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Elena came to me with an impressive trauma resume. Childhood emotional neglect. Bullying in middle school. Date rape in college. Emotionally abusive first marriage. Car accident three years ago. She’d been in various therapies for fifteen years, accumulating diagnoses—PTSD, complex PTSD, attachment disorder, depression, anxiety. She knew all the language: triggers, dissociation, hypervigilance, emotional flashbacks. She’d done EMDR, somatic experiencing, internal family systems, DBT. Some helped temporarily. Nothing stuck.
“I’m just so broken,” she told me in our first session. She said it matter-of-factly, without drama. A simple statement of fact, like saying “I’m short” or “I have brown eyes.” Broken was her identity.
And here’s the thing that makes me uncomfortable to say: the story of being broken had become more damaging than the original traumas.
Let me be immediately clear: trauma is real. Terrible things happen to people, and those things have lasting effects.
PTSD exists. Complex trauma shapes development profoundly. Everything the trauma-informed therapy movement has taught us about how overwhelming experiences affect the nervous system, attachment, self-concept—all of that is real and important.
But somewhere in the past twenty years, as trauma has moved from the margins to the center of therapeutic discourse, something has gone wrong. We’ve become so good at identifying trauma, so committed to validation, so careful about not blaming victims, that we’ve lost our ability to help people move beyond trauma identity. We’ve created a therapeutic culture where being traumatized becomes a permanent state, where healing means managing symptoms rather than recovering capacity, where the language of trauma becomes a trap.
I think we need to talk about this. And I think we need to be careful about how we talk about it, because it’s very easy for this conversation to slide into victim-blaming or minimizing real suffering. But the conversation is necessary because I’m seeing more and more people whose relationship to their trauma history has become the core problem, and our current
therapeutic approach is making it worse.
The Narrative Trap
Here’s how the trap works. Someone experiences genuinely traumatic events. They struggle—of course they struggle. The trauma affects everything: relationships, work, sense of safety, capacity for joy. They go to therapy. The therapist,
properly trained in trauma-informed care, helps them understand that their struggles make sense given what they’ve been through. It’s not their fault. They’re not weak or damaged. They have normal responses to abnormal events.
This is all correct and helpful. Except sometimes it’s not.
For some clients—not all, but an increasing number—this framing becomes fixed. The trauma explanation for their
struggles ossifies into trauma identity. Every difficulty, every bad day, every relationship problem gets filtered through trauma lens. “I can’t trust people because of my trauma.” “I have to work part-time because trauma makes full-time
impossible.” “I can’t commit to relationships because my attachment is too damaged.” “I need constant reassurance because of my abandonment wound.”
The trauma narrative explains everything and thus makes everything inevitable. It provides a coherent story that makes sense of suffering while simultaneously foreclosing possibility. If you’re broken by trauma, trying to change feels like denying your truth, minimizing what happened to you, playing into toxic positivity culture that refuses to acknowledge real damage.
Elena lived in this trap completely. Every limitation, every avoidance, every difficulty was understood through trauma. And every therapy she’d done had reinforced this understanding. Therapists had helped her identify more traumas (was that fight with her sister traumatic? Yes, probably. That time her boss criticized her? Definitely retraumatizing.). They’d helped her recognize more symptoms (trouble concentrating? Trauma. Difficulty orgasming? Trauma. Preferring to stay home? Trauma.). They’d validated that her responses made complete sense given her history.
All true. And all leaving her more stuck, more disabled, more identified with being damaged than when she started therapy.
The Victimhood Paradigm
There’s a concept I’ve been working with, borrowed from a colleague: forfeiting the paradigm of victimhood. It’s controversial language—I’m aware of that. But hear me out.
Being victimized is a fact. Things were done to you. You didn’t choose them, didn’t deserve them, couldn’t prevent them. This is objective reality, and denying it is gaslighting. But living in victim paradigm—organizing your entire identity around having been victimized—is a choice. Usually an unconscious choice, and usually one that made sense at some point, but still a choice.
The victim paradigm offers something important: it explains your suffering, absolves you of responsibility for your limitations, provides moral clarity (you’re innocent, they’re guilty), creates community with others who’ve suffered similarly, and often elicits support and accommodation from others. These aren’t trivial benefits. For someone struggling to make sense of inexplicable suffering, the victim paradigm can be a revelation.
But it comes with costs we don’t talk about enough. Living in victim paradigm means:
Your wellbeing depends on things outside your control (processing the past, achieving justice, getting acknowledgment from people who harmed you)
Present difficulties are always explained by past events, which makes them feel unchangeable
Improvement threatens your identity and your community—if you heal, who are you? Where do you belong? Others’ increased expectations feel invalidating rather than confidence-building
Taking responsibility for current choices feels like victim-blaming yourself
Elena couldn’t leave victim paradigm because her entire sense of self was built on it. She’d found community in trauma survivor groups. She’d learned to communicate her needs through trauma language. She’d structured her life around accommodation to her limitations. Friends knew not to expect too much. Her family had learned to tiptoe around her triggers. She had a disability claim based on PTSD.
None of this is judgment. These are all rational responses to genuine suffering. But the structure had calcified to the point where healing threatened everything she’d built. Getting better would mean losing her identity, her community, her explanation for struggles, her protection from expectations. It would mean facing the terrifying possibility that she’s been living as a victim longer than she needed to.
When I suggested, very gently, that we might work on expanding her capacity rather than just managing symptoms, she looked at me like I’d suggested she fly to the moon. “I’m disabled,” she said. “Trauma disabled me. Are you saying I should just push through it?”
No. But also, kind of yes? This is where the conversation gets difficult.
The Capacity Question
Here’s what I want to know with trauma clients, and what I’m often afraid to ask directly: How much of your current limitation is because you can’t, and how much is because you haven’t tried recently?
I’m not talking about flashbacks or panic attacks or dissociation—those are clearly not voluntary. I’m talking about the broader life constriction. The underemployment. The social isolation. The avoidance of challenge. The dependency on others. The lack of engagement with anything difficult or new.
How much of that is trauma damage, and how much is trauma accommodation that became habitual and then became identity?
With Elena, we started exploring this carefully. Not challenging her limitations, but getting curious about them. “You say you can’t work full-time because of trauma. Tell me about that. What happens when you try?”
Turns out she hadn’t tried in eight years. Eight years ago she’d had a bad experience at a demanding job—triggering boss, overwhelming workload, ended in stress leave. Since then: part-time work only, carefully chosen for low stress. Had
trauma made full-time work impossible? Or had one bad experience plus trauma narrative led her to stop trying?
I suggested an experiment: informational interviews at places she might want to work full-time. Not job applications, just conversations. Exploring possibility with no commitment. She was terrified but agreed.
First interview: she was exhausted afterwards, overwhelmed, convinced she could never do it. Second interview: slightly easier. Third: she noticed she actually enjoyed talking about work. Fifth: she accepted a full-time position, trial basis, plan to reduce hours if it was too much.
She’s been full-time for eighteen months now. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes she’s exhausted. But she’s doing it. The trauma didn’t make it impossible—the trauma narrative plus eight years of accommodation plus identity investment
made it feel impossible.
This is where trauma therapists get angry at me. “You’re blaming her for being traumatized!” No. I’m distinguishing between trauma effects and trauma narrative effects. Real limitations exist. But trauma narrative can make those
limitations seem more fixed, more comprehensive, more permanent than they actually are.
The Paradox of Trauma-Informed Care
Here’s my heresy: trauma-informed care, as currently practiced, sometimes maintains trauma more than it resolves it.
Trauma-informed care teaches us: always go at the client’s pace. Never push. Prioritize safety and stabilization. Validate that their caution makes sense. Accommodate their limitations. Be careful about expectations that might feel retraumatizing.
All of this is sometimes right. But it can also become a structure that prevents recovery. Because healing from trauma requires, at some point, doing things that feel unsafe. Tolerating discomfort. Facing triggers. Taking risks. Disappointing people who expect you to stay the same. Challenging your own narrative about what’s possible.
If trauma-informed care means never encouraging clients toward discomfort, we’ve created therapeutic approach that
maintains avoidance indefinitely. We’ve pathologized the normal process of recovery, which involves gradual exposure to difficulty.
I see this constantly in supervision. Therapists present cases where clients have been in therapy for years, made no progress, but the therapist is committed to “going at the client’s pace” indefinitely. When I ask what pace the client is going, the answer is usually: no pace. They’re not going anywhere. They’re comfortably stuck in supported stuckness.
The trauma-informed frame makes this situation seem compassionate. We’re not pushing. We’re respecting their limits. We’re providing safe space. But we’re also colluding with avoidance and reinforcing the narrative that they can’t handle challenge.
Real trauma-informed care should include informed pushing. Not recklessly, not without preparation, not without support. But pushing. Because trauma recovery requires encountering the things trauma taught you to avoid. And if therapy never involves productive discomfort, it’s not therapy—it’s expensive friendship with someone who validates your limitation.
The Integration Problem
Part of what’s happened is that trauma therapy and identity politics have merged in ways that make recovery harder. The language of trauma now overlaps completely with language of marginalization, oppression, and identity-based harm.
This creates conceptual confusion that affects how people understand their own suffering.
Someone experiences workplace discrimination based on their race or gender. That’s real, that’s harmful, that may well be traumatic. But the current discourse treats this as creating permanent trauma identity: “I’m traumatized by
racism/sexism/homophobia.” Once established, this identity makes every subsequent difficulty interpretable as trauma response.
A microaggression isn’t just offensive—it’s triggering. A disagreement isn’t just frustrating—it’s retraumatizing. Normal workplace stress isn’t just stressful—it’s activating PTSD. The trauma lens becomes all-consuming, and suddenly you’re not just someone who experiences discrimination (real) but someone who is disabled by cumulative trauma (often questionable).
This matters because it affects what solutions seem possible. If discrimination is the problem, solutions include justice, policy change, cultural transformation—things you can work toward. If trauma is the problem, solutions include accommodation, therapy, symptom management—things that accept your limitation as given.
I’m not denying that discrimination causes trauma. I’m questioning whether trauma framework is always the most useful way to understand discrimination’s effects. Maybe sometimes it’s more accurate and more empowering to say: these
experiences are making me angry, exhausted, demoralized, but I’m not traumatized—I’m responding appropriately to unjust circumstances. That framing maintains agency in ways trauma framing often doesn’t.
What Actually Helps
So if trauma-informed care as currently practiced is sometimes part of the problem, what works better?
With Elena, what helped was what I call narrative revision. Not denying her trauma history, but revising her relationship to that history. Moving from “I’m broken by what happened” to “Difficult things happened and I’m someone who survived them.”
This sounds like semantic game, but it’s not. “I’m broken” is an identity statement that makes present and future functions of past. “I survived” is a capacity statement that makes past evidence of resilience. One forecloses possibility; one opens it.
We worked on this through very specific exercises. I’d ask Elena to tell a story about her life, any story. She’d tell trauma story: “When I was eight my parents divorced and I felt abandoned…” I’d stop her. “Tell me a different story. Not about trauma. Just about your life.”
She’d struggle. After fifteen years of trauma therapy, she literally couldn’t tell her story any other way. Every memory was organized around trauma. She couldn’t remember being eight without remembering the divorce. She couldn’t remember college without remembering the rape. Every experience was tagged as “before trauma” or “after trauma” or “related to trauma.”
So we practiced finding other narratives. “Tell me about a time you helped someone.” “Tell me about something you’re proud of that has nothing to do with trauma.” “Tell me about a time you surprised yourself.”
Initially these stories kept circling back to trauma: “I helped my friend going through divorce because I understood
abandonment…” But gradually, haltingly, she found stories that existed independently. Stories about her competence, her kindness, her humor, her intelligence. Stories where trauma was background rather than foreground.
This wasn’t denying trauma. It was refusing to let trauma be the only story. And as alternative narratives became available, her sense of possibility expanded. If she wasn’t just “trauma survivor,” if she was also “loyal friend” and “creative thinker” and “person who makes people laugh,” then her future wasn’t predetermined by her past.
The other thing that helped—and this is controversial—was expectations. After months of work, I started expecting
things from Elena. Not cruelly, not without support, but genuinely expecting. “You’re working full-time now. That’s hard. But you’re doing it, which means you can do hard things. So I’m going to expect you to do other hard things too.”
This was terrifying for her. Every previous therapist had been so careful about never expecting too much. I was explicitly expecting more. At first she experienced this as invalidating, as if I didn’t understand her trauma. But gradually she started experiencing it as respect, as confidence in her capacity, as treatment like someone who could handle challenge rather than someone who needed constant protection.
I think trauma therapy has become so focused on validation and accommodation that we’ve forgotten people often need us to expect more from them, not less. Not in ways that blame them for limitation, but in ways that reflect genuine
confidence that they’re capable of more than they currently believe.
The Recovery That Threatens Identity
The hardest part of trauma recovery is that it requires giving up trauma identity. And for many people, that identity has become everything.
If you’ve organized your whole life around being a trauma survivor—if that’s how you understand your struggles, how you connect with others, how you explain your limitations, how you derive meaning—then recovery is existential threat. Getting better means becoming someone you don’t know. It means losing community with other survivors who are still suffering. It means facing difficult questions about time spent in limitation that might have been unnecessary.
I see this most clearly in trauma survivor communities online. Spaces that start as support end up as identity reinforcement. Members share stories of trauma and accommodation, validate each other’s limitations, compete over who’s more damaged, and subtly police anyone who suggests recovery is possible. Getting better becomes betrayal.
Elena struggled with this enormously. As she recovered capacity—working full-time, socializing more, managing stress without constant accommodation—her trauma survivor friends became uncomfortable. “You’re acting like trauma doesn’t affect you anymore.” “Are you saying we should all just push through it?” She was inadvertently threatening their
narrative by demonstrating that limitation was less fixed than they believed.
She ended up leaving most of those communities. It was lonely. But it was also necessary. You can’t recover while surrounded by people invested in permanent damage.
The Moral Injury Distinction
One thing I’ve found helpful is distinguishing between trauma (overwhelm of protective capacities) and moral injury (violation of beliefs about how world should work). They often co-occur, but they’re different problems requiring different approaches.
Pure trauma—like car accident, natural disaster, sudden violence—benefits from standard trauma treatment: processing memories, reducing arousal, addressing conditioned fear. But moral injury—betrayal by trusted person, institutional abuse, discrimination, exploitation—doesn’t resolve the same way.
Moral injury involves shattered worldviews, loss of trust, sense of injustice, ongoing bitterness about what shouldn’t have happened but did. Processing memories doesn’t fix this. You need philosophical work: reconstructing worldview that
accommodates betrayal, finding meaning despite injustice, accepting that terrible things happen without becoming permanently bitter.
Elena’s trauma was mostly moral injury. She felt betrayed by everyone: parents who didn’t protect her, school that didn’t stop bullying, date rapist who violated trust, husband who abused power, even her own body after the accident. Standard trauma treatment hadn’t helped because it treated the symptoms (anxiety, avoidance, hypervigilance) without addressing the moral injury (the world isn’t safe, people aren’t trustworthy, suffering has no meaning).
We had to do philosophical work. Not about processing memories but about reconstructing relationship to reality. Can you live in world where terrible things happen to innocent people? Can you trust anyone knowing betrayal is possible? Can you find meaning in suffering that shouldn’t have occurred?
These are existential questions, not psychological ones. Trauma therapy often avoids them, focusing on symptom management. But for moral injury, these questions are the work. And avoiding them means staying stuck in bitterness and victimhood indefinitely.
The Complicated Truth
So here’s where I land after thirty years of this work: Trauma is real, and trauma narratives are sometimes more damaging than trauma itself. Both things are true simultaneously.
People are genuinely harmed by terrible experiences. Those experiences leave lasting effects. Some people are more fragile, more affected, more limited by trauma than others. Individual differences matter. Some trauma is so severe that full recovery may not be possible.
And: trauma narrative can become trap that maintains limitation long after healing becomes possible. Trauma identity can foreclose possibility. Trauma-informed care can collude with avoidance. Validation without expectation can maintain disability.
We need to be able to hold both truths. To honor real damage while refusing to make damage into permanent identity. To validate suffering while challenging limitation. To respect trauma while expecting recovery.
This is hard work. Much harder than simply validating limitation or simply pushing through it. It requires constant calibration: Is this limitation real or narrative? Is this accommodation necessary or habitual? Is this person stuck because they can’t move or because they haven’t tried lately?
I get these calibrations wrong sometimes. I’ve pushed people who genuinely couldn’t handle it. I’ve accommodated people who needed expectation. The work is imperfect because people are complex and trauma affects everyone differently.
But I’m convinced we’ve gone too far toward validation and accommodation, and we need to reclaim expectation and
challenge as therapeutic tools. Not cruelty, not victim-blaming, but genuine confidence that people can handle more than trauma narrative tells them they can.
Elena sent me a message last month: “Remember when I told you I was broken? I believed that completely. Thank you for not believing it.” She’s working full-time, dating someone new, planning a trip abroad. She still has hard days. She still manages anxiety. But she’s not broken. She never was.
She just believed a story about herself that needed revising.
Aleksandar Fatić is a research professor at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, and director of the Institute for Practical Humanities. His work explores the intersection of philosophy and psychotherapy, with particular focus on narrative identity and moral injury. Contact: a.fatic@iph.edu.rs
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