A You Problem

I was reading "The psychological battle over trauma" as part of a deeper dive into the phenomenon of "therapy speak," and came across the following passage:

The psychotherapist Alex Howard, author of It’s Not Your Fault, distinguishes between overt trauma, as described by Bonanno, and covert trauma, this less tangible, nevertheless traumatic experience. [...] But this covert trauma, for an increasing number of clinicians, explains why we are the way we are. And through this interpretation, we are moving our conception of mental health away from “what’s wrong with you” and toward “what happened to you?”

The title of Mr. Howard's book is telling, and perhaps points to the root of the problem, at least here in the United States. American society is, in a number of ways, focused on efficiency: how to derive the highest returns from any given set of inputs. But it also manifests itself in a drive to decrease the inputs while maintaining the same returns. And labor is one such input.

The material needs of the United States can be satisfied, generally speaking, without needing the entire populace of the nation to work. One could make the case that there is unrealized demand in some or all sectors of the economy, as the United States' high levels of inequality have the effect of suppressing demand at the lower levels of the income and wealth distributions, but as things are currently structured, the United States effectively has an excess of labor capacity. The fact that the United States has a weak system of social supports, given that it is an industrialized and expensive society, means that this excess capacity becomes competition for work. Likewise, technological advances (and differentials in education) have led to that competition being international. The result being that an unemployed American can find themselves competing with workers literally on the other side of the globe for opportunities. For those people who hold opportunities, and thus can distribute them to others, this creates a wealth of choices born of a flood of candidates. And so a means of discrimination is required. And "something is wrong with this person" is as good a means of sorting as any.

Part of the rationale behind the adoption of "therapy speak" is overt effort on the part of people to say "Whatever flaws you may perceive in me, they aren't my fault. Nothing's wrong with me; something happened to me." This is a sub-optimal viewpoint on the subject, because it buys into the hostile framing of the underlying concern that the "judge" brings to the question, namely: "I have learned this bad thing about you, and it legitimately disqualifies you from the opportunity to work to support yourself." Of course, these sorts of questions extend beyond work; people deploy variants on "It's not my fault," in all sorts of situations, and many of them serve to legitimize what should be understood as the basic problem; the continuous need to find fault with others as a means of justifying the choices one makes concerning others.

Were it up to me, I'd steer society away from it's current apparent level of buy-in to a culture of stigma. But I understand that it's a tough sell. While I was never a big fan of Senator Bernie Sanders, I think that his perception that one of the primary factors driving prejudices is the perception of scarcity is largely correct. While it's true that there are people out there for whom preventing people from meeting their needs is an end in itself, for many people, the competition for resources pushes them to developing ad-hoc heuristics that sort themselves into the group of people who are deserving of access, while keeping enough other people out that a perception of shortage is averted. In other words, instead of viewing scarcity as the problem to be solved, resource distribution to the undeserving is the concern. Assigning stigma to others, then, becomes a solution, even if it isn't a good one.