After something painful happens, the mind rarely leaves it alone.
We go back over it. We wonder what we missed. We imagine what we could have done differently. We try to decide what the experience says about us, about other people, and about the kind of world we live in.
Sometimes we arrive at a pretty good understanding.
Sometimes we arrive at a story that hurts us almost as much as the original event.
I should have stopped it.
People can’t be trusted.
If I let my guard down, this will happen again.
The story may not be completely true. But that does not mean it is useless. It may be giving fear, shame, or grief somewhere to live.
And we do something remarkably similar together.
TL;DR
Trauma does not arrive with an explanation attached. People have to make sense of what happened, and research shows that the meanings we assign to traumatic experiences can affect what happens afterward. Those meanings may involve ourselves, other people, or the world: I caused this. Nobody is safe. People like them cannot be trusted. Communities build narratives around suffering too. A complicated loss can become a story of betrayal, a humiliating period can become a lost golden age, and a real wound can become the opening through which propaganda enters. Repetition then makes familiar explanations feel increasingly natural. This is why correcting false information may not be enough. If a story is carrying grief, dignity, fear, or belonging, taking away the story does not automatically take away what it was carrying.
Pain Does Not Explain Itself
Psychologist Crystal Park has spent years studying meaning-making after trauma and other major life disruptions. Her basic insight is surprisingly intuitive: we already carry assumptions about ourselves and the world, and painful events can collide with them.
Good people are supposed to be protected. Parents are supposed to love their children. Hard work is supposed to matter. The people we trust are not supposed to betray us.
Then something happens that does not fit.
We have to make the event fit into our understanding of reality, or change our understanding of reality to accommodate the event. (PubMed Central (PMC))
That process matters. A large meta-analysis of trauma research found a substantial relationship between PTSD symptoms and negative interpretations of what happened, particularly negative beliefs about the self and the world. (PubMed)
Consider the difference between remembering, Someone abused me, and concluding, There must have been something about me that made this happen.
The second statement explains more. It also wounds more.
Yet even a terrible explanation can offer a strange kind of order. If I caused what happened, maybe I can make sure it never happens again. Accepting that someone I trusted could hurt me for reasons I could not control may be even harder to hold.
This does not mean survivors consciously choose self-blame because it feels good. It means stories can solve one psychological problem while creating another.
Eventually the Story Starts Reading the World for Us
A conclusion formed around one experience can gradually become a rule.
Someone betrayed me becomes people are dangerous.
Someone abandoned me becomes people always leave.
I was powerless becomes I must always be in control.
Now the narrative is no longer only explaining an old wound. It is interpreting new experiences.
A disagreement looks more threatening. An unanswered message seems more significant. Trust starts to look naïve.
This is where the previous posts in this series come together. The body learned danger. The adaptation became part of identity. Fear made certain explanations feel more believable. Now the explanation itself begins organizing experience.
The story gives the wound a plot.
Communities Do This Too
Gilad Hirschberger describes collective trauma as a crisis of meaning as well as a history of suffering. Communities reconstruct traumatic events into shared memories that help explain who they are, where they came from, and what the past means for the future. (PubMed Central (PMC))
Sometimes those narratives are healthy. A community can remember persecution and decide that nobody else should experience it. Suffering can produce solidarity, institutions, rituals of remembrance, and a serious commitment to preventing repetition.
But pain can also become a permanent interpretive lens.
A historical betrayal becomes evidence that outsiders can never be trusted. A defeat becomes humiliation that must eventually be reversed. A period of social change becomes the story of how our people lost the world they deserved.
The story may contain real history. That is part of what makes it powerful.
The danger begins when history stops helping us understand the present and starts deciding in advance what everything in the present must mean.
A Simple Villain Can Be Emotionally Convenient
This is where scapegoating becomes attractive.
Real social problems are irritatingly complicated. A town can decline because of automation, corporate decisions, tax policy, migration, poor leadership, changing markets, and decisions made twenty years ago.
That explanation may be accurate. It is also emotionally terrible.
Who are you supposed to be angry at?
Research by Zachary Rothschild and colleagues found that scapegoating can serve psychological functions by shifting threatening blame and by restoring a sense of control when a negative event otherwise seems difficult to explain. (PubMed)
A scapegoat makes the story cleaner.
Instead of trying to understand a tangled system, we can say, They did this to us.
Sometimes someone really is responsible. Power should not be hidden behind psychological explanations.
The question is whether the evidence identified the culprit, or whether our need for a culprit began deciding what counted as evidence.
Then Comes the Better Past
Pain also organizes itself through nostalgia.
There was a time when families stayed together, communities were safe, people respected one another, religion mattered, jobs were secure, and everyone knew where they belonged.
Collective nostalgia can provide belonging and continuity, but research also shows that its political effects depend heavily on which version of the past a group chooses to remember. (PubMed)
Because memory edits.
We can remember stable marriages without remembering who could not afford to leave them. We can remember social order without remembering who had to stay quiet to maintain it.
The story becomes seductive because it turns grief into a plan: if something corrupted the good world, remove the corruption and the good world will return.
Building a genuinely new future is much harder.
Propaganda Does Not Need to Invent the Pain
Once a story feels right, repetition helps it settle in.
Research on the illusory truth effect finds that repeated statements tend to be judged as more truthful, including misinformation and even some claims that conflict with prior knowledge. (PubMed)
That does not mean repetition magically brainwashes people. It means familiarity can quietly influence credibility.
The most effective propaganda can therefore begin with something true: You were hurt. You lost something. Someone failed you.
The manipulation happens when the story tells us exactly where to send the pain.
A real wound can be attached to a false enemy.
Real humiliation can support an imaginary golden age.
Real injustice can be used to justify another injustice.
That is the connection to The Sporebank in The Mycelial Mind. Old stories of enemies, betrayal, purity, and restoration can remain culturally available for years. When new fear appears, an old narrative may suddenly find fertile soil again.
What Happens If We Take the Story Away?
This is why narrative literacy requires more than fact-checking.
Facts matter. Falsehoods should be corrected. History should be challenged when it is distorted.
But there is another question underneath all of that:
What has this story been carrying?
If it has been carrying grief, then we need somewhere to grieve. If it has protected dignity, we need a form of dignity that does not require deception. If it has provided belonging, simply humiliating the believer may drive them further toward the community built around the story.
The same applies personally.
Telling someone not everyone will abandon you may be true. But if expecting abandonment has protected them for twenty years, the new belief has to become more than intellectually correct. It has to become livable.
People rarely abandon a harmful story until they have another way to hold the pain the story was organizing.
That may be one of the harder lessons of healing.
Sometimes changing the story requires finally feeling what the story was protecting us from.
Practice for the Week
Think of an explanation that shows up quickly when something goes wrong, whether it is about yourself, another person, or the world.
Ask: What does this story help me make sense of, and what would I have to feel or accept if I could no longer use it?
The goal is not to distrust every story.
It is to notice when the story has started carrying more than truth.
Influencers
Crystal Park studies meaning-making after trauma and major life disruption, including what happens when an experience conflicts with our existing beliefs about ourselves and the world. (PubMed Central (PMC))
Anke Ehlers and colleagues have developed and tested influential cognitive models of PTSD showing the importance of post-trauma appraisals, memory, and coping patterns in persistent symptoms. (PubMed)
Gilad Hirschberger examines how collective trauma becomes collective memory and eventually part of the meaning and identity through which groups understand the present. (PubMed Central (PMC))
Zachary Rothschild and colleagues experimentally examined how scapegoating can help people manage guilt or restore a sense of control when bad outcomes need explanation. (PubMed)
Next week: When Loyalty Forms Around Harm.