Tipping the Sacred Cow: The Trauma Industrial Complex

How many have been sold a bad bill of goods? What should be a crime is instead hailed and defended by all would-be consumers. The weaponization and commercialization of garden-variety human suffering is one of the greatest mass harms of propaganda in our time. In exchange for your freedom, autonomy, and self-realization—in exchange for the normal methods life employs to bring you wisdom, the consequences you work through to extract the gold of a hard-earned lesson, the very trials that deliver a titanium backbone and genuine, resolute self-esteem—you were given the therapeutic bypass.

What’s this? It’s the get-out-of-responsibility-free card, which reads: I am not responsible for my actions, my boundaries, or my consequences. I have a diagnosed condition. Therefore, you are responsible for my well-being. I am a ward of the world.

Except life doesn’t work that way. There are immutable laws. No matter how many experts tout their wares and sell you their methods, no matter how much social backing you have, no matter how many circles you sit in and sob with your sisters—your basic human karma waits for you. Even while you go through dramatic histrionics, visit healing centers, and blame the “manipulators,” the “narcissists,” life will come back with one statement and two questions:

1. Yes, that may have happened.

2. What was your part in creating it?

3. Did you convert it into wisdom?

The ego will seek significance however it can. You can gain it by holding a gun to someone’s head or through altruistic deeds. The former is an empty calorie that leaves you jonesing for more, needing to up your dose. The latter, while not easy, produces an easeful baseline happiness that, eventually, after a long time, becomes a happiness with no opposite. Diminishing returns vs. accelerating returns.

So let’s call the game and expose the grifters hawking it—the ironic game of selling you the idea that “the abuser” is at fault for your basic human discomfort. The game that stuffs the drug of blame in your mouth for every small ailment until you’re hooked, and the detox is too grueling to go through in order to get sober. You need someone, anyone, to blame for this universal burden of human existence. But the real remedy is this: take on your portion and lift that burden—for yourself and others.

But that’s not very sexy. It’s hard to sell the truth—that what we call trauma is simply a bad habit, exacerbated by repetition. I mean, who would take your medications, sign up for your seminars, or buy your books if the message was: You are responsible for your one acre of land. No one else is. No one else can be.

That “special” thing you seek—the lover, the Daddy, the husband, the teacher, the job position, the thing that will finally save you? That does not exist. It’s just you and you. You may as well get to work.

The Surrogate Mommy Medicine—the furrowed-eyebrow, “compassionate” speakers who endlessly reinforce what your procrastination wants to hear, that you are powerless, hopeless, helpless, that the best you can hope for is pain management—these are the biggest shysters of our time.

Compassion is the Swiss Army knife of life—many tools in one: peace, increase, power, wrath, and activity. To hijack and rebrand it as mere enabling, as savior or rescuer, is to rob people of real compassion—the kind that offers both nurturance and the blade that cuts through delusion and sends you into action. The kind that spanks your butt and sends you out the door. That is real compassion.

Bonbon self-diagnosis, womb healing, and indulgence in one’s story? That’s a toxic mimic.

No, your ex-boyfriend isn’t toxic—the medication you’ve been given to deal with basic human heartbreak is. That is both toxic and addictive.

So let’s get it straight. Identity is just a habit. It might be a multi-lifetime, multi-generational habit, but at the end of the day, all relief and joy come from exchanging bad habits—the ones that place the locus of power outside yourself—for good habits. Ask yourself:

•How did I create this?

•How am I responsible for my suffering (and that of others)?

•What can I do to amend this?

Start Here

1.Go on a complaint detox. Even in your own head. Even when it’s the false intimacy of commiserating with your sisters. Zip the complaint lip.

2.Watch the detox start. It won’t be pretty. Your ego will thrash. It will seek comfort, because without it, it gets exposed. Watch the voices amplify: Retribution. Blame. I have a right to my pain. You don’t understand (terminal uniqueness). I just can’t. I have to give myself self-love. Yep. You will feel the fire of all that was anesthetized—rage, anger, horniness, obsession. Normal. Normal. Normal.

3.You need those intense feelings liberated. Ultimately, you have to break through the valence of the ego, and you’ll need the power. The stupid methods have tried to keep you comfortable in the swamp water on this side of the valence. With mindfulness, control, and restraint, you’ve maintained the illusion that you are above and beyond human passion and error. You are not like “them.” Ah, but you are. That’s why you keep drawing your own shadow in the form of “them” to you. You need a mirror of all that you reject in yourself. May as well draw it back into your own body where you can learn to steer it.

4.Right about now, you’ll want to quit. You’ll be losing everything—not just saviors, but the whole construct of what you’ve known love and romance to be. You won’t be able to demand attention based on trauma, where social convention requires people to be kind to you. Your attention tactics won’t work.

5.Here’s the miracle cure:

•Get some damned sunshine.

•Cut all coping chemicals out of your system.

•Know that sugar is shit.

•Alcohol is sugar.

•The nightly news and anything that trades in pain is sugar.

•Move your sexual energy. Preferably with a good friend or a preexisting relationship.

6.Now add in some psychic probiotics: learning. The brain turns on when you’re learning. Get engrossed. Instead of easy-fix junk, try Jung, Tibetan Buddhism, Esoteric Christianity (Cynthia Bourgeault is great), mythology—or hell, get wild and learn AI.

7.Now plant. Get a daily spiritual practice so you have a home to return to when shit gets real.

8.Break the habit of commiserating friends. They’re not friends. They’re drug dealers and users.

9.Get a daily self-inquiry practice. Inventory where you missed the mark. What drove it? How could you have done it differently?

10.Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries. You are 100% responsible for maintaining them.

11.You are ready. You have transferred your consciousness from the plane of the me-child to the plane of adulthood. Let go of your grip on the side of the pool. Get in the middle.

12.Find a community based on movement, not grievance. Replace the intimacy of grumbling with creativity.

13.Be there for others. Let the world know you don’t need to magnify a problem to get attention—there are people happy to meet you in joy, self-inquiry, and creativity.

When you free yourself, you free the world from the tyranny of your complaint. This is one of the most generous offerings you can make—getting off the social welfare system of needing to be tended to, and becoming one who tends to others.