some meta on the depiction of trauma in TV and fanfic
Taking a break from writing to do a little musing. The effects of trauma are a running theme in my fic. You’ll see it in just about everything I write about Tim Gutterson, but it creeps in when I’m writing Kirk, Bashir, Chakotay, Loretta McCready, and even Alex Krycek too, when I can justify it. I am not a trained psychologist by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s something I’ve studied to a certain extent and something that I think some TV shows really fail to explore adequately when they decide to give a character a particularly traumatic background.
It’s a trope, at this point, for a law enforcement character to have had an abusive childhood and/or military career. That’s unsurprising, because it lets the TV show’s writers get away with having the characters do pretty outrageous things sometimes and then blame it on that backstory, and by the time it happens, often we’re rooting for it (consider in Justified when Raylan shoots his abusive father in the leg—if you didn’t cheer, you probably at least thought about it).
Traumatic experiences fundamentally alter people’s brains, and people find a whole lot of healthy and unhealthy ways to deal with it. There’s a lot of research showing that trauma in childhood has particularly powerful effects—the ACE (adverse childhood experience) score is one way of measuring the effects of certain types of trauma, though as this article notes, it doesn’t account for many other types of trauma or instability. Dissociation, hyperarousal, and hypervigilance are very common results of certain kinds of trauma (one reason that it’s so sad in Harry Potter when Mad-Eye Moody is always shouting “Constant vigilance!”) because those are adaptive skills that people have to develop when they’re in chronic traumatic situations, and it’s very hard to let go of them when you don’t need them anymore.
I’m pretty relaxed about the different terminology I use in fic, often because the characters themselves are going to have their own attitudes toward PTSD/however they interpret their own responses to their experiences, which isn't always to call it PTSD or even acknowledge it as anything other than maybe having a drinking problem. But I try to be careful about two things:
(1) not letting people off the hook for being assholes, even when it’s an understandable learned response to trauma they’ve experienced
“Funny,” Loretta says. “Sure seems like you’re out there waitin’ on somebody comin’ out to tell you how it ain’t that bad what you said, don’t you worry about it, like you’re the one been done wrong somehow.”
Tim stiffens. “Never said anything like that.” Loretta looks pointedly at his hands and he realizes he’s going through the automatic motions of fixing up his coffee with some whiskey. “Jesus, what do you want, I’m just clearing my head. I got plenty of food in my stomach to soak it up.”
Loretta’s expression breaks some, worse than he’s seen it before. “Like I said, neither of you’s my brother or my boyfriend or my daddy, that I oughta trouble about either of you. So you go on ahead and just sit outside, until you got Jimmy twisted up enough, feelin’ bad for how sad you are, that he comes out to make you feel better over everythin’ you said.”
Fuck, he feels like she just reached into his guts and twisted them herself. “You ever,” he asks, and his voice is raw. “You ever worry you’ll turn into your old man?”
She looks at him awhile. “No,” she says at last. “Maybe you oughta worry about it more.”
(hooked on being low, chapter 7)
and (2) not giving in to the impulse to have quick fixes/cured by the power of love:
“I’m not gonna just—get better,” Tim tells Raylan, when he breaks away for a breath. “You know that, right? The shit that’s in my head don’t go away.”
“I know,” Raylan says, and then, stronger, “I know, Tim.” He slides his fingers into Tim’s newly-shorn hair and kisses him again up against the bathroom wall. Arlo’s old room is just on the other side of the wall, but it’s empty, he reminds himself. Tim emptied it out for him, and now there’s nothing there at all—no monster, no ghost, no remnants. Only the smell of fresh paint.
Tim grips at his shoulders, hands still wet, and Christ but Raylan’s wanted this bad since the last time he touched Tim, and the time before that, and the time before that. “I’m not gonna just fall asleep together and wake up cuddling,” Tim says, and his voice gets rougher when Raylan pulls their hips together. “Prob’ly never.”
(other things than smart, chapter 6)
Unless it’s a specific plot point, TV shows tend to smooth over the PTSD that characters would experience as a result of the things that have happened to them. That’s understandable, because if people in episodic television actually reacted the way that normal humans would to everything that happens to them, it would make adventure television very depressing and not very interesting to watch (Battlestar Galactica walks this line, sometimes). But fic is a great place to explore that, because a character can have what’s basically a Heroic BSOD or a series of recurring episodes that really does inconvenience everyone and effectively shut down the progression of the other storylines for as long as you need.
My Justified series older and further away is probably the most extreme example of this, since the fulcrum fic (hooked on being low) involves Tim basically having a total breakdown post-series and spending months on leave, mostly drinking and lashing out at people before starting to get his shit together gradually. (You’ll probably see me discuss the events of this series more in the future, because it’s one of my personal favorites).
