@laurierrose Sure! What’s crazy is, I actually remember the exact context of why I said this; it was because I had just watched Demi Lovato’s documentary on her own life. (Disclaimer: I could be conflating some stuff, in terms of what info was in it vs. what I found out from other sources later–it’s been a long time since I watched it, but I do remember the effect it had on me.)
In it, she talked about having an eating disorder, being addicted to drugs, experiencing bullying, mental illness, and toxic work environments as a child star, to the point of being raped by a co-star, who never saw justice and wasn’t even removed from the project. This doc was also after her phase of identifying as nonbinary and using they/them pronouns, which, the sociological reasons there jump out I think.
In the documentary, I remember being struck about how every single thing she talked about was, “my trauma, my trauma, my trauma.” Every experience either went back to her past trauma or was in itself a trauma. There was no particular commentary in terms of gender–being targeted specifically as a female person, for sexual assault, damaging standards of thinness and beauty, etc–nor even commentary in terms of child actors as a group, their vulnerability to harm and exploitation. She was just narrating a story of harms done to her as a kind of explanation to the public, but with no particular analysis.
It struck me at the time, and it’s stuck with me since then, that framing life events like the ones she experienced as “trauma” is a way of shrinking and psychologizing and personalizing a phenomenon that is larger and political. “The personal is political,” right? Except that it seemed to me then, and to a large extent now, that what had previously been understood to have political dimensions (maybe that’s a fantasy, maybe it was never thought of that way) had been shrunk down to individual instances of harm with no particular pattern in the larger society and no particular social meaning. This was just stuff that was done to her. And why her? There was nothing in it about being a young girl specifically in an extremely vulnerable and exploitable position under the thumb of one of the largest media companies in the world. Just about her trauma.
She had kind of been the biggest example of this phenomenon that I saw at the time, but especially in this fairly early Tiktok/other shortform media just-after-covid era, I felt I was seeing this therapized language absolutely everywhere. This is right around when terms like “gaslighting” got super popular and present in the public consciousness as well. All of this is still everywhere tbh, and shows up in a million different places, because therapyspeak, whether we like it or not, is embedded in our day-to-day language and is what we’re using to describe everything.
And the reason I called it an “opiate” is because it actually is really, really comforting and soothing to have the word “trauma,” whether for her or any other woman. The word “trauma” acknowledges not just our pain but its intense reverberations, and allows us to describe harm in terms that expresses fully the psychological ramifications of that harm. But the way it was and, I feel, still is used is as a way of shrinking our suffering, a way of minimizing it to our immediate context. It just so happened that the man in your house was the one who beat you–that just so happens to be your trauma. No analysis, politics, statistics required. Hope that makes sense
