of pre-recorded “E-courses,” weekly journaling prompts by email, and the opportunity to connect with other subscribers in an online “Monthly Healing Community.”
Teahan was the center of a mild controversy in July 2024 when clinicians criticized his tendency to recommend clients cut off all contact with difficult parents, what he calls “going no-contact” (see here and here)
 
The Claim
The TikTok video was a brief clip from a longer conversation during an episode on The Dr. Ramani Network, a podcast run by psychologist Ramani Durvasula, a specialist in narcissism.
 
Durvasula: What do you consider to be the definitive sign of childhood trauma?
Teahan: I think for a lot of us it’s about trying to get the difficult person to be good to us in our adult lives.
Durvasula: (Interrupting) Wait! Say that again! Say that again. That’s so important. Say that again.
Teahan: A definitive sign of childhood trauma is about trying to get a difficult person to be good to us.
Durvasula: So, that’s it, right? I mean that right there. If we stop the show right here, you just gave us wisdom for the ages, right?
 
When the video garnered over 4.8 million views and nearly 500,000 likes, a health reporter for NBC’s Today show declared, “Teahan's answer was a mic-drop moment for many.” When the reporter interviewed Teahan, he explained that individuals who grew up with difficult parents become so interpersonally warped that their “inner child” is trying to please difficult people in the present just as they tried to please their parents in childhood.

Analysis
Teahan is among a large group of clinicians who believe that almost any type of everyday stressor qualifies as “trauma.” This contrasts with the definition used in posttraumatic stress disorder in which traumas are life-threatening events. According to Teahan, narcissistic mothers who are self-absorbed and criticize their children are a form of trauma and childhood maltreatment. His overly expansive use of trauma is consistent with the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) narrative which also conflates stress with trauma.
 
There is no such thing as a definitive sign of any childhood event. The claim is logically and scientifically hollow. Many people try to please difficult people and experienced neither true childhood trauma nor narcissistic parents. Also, many people have suffered childhood trauma or narcissistic parents, and do not have trouble dealing with difficult people.
 
Teahan’s methods of reaching his audience include videos of him playing guitar and drums, singing, dancing, role playing as narcissistic parents, and dressing up as the famous painter Bob Ross. If you do not share Teahan’s worldview or disagree with his teaching methods, he seems easy to dismiss. Below is a clip from one of his videos showing his many talents:

But simply dismissing him would miss the context that he is obviously popular. A substantial portion of the population shares his worldview and desires his unique way of blaming parents for their adult relational problems.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Teahan is among a growing group of clinicians who are trying to make their living as internet experts. They do not provide therapy. Instead, they use their clinical expertise to coach, enlighten, and entertain.
The attractiveness of the TikTok video seems partly due to the underlying ideology of the claim. By asserting childhood trauma can make permanent changes to one’s personal relationship style, it assumes that humans are highly fragile. This is the same ideology of other false claims that have great appeal to a segment of the population including the bestseller book The Body Keeps the Score (see here), the contrived complex PTSD disorder, and the ACE movement (see here). These are all provably wrong but that is not a concern for some individuals whose personal worldviews are seamless with these fabricated worlds.

Source: Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Read time: 2.3 minutes

This Happened
On July 2, 2024, an interview with Gabor Maté, MD was released on Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN podcast to discuss his views on trauma, happiness, and healing.
 
Who Did This?
Gabor Maté was born in Hungary, immigrated to Canada when he was 12, and became a family physician who practiced for many years in Vancouver. He is not trained as a licensed mental health clinician and has not published a research article on any psychological topic. Maté has written four books, three of them best-sellers, and has over 70 hours of videos of his presentations/courses for sale. Now 80 years-old, he is one of the most sought-after trauma experts, with dozens of interviews on the internet, and maintains a busy international speaking schedule.
 
The Claims
Maté has made an enormous number of assertions that he claims are settled science over the years. In this 32-minute podcast, he covered a small portion of them, but these include some of his core assertions that reflect his general views:

• There are two types of trauma— big T and little T. Big T is life-threatening events, what conventional researchers consider to be real trauma. Little T traumas are everyday stressors, like parents who are stressed out or have normal marriage difficulties. 
• Childhood trauma (both big and little T) is the root cause of a wide range of physical diseases, including chronic pain, asthma, and addiction.
• Childhood trauma is the root cause of fundamental personality traits.
• Childhood trauma is the cause of mass killers.
• The mechanism of how childhood trauma alters all these things is through the immune system and the stress hormone cortisol.
• Infants can remember trauma events as implicit memory, and these embedded memories shape their fundamental personalities their entire lives. Maté’s evidence for this is a story he’s told many times: At 11 months of age, he was “abandoned” when his mother put him in the care of a stranger to save his life during the Holocaust. When he saw her again, after five or six weeks, he didn't look at her for several days. As evidence that this scarred him for life, at the age of 71, he would not look at his wife when she neglected to pick him up at the airport.
• These traumas and little stressors get instantaneously wired into neural circuitry of the brain.
• Society is the cause of our small T stress.
• Whenever he has examined his pain and setbacks, he has always found a meaning from his past, which allowed him to move forward more powerfully in life.

 
Analysis
All Maté’s claims about trauma and stress are provably wrong. Life-threatening events are not equivalent to little stresses in their psychological impacts. Trauma and stress do not permanently damage brains or bodies (debunked here and here). A mechanism of damage—be it cortisol, immune, or epigenetic changes—has never been remotely proven. Infants do not store implicit memories that shape their behaviors for lifetimes. Society is not the cause of all our stress, as inherited individual differences determine far more about how stress is perceived.
 
In contrast to many psychiatrist and psychologist trauma experts who make the same types of claims, Maté doesn’t even try to verify his claims with original research evidence (a common criticism of his books). His authority comes solely from lived experience and anecdotes.
 
Why Is This Happening?
Why he is so popular? Maté’s striking demeanor may have something to do with it. He looks like the personification of ascetic contemplation with deep set eyes, droopy eyelids, unkempt hair, with wrinkled skin on a spindly frame. He has no full smile. His soft utterances seem dense with compassion.
 
The misinformation in his message has much in common with other progressive liberal philosophies that claim to know what’s wrong with societies. These sensibilities believe that the self and society must progress, and can be controlled, and want to point at one thing and say with certainty, “This is the oppressor that caused all my problems.” An expert on perhaps the greatest literary work on oppression and human nature described why he believed Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto maintains such enduring and worldwide appeal: “A manifesto is primarily a performance, which uses language to enact a will to realize a particular future. It aims to orientate the reader towards a specific future. This willfulness manifests itself in a special kind of literary absolutism—the use of the tense of the absolute present—in which what is desired is presented as if it were already the case, in order that it might become so” [1]. In the case of Maté, it is a performance to convince the world that the path to a better future for humankind  is already known. We must only work harder to find the meaning in our traumas, whether we remember them or not.
 

​REFERENCES
[1] Peter Osborne (2005). How to Read Marx, p88. W.W. Norton & Company: New York


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written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 2.9 minutes
 
Two people can look at the same artwork and come to different opinions. Many have hailed writer and director Todd Phillip’s Joker as a visionary commentary on society that tapped into a profound zeitgeist.  Others are less positive, and believe that its sympathetic portrayal of violence was misguided and could trigger more mass shootings. So, what really is the message of the film?
 
Movie Summary
The movie follows the origin story of how Arthur Fleck became the Joker. We are led to believe that Fleck suffered childhood trauma and this abuse helped to create the emaciated monster that he became as the Joker. Furthermore, he completely forgot his history of child abuse until he stole his hospital record and then all the memories came back to him. 
Fleck’s path to become the murderous Joker was also facilitated by a string of other misfortunes, including being bullied, fired from his job, and government defunding social programs he depended on for psychotherapy and psychiatric medications.
The movie culminates in a riot in the streets inspired by the Joker’s violence meant to symbolize a counterculture rebellion against the rich.
 
The movie inspired real-life individuals at various types of protests around the world to invoke the Joker, turned a spot in New York city where the Joker danced into a tourist spot, and it became the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time.

​Todd Phillips (right) may be best known for a string of so-called gross out comedies including Road Trip (2000), Old School (2003), Borat (2006), and the three Hangover movies (2009, 2011, and 2013).

​Analysis
Almost nothing about abuse, trauma, or posttraumatic stress disorder in the film was accurate. This origin story rests on the premise of two modern theories of trauma activists. The first theory is that trauma can create criminals, including mass killers. The second theory is that trauma memories can be totally repressed while having strong power over our behaviors. Both theories are discredited, yet many people insist they are true, seemingly unaware of the evidence to the contrary.
 
The driving plot narrative is a causal theory of human nature. The reason Fleck became a broken man and then was pushed beyond his limits to become a murderer is that he was a member of the underclass, oppressed by the wealthy through their corruptions of society. It’s another parcel of the progressive leftist reframing of human nature: individuals can’t just be born bad. There must be a societal reason killers become killers.
Mixed into the story is an overly simplistic beckoning for government intervention into the personal sphere; his plight could have been prevented if we had just invested more in social services.
As Ann Hornaday wrote in the Washington Post, “Joker is a flagrantly seedy movie, one that constantly evokes the garbage, vermin and social apathy that New York was known for at its worst. Welcome to Gotham City, where the weak are killed and eaten.”  This creates the context for an amped-up version of the wealthy stepping on the throats of the poor as the cause of their problems.
 
In the debate of nurture versus nature as driving forces of human nature, Fleck is the victim of nurture. If not for bad life experiences, he could have reached a higher level of self-actualization. To make the point comic-bookish obvious, we see his smothered nobility blossom when he dances gracefully in a bathroom to express something noble, we’re not sure what, after his first kill. 

Fleck is therefore not an unempathic deviant that can be written off to genes. He’s Locke’s blank slate and Rousseau’s noble savage; with different life experiences, he could have become anything. Fleck embodies the belief that trauma can change your essential character, which is a compelling narrative but has no basis in science.
Finally, the riot at the end of the movie seems straight out of the Communist Manifesto: Marx believed that capitalism smothers the possibility of self-actualization, leaving workers permanently stunted and alienated; eventually the proletariat rises up in a revolution to wrest the levers of production from the wealthy.
 
Why Was This Made?
I can make a good guess at the political beliefs of Phoenix, but I don’t know the politics of Phillips. When controversy arose about the film’s use of violence as a means of individual and group protest, Phillips seemed genuinely surprised. When addressing this at the Venice Film Festival, Phillips said, “It’s certainly not a political film,” which caused some laughter in the press room [1]. Taking Phillips at his word, as incredible as that seems, it appears possible that Phillips truly believes the portrayal of human nature in his film is just common sense and he has no deeper reflections or doubts about his beliefs, and that may be a fair assessment of much that comes out of Hollywood that can influence our popular culture.
 
References
[1] Nancy Tartaglione (August 31, 2019). ‘Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix & Todd Phillips On Creating DC Character Study & Finding That Laugh – Venice. Deadline.

(This is a revised version of a blog post by the author from 2020 at www.psychologytoday.com.)
 
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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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