‘Trauma’ is arguably the therapy-speak buzzword du jour. Media and culture is saturated by our fascination with traumatic backstories; it’s in bestselling books like A Little Life, in TV shows like Fleabag, I May Destroy You and Yellowjackets, and it’s even entering our everyday language through social media’s endless circulation of pop-therapy content. Of course, it can be positive to draw more attention to mental health issues, especially ones that may carry shame and stigma like trauma. But the way trauma has been co-opted as a totalising way to see the world and the self is beginning to have consequences.
One of these is the mounting popularity of ‘trauma releasing’ or ‘somatic’ exercises which claim to help heal the body and mind from traumatic events, boasting various benefits like hormone health, improved sleep and weight loss. While this may sound positive, the way in which these programmes start to blame all potential health issues on trauma – particularly questionable recommendations for weight loss – is sounding alarm bells.
@liv.ingwell Replying to @Bailey i feel so strongly about this!!! I am no therapist but i am a different human from dealing with emotions/trauma #weightloss #weightlosstransformation #weightlosstipsforwomen #trappedemotions #traumahealing ♬ original sound – Olivia Hedlund
‘Somatic’ exercise – which actually just means exercise ‘relating to the body’ – generally refers to a kind of exercise that is done in slow, mindful ways, with a focus on precise body movements, the release of tension and, crucially, trauma. Recently, there have been a spate of apps, programmes and online creators who are touting somatic movement as a quick fix for weight loss. Often their advertising promises to help consumers “finally start losing weight”, inevitably targeting those who may feel desperate or let down by other methods they have tried. Of course, many of these programmes state that the reason you can’t lose weight is because you have unprocessed trauma – and if you don’t think this applies to you, they’ll try to persuade you otherwise.
BetterMe, a subscription-based behavioural healthcare platform, periodically goes viral for its ‘Childhood Trauma Quiz’, while similar app named Breeze Wellbeing also has a test which will give you a ‘trauma score’. After completing these quizzes, you will be directed to a ‘personalised’ treatment plan of exercises and mindfulness that will supposedly help you process trauma and lose weight which, unsurprisingly, you must pay to access.
When these quizzes go periodically viral on TikTok there are frequently users and commenters who are surprised by their high scores, claiming that they had fine childhoods but are being told by these apps that they have ‘severe’ childhood trauma. The quizzes use very general questions with answers that encompass a huge array of experiences and severities, such as “did you experience the loss of someone important?” or “do you say sorry a lot when you don’t need to?” or “do you dwell on small mistakes?” Often, answering “yes” to these questions will prompt the quizzes to conclude that you’re grappling with deep-seated trauma.
Of course, these quizzes have a vested interest in claiming people are traumatised, in order to try and sell their product. Dr Joseph Davies, lecturer and researcher in Applied Psychology at Cardiff Metropolitan University, says that while some of the questions and answers in these quizzes have some level of accuracy, they’re not sufficient to legitimately diagnose someone. “The key issue is that the impact that trauma can have on an individual is incredibly complex and using a basic questionnaire like the ones they use cannot provide a full picture of what is going on,” he says. Understanding the impact of trauma, he explains, “requires an in-depth discussion with the individual to build a robust psychological formulation.”
Dr Davies acknowledges that “the positive impact that movement or exercise and mindful thinking can have on mental wellbeing is widely accepted,” but ‘healing’ trauma cannot be done through exercise and mindfulness alone. “A key issue is that these apps which target weight loss by focusing on somebody’s experiences of trauma do not consider deeper psychological factors that are impacting their lifestyle,” he says. Plus, it’s worth stressing that while there are studies which show that experiencing trauma can lead to weight gain and increase your risk of obesity, claiming that healing from these traumas will help you lose weight is a gross oversimplification (and a troubling indication of diet culture’s ubiquity).
Much of this type of content is aimed at women. For example, creator Isabella Mainwaring, who rose to prominence on TikTok for her somatic healing exercises, frequently states that conditions like PCOS and endometriosis are caused by unprocessed trauma which her exercises can heal. While there is research beginning to be done about this possibility, to say this so definitively about conditions which are chronically underresearched feels like preying on the desperation of sufferers. It is also jarring to hear recommendations for exercises to process trauma and ‘heal’ PCOS be the same exercises to help “keep the holiday weight off”.
The jarring juxtaposition of serious health issues and more aesthetic concerns about weight and appearance is what makes this content feel so icky; it appears that creators are trying any and all tactics to pique viewers’ interest. Despite the language of care and healing they use, it appears they may not actually be that careful with their audiences.
It’s amazing how little this book helped, as opposed to just traumatizing me more pic.twitter.com/mQ0zosHbDe
— Zweil ☭ (@somethings_awry) June 10, 2024
Part of the blame for this increased focus on the body within trauma discourse could be placed on Bessel van de Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, a bestselling book about the ways in which the body and mind interact in their experience and aftermath of traumatic events. While the book and its author have faced criticism in the years since its publication in 2014, particularly for the book’s presentation of wartime trauma, its central ideas have been absorbed into the self-help genre in an oversimplified way that removes all nuance. This is typical of social media platforms like TikTok, says Dr Davis, where “very complex ideas” are condensed and oversimplified to fit into short clips which suggest that we’re all ‘storing trauma’ in our bodies. As a result, so many varieties of exercise, movement or massage can then erroneously be called ‘trauma informed’ or ‘trauma releasing’.
We know trauma affects our physical health, but this rebranding of trauma as the sole reason for all bodily ailments is misguided, like the other recent health craze of lowering cortisol to fix your sleep, acne or weight gain. It’s apparently impossible for social media not to simplify complex issues into viral moments and monetizable schemes, add in emotional topics like weight and trauma and this tendency starts to become especially fraught. The power of contemporary self-improvement culture is great, but it’s worth remembering that miracle cure-alls have always been bullshit.
