Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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The creator of complex PTSD, psychologist Judith Herman, PhD CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS  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. Comments are closed.
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