I don’t want to bore y’all with overly detailed or technical explanations ... I guess the best way to explain it, overall, is to say that Shauna here has a collection of related words – a kind of technology of language – that’s clearly unrelated to any substantive knowledge of the field. It’s as if I had a few terms from a field about which I knew absolutely nothing, like IT, and then I threw them into a few incomprehensible, jargon-filled paragraphs: something about a “server,” something about “bytes,” something about “bandwidth,” etc.

The big problem, as I see it, isn’t that Shauna’s not a trauma expert; there are lots of people who claim expertise in this area, and who do real harm by doing so. The big problem is that Shauna’s lack of substantive knowledge makes her mediocre and uninspiring at her primary task, which is writing. If her goal is to write something inspiring, emotionally true, and sufficiently accurate about a nuanced scientific topic with which she’s unfamiliar, then the first step is for her to grow informed - otherwise, her writing will come across as muddled, confusing, imprecise, and flaccid. I guess it’s not so relevant that a complex trauma specialist might roll her eyes at this newsletter; it does seem relevant, however, that a reading audience wouldn’t be moved by or interested in her take on the topic, thereby making this yet another one of her failures. I actually happen to be a big fan of failure (I’m one of those annoying people who has a “failure CV”), but the point is to USE failure to make you better, not to keep repeating the word “enough” as if it’s a post-hypnotic induction with the power to put a discerning audience into a trance in which eating pluots is the equivalent of professional excellence.