Achievement is a Trauma Response

It was those last unforgiving years of graduate school, and we were all down to the wire. We knew that if we could just satisfy the caprices of some nameless, faceless search committee, they would shine their light upon us, lift us up out of our graduate student misery, give us that golden ticket and, just like that, we’d be success stories that our advisors would rave about for years. The rest of us, not so much.  

Like most grad students, I was terrified that I’d end up as one of the unlucky. But I also think I saw landing a tenure-track job as the only way to prove that I had ever really belonged – in the field, in the historical profession, in academia, writ large. If I got a job offer, those seven years of imposter syndrome would vanish and I would finally take my rightful place among the worthy.

So in the final years of the PhD, I was the very picture of determination. If academic job gurus recommended publishing one article, I published two. They said we needed evidence of university service, so I took on as many leadership roles as possible. They demanded proof that we were excellent teachers so I compiled a dossier replete with pedagogical anecdotes, testimonials, and quantitative assessments that showed what an outstanding educator I could be. My CV became something of a challenge to all search committees everywhere: Refuse me, I dare you. (spoiler alert: they dared)

Until recently, I saw myself and my relationship to education, academia, and professional success through the prism of the classic overachiever hooked on the opiate of meritocracy. And from that angle, there is nothing particularly unique to me. But all my thinking about trauma this last year has me wondering if there’s a deeper story pulsing below the surface of this one.

**

Several years ago, I read bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress. I was probably scouring it for ideas, looking to extract tips and tricks that could be useful in my consulting work with faculty. Then I stumbled on chapter 5 and got more than I bargained for. There, hooks writes about her personal relationship with education, and she traces it to her tumultuous home life.

As in many of her other writings, she makes it clear that she didn’t belong there – in her home, in her family. Home was instead the physical and emotional site where her parents sought to “repress, contain, punish.” The result? “As a child, I did not know where I had come from,” she writes, “And when I was not desperately seeking to belong to this family community that never seemed to accept or want me, I was desperately trying to discover the place of my belonging. I was desperately trying to find my way home" (60).

hooks eventually found that home in schooling, education, and intellection. She reflects, “the lived experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis” allowed her to “explain the hurt and mak[e] it go away” (61). For hooks, academic pursuit and the life of the mind offered nothing less than emotional healing and a space for belonging.

Ever the good student, I recorded her words. I didn’t allow myself to pause and reflect on their meaning, though. That would have hurt too much. But clearly something in these sentences spoke to me. When I reflect on it now, I can see why.

**

I recently read Stacey Haines’s work, The Politics of Trauma. According to her, too often we think of trauma as harm on a small scale, between individuals. Instead, she argues that it’s imperative to engage in structural analyses of oppression that move beyond individualistic and interpersonal approaches. That is, we must analyze the systems that motivate people to do harm to begin with. She calls this structural or systemic trauma, which she defines thusly:

“Systemic trauma is the repeated, ongoing violation, exploitation, dismissal of, and end or deprivation of groups of people. State institutions, economic systems, and social norms that systematically deny people access to safety, mobility, resources, food, education, dignity, positive reflections of themselves, and belonging, have a traumatic impact on individuals and groups” (80, emphasis mine).

After reading and reflecting on trauma, I think of the exile and alienation my mother experienced when she was ripped out of her home and sent to a faraway country. I think of the violence and indignity she experienced at the hands of a miserable man whom she was forced to marry. I think of the opprobrium and disparagement she was met with by her so-called community when she left that man. I think of her struggle as a single, divorced mother who was forced to stay here and make it on her own. I think about her remarriage, how she probably thought this would make things better, and how it didn’t.

That’s the view on the ground. But Haines would say that I need to think bigger.

What of the patriarchal norms of a culture that required the subjugation of their women through marriage and sexual violence?

What of the gendered and classed cultural norms that prevented her from coming home without bringing shame on her whole family?

What of the American economic system which offered only a race- and gender-stratified job market that made it nearly impossible for a recently arrived immigrant woman to find a well-paying job commensurate with her intelligence and potential? The same system that made it nearly impossible for a working-class white guy like my dad who, without a college education, never quite found the dignity-affirming work that would have made him feel like a man, or at least what he was told a real man should be.

What of a deeply inadequate public health care system that might have helped them work through the anger, bitterness, and above all deep sadness that they rightly felt in the face of all they confronted on a daily basis?

Where does all that fury and frustration go because it has to go somewhere.

Structures of oppression take their toll on us, and they weigh heavy on families, that primary social unit that is, we are told, the building block of society. It creates the conditions where we revisit harm and violence upon those with less power than us because that’s the only way we know how to cope. The anger, the bitterness, the sadness, it all trickles down, moving from generation to generation like poison through the body. The family then becomes its own harmful and violent system, a veritable trauma incubator. This is what they call intergenerational trauma.

I must have realized early on that being smart, that proving I was smart, that performing smartness marked me out for distinction. Getting good grades made my teachers respect me. But more than that, being good at school earned me a place in my teachers’ hearts. I’m not talking about approval – that’s a low bar and I cleared it with ease. I’m telling you they really loved me. They spent time with me. They invested in me. They consoled me. They looked out for me.

And so achievement became a way that I could win love and affection, if not from my family then from my daytime guardians. Little wonder that the only future I could ever imagine was one where I would stay in school forever. Education was my so-called “safe space,” the only place I ever belonged. And when that stopped being the case in graduate school, it left me disoriented in ways that I’m still trying to understand.