The Tyranny of the 'Normal'

More thoughts on creating a trauma-informed classroom

I am pleased and very grateful for the strong response I received from readers over the past week regarding my initial thoughts on creating trauma-informed classrooms. As I mentioned in that post, it is my intention to continue these reflections for a few weeks, in the hopes they might prove useful. It seems so, and I am glad to expand and deepen the endeavor here.

One reader in particular wrote to me with a couple of questions, and they have given their permission for me use one of those questions as my starting point for this entry. I will also return to their second question in a future post, but for now, let’s start here:

Would you flesh out the idea of the difficulty of traumatized people having to show up “normally,” and the threat that creates for them?

The word “normal” is subtle and powerful. It steps into our rooms and asserts a quiet authority that often goes unnoticed and unchallenged. But this quiet authority, while good for keeping things orderly, is not benign. In fact, the quiet presence of “normal” in our midst is often one of the greatest hinderances to actual education we could find.

Let me give an example of what I mean. The first entry in the Book of Psalms is incredibly straightforward in how its author believes the universe works:

Blessed is the man who does not walk
in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the way of sinners,
nor sit in company with scoffers
Rather, the law of the LORD is his joy;
and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree
planted near streams of water,
that yields its fruit in season;
Its leaves never wither;
whatever he does prospers.

But not so are the wicked, not so!
They are like chaff driven by the wind.
Therefore the wicked will not arise at the judgment,
nor will sinners in the assembly of the just.
Because the LORD knows the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked leads to ruin.

There is a very clear moral algebra at work here: Those who follow the commandments will be guaranteed to prosper; those who are wicked are guaranteed ruin. This is not presented as a matter of probabilities. Instead, the psalm declares this as a truism. This is a feedback loop hard-wired into the universe. This is the way things work.

If we were looking at this psalm through the lens of a discipline like psychology or media studies, this would be the point where we would say that we have identified this writer’s normal. That is to say, we have identified the basic set of structural assumptions this text is making about the proper function of relations in the world.

The media analyst Dan Olson suggests that the “normal” of a constructed text or situation often exerts the power of a bio-truth—”something that is an emergent property of biology and therefore immune to criticism.”

Let’s take a moment to explain what this means with an example from our own bodies. Humans are bipedal creatures, and do not have wings. Therefore one of the “bio-truths” of being human is that, under “normal conditions,” when we move from place to place we walk, and do not fly.

Already you should see the problem with this, because humans have created any number of work-arounds to undermine the obstacle that this “bio-truth” presents. We do not simply walk, we ride in cars and pedal bicycles. More than this, we have created airplanes and do indeed fly.

For Olson, the danger of the normal comes when we tacitly of explicitly mistake a socially constructed situation, like the relations involved in playing a video game or sitting in a classroom, for a situation constrained by bio-truths.

To return to the Psalm above, the author has presented the mechanisms of reward and punishment as universal and fully reliable. The righteous are blessed and the wicked are punished. This, for the author of Psalm 1, is presented as a bio-truth. This is this Psalm’s normal.

But we need to be careful universalizing this psalm’s view of moral relationships. It is a testimony of coherence, but we do not have to go far in the Book of Psalms to find counter-testimony, and attestations of moral incoherence. Take, for example, this portion of Psalm 88:

But I cry out to you, LORD;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.

Why do you reject my soul, LORD,
and hide your face from me?

I have been mortally afflicted since youth;
I have borne your terrors and I am made numb.

Your wrath has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me.

All day they surge round like a flood;
from every side they encircle me.

Because of you friend and neighbor shun me;
my only friend is darkness.

Here, the assurance and coherent moral algebra of Psalm 1 is completely inverted. In the testimony of Psalm 88, the wicked flourish and are blessed, while those who are prayerful and righteous are unjustly punished.

I submit that the voice of Psalm 88 is the voice of trauma. This is to say, it is a testimony from one for whom the “normal” of a coherent, predictable world has been upended and replaced with chaos.

The world inhabited by the writer of Psalm 1 is safe, and it is safe because it is predictable. The author is letting us know that there is a sure formula though which one can achieve blessing, and a sure path by which one might choose to go to ruin. Again, this is presented with the strength of a bio-truth. The author os Psalm 1 is not just saying “Hey, it worked for me.” No. The author’s claim is that this formula will work for anybody.

You will notice immediately that the language of Psalm 88 is much more personal. The author of this psalm is not speaking in broad universals, but rather is speaking from very personal “I” statements: I have been mortally afflicted since youth; your terrors have destroyed me.

The testimony of Psalm 88 is to a lived experience of one for whom the “normal” of Psalm 1 has failed. Rather, the testimony is that the coherence promised in Psalm 1 is not universal, and the moral algebra of The LORD cannot be trusted.

Now let’s bring this back to the classroom. I mentioned in the previous post that statistic that says that roughly 50% of all adults have survived at least one significant traumatic experience in their childhoods.

Practically speaking, this means that in any given classroom, I can expect my students to be pretty evenly divided between Psalm 1 learners and Psalm 88 learners. In other words, about half my students will enter the classroom with the testimony that the universe is safe and morally coherent, and the other half will be carrying the testimony that the universe is harmful and chaotic.

So as an educator, I have to begin my classroom work with the assumption that half my students have been traumatized. But it goes deeper than this—because there is the possibility of a secondary trauma: I could insist on asserting the “normal” of the Psalm 1 universe.

Here’s how that would work: Simply construct a classroom around the tacit assumption that the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished, and that this mechanism works perfectly and that it can be applied universally—basically, all the assumptions that we find in the testimony of Psalm 1. This is what I meant when I said (in the previous post):

Reinforcing the idea that the students must present in my space as “normal” just means that, for students with trauma, the entire institution is designed to create a threat without the obviousness of the threat.

Because the Psalm 88 students show up knowing that the promise of Psalm 1 is a lie, or at the very least that it is a promise that is limited to working only for those who have stability and privilege.

But this is the danger I am trying to name and identify in our pedagogy today. We keep trying to create Psalm 1 classrooms, assuming that the algebra of rewards and punishments that are part of that structure are morally neutral and work the same for all participants. But this is not the case.

For those entering our classrooms with testimonies of trauma, our insistence that they navigate our “normal” can be profoundly disorienting, because the coherence for them is inverted. In their experience, they have been punished because they were doing the right thing, and whose who do harm have been rewarded.

Therefore, I claim that a classroom that presents a stable, bourgeois, middle-class “normal” as if it is an innocent bio-truth can be a space that regularly re-traumatizes around half our students. They are re-traumatized because they are asked to navigate a moral landscape they know to be a lie, and they are re-traumatized because the very structure of this kind of classroom denies the very reality of their lived experience.

In other words, a classroom that assumes that everything and everyone is the Psalm 1 “normal” will be invested in silencing the voices and experiences of those who enter it with a Psalm 88 testimony. In fact, a classroom built on this kind of “normal” will be so invested in maintaining the coherence of its moral narrative that it will actively destroy students who bring the counter-testimony of a Psalm 88 experience.

This destruction will take different forms. For some, it will be the destruction of “earning” a failing grade. For those who succeed, the destruction will be less visible, but no less damaging, for to them it will mean the destruction of their lived experience. We will teach them to hide their pain and cover their trauma so fully that it will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

For the traumatized, the price of success in our “normal” classrooms is that they must take their experience and throw it down a well so deep that it no longer bothers us. But it will poison every draught they draw from that well, and for the sake of our comfort, they will suffer for years, and perhaps for the rest of their lives.

It doesn’t have to be this way. But in order to create educational spaces that are hospitable to fully half our students, we educators must start by dismantling the idea of a one-size-fits-all classroom. We must depart from the romantic attachment to the orderly space of the Psalm 1 universe, and understand that many among us live in a different reality.

We must learnt to listen to that counter-testimony that comes to our classroom and says to us, the teacher, I have borne your terrors and I am made numb.

And to do that, we must be willing to re-think what it even means to be a teacher.

We must be willing to name our own incoherent pain. We must be willing to undertake our own painful process of starting to heal.

And then, to our students, we must finally risk becoming—not simply educators, not simply gatekeepers for the Psalm 1 “normal”—but listeners and healers.

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As I mentioned, this is part 2 of a series on “creating a trauma-informed classroom.” You can read part 1 here. I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment, and if you want to ensure you get access to the whole series, please consider subscribing. Also, if you think others would benefit from reading these ideas, it would be wonderful if you would share them. Those links are below. Thank you.