The Trauma Virus
I wrote this book to sound the alarm about trauma. Trauma is way too prevalent, harmful, contagious, and often invisible — just like a virus. And if we keep ignoring that fact and allowing trauma to remain hidden, I wouldn’t bet on our ever defeating it.
The Trauma Virus
I probably use this analogy the most, and it’s certainly germane at the time I’m writing this book. I’ve been thinking of trauma as an epidemic for years now, but recently the Covid-19 pandemic has hit home everywhere, and I’ve started considering trauma as being like a virus that also leaves far too many people dead and suffering aftereffects in its wake. As with Covid, you can’t see trauma itself; you just see it at work—silently but maliciously. As it harms one person, it replicates and jumps to another; then it spreads to another and often back again. Unfortunately, there aren’t vaccine trials for trauma, and early testing for trauma is woefully lacking. And until we employ all of the tools at our disposal and finally face the threat of the trauma virus, not only will our happiness and well-being remain threatened but also our survival.
I’m deeply troubled by this. But it also makes me all the more determined to get the message out about the trauma virus, which is also a pandemic generating untold misery and desperation around the world.
Trauma might not be getting the press Covid is at the moment, and that makes it all the more deadly. Like Covid, the trauma virus itself is invisible. We might be able to recognize some of its symptoms, but because trauma actually alters our brains—our thoughts and memories and their meanings—it’s even more difficult to recognize the extent of its damage. Most of us think of trauma as something that results from a significant, one-time event, but that’s just the tip of the trauma iceberg. The scientists who study trauma tell us there’s a lot more to it than the obvious stuff we can see, but — as the Covid pandemic has shown — we’re not always the best at listening to scientists.
One thing scientists tell us about the trauma virus is that it is harmful enough to affect the children of the future—children who aren’t even imagined yet, let alone born. Trauma can define how genetic characteristics are passed on, meaning that the consequences of trauma are being written into our future genetic record today. So trauma acts like a pandemic that extends beyond a person’s death. We’re looking at a virus that infiltrates the survival chain of our very species, allowing its harm to amplify across generations.
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Trauma is a lot like the air we breathe — it’s everywhere, flowing in and out of our homes and our bodies and the bodies of our loved ones. […] Just because we aren’t immediately aware of or concerned about pollution doesn’t mean that it isn’t a danger to our planet. And just because we aren’t paying attention to trauma doesn’t meant that it isn’t working to undermine our well-being. The threat is real, and trauma is actively doing damage at this very moment.
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Trauma alters our brains in ways not unlike those by which toxoplasma makes mice less aware of the obvious danger of cats. Instead of paying attention to the warning signs in others, traumatized people often get focused on changing themselves—on acting and being “better” (with little help from society in this regard, too). This thinking just generates more shame, self-blame, and fantasies that a new relationship can be made healthy and safe, which often lead an abused person to discount or ignore warning signs that might as well be on a neon billboard. The signs clearly indicate that more abuse, despair, and shame are ahead, but trauma causes people to mistakenly think that changing themselves will change how other people behave toward them.
Like toxoplasma, trauma does what it does in order to survive. It might not be capable of conscious thought, but that doesn’t make it any less dangerous or effective. Toxoplasma has evolved to create more toxoplasma no matter what. In the same way, trauma makes more trauma, moving from human to human, from humans to other living beings and the planet, and back to humans again. And it will keep doing so until we stop it."