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.
What happens when the field designed to support the human soul slowly begins to reject it?
This question has followed me for years, largely because I live on both sides of it. I am a therapist. I have been deeply helped by therapy—by one therapist in particular who helped stabilize my relationships...
There are moments when something from the past rises with the same intensity it once had, and the mind rushes to explain it as regression, as though time were a straight line and you somehow walked backward on it, as though progress were something that could be undone by a single reaction, memor
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