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.
There is a rhythm to being human that we spend a lot of time trying to outsmart. It goes like this: we forget, and then we remember. And then we forget again.
In the self-help world, forgetting is usually framed as a failure. If you find yourself back in an old pattern—if you lose your temper, if y...
If you spend enough time in the therapy or self-help world, you will eventually bump into a very specific, very subtle implication. It usually sounds something like this:
If you had just had a more attuned caregiver, you wouldn’t have these patterns.
It’s the foundational premise of modern attachm...
A couple of years ago, my husband and I went backpacking. We hiked a ridiculous number of miles in one day—because that’s just what we did back then—and by the time we needed to set up camp, we were too tired to be picky.
I like to camp near the designated campsites, but not actually in them. The w...
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