The Culture of Harm, How Therapy Talk Became A Sociopolitical & Cultural Weapon

"We are teaching people to speak harm fluently, and it is costing families, churches, and civic life. Real trauma needs real care, yes, but without precision we end up rewarding grievance and punishing resilience."

By Richard A. Graves

October 12, 2025

We taught a generation to see trauma everywhere. Harm became elastic, and wounds were framed as either endlessly treatable or never truly healable. That mindset spread through schools, media, and the helping professions, steadily widening what counts as injury while elevating grievance to a public credential. Psychologist Nick Haslam calls this “concept creep,” the expansion of terms like trauma, abuse, and bullying far beyond their original scope, with predictable effects on how people build identity and how institutions police speech and behavior (Haslam, 2016; Haslam et al., 2020).

Out of this climate emerged a new moral style. Instead of encouraging direct resolution and thick skinned adulthood, we reward public displays of injury and third party enforcement. Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning describe the shift as the rise of a “victimhood culture,” where social status is gained by showcasing harms and mobilizing authorities to validate them (Campbell & Manning, 2014). In political psychology, this maps onto “competitive victimhood,” in which groups race to claim greater suffering because victim status brings moral authority, attention, and protection from ordinary scrutiny (Young & Sullivan, 2016).

How politics exploits the therapist’s script

This ideological infection has been deliberately exploited by parts of the modern American political landscape to advance an agenda that is openly anti nuclear family, anti Christianity, and anti Western values. It is, in a word, fascinating. The therapeutic script fuses with a political script. People are told to read their biographies backward, to reinterpret ordinary family conflict as permanent moral injury, and to judge their parents through the unforgiving lens of hindsight. The result is not forgiveness or growth, it is estrangement.

Children are pitted against parents, siblings, and extended family. The tragic irony is that this worldview excuses the now adult child from responsibility and maturity, replacing introspection and accountability with resentment dressed up as enlightenment. These incentives match the literature on harm inflation and grievance status, where expanding harm categories and institutional validation confer reputational rewards for public injury and weaken the social rewards for reconciliation and responsibility (Haslam, 2016; Haslam et al., 2020; Campbell & Manning, 2014).

Once recognition and resources flow toward certified injury, people learn to speak harm fluently. Institutions widen harm boundaries to prove they care, and new speech rules appear as therapeutic guardrails. Meanwhile, one demographic is told it cannot access this moral currency, White, heterosexual, working class males, which hardens zero sum resentments and corrodes civic trust. The point is not to deny real trauma or necessary care. The point is that a therapeutic script, unmoored from clinical precision, has merged with politics and is now rewarded as public identity and public policy (Haslam, 2016; Haslam et al., 2020).

Keep real care, purge the creep

Trauma informed practice matters. Many clients carry real histories of abuse and violence. The federal TIP 57 guidance exists for a reason, screening wisely, avoiding re traumatization, connecting people to appropriate care. The danger is mission creep. When the trauma frame scales from clinic to culture, it pathologizes normal conflict, turns ordinary difficulty into diagnosis, and can teach learned helplessness instead of agency if implemented without discernment (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014, 2025).

A better script is available. Keep the clinical precision TIP 57 recommends, and resist the pull to label every discomfort as trauma. Retire status competitions. Recognize harm where it exists, yes, then reward responsibility, reconciliation, and measurable improvement. In schools, workplaces, and civic life, trade the expansion of harm categories for the expansion of coping skills, problem solving, and pro social conflict resolution. The cultural pendulum moves toward what we celebrate. If we celebrate durable recovery and adult agency, we will get more of both. If we celebrate grievance as identity, we will get more grievance.

The counterpoint, and why it falls short

Counterpoint, broadening harm categories increases compassion and access to care, especially for historically neglected groups. It surfaces silent suffering and reduces stigma.

Reply, compassion without precision misfires. The peer reviewed literature shows that as harm categories expand, they capture more borderline or everyday experiences. That over pathologizes life, incentivizes performative injury, and undermines both clinical triage and social cohesion. The answer is calibrated care, not cultural fragility, protecting real victims while refusing to make grievance the price of admission to public life (Haslam, 2016; Haslam et al., 2020; Campbell & Manning, 2014; Young & Sullivan, 2016).

What this means for families, churches, and civic life

If we want families that heal, churches that minister, and neighborhoods that hold together, we must stop paying out moral dividends for estrangement. We can refuse the script that tells children to relitigate their childhoods forever, and instead teach reconciliation with accountability. We can refuse politics that markets injury as identity, and demand a politics that insists on both compassion and responsibility. You can be merciful without making fragility a civic virtue. You can be honest about harm without turning every discomfort into trauma. The culture will move where we steer it, one policy, one school, one counseling room, and one family at a time.

References

Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2014). Microaggression and moral cultures. Comparative Sociology, 13(6), 692,726. https,//doi.org/10.1163/15691330,12341332

Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep, psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1,17. https,//doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418

Haslam, N., Dakis, B. C., Fabiano, F., McGrath, M. J., Rhee, J., Vylomova, E., Weaving, M., & Wheeler, M. A. (2020). Harm inflation, making sense of concept creep. European Review of Social Psychology, 31(1), 254,286. https,//doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2020.1796080

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2014). Trauma informed care in behavioral health services (Treatment Improvement Protocol 57). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https,//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207201/

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2025, February 21). TIP 57, Trauma informed care in behavioral health services [Resource page]. https,//www.samhsa.gov/resource/dbhis/tip,57,trauma,informed,care,behavioral,health,services

Young, I. F., & Sullivan, D. (2016). Competitive victimhood, a review of the theoretical and empirical literature. Current Opinion in Psychology, 11, 30,34. https,//doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.04.004

About the Author

Richard A. Graves is an author, teacher, historian, and theologian. He received a Bachelor of Science in Ministry and Leadership from Dallas Christian College, a Master of Arts in Religion, Biblical Studies from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, and a Master of Arts in American History from Southern New Hampshire University and is a CADC. He earned a Post Graduate Executive Certificate in Public, Social Policy and is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy with a focus on Social Policy at Liberty University’s Helms School of Government. For correspondence, contact richardgraves@live.com