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.
I have been thinking a lot about shame lately. It’s a familiar subject in my work, but recently, questioning my underlying assumptions about it has taken me somewhere unexpected. I didn’t expect that learning how to work with shame would lead me directly to understanding the emotion of awe.
It’s ti...
There is an exhaustion I see constantly in my practice, and it is one I have certainly felt in my own life. It is deeper than the exhaustion of having done a lot of “work” and still feeling like there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
In my book, Already Human (download for free here), I d...
I woke up this morning feeling a familiar dread. It wasn’t the dread of anything in particular, but because it was aimless, it touched everything I did.
I didn’t want to work out. It was deadlift day, and I didn’t particularly feel like lifting anything heavy. But I got on the Stairmaster to warm u...
The Unbecoming Hub Podcast
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