What is the basis of the trauma-informed movement?

Another iteration of radical progressive attempts to shape public consciousness along skewed morality. What is the moral basis? What are the costs?

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Socrates

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. 

The alleged insensitivities which trauma-informed services aim to change are arbitrarily-invented moral offenses.

​There are no known analyses of the specific moral foundation that is being satisfied or of the inevitable moral trade-offs that might cause harm in trauma-informed practices. It is simply assumed that coddling trauma victims is common-sense without any consideration of the potential costs.

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.