Bessel van de Kolk once received a request to help me find an internship. Or at least, that’s what I was told. No internship came of it, in the end. This was around 2014, and I guess one reason for not responding was that he was busy finishing this book – which bears the title of his pathbreaking article on his trauma research from 1996. What happened to the term trauma between those years to bring it in to such prime focus? Initially, van der Kolk pursued the field because of his own sense of traumatization during the WW2, as a boy in occupied Amsterdam. Later, as a young MD in the US, he began observing Vietnam veterans and their inability to recover from wartime experiences. van der Kolk outlines his own interest in the field in the beginning of the book, and his own story mirrors the evolution of the term from world wars to its current status as a word that has enjoyed exponentially increased dissemination the last ten years.
The book refers to a lot of studies of trauma, PTSD and dedicated a lot of pages to describing different modalities of treatment. He tells of CBT, EMDR, “bodywork” but also of drumming, theatre and song.
I recently partook in a four day course on a trauma treatment method called PE, where I asked the instructor what she thought about Bessel van der Kolk’s work. She scoffed at the mention of his book, which surprised me. My understanding was that he might be controversial, but still a respected authority on trauma. This proved to no longer be the case, at least for this particular instructor.
Later I found out that van der Kolk has been attacked by various journalists and writers for making the word trauma popular, and thereby twisting its meaning. It has become chic to refer to something awful that happened in the past as a trauma, and what once was only associated with the terrors of war, torture and assault now encompassed lighter problems like squabbles, neglect and other such slights. The death of a pet goes from being a sad event to being seen as an insurmountable emotional hurdle. This change has also fueled a movement that sees a system of generational trauma connected to historical racial injustice.
I am particularly invested in the idea of generational trauma since I am two generations down from holocaust victims, which is a fact that informs my self-identity (rightly or wrongly). My father’s life and upbringing was seriously stumped because of his parents had spent time in what is called concentration camps, a term I have a hard time with. His life informed my life. And my life informs my children’s lives.
My grandmother knew Bessel and used to attend his conferences. She even took to habitually carrying the little black and red bag from the conference as her usual carry-all. In big red letters on black background it said “TRAUMA STUDIES CONFERENCE”, which I guess gave her some kind of thrill to parade around with. She was herself a victim of trauma – and a wounded healer later helping other survivors.
Back to Bessel – he has recently also been accused of acting uncavalier at his workplace, which lead to his termination. This in addition to the claim that he has blurred the notion of trauma currently puts him in a somewhat disgraced position. One might say that van der Kolk has misshaped modern perceptions of trauma, but I believe that this tendency was evident in the zeitgeist regardless of his particular efforts. We are now in a moment where a countervailing force is emerging. This is represented by people who rather emphasise words like grit, resilience, robustness, and antifragility, to use a coinage by Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Another writer, Abigail Shrier, argues that “therapy culture” has made a whole generation into wimpy snowflakes, in her new book Bad Therapy. As usual, I think the truth lies somewhere in between these extremes. I took offense at reading Shrier’s ranty prose dismissing a lot of research findings. Sadly this is not unusual when a non-expert reviews psychological concepts. She pisses on epigenetics, on generationally inherited trauma research (conducted by Rachel Yehuda et al) on Bessel’s whole life’s work.
I am beginning to think there are two types of trauma researchers; those who’ve experienced trauma themselves and want to understand it, and those who want to make a career and happened to choose trauma as a specialty – and therefore don’t possess enough of an understanding of the phenomenon to really grasp what it is. I’m not arguing that one needs to suffer from the particular ailment one treats or does research on as a professional – that would be absurd – but I think in this particular case it might help.
Kinship of all Species 