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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CATEGORY: BOOK REVIEWS  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. Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Comments are closed.
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