THE HARM PORTRAIT
A movement against the ‘trauma plot’ reductionism
Trauma isn't a plot device. It's how humans respond to harm. Understanding its patterns means seeing life more clearly
THE HARM
PORTRAIT
A movement against the ‘trauma plot’ reductionism
Trauma isn't a plot device. It's how humans respond to harm. Understanding its patterns means seeing life more clearly
THE TRAUMA
PLOT DEBATE
I first encountered the term trauma plot listening to Jamie Hood on NPR in March 2025. Hood was responding to Parul Sehgal's 2021 New Yorker essay The Case Against The Trauma Plot, which sparked a backlash among literary critics and internet trolls dismissing trauma narratives as artistically limiting.
Hood's solution: refuse conventional forms and 'not prettify the story in order to fit accepted form.' Her call to action was simple:
'GO WRITE WEIRD SHIT.'
By the time I heard the Jamie Hood interview, my short story Minami-Azabu was collecting rejections. But Hood's interview made me realize: I wasn't just writing a story—I was joining a conversation about how contemporary fiction engages with trauma.
This raises three essential questions.
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Because there's no playbook on how to integrate modern clinical understanding of trauma into storytelling.
Writers and readers both recognize terms like dissociation, hypervigilance, fight/flight/freeze, but most don't grasp what these words actually mean.
Writers drop clinical cases of trauma as a shortcut for characterization—but without true understanding of the mechanisms underneath, these become labels rather than living patterns of behavior.
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For the same reason: the lack of a trauma-writing playbook.
Critics see writers using trauma clumsily—dropping clinical terms as explanations, treating diagnoses as character depth. They react by dismissing all trauma-engaged fiction as trendy or reductive.
But they're conflating bad craft with bad subject matter. Stories have always been about trauma—we just called it conflict, adversity, suffering. The dismissal isn't about trauma itself. It's a reaction to watching writers struggle to integrate new understanding into old forms.
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Because knowing words isn't the same as seeing oneself.
Clinical language describes mechanisms. Arts and literature create recognition. With public consciousness still trying to catch up to clinical trauma understanding, the need for accurate portrayals integrating this knowledge is evident.
This is the gap we're working to close—trauma portraits that help people finally see themselves.
WHY THIS MATTERS
WHY THIS
MATTERS
PROJECT MANIFESTO
PROJECT
MANIFESTO
My Own Experience
My first short story, The Feast (1998), follows a French conscript with a cleft lip during Napoleon's retreat from Russia—marked as "other" and ultimately destroyed by marginalization. I had no trauma vocabulary then; I could express pain only through metaphor and historical distance.
Three decades later, my most recent story, Minami-Azabu, engages directly with intergenerational trauma and the immigrant experience. Two years developing this story transformed a passport renewal into an exploration of how childhood trauma resurfaces decades later.
Looking back at these two versions of the same story, I realized that, without trauma awareness, I’d removed important identifying details in 1998—such as race. Where The Feast is abstract, anonymous, incidental suffering, Minami-Azabu is an auto-portrait where I recognize myself. And if one reader recognizes themself through it, the story will have fulfilled its purpose.
The Recognition Gap
In 2025, trauma vocabulary is everywhere. People recognize these terms scrolling social media, streaming TV shows, gossiping about peers—but rarely in themselves. That’s because self-recognition requires hard work asking uncomfortable questions, finding ugly truths, and dealing with unbearable implications.
Without this work, contemporary trauma narratives ARE hollow. But readers who haven't done the work can't distinguish hollow writing from genuine self-expression—both look like sensationalism. This is what drives the kind of literary backlash seen in Parul Sehgal's essay.
When people connect vocabulary to lived patterns, everything shifts. New portraits become recognizable. Old, abstract stories suddenly make sense. The Feast got lukewarm response in the 1990s; today, readers respond completely differently. This is the gap literature needs to close.
Call To Action
The Harm Portrait project addresses this gap—integrating trauma understanding into craft as a lens for seeing human behavior more clearly. But the lens matters; it demands genuine understanding of the pathology of harm. And the only way to polish that lens is to, in Jamie Hood’s words, ‘go write weird shit.’
This isn't solo work. The playbook requires many voices, many experiments, many perspectives. Writers refusing conventional trauma memoir arcs. Readers trying out new genres and recognizing themselves in accurate portrayals. Experimentation that won't fit neat categories. Conversations about what creates genuine recognition.
If this project resonates with you—if you've done the work of connecting vocabulary to lived experience, if you're writing toward this kind of integration, or if you recognize yourself in these ideas—use the form below to reach out. Share your story, your thoughts, your experiments. And together, let’s go write weird shit.
JOIN THE MOVEMENT!
JOIN THE
MOVEMENT!
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THE STORIES
Both The Feast and Minami-Azabu are currently in submission to literary magazines. If you'd like to read them, use the contact form above and I'll send them your way.