Trauma in the Public Square

In the post #MeToo landscape, the trauma memoir reigns supreme. These texts are a form of feminist-consciousness raising, shining a light on painful experiences that occur in secrecy. Yet as Scottish author and activist Darren McGarvey asks us to consider in his 2025 book, Trauma Industrial Complex, what is the cost when ‘genuine suffering is flattened into marketable content’?

Reflecting on his unique learnings following the publication of his own trauma memoir Poverty Safari in 2017, McGarvey offers a considered critique of the shift towards centring lived experience in our understanding of trauma, and of the urge to tell our traumatic stories to the world in this digital age. Drawing on his own experience, which is mindfully and purposefully shared, he asks us to consider the cost of participating in the ‘trauma industrial complex’, a market-driven system that takes the worst events of a person’s life and gives them a public life of their own. In this sense, they are put outside of that person’s control once more, but this time accompanied by the illusion of control and empowerment.

McGarvey’s observations apply to all forms of complex and relational trauma – these are repeated overwhelming experiences of harm, abuse, or neglect. These abuses often occur in close relationships with trusted people, or those charged with one’s care. Yet I am especially curious about the creep of the trauma industrial complex into writing about sexual violence, largely because I am a psychologist working with victim survivors of sexual violence, but also because I believe sexual violence has a uniquely destructive impact on the mind and body, and thus requires a particular form of healing. No other kind of abuse recruits a person’s own body in such a pernicious and confusing way. The result: conflict between dissociation and vividly burned-in memory, the comingling of disgust and pain and unwanted physiological arousal or pleasure during the incident (far more common than we as a society would care to acknowledge or make space for in the trauma memoir with its current conventions).

How can writing express the disgusting, disturbing, overwhelming and shame-ridden elements of the traumatic experience without stooping to ‘trauma porn’? What of, in McGarvey’s words, the ‘side of the story about trauma nobody wants to tell’? In a market flooded with post-MeToo memoirs, how can authors capture the experience of sexual violence in a way that nuances our understanding of it?

I believe art can play a role in this, through representations that convey to its audience the complex impacts of sexual violence. David Lynch’s 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Fernanda Melchor’s 2017 novel Hurricane Season are two examples where depictions of sexual violence serve not merely as plot device or to aid ‘character development’ but function as central subject matter. Both works capture something of the horrifying and mind-shattering aspects of child sexual abuse. Through this, they can further our understanding of an experience that society often shies away from knowing about on a deeper level.

Trauma Industrial Complex is a logical progression from McGarvey’s first book: away from a lived-experience-first narrative, towards a compelling treatise on trauma recovery. McGarvey structures the book in three parts, in line with the three-stage model of recovering from trauma: ‘Establishing Safety and Building Awareness’, ‘Processing’ and ‘Releasing’. The three-stage model was first presented by feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman in her seminal 1992 text Trauma and Recovery, where she also articulated the presentation of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Trauma and Recovery is something of a bible in the field of trauma treatment, offering therapists like myself a rich, yet non-restrictive framework for trauma recovery that is not wed to any one therapeutic modality. Herman articulated the recovery journey as a nonlinear one: while people generally progress through these steps, broadly speaking, victim survivors of complex trauma are generally doing some work in each stage simultaneously. For example, while we might still be focusing on managing flashbacks (stage one), reducing the effect of those flashbacks on day-to-day life gives someone more space to comprehend the deeper impacts of what happened to them (stage two) and to feel perhaps a greater sense of trust in their close relationships (stage three). Yet the work of understanding these impacts and getting closer to people is often destabilising, stirring up memories of actual harm, and fears of being harmed again. And so we return to stage one work. And so the cycle continues. This can feel tedious, or disheartening, but many people tell me that when they zoom out on their journey over the months and years, they can see progress – a sense of ‘trending upwards’. The three-stage model is thus useful because it normalises the dance of recovery, the back and forth, the way in which trauma remains with you for life but need not ruin your life permanently so long as you can find a way to confront and mourn it. McGarvey understands this when he critiques the trauma industrial complex for its overrepresentation of stories that fit in with a fantasy of linear recovery:

He challenges this by sharing the less palatable elements of his own messy journey: for example, returning to rehab at the height of his success, or being challenged on the finer details of memories of abuse. These details struck me as sharing with a purpose, not just sharing for its own sake or acquiescing to what Clem Bastow termed in a 2017 piece for The Saturday Paper ‘the demand to perform trauma’. McGarvey shares in order to be truly open about the more unpalatable and unsettling aspects of surviving trauma: for example, the way in which fantasy can impinge upon details of traumatic memory, and how this can lead to subjective differences in recall between family members exposed to the same events. This is a truth of the fallibility of human memory that rightly sits uncomfortably with victim survivors of trauma, who seek reassurance within themselves that they have a right to their distress, and that this distress makes sense to themselves and others. My clinical experience tells me that outright fabrications are very uncommon, but that details can be forgotten or misremembered as the complicated interaction between time, fantasy, dreams and our ever-evolving selves exert their influence on our remembered histories. These key details do not invalidate the overall memory but are worthy of exploration in their own right. McGarvey shares to show how we can confront this without losing grip on our sense of what happened, and our right to be supported in our processing of this.

While Trauma Industrial Complex does not explicitly touch on child sexual abuse, much of McGarvey’s thesis – that there are parts of trauma that most readers don’t get to hear about because they aren’t easily marketed – absolutely applies to stories of child sexual abuse. The Australian child sexual abuse attitudes, knowledge and response study from 2024 indicated that while 86 per cent of 4,055 respondents agreed that child sexual abuse is more common than is generally believed, over half of respondents surveyed also believed that child sexual abuse was not occurring in their community. This suggests that child sexual abuse is a social horror that we cope with by looking the other way. This mental process of knowing and not knowing something at the same time, as articulated by the British psychoanalyst John Steiner, functions as a means of coping with the fact that terrible things can happen to anyone. We thus unconsciously decide that child sexual abuse is something that could theoretically happen to others but not ourselves or members of our community.

In a sense, societal discomfort and denial mirrors the internal experience of the victim survivor: denial and minimisation are defence mechanisms that help us cope in a world where children are harmed. Even those in the later stages of trauma recovery can forget the power of seeing one’s experience reflected in the words of another, and how this can break through the barriers of denial, dissociation and self-invalidation that keep traumatic experiences frozen in time. Hence, the trauma memoir serves an important function, particularly those focused on sexual violence and, especially, child sexual abuse. Such stories force us as a society to grapple with something we would prefer not to know about, while also giving victim survivors access to aspects of their experience that have been sent to the far reaches of their unconscious. 

David Lynch’s iconic Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me captures and calls out this tendency to look the other way. The film serves as a prequel to the series and tells the story of the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life. Fans of the original series were disturbed by the film’s anti-fan-service nature and it was panned. The basis for this reaction is best expressed by novelist Steve Erickson in his review for LA Weekly during the first month of the film’s release: ‘Where the pitch of the TV show was grief laced with black whimsy, here it’s hysteria chafing against delirium’. Erickson shares the reaction of a friend with whom he saw the film: ‘I don’t want to see this picture […] I don’t want all that stuff in my head.’ Yet as time went on, FWWM received critical acclaim.

This is partly due to society’s maturation in being able to bear more awareness of child sexual abuse, thanks to the bravery of victim survivors coming forward over the years. As noted by Brent Simon for AV Club in 2022, the film’s centring of Laura’s experience via portrayals of her self-destructive and disturbing behaviour (common impacts of child sexual abuse) demonstrates just how far ahead of its time the film was. David Lynch himself shared, in Lynch on Lynch, how, after the film’s release, he received letters from many victim survivors of incestuous child sexual abuse, who ‘were puzzled as to how he could have known exactly what it was like’.

It’s not hard to see why people were so disturbed by the content of FWWM. The film depicts the final week of Laura Palmer’s life and contains a brutal on-screen depiction of Laura being raped by her father Leland. Leland is possessed by Bob, the malevolent entity that possesses humans to harm others, to propagate fear and suffering in this realm. As Laura is being raped in her bedroom, the face of Bob transforms into that of her father. This is a striking symbolic representation of the psychologically destructive nature of incestuous child sexual abuse. The psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in 1998 articulated the way children in Laura’s position might maintain psychic survival when placed in the impossible paradox of being abused by the exact person one would turn to for comfort; he termed the concept ‘identification with the aggressor’.

Ferenczi argued that young children being abused devote most of their energy towards hypervigilant observation of the body language, energy and moods of their abusers. Through this vigilance, such children can minimise harm by learning when to make themselves scarce, or how they can cater to the whims and desires of the abuser, by becoming a ‘love-automaton imitating the adult anxiously’. The experience of having clients pick up on my mood before I’m even aware of it is testament to this theory. These are the same clients presenting to therapy for significant gaps in their sense of self, and who tend to find themselves reliving elements of the abuse in harmful or unsatisfactory relationships. The healthy developmental process of identity formation, for them, was compromised by the efforts required to survive childhood. Ferenczi felt this was achieved by a process of, essentially, absorbing a version of what the child understood to be the mind of their abuser into their own mind.

Beyond supporting an abused child in mitigating damage by learning what their abuser wants from them, identification with the aggressor also supports a child in divorcing themselves from reality. In cases of parental child abuse, by absorbing a simulacrum of their abuser-parent in their mind, the child can go on interacting with the actual parent in reality, allowing themselves to be fed, clothed and shuttled to school without their psyche snapping in two. At the time of abuse, the dissociative split comes into play and the actual parent in reality is removed from the experience in the mind of the child. This approach requires the repression of memories to be successful; when Laura is confronted with her father’s face, she loses this defence mechanism, which causes her to mentally disintegrate.

Bob’s possession of Leland enables Lynch to depict the mind-shattering cognitive dissonance so central to the experience of incestuous child sexual abuse. The switch from Bob’s face to Leland’s when he is raping her – shot from Laura’s perspective, and accompanied by Sheryl Lee’s iconic blood-curdling scream – captures the fragmentation of Laura’s mind. She is caught between her close relationship with her father (who is depicted, when not possessed, as loving and playful) and the force of evil that has been abusing her through his mind and body since she was twelve. The very next scene is of family breakfast the next day; an ashen Laura is crying into her cereal while her father asks if she’s okay. Nor will Lynch let Leland off the hook for his actions. We see his cruelty manifest itself in calculated decisions, like drugging his wife Sarah, that seem to occur when it's unclear whether he's possessed by Bob. The culmination of all of this complexity is that we are put into Laura’s shoes as a child sexually abused by her parent – a child who doesn’t know ‘which one’ she will get on any given day, when the painful reality is that the abuser and the parent are one and the same.

Fernanda Melchor similarly deploys identification in her 2017 novel Hurricane Season, though with the aggressor rather than the victim. Instead of displacing the responsibility for such abuse onto an evil supernatural entity, Melchor places us firmly in the material reality that enables such violence. The story takes place amidst the brutal and dehumanising forces of machismo and capitalism, and within a rapacious cartel empire that transforms a village into a cesspit of drug dependence and survival sex work. Hurricane Season broadly centres on the mystery of the murder of a woman known as ‘the Witch’. The novel is an assault on the senses, containing vivid descriptions of child sexual abuse, domestic violence and homophobic and transphobic hatred. Melchor’s sparing use of full stops creates sentences that go on for pages, contributing to an overwhelming sense of dread and disgust. It is hard to catch one’s breath, and easy to dissociate and lose your spot on the page. Past, present and future are fractured, and time is non-linear – at the paragraph and even sentence level. In this, Melchor captures the disorientation and seeming endlessness central to living with unresolved and ongoing trauma. There are extended sections of the text that left me, a person in possession of finely honed skills of compartmentalisation who has heard about sexual violence four days a week for almost a decade, in a state of agitation and literally nauseated.

Hurricane Season deploys identification with the aggressor in a sustained way, placing us within the experiences of Luismi and Brando, young men in the village with no prospects of work outside of the cartels and who depend on drugs and alcohol to numb their misery. The two are raised in a cruel social milieu that demands dominance and disavowal of anything associated with vulnerability, and Melchor tracks their corruption as they grow from helpless children into hateful adults. We are often horrified by Luismi's and Brando’s internal worlds, by the cognitive gymnastics they deploy to justify the endorsement of the values forced upon them. Yet Melchor also offers glimpses into their repressed sexuality, their tenderness, their yearning for comfort and for self-expression. In this way, we are allowed into the minds of these men and forced to understand them as whole people, not merely disembodied caricatures of machismo or capitalist greed, but rather, as two of many casualties of such forces around the globe.

One of the most painful and haunting plotlines of Hurricane Season, however, is that of Norma, a neglected teenage girl forced to raise her four younger siblings to fill the void left by their mother, who has been incapacitated by grief. When her stepfather Pepe comes along, Norma is pleased to have his warm attention; unsurprisingly he goes onto groom and sexually abuse her. One of the most tender and brutal moments in the book is a depiction of Pepe abusing Norma, lasting several pages, which culminates in an extraordinarily painful glimpse into her thoughts:

As painful as this section is to read with its vivid and detailed depiction of Norma’s submission to abuse, all for a taste of a cruel mockery of love, countless survivors have told me, often in shameful whispers, how they came to feel that they loved their abuser. They share how their bodies responded mechanically with pleasure to their touch, how they made themselves available to their abusers because, as neglected children, receiving corrupted touch or attention was better than nothing at all. It is an extremely harrowing thing for survivors to share that they wanted ‘that crude embrace’. There is a fear that therapists, friends, partners will respond in horror and echo what they hear in their own mind – that they were to blame.

Yet we can, and must, honour the reality of the sexual body without succumbing to the reality-bending mythology of paedophiles, that children enjoy being sexually abused. We can allow for the reality of bodies, and for how neglect makes children vulnerable, without undermining our ability to place the blame for sexual violence squarely on the perpetrator. Truly, it is possible and essential to occupy this painful space together in therapy and in writing, to normalise a complex array of responses to abuse. In Hurricane Season, Melchor asks us to consider these experiences of child sexual abuse and grooming, so unacknowledged and disavowed. She inscribes them within the reader, knowing that talking around the events will not suffice to drive home the true horrors of sexual violence. Like Lynch, Melchor forces the audience to confront their wilful ignorance, their tendency to look away – in Lynch’s case, from the festering evil that can exist in smalltown America; in Melchor’s, from the sheer scale of suffering experienced by those subject to abuse, and the material and social conditions that foster such brutality.

In Trauma Industrial Complex, McGarvey finds a way to be critical, curious and even firm with readers, speaking directly at times to victim survivors, in a tone that is refreshingly different from the automatic and unthinking validation of Instagram therapists and AI chatbots. Lynch and Melchor enact something similar in their representations of sexual violence. All three works described in this piece manage to land a complicated manoeuvre, not unlike a skilled trauma therapist, ultimately encouraging us to look deeper, to go beyond. We are encouraged to see, feel and understand the impacts of complex trauma, and we are held during this process, in the way that a good therapist can make you feel held without touching you at all, encouraging you to really, truly, be with your pain in their presence.

Some depictions of abuse rely on gratuitous depictions of trauma and violence without an appreciation of the power dynamics or complexities that undergird it, thereby simplifying such experiences. FWWM and Hurricane Season, I believe, successfully sidestep this danger, capturing elements of the experience of sexual violence that aren’t typically portrayed: what it’s like to also love your abuser, what it’s like to be so helpless and touch-starved that you submit yourself to sexual violence, how it feels to lose your mind without being able to tell anyone why. Both paint rich and complex pictures of the social milieux in which the abuse they detail occurs. And while the overt depictions of abuse in these texts might seem gratuitous to those with the good fortune of never having had to undergo child sexual abuse, these are the nuances that can help victim survivors feel truly seen. These depictions go beyond the surface-level DSM-5 symptoms of PTSD, or the neat and tidy recovery arc that has become central to the trauma memoir. These kinds of texts can also have a material impact on those who don’t personally have any experience with sexual violence or child sexual abuse, fostering an understanding of a victim’s experience in a visceral way. We can see how such a powerful narrative can help to dispel myths surrounding rape. For example, there is a societal preoccupation with stranger danger and yet we know that less than 5 per cent of children are sexually abused by people they don’t know. The fact is that lonely children’s yearnings for love, attention and physical contact are weaponised by abusive adults. While awareness-raising campaigns and trauma memoirs do certainly, and usefully, discuss this, good art can bypass cognitive defences and structures in a way that such campaigns and memoirs can’t.

McGarvey articulates the way in which trauma recovery is progressed by letting go of rigid narratives or held-to-be-absolute truths about ourselves. He also gently wonders if some of the impulse to share publicly might reflect something other than a wish to raise awareness. If, before having carefully considered the implications of doing so, or before having done the work of recovery in therapy and in personal relationships, such sharing might stem from what Freud described as ‘repetition compulsion’, that is, an unconscious effort to gain mastery over painful, unresolved past experiences by finding a way to relive them in the present. In McGarvey’s words:

It is tempting to imagine that the process of sharing publicly might stop the cruel voice inside one’s head, or resolve painful prior experiences of not being believed or not being safe enough to disclose. Yet I have observed how the kind words and validation of others can be twisted and rendered meaningless by the self-hating parts of a victim survivor’s consciousness if self-compassion and self-validation has not yet been found. Generously, McGarvey reflects on the unconscious wishes and fantasies that drove him to share his own experiences in the first place. He identifies these as stemming partly from painful yearnings that he understands, in hindsight, to have been rooted in the exact trauma he was writing about. In this sense, he offers not just a staunch condemnation of the commodification of trauma but also a loving appeal to victim survivors to join him on the other side of the market and into the further reaches of recovery. These are the moments that make Trauma Industrial Complex not just a political and personal treatise on the trauma market but also a helpful resource for victim survivors.

McGarvey especially champions the importance of grappling with the fact that trauma can make us harmful to others and ourselves: ‘Trauma shows up in the very relationships we turn to for comfort, bending them to its will.’ This work, in the later stages of trauma recovery, is part of the painful grieving process that must take place at some point in the journey. For we must grieve over the central tragedy of trauma: that being helpless and at the whims of others and of a cruel world can render you unable to control your behaviour in its wake; that the worst experiences of your life can lead you to hurt others. I am not saying all abused people go on to become abusive, or that abusive behaviour is excused by histories of abuse. But there are ordinary forms of harm, the less egregious ones that can take place in all relationships, that we must all take some responsibility for. It is unfair to have to bear responsibility for the way another person’s cruelty has impacted us, yet this is the painful reality that must be grappled with. Nobody can do the work for us; led to the proverbial water, we must find a way to drink. As per McGarvey:

Yet McGarvey does not advise a bootstraps approach to trauma recovery, nor does he assume a scolding tone that is overly preoccupied with personal responsibility at the expense of broader, contextual understanding. Rather, returning always to the relational element of healing essential for recovery, McGarvey’s critique of the trauma industrial complex asks how healing can public sharing of the personal really be when it causes you to remain pigeonholed in your experiences? He reflects on the commercial pressure from outlets to share his lived experience when talking about issues on which he is well read and resourced beyond the personal, and their lack of interest in any other topics he might speak on. As per Judith Herman, complex trauma occurs at the hands of another; thus healing must occur in safe and trusting relationships, to restore a sense of faith in others and the world as a whole.

McGarvey understands the impulse to throw oneself into activism – ‘believing conflict is where healing happens’ – and does not discount the importance of survivor voices. But he also asks us to consider the limits of action-driven efforts to recovery via activism and legal struggle: ‘activism itself becomes a form of dissociation. The political struggle, no matter how futile or miscalculated, feels safer than the uncertain, personal work of self-examination’. McGarvey’s book speaks to both – the need to take action and do something with one’s pain, and the need to accept and be with the pain. Judith Herman, too, saw that the individual and collective work of recovery could not be separated. McGarvey articulates a model for what he terms ‘healing-driven activism’, one that:

McGarvey ends Trauma Industrial Complex on a touching, hopeful note. He shares a memory of his final moments with his grandmother, clearly someone he looks to as a model for resilience, grit and community care. McGarvey notes that his initial memories were incorrect: he felt he had bailed on visiting her in the hospital in her final days, too fucked up to bear seeing her in that way, instead opting for a bender to suppress his grief. Through the mental freedom that comes via healing, McGarvey was able to recall that he actually did see her one last time – ‘a beautiful story which, for some reason, I forgot to tell myself’. Handing her a long letter in which he ‘poured my breaking heart into every word’, McGarvey had indeed been able to tell his grandmother how much she meant to him and how much he loved her. This final act of sharing left me in tears, the kind I shed sometimes with clients when there is a glimmer of light on the horizon. There is something in recognising that our experiences and stories of pain can strip us of our ability to see beauty. That the only way out of this depriving space is through – through being with our pain, reckoning with the complexities of our experience, and seeing ourselves and our emotions reflected in art and memoir. Through the pain, space is freed up to experience more fully the other side: the goodness of life and the world, and to feel the love we have been graced with.