IMHO it's a serious concept, AND it's vastly overused. It's something to be taken seriously, and I think there are a fair number of people who find it has expla

IMHO it's a serious concept, AND it's vastly overused. It's something to be taken seriously, and I think there are a fair number of people who find it has explanatory power in their lives. But yeah, it's also a fad. That this framework has come to be the dominant model of interaction in the discourse is an insult to people who have experienced real trauma, even more so because often there seems to be no effort at healing, just rolling through the identity supermarket picking up various kinds of afflictions and mental illnesses as a personal definition rather than a diagnosis pointing to treatment. That was maybe more glib than it should have been, and I am sympathetic to the desire to figure out who you are absent many of the normal meaning-making centers people used to have. Without that, there is only the identity supermarket. What's more, trauma-as-spectrum isn't the worst way to think about the aches of being a person. Maybe you weren't beaten as a child, maybe you didn't flee an invading army, but the pain and sadness lives on inside you nonetheless. The darker side of it is that rolling around on the ground holding your tummy and crying is an efficient attention-getter. So there's nuance. I think it's a serious idea, with serious consequences, and too many very unserious people have glommed onto it.