The Archive
Essays, episodes, and reflections — one new piece of each, every week.
The Latest
THIS WEEK'S ESSAY
When Everything is Trauma, What is Human?
The field of trauma therapy has given us an increasingly expansive framework for understanding human suffering — one that now risks explaining nearly all adult difficulty as the consequence of a damaged childhood. This essay examines concept creep, the phenomenon by which clinical terms gradually lower their threshold to include less extreme experiences, and traces how it has reshaped the way people understand their own stories.Â
THIS WEEK'S EPISODE
Is Everything Trauma?
The word trauma has changed. What once described an experience that overwhelmed the nervous system beyond its capacity to cope now appears on social media infographics as an explanation for low self-worth, relationship struggles, and everyday emotional difficulty. In this episode, we look at concept creep — the gradual lowering of the threshold for harm-related language — and ask what it actually costs us to call the friction of being human a disorder.
THIS WEEK'S REFLECTION
You Are Allowed to Have Been Affected
For when something was hard — and you're not sure you have the right word for it, the right label, or enough of a reason for it to count. This meditation asks you to set down the search for a verdict and simply acknowledge what you lived through. You don't need a diagnosis, a guilty party, or anyone's agreement for your experience to be real.
This is Part 2 of a series on the language of trauma, the science of stress, and what it actually means to be human right now. If you haven’t read Part 1, you might want to start there.
In the trauma and attachment world, we rely heavily on nervous system science to make sense of human behavior. I ...
This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the language of trauma, the science of stress, and what it actually means to be human right now.
I have been experiencing a quiet identity crisis in my career lately, and honestly, I welcome it.
There is a certain health in questioning what you have always h...
I had a moment the other day that I think we all have, though we don’t always talk about it. I was sitting down to record my podcast when I felt this familiar, heavy pressure kick in. It was the pressure to produce something of substance, something valuable, something that sounded like all those inf...
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