Performative Trauma is a Devil's Bargain
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out
And show ourselves
When everyone has gone
Some are satin some are steel
Some are silk and some are leather
They're the faces of the stranger
But we love to try them on
—Billy Joel, The Stranger
We live in the Age of Branding exponentially charged by the vast oceans of digital outreach and the flooding of information across the globe.
From the days of the salesman, going door to door, selling Fuller Brushes and Encyclopedia Brittanica, to the jingles and contests on the radio, to the sponsored television shows in black and white, the art of branding things and people is as old as capitalism and the gullibility of want.
Candace Owens might be a race traitor or she might just be a capitalist who sees a vacuum of black female conservatives and is angling for a check to cash as a Republican unicorn. Only she knows and her branding as the Audie Cornish of FOX prevents us from knowing one way or another. Regardless the branding is solid.
That heavily-muscled triathlete on Instagram might be a perfect human specimen enjoying months at a time vacations in Spain and Barbados or he might be juicing up with steroids and posing on random beaches just outside Venice Beach in a Speed-o to give that impression in order to get followers and sponsorships. Either way, his branding is working if the photo of him posing in front of a palm tree with a can of Red Bull is any indication.
My mother (a white woman) who was born in the forties (Boomer) is a very devoted church-goer (Christian Right). Based upon the stereotyped, monolithic branding we undergo, you likely think based solely on my quick description that you know who she is but you'd be wrong. While a significant portion of white, Boomer, Christian women in the United States are conservative, my mother couldn't be further from it. A long-term liberal, a Bernie Sanders supporter, the Christian who supports gay rights and founded a Food Bank in the middle of Nowhere, KS, my mother's branding does not fit the expectation. Her neighbor next door in Wichita, he with his "Let's Go, Brandon" bumper sticker, thinks she's a Black Lives Matter Communist and he's wrong, too. An avid supporter of BLM, mom is definitely not a communist—she likes Bed, Bath & Beyond too much.
*
I was nine years old and a latchkey kid.
We lived in an apartment complex on the less than affluent side of town. Mom worked several jobs and the step-dad at the time was a preening, disco-dancing domestic abuser. As such, I found myself out and about without a lot of safety nets in place. I played in a septic ditch just on the outer parameter of the complex. On the other side was an abandoned housing development and I frequently went over there alone to practice my karate (which I thought I was learning from watching David Carradine in Kung Fu, a popular episodic featuring a white man posing as an Asian man who saved people with his peaceful but forceful side kicks). I’d kick holes in the drywall pretending it was made up of bad guys.
On the north side was, in my mind, a forest but in reality was just a bunch of trees in several abandoned lots. Whenever I ran away from home (a feat that usually lasted until I was tired or hungry) I would go to my forest and “read” the tattered copies of Playboy and Penthouse I had stolen from the aforementioned step-parent.
To the south was a playground for the kids in the complex. A rickety swing set, a teeter-totter, and a broken merry-go-round surrounded by garbage dumpsters. A cursory examination of the dumpsters — a routine activity for a vagabond third grader — revealed a coterie of used hypodermic needles, marijuana roaches, empty liquor bottles and fast food trash.
It’s likely that parents reading this have already crossed themselves or knocked on wood in deference to the fact that their children would never be put in these positions. That their children are safe.
One day, as I had exhausted myself from kicking holes into drywall villains, I headed to the playground. There was no one else around and I decided that I wanted to swing but not on the actual rubber strap. I unhooked the strap from the hefty S-hook it hung from and grabbed it like Tarzan on a vine. I started to swing around in circles holding as tightly as I could to the chain.
Slowly, I began to slide down until the S-hook punctured my white jeans and then into my scrotum. I felt some discomfort and looked down and saw blood on my crotch but I couldn’t disengage. I was hooked, by my ballsack, to the chain. I panicked and did my best to scramble up the chain but the S-hook was firmly in there and the chain just followed me up.
I screamed for help. No help arrived. I struggled and the blood started running down my left pant leg, flowering out like a Rorschach. It seemed I was hanging there for hours but the reality was more likely a few minutes until the hook, now greased with blood, slid out of my nuts and I fell to the dirt.
Leaping up, I dropped trou on the spot to inspect the damage but there was so much blood that I couldn’t see what was actually a small leaking hole. I cried. I squalled. With my pants around my knees, I ran home.
I smashed into the front door screaming bloody murder that my balls were bleeding. My mother, shocked by the sight of her nine-year-old kid, reddened pants around his knees, crotch covered in blood, and in high hysteria (I mean, who male among us wouldn’t be?), laughed out loud. A giggle turned into a laugh transforming to a barking guffaw.
The more dramatic I was about it, the harder she laughed. Out of shock, out of horror, out of knowing how melodramatic her son was prone to be. She giggled as she washed my junk off and saw the tiny hole. She giggled episodically as she put an ice pack on it and tossed me in the car to go to the emergency room. She stopped laughing by the time we reached the hospital and I received two stitches on the underside of my underside.
The thing about her giggling was it put my pain into perspective. I wasn't going to die. I wasn't going to lose my balls. My hysterics were performative and her reaction was not the planned response as I calmed down.
*
Complexity and marketing are not compatible lovers.
When consumers are faced with too many choices, they generally balk at buying anything. The tyranny of options is too much to risk the expense. In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper from Columbia and Stanford University published a study about jams. On a regular day at a local food market, people would find a display table with 24 different kinds of jams. Then on another day, at that same food market, people were given only 6 different types of jam choices.
Sales were down on the days with the multitude of choice and dramatically up when there were only six options.
This is true when it comes to everything else we consume and, given we are an entire nation built not on creation but consumption, that behavior encompasses almost every avenue of American living. Complexity is a thing we avoid and simplicity sells. Because of this, we (as in the societal "we") dumb down the branding so that the simplified marketing is the substitute for all of its type. Thus, for example, in some parts of the country every soda is referred to as a coke. "Gimme a coke with ice. Dr, Pepper, please." That's the result of decades of Santa holding a bottle of Coca-Cola and billions spent on making sure when you think of a sugar-laden soft drink, you think of one brand first.
How things become simplified into a branded quantity is a cultural phenomenon gripping us each passing day. This ongoing practice spawned from the grift of advertising and sales at any cost strips meaning for the hot take.
Prostitutes have a long and sordid history in the world and are as different from strippers and young women selling videos of themselves masturbating on OnlyFans as active soldiers are as different from Army Reservists and fat, white guys in Michigan gun clubs. Despite these substantive differences, prostitutes, dominatrixes, strippers, and OnlyFans creators now fall under the all-inclusive "sex worker" category which effectively smooths out the contrasts between a parking lot handjob to pay for a meth hit and a dollar stuffed into a g-string. While it destygmatizes the prostitution, it also denies the reality of the dark circumstances of the labor.
While there is a marked difference between being hit in the face with a brick repeatedly and being shoved to the ground, any unwanted physical encounter falls under the incredibly simplified branding of "assault" which allows an eighth grader being physically removed from class for catcalling his substitute teacher the same claim of harm as the substitute teacher later that day being punched in the stomach for the disciplining. Lacking any context or nuance, a man alleging another man "assaulted" him includes everything from a finger poking him in the chest to a crowbar upside his skull and makes the entire term somewhat meaningless (or at least without meaningful purpose).
"Harm" is another more recent simplified rebranding. Where the idea of violence used to be stratified into distinct categories (physical, emotional, verbal), today's culturists would have us accept that being verbally assaulted (see how this works) is as violent as having a pencil shoved into your eye, that a micro aggression about someone's outward appearance is on par with an aluminum baseball bat to the left kneecap.
This brings us to the rebranding of trauma and the increasing use of undiagnosable disorders under the umbrella of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and the myriad versions of anxiety disorders to simplify and make meaningless genuine trauma.
A central tenet behind psychiatric diagnoses is that a disease has an objective existence in the world, whether discovered or not, and exists independently of the study of psychiatrists. In other words, PTSD and anxiety disorders have always existed in every culture and we're just getting around to branding it as such. Remarkably, the story of PTSD is a revealing example of the role of society and politics in the process of invention rather than discovery.
PTSD is a legacy of the war in Vietnam and is a product of the post-war lives of the men who served there. They came home to find that they were being blamed for the war. Pejoratives like “babykiller” and “psychopath” were thrown at them by some who had watched on television the US military's atrocities against defenseless peasants. Combining this reception at home with the actual horrors of war exposed the frequently damaged and antisocial behavior of a number of veterans. These men were diagnosed as having an anxiety state, depression, substance abuse, personality disorders, or schizophrenia; these diagnoses were later supplanted by PTSD.
Early advocates of PTSD as a simplified umbrella term were part of the antiwar movement who were outraged that psychiatry was being used to serve the interests of the military rather than those of the patients. They lobbied hard for veterans to receive specialized care under the new diagnosis, which became the replacement to the older diagnoses of shell shock and battle fatigue. Veterans were to be seen not as villains but as people traumatized by roles placed on them by the US military. This legitimized their “victimhood,” gave them moral vindication, and guaranteed them a disability pension.
This is a sticky concept. Well meaning yet easily manipulated, this now officially sanctioned status of victimhood is one that has grown to encompass almost anyone feeling almost any sort of discomfort or anxiety.
*
I was thirty two years old and had suffered through a recent divorce, the theater company I had founded effectively falling apart, and the ex-wife getting rid of most of my worldly possessions by simply putting everything out into our yard and a sign that instructed anyone to take what they wanted. In a swamp of self pity I drank a bottle of low-grade Scotch and attempted to drown myself in Lake Michigan at three in the morning.
I stopped myself when I realized no one was there to witness my suicide which was all I needed to know to see how performative it all was. I called my mom and told her I had tried to end my life.
"How old are you?"
"I'm thirty-two."
"So you had a really horrible year this year. How many other horrible years have you had in the previous thirty-one?"
I thought about it for a bit. "Not really any of them were really horrible years."
"So one out of thirty-two was really horrible. Those aren't bad odds. Now get over yourself, get back up and hope the thirty-third year is better."
*
A few years ago, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning published an influential study in which they described three kinds of cultures, each defined by what lends people status and gives their lives meaning. A culture of honor is exemplified by using violence to answer a perceived insult. In a culture of dignity one’s sense of value is primarily internal and one can patiently bear injustice without diminishing it. Campbell and Manning call our current standing a culture of victimhood, in which the source of status and meaning is one’s claim to oppression, suffering, and “marginalization.”
An entire industry has been created by selling the idea that everyone suffers from some sort of trauma. A tough time with work? Trauma. Unpopular at school? Trauma. Fatshamed? Trauma. A racist Halloween costume? Trauma. The existence of COVID and subsequent restrictions have traumatized the entire world (you know, except for those essential workers because you not getting your latte is fucking traumatizing, amiright?).
Authentic PTSD is almost entirely divorced from this narrative.
First, what qualifies in the objective sense, as a traumatic event?
According to George Bonanno, author of The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD, a traumatic event is an incident that causes physical, emotional, spiritual, or psychological harm.
Examples of traumatic events include:
physical pain or injury (e.g. severe car accident)
serious illness
war
natural disasters
terrorism
witnessing a death
rape
domestic abuse
incarceration within the criminal justice system
It is worth noting that enduring micro-aggressions, suffering religious contempt, hearing certain forbidden cultural slurs, being required to wear a mask, hearing inappropriate jokes, the presence of a transgender male taking a shit in the men's bathroom, having your kids be taught Critical Race Theory, and having a boss criticize your tardiness are not on that list.
Further there is no legitimate science to support the bizarre idea of generational trauma. It's a great piece of branding but is, like the claim that zit cream will get you laid, a bucket of crap.
PTSD affects stress hormones and changes the body’s response to stress. PTSD can cause an intense physical and emotional response to any thought or memory of the event. It can last for months or years following trauma.
Experts do not know why some people experience PTSD after a traumatic event, while others do not. A history of trauma, along with other physical, genetic, psychological, and social factors may play a role in developing PTSD.
The self diagnosed trauma and resulting PTSD has become branding. It has become a catch-all excuse for refusing to cope with stress. It has become the performative dance with the devil as the cause du jour.
In the Christian Bible we learn not only about the origin of sin (behavior frowned upon or forbidden in society) but also about the original performative dance of avoiding responsibility.
When the Lord graciously seeks out Adam, inviting repentance, Adam doesn’t take responsibility for his disobedience but blames Eve for giving him the fruit to eat. He even takes things further by calling her “the woman you gave to be with me.” When Eve is confronted, she points the finger at Satan in his serpent form, who “deceived” her.
"The devil made me do it" has been the marketing of blame, the commercial response to dodge responsibility, the circular nonsense of circumventing accountability. The new Satan in today's blame game is self diagnosed trauma and is just as amorphous, unsubstantiated, and mystical as the serpent in a garden with an apple.
Thus, we pretend we have traumatic symptoms and pretend that we have PTSD. We claim to have panic attacks and anxiety disorders sans any serious attempt to receive legitimate medical care. As we pretend, as Vonnegut portends, we become that which we pretend to be and the avatar of those born after even 9/11/2001 is that of a being made entirely of tissue paper, existing to be coddled and excused, so weak and unable to cope with the harmless suffering of much of American life (which is the fattest and easiest nationality to be part of in 2022) that taking them seriously about any genuine harm they encounter is washed away in the marketing of the all-encompassing phantom PTSD.
This culture of victimhood cannot sustain nor should it. There are authentic victims—of violent crime, of domestic abuse, of environmental disasters, of genuine pain—who are crowded out to accommodate the childish need for attention demonstrated by the activist exaggerating perceived harms, the college utopian whining about the professor who made her feel triggered, the under achiever blaming the system for his lack of ambition or drive.
If everyone is traumatized in an accepted metric, then trauma means next to nothing. If anyone can self diagnose their own PTSD, what happens to those who manage to live through the real tragedies of life?
*
My mom drilled into my head that for every bad thing that happens to me, I have three days to grieve, complain, suffer, and dwell upon it. After three days, it's time to get moving because anything more than 72 hours is self indulgent and counterproductive.
Is that realistic? Not really. Some things happen that require a few more days to process. It isn't the number of days that counts in this lesson. It is the intent to fully wallow for a finite period of time and then stand up, shake it off, and get busy living again.
