Podcast | Ready to Be Strong Ep. 22

Show Links:

Outraged by Kurt Gray: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/714327/outraged-by-kurt-gray/

Concept creep: “The Creeping Concept of Trauma”

Transcript

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Tania Israel: Welcome to Ready to Be Strong. I’m Tania Israel

Elizabeth Scharf: I’m Elizabeth Scharf. Together we’re broadening our minds, opening our hearts and strengthening connections to face the challenges of living in a divided world.

Tania Israel: In this episode, we’re talking about safety and harm. So, Elizabeth Scharf, I don’t know about you, but I hear a lot of people these days talk about feeling unsafe and feeling like they’ve been harmed. And I feel like I’m hearing that a lot more than I had in the past, and I’m curious about what your experience of that is.

Elizabeth Scharf: I agree. Once you brought it to my attention, I started thinking about the different conversations I’ve had in the last hundred days. Also the WhatsApp channels or Signal channels that I’ve been a part of with different communities. And that seems to be a theme not only of feeling like people have been harmed or might be unsafe, but also ways in which they can anticipate that and protect themselves.

Tania Israel: Sure. I mean, I think people are trying to anticipate things because things feel so out of control and so uncertain these days. I feel like I was hearing this a lot even before the new presidential administration came in. But, when somebody says to me, I feel unsafe, then my response is my gosh, what do we need to do to get you out of danger?

And then what I’ll hear from people sometimes is, I’m not in danger. I just feel unsafe. And I’m like, you don’t actually think that you are at risk in some way, but there’s a feeling that you’re having internally of threat. And so that seems to be a little bit different in terms of the way people are talking about feeling unsafe, it’s more based on that feeling that might be associated with some real external kind of threat, but also might not be. It seems to sort of have a broad definition.

Elizabeth Scharf: And do think that’s changed over the past, I don’t know, say five years?

Tania Israel: I don’t know exactly the timeframe, but it feels like it’s changed some. And actually, I found some interesting research on this because there’s this thing called concept creep and Nick Haslam wrote some of the earlier stuff on this, but there’s been more studies that have come about where the concept of trauma has really been broadened to encompass a much wider range of experiences than used to. And I actually got connected to this idea from the book Outraged by Kurt Gray, which I will just keep talking about because I think it’s so great. But in this book, and then I went to look at some of these studies, so Kurt Gray talks about this really interesting study where researchers laid out these experiences and they had a pretty wide range of them like walking up a flight of stairs or having your tongue cut out by a stranger where I’m like, my gosh. So that’s a pretty wide range of things. And then they were asking people like, what do you consider traumatic?

But what they did is they gave some people only this list of milder examples, like you weren’t hired for a job interview, kinds of things. And they gave other people only the more severe kinds of experiences, like you’ve received chemotherapy, was like the mildest of them. And then on up from there. And what they found was that the people who had the only pretty severe examples had a higher threshold for what they considered traumatic. It would only be traumatic if it was something like witnessing a corpse in the street, kind of thing. But the people who only had the milder examples saw much less severe things as being traumatic, like being scolded by a teacher might be considered traumatic. So, Kurt Gray’s point is that we actually live in a much safer world than we used to, if you look at all kinds of indicators. But people still seem to feel under threat and feel traumatized. And some of that has to do with their frame of mind about what is dangerous, and really thinking about a broader range of things as being dangerous in part because maybe they’re not being exposed to as many of the actual severe kinds of experiences.

Elizabeth Scharf: I mean, that’s fascinating. I think from a personal point of view, I think I had a pretty high threshold for what’s considered trauma or pain. Probably because my early days I worked with a lot of people in the 90s that were, or early 2000s, refugees from former Yugoslavia.

Tania Israel: Wow.

Elizabeth Scharf: So I was living in Austria at the time and probably, I don’t know, third of the people that I knew and worked with and were friends with just fled, Milosevic, etcetera. And then I went on to work in Rwanda, which had a genocide. My threshold might be a little higher. Though I’ve revised that more recently because I do think some of the things I experienced could be considered traumatic even with the huge continuum now that we’ve laid out. But I wonder how with this concept creep of what’s traumatic and that lending itself to a lot more people feeling unsafe—
Is that a bad thing? Do we care about that? Are we just creating more, I don’t mean to sound like an old crotchety lady right now, but more paranoid people? I don’t know.

Tania Israel: I think it is a really good question because one of the things I know from the research in psychology is that, for example, with microaggressions, and microaggressions might be sort of verbal invalidations or exclusions of people or stereotypes. These are things that’s not physically harmful. But one of the things we’ve been able to do with measuring exposure to microaggressions is that we know that when people report being exposed to a greater number of microaggressions, then the worse their mental health is. So then we can say, wow, there’s a relationship between exposure to microaggressions and mental health. So we can measure a certain type of harm, like a type of psychological harm.

And sometimes, being able to get at that granularity a little bit more says, okay, sure those, severe physical harms are harmful. I think we can all agree on that. But when we can start to see the ways that other kinds of milder experiences can also have an impact, then we have a way of acknowledging that, that seems important because people’s mental health can be affected. And at the same time, I feel like we don’t want to do sort of the adversity Olympics where we’re like, who got it worse off? And at the same time, I think, is there a way of distinguishing between some of these levels of harm or trauma while still acknowledging that these things have an effect, but that to put them all in the same basket, I don’t know if that might dilute in some ways the way we’re thinking about some of the more severe things together.

Elizabeth Scharf: Right, I agree. I think it’s important to acknowledge the harmful effects of microaggressions, is linking back to systematic historical centuries of oppression. So I think it’s important to acknowledge that. But I do appreciate giving context and couching and the different levels, how you said that now, how you do it in real life, not sure. And my mind goes to, when I first heard about this book and the evidence, my mind went to generations and how I think the millennials at first, getting kind of a bad rap a little bit in the workplace, for example of having people say that they’ve gone through different experiences and can’t come to work today. This is just hearsay, by the way. I don’t want to sound, again, I am a Gen X at the end. But is there something to that as well in terms of, you know, I think about our parents’ generation, I think they were tough as nails and they didn’t necessarily say that they felt unsafe, even if they did. And now we have 50 years later, a generation who is being stereotyped in exactly the opposite.

Tania Israel: Yeah, well, I mean, you and I are both Gen X, and Gen X, we think our scrappiness is one of our great qualities. We were the latchkey kid generation, and so we figured out how to get stuff done on our own, and that’s sort of a source of pride. And at the same time, we might not think it’s ideal that we had to figure everything out on our own. So, yeah, there does seem to be some generational stuff here, and I’m hearing this from people in the workplace. The older generation people are saying, yeah, well, it seems like there are people coming into the workplace with really different expectations. And some of it has to do with accommodations. So accommodations, also something that we’re like, okay, totally makes sense to have accommodations in the workplace.

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires it. We want to make sure that everybody can really perform at their optimal level and that the workplace supports that in various ways. But the idea of accommodations has also then broadened, it seems like. Not just physical disabilities, but also mental health kinds of things. And I’m a psychologist. I have to be like, yes, we should, of course accommodate people’s mental health. But what happens then if this concept creep idea has come in where the concept of what requires a mental health day off from work has really expanded over time and maybe expanded generationally so that some people are like, I don’t see why that would require you to not come to work today. And some people are like, can’t you see I’ve experienced harm and this is what’s necessary for my mental health. So I don’t know that there’s an easy answer to this because it’s so contextual and generational and all of these other things, but I think it’s really important that we’re talking about it.

Elizabeth Scharf: I think it’s easier if you have, let’s just talk about the workplace. Everyone’s of the same mindset and let’s say a younger generation and they all maybe have a little bit of creep, concept creep and then separately in another workplace you have the older generation and they have the same expectations of what it is to feel unsafe.

The harder part is folks that are in the middle, like the majority middle, that you really need to show clarity and almost articulate. What is the definition of being able to take a mental health day? And I think that’s really the hard conversations that have to be had in order for different people to not feel resentful. Like this person took a mental health day. Well, did they know what’s going on in my life? I would have taken a mental health day. Having those conversations, bridging differences of opinion within the middle part of that continuum, is the challenge, but a necessary thing.

Tania Israel: Well, and in Kurt Gray’s great book, Outraged, he also talks about how these researchers did another study where they said, OK, what if we shift the definition that people have of what trauma is? We’re going to tell some people trauma is a pretty unusual thing that’s severe and is more in this narrow range of things. And we’re going to tell other people that trauma is anything that’s going to affect you negatively and it’s pretty broad. So for both of these, it’s like, this is what psychologists think trauma is. And what they found was then after they said, OK, now read this article about something that could be distressing, the people who thought that trauma was narrower didn’t have as severe a reaction to that. They didn’t have intrusive thoughts about it and things. That the people who were told that trauma was this much broader concept really had more of some symptoms associated with PTSD from reading this thing.

So it’s not insignificant how we are defining this for other people. When we say it’s one thing, when we say it’s a broader concept, people may have more of a reaction or maybe people are just more tuned in to the reaction that they’re having, you know, could write as maybe another way to think about it. But I do think that the definition of it then makes a difference in terms of how we’re experiencing it. And then beyond that, how we’re dealing with the workplace or in educational settings, there’s a lot of this going on also, I see. So it’s a real challenge.

Elizabeth Scharf: I know I fall in the latter bucket of what you just described. I didn’t think I experienced trauma and then maybe because I learned of this new concept of trauma. I’m like, wait, maybe I did. And then I had to do a little, not revisionist history, but I had to go back to that place, experience those feelings and what happened. And I’m like, yeah. And I felt them deeply again, but I’m glad, I’m actually glad it was named for me.

Because then I was able to process and actually acknowledge and then move on a little bit. You know what I mean? Like I went through whatever trauma processes, grief and then understanding and then maybe some forgiveness in there. So I think there is definitely some value in naming it and defining it as well. But does it spark more PTSD, that’s definitely a negative thing though, wouldn’t you say?

Tania Israel: Well, I mean, I think it’s interesting. Thank you for sharing that, because I think that if there’s unacknowledged trauma and unprocessed trauma, then that can have effects on us that we’re not even aware of. It can be driving us in certain ways or making it harder for us to make our way through life well. So I think that that is good. And it sounds like you were then able to process it though. It wasn’t just, look, this thing happened, but you worked your way through it. And maybe that’s one of the pieces is, okay, if we have experienced something, are we looking externally to say, and therefore my environment needs to accommodate this reaction that I’m having?

Are we saying, wow, I’m having this reaction and how do I move through it and get to another place with it or some combination of those things or something else? And I think that’s part of what I’m hearing, is an expectation of, okay, I’m experiencing this thing, my environment needs to accommodate it. And I can understand where that comes from. And I wonder if coming from a Gen X perspective, it’s like, here’s something, now I got to figure it out. Which is very different from, here’s something. I need to put the environment on alert that there’s something that they can do to make it easier for me as I have experienced something challenging.

Elizabeth Scharf: Mm-hmm. Again, both of those things though are actions and activating to try to minimize that traumatic effect, which is a good thing. I would add one more piece to it. Not only I need to change my environment or the environment needs to accommodate in preparation or anticipation of something happening again and I want to stop that. And so in that sense, I think it’s a really good thing that we’re more on alert because it allows us to activate and prepare so it doesn’t happen again. Something very worthwhile.

Tania Israel: Maybe it’s something to think about in terms of a collaboration between the individual and the environment. Because I think if the individual feels like they’ve got to deal with it completely on their own without environmental support, that’s not such a positive thing. And when the individual’s like, hey, environment, you need to accommodate all of this, and it’s not my responsibility to do anything because I was the victim, and I can understand why people would be feeling that. And at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily create that space where somebody can move forward with support of the environment. Sometimes people can get stuck in that.

Elizabeth Scharf: Mm-hmm. Right. It has to be more balanced and collaborative, as you said. Do you feel like I just had this kind of little thunderbolt? Like, are we having a very American, Portlandia conversation right now?

Tania Israel: I did not watch Portlandia.

Elizabeth Scharf: Me neither. But I know that because you know what? I thought, I already know that world. I don’t need to watch it. Do you think people in other countries are having conversations like this around how trauma is defined, the creep, the concept creep of trauma or feeling safe, unsafe?

Some people think that Americans are very navel-gazing and it’s like a luxury that we’re even able to have this conversation because we actually are so safe relative to other countries and other people in this world.

Tania Israel: So you’ve spent a lot more time doing work outside the US than I have. So you might have a better perspective on that. I’m pretty aware of what’s going on in the US and being able to see this sort of generational thing. And also there’s some left and right thing with this in some ways, I feel like, where people on the right are really seeing people on the left. The whole snowflake thing is, being very fragile and whatnot. So I think some of that has to do with the embrace on the left of these things we’re talking about—microaggressions, intergenerational trauma, privilege, the ways in which the structural inequities play out in our everyday interactions with other people and have an impact on us. And people on the right are often not seeing those as being as legitimate in terms of their assessment of how damaging or how harmful these things are. That’s sort of where I see some of that difference, but you may be able to speak better to the US versus outside the US perspective.

Elizabeth Scharf: Well, I have to admit that I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called too sensitive, so sensitive, by my family, by picking up on microaggressions, etcetera.

So I am guilty probably, or guilty is probably not the word, of being a snowflake in that situation. But I still think it’s important to acknowledge even microaggressions and how that could lead to larger, more harmful things. Now, in a global context, I have to admit that we are the most prosperous country with a high standard of living. And relative to the rest of the world, I do think we have concept creep in terms of what is trauma and what is hardship to a certain degree. I wish I had the stats, so put them in the footnotes. In terms of poverty levels, I know it doesn’t seem it, but democracy, our rights, our human rights are much more than average compared to around the world. So yes.

Tania Israel: Yeah, I’m remembering now something else from Kurt Gray’s book, which is that people on the left and the right both sort of recognize that people can be vulnerable to being targeted by other people. People on the left tend to see certain groups as being particularly vulnerable. People on the right tend to feel like anybody can really experience that kind of victimization. It’s sort of like who is most susceptible to victimization. People on left would say, here’s a list of groups that are most susceptible. And people on the right would be like, well, anybody is susceptible to victimization. So when people on the left push back against people who are in more privileged positions, then people on the right see that as these people are being victimized then. Where people on the left are like, no, speaking truth to power. No, those people have all the power. We are not harming them. We are calling out the harm that they’re doing. And that really helped me to understand a lot of this real difference in the left and the right in terms of how we think about victimization and harm.

Elizabeth Scharf: Where do you see Kurt Gray’s sequel book going?

Tania Israel: Well, he ends up actually in a place of, in this book, talking about, what do we do about it? And he goes to what kinds of conversation should we be having? He talks about how it’s helpful, one, if we share stories, which is a thing I always say to him, like, share stories rather than stats and slogans. And yet here I am sharing all the stats, like, but this research study is really fascinating. But I think it is.

What he says we should share in our stories is we should talk about harm, that we should talk about where we see harm and how we understand harm because that’s the common ground that we have is that we are prey, that we are in an evolutionary sense sort of drawing on our experience of being aggressed against and being at the mercy of the saber-toothed and whatnot. And so that’s where we’re reacting from is not because we’re trying to harm other people but we’re trying to protect ourselves and others from harm. So if we can come from that common ground and be like, yes, I think harmed children is a terrible thing.

And this is what we should be doing on this policy level, or this is where my opinions are connected to seeing harm that’s being done here and how we can protect.

Elizabeth Scharf: But the first step is acknowledging all of us that that is harm, and something needs to be done about it.

Tania Israel: Yeah, and that’s one of the challenges is we don’t necessarily have common ground in terms of what we see as harm. But part of it is we need to articulate that.

So some of the conversations I’ve been having with people lately around the issue of harm and feeling unsafe have to do with what’s going on on college campuses, which is where I spend a lot of my time.

There have been concerns about anti-Semitism on college campuses. There have been concerns about Islamophobia on college campuses, concerns about racism, concerns about safety of protesters, safety of undocumented people, safety of trans people. There have been so many conversations lately about who is safe and unsafe on college campuses. And wow, are there some big differences of opinion about that and about who should be prioritized and about who is actually potentially being harmed here. So I think that the kinds of ideas we’re talking about with concept creep and the ideas we’re talking about with different perspectives on who is vulnerable have some absolute relevance to the kinds of policy and social division things that are happening right now.

I think that when we talk about harm, when people say, there’s anti-Semitism going on on college campuses, I always find it useful to unpack that a little bit. Like, what do you see? What are you concerned about? And the same thing with any of these pieces is saying, okay, What if rather than just saying there’s anti-Semitism, we say, okay, well, what does that mean? What does that look like? Where do you see the harm that’s happening there? And same thing with, you feel like there’s Islamophobia going on. What do you see? What are you most concerned about? Where do you see the harm? Sometimes just getting more granular with it is helpful both for someone to hear what the concerns are. But also I think when we’re throwing around these terms, for us to be able to go, okay, well, let me reflect a little bit. Somebody asked me recently, what’s happened, your campus around anti-Semitism? I’m like, okay, well, there’s this person who’s a student leader who was targeted. And then I was like, well, let me think about what I mean by the word targeted. What actually happened? And we were sort of unpacking it.

And recognizing where there were holes in the details of it, but there’s a sort of concept of there’s anti-Semitism and it’s harmful. I’m not saying there isn’t anti-Semitism and I’m not saying it isn’t harmful, but I think that the granularity of it is helpful because there’s major harm that’s certainly been done to Jewish people. And when we’re thinking about things like the Holocaust, there’s some real harm there. And there’s some real intergenerational trauma in terms of how safe or unsafe people feel around that. Same thing with racism, same thing with, you know, all of these different pieces have long histories and complicated ways that they play out for us, socially, politically, and psychologically.

Elizabeth Scharf: When you were talking about having that granular conversation, do you think that granular conversation is happening on campus too, like amongst administrators, with students, or is it not happening?

Tania Israel: I think it depends. There’s very different things going on on different campuses. I think it’s beneficial when we can have a more granular conversation. What I see is sometimes the differences in terms of even language that we’re using around things. And some people are like, if you are not using my language, then you are doing harm. then I don’t feel safe. Then these are things that really shut down conversations. But it all then gets back to this issue of, OK, what is it that’s not feeling safe about this? Where’s the harm and how are we each understanding it? But I think to be able to even have those conversations, you’ve got to have that within a sense of connectedness and community. I think that honestly, I think the pandemic also put us in a very difficult place with feeling less of that connection and community to be able to hold the conversations that would be helpful for us to have.

Elizabeth Scharf: You’d think that if there’s any place these kinds of conversations could happen, it would be at a university.

Tania Israel: Yeah, that’s what I would hope. Yeah, that’s really what I would hope. And I think that it is happening on some campuses and they’re doing this, but it’s definitely not happening everywhere.

Elizabeth Scharf: Yeah.

And it’s then inevitable to then turn into a headline. My experience of this on college campuses is reading headlines of what’s going on in Columbia, which doesn’t seem like a conversation is being had, but it’s also gotten into the mix of being a proxy for a political battle.

Tania Israel: Columbia University, not the country. And the thing is, even the headlines that we’re seeing, I don’t think get at everything that’s going on. There was a lot going on at Harvard and I talked to somebody whose kid was at Harvard. I was like, how’s your kid doing? They were like, he’s going to classes and studying. Most students are actually not involved in any of this. Most students are trying to go to classes and take their exams and learn things and get their degrees. So that’s where the headlines that we’re hearing really focus in on the most conflictual and attention grabbing aspects of what’s going on on a campus

Elizabeth Scharf: Mm-hmm. It’s almost like a caricature of what we’ve been talking about this whole time.

Tania Israel: And not that the media should be ignoring it. And at the same time, it’s not that anything that they’re reporting is necessarily inaccurate. It’s just a small slice of what’s happening.

Elizabeth Scharf: Right.

So going forward, do you feel like there is a future in which you’re going to ask people about people’s trauma or how they define trauma or safety?

Tania Israel: I think that’s a big question because when somebody says that they’re feeling traumatized, like inquiring about people’s trauma, can be a very intrusive sort of thing. And at the same time, when people are putting their trauma out there so publicly or in such a way as to say, I need these accommodations, then yeah, I think it’s a good question of how do we actually talk about that?

It’s challenging when we’re looking at people’s traumatic experiences and saying, tell me more about that. That can be a lot for people to open up and share. And at the same time, this thing about people’s concepts of trauma, that might be the place to start with it.

How do you think about harm and how do you think about trauma? And not necessarily starting by asking people to prove that you’ve experienced trauma. That’s not going to get us to a good place. That’s maybe a little bit what people are feeling sometimes when they feel like they’re being challenged by somebody to accommodate their needs around stuff or when they’re hearing, you’re doing harm to me. I do feel like that’s something where you’re like, OK, tell me what this experience is like for you, at least if we start by talking about how we think about these concepts, how we think about harm, I think bringing some of the research into and saying, my gosh, there’s this really interesting study and it made a difference what our frameworks are and what do you think about that? Just starting to have some conversations on that level may help us to unpack a little bit the assumptions that we have behind the conversations.

Elizabeth Scharf: Mm-hmm, hopefully that way we can connect. And I think it’s a taboo issue and really important then to disrupt and take on that taboo because it’s important to bridge and connect.

Tania Israel: Yeah. Safety, harm, concept creep, that this is something that maybe we need to really be looking at how this might underlie some of the divisions and conflicts we’re having right now.

Elizabeth Scharf: Absolutely.

Tania Israel: I’m Tania Israel: Israel, professor, psychologist, and author of Facing the Fracture.

Elizabeth Scharf: And I’m Elizabeth Scharf: Scharf, social entrepreneur and urgent optimist.

Tania Israel: Make your choice.

Elizabeth Scharf: Are you ready to be strong?

Tania Israel: Ready to be Strong is brought to you by me, Tania Israel: Israel.

Elizabeth Scharf: And me, Elizabeth Scharf: Scharf.

Tania Israel: And produced by Sarita Bhatt. Our theme music is by Jeff Marcel at Premium.Elizabeth Scharf: And don’t forget to bring this conversation into your circles. Rate and review the show wherever you’re listening. And most importantly, share this episode with a friend.