How Not to Be Traumatized

Your friendly guide to surviving the next four years +

I never thought it would happen here. Although I can’t imagine why I ever thought the United States should have been immune. Most other countries in the world have known fascism, or something like it, at some point in their long histories. In this, as in so much else, we are not special.

I’m looking for fantasy books in the library right now. Fantasy’s always been one of my favorite things to read, and I’ve never remotely thought of it as “escapist” before. I do now! Because I WANT to escape. Give me elves — let’s see, handsome queer elves of all sexes — a beautiful continent I have never seen before, an evil being none of my compatriots voted for. None of his minions wear stupid red hats. Let’s go on a quest!

Every day I zigzag between numbness and horror, blankness and pain, a billion times a day. Listening to NPR, the New York Times, The New Republic, I shut down from the information filling my gullet like a fat, force-fed duck — I have a very vivid and specific sensation around information these days, which is that I eat it, I guzzle it. I eat the news like a glutton and I stuff myself with it till I’m nauseous.

Or I shut down from the terror that inevitably rises: What are the new immigrant detention camps like? Will there be a nuclear war because of Trump and Putin? What are the next ways the government will exclude trans people from public life? How many others will they arrest for peaceful political activism, now that they’ve laid hands on Mahmoud Khalil? Will a new and absolutely preventable pandemic kill me?

I don’t believe I should simply numb myself with elves for four years, of course. But I have had several bad weeks. It’s been hard to focus on my work, and it’s been easy to scarf down many more cannabis gummies than I should. So it goes: The Guardian, mango-flavored gummy, Slate and Wired, sadness making my eyes sting, checking out, scrolling Instagram till I forcibly pick up my eyes and place them somewhere that is not the screen.

In a very deep place inside me, I think it’s important to take seriously Russell Vought’s remark that he wants to “traumatically affect” federal workers. In case his point wasn’t clear, he added, “We want to put them in trauma.” Though directed merely (merely!) against the three million people in the federal workforce, his goal is similar to the way Steve Bannon has articulated the essential Trumpian project: “flooding the zone with shit.” Both are intended to overwhelm, disorient, and horrify people into inaction. ¹

These are only a few of the ways they’re traumatizing us, of course. Cutting federal programs from Medicaid and Social Security to FEMA, NOAA, the FDA, and the CDC puts us all at immediate risk, whether we’re a frail old person who needs to stay in a nursing home or a disabled kid who can no longer go to school. Hundreds of people about to die from measles because, frankly, the CDC could care less. A North Carolina town destroyed by Hurricane Helene that’s just had all its FEMA funding stolen away. I believe this is the point of DOGE’s sickening chainsaw: making all public goods, and the fulfillment of any and all human needs, contingent on the good will of God King Trump.

What can be done against a government intent on traumatizing us?

One question that arises here is how much of their traumatizing is strategic, and how much emerges “organically” from the MAGA desire to hurt others. (What Adam Serwer, famously, called “the cruelty is the point.”) Trump and the people who voted for him like sadistic bullying, spectacularly exercised against others.

In a way, it doesn’t matter how much of it they do for kicks, and how much for serious political purposes. The pain affects us the same in both cases. But knowing that a great deal of it is politically purposeful — that they are trying to overwhelm us in order to stay in power — can help us find ways to ground ourselves and protect ourselves and one another.

Lately, I’ve been thinking back to when I got a disabling injury in my hands 25 years ago, that left me in biting pain every day. The injury forced me to stop using my hands for most things (typing, carrying, pouring, holding things). I was largely unable to work and, for a time, I thought I might have to give up writing forever. That malady was the greatest trauma of my adult life, and the thing that got me through was caring for myself ferociously, as though I had been my own parent.

What was important to me: helping my body (and mind) heal. Prioritizing getting treatment, and keeping myself sane and whole. The latter meant not participating in any process that threatened to hurt my arms further, to erode my physical boundaries, or infringe on my dignity as a human being. I cannot tell you how much it improved my life to care for myself so fiercely. The rewards from that time are still quite present in my life.

That dignity as a human being thing? Before the injury, I had almost never recognized that I deserved that. I had almost never acknowledged my own value.

To the leftists who were around when I was coming up, self-care was anathema. It was selfish to prioritize your own mind and body, bougie to concern yourself with your needs, your boundaries, or, god forbid, your feelings.

I’m here to say: WRONG. In this godawful moment, stand up for yourself in every way you can, and show yourself more love than you’ve ever shown yourself before.

Memoirs of people under torture show that even they have some agency, that there are always ways to resist, internally and externally. They can look another prisoner in the eyes and share, for a split second, solidarity. (Really: torture survivors have done it.)²
They can spit and vomit, they can defecate in places their tormentors will have to clean up (pants and shirts, hands, sensitive files). And inside their own heads, they can know that they are worthy of love.

I want to explain how to put up an umbrella of self-care around yourself that will embrace you in folds of unshakable goodness and keep you as healthy as you can possibly be in such a time. Care for yourself deeply. By which I mean two things: 1) Commit to yourself, your principles, and your needs, as though you were a child you needed to fight for. 2) In the most practical terms, take care of your body and mind. Everyone has different needs, but this might mean, for example, not taking in the news five times a day. It might mean making sure you eat right and get enough sleep. For me, it means going swimming as much as I can. When I swim, I feel alive and strong and happy, I feel grounded in my animal body, as though I were an otter moving through the water.

There are many different ways to ground yourself. Being in nature helps me. Being somewhere quiet helps me. For others, it might be the sun or the crocuses bursting out or the birds suddenly back in our lands and talking up a storm. Nature knows that Trump won’t be around forever, and we need to absorb this essential knowledge, in the deepest place inside us.

When you sustain your own soul and body, you create the conditions under which you can fight for your neighbors.

When your neighbors learn to care for themselves deeply, they create the conditions under which they can begin to fight for you.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/

2. Sister Dianna Ortiz, The Blindfold’s Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, Orbis Books, 2004.