It's unfortunate to see in this venue that a set of practices are dismissed without ever being defined. I am referring to the apparent dismissal of trauma-informed practices. The author appears not to know what they are, or is dismissing a straw-man version of them that are assumed. Trauma-informed practices are actually pretty evidence-based and are described by other names in the extant I/O psychology and organizational behavior literature.
Librarianship literature is a sponge for bullshitty fads -- by which I mean uncritical embrace and epistemically irresponsible promotion of evidentially dubious stuff that resonates with woke progressive pieties -- from education and psychology:
Stay tuned for Cory Clark's forthcoming article appearing September in the special issue of Journal of Controversial Ideas based on material from her presentation earlier this year at the Censorship in Science conference:
"From Worriers to Warriors: The Rise of Women in Science and Society"
Thanks for clarifying what you mean by trauma informed practices. This makes it clear that what you are referring to is not what I'm referring to. I am not referring to dealing with trauma, or treating people with trauma. I am referring to trauma-informed practices, which are effective without regard to the existence of trauma. It is unfortunate that these practices are associated with the trauma industry because there are a lot of myths pertaining to trauma. I agree with Bonanno that use of the word trauma just confuses people. The practices that I am referring to are evidence based practices that improve workplace efficiency, productivity, and longevity. And as i have pointed out already, they are evidence-based strategies found throughout the peer-reviewed literature. These are practices that promote transparency, psychological safety, collaboration, mutuality, relationship development, and others. It doesn't matter whether a person actually has a trauma-history to benefit from trauma-informed practices.
Sure there are tons. It seems like most of the team efficacy literature addresses it one way or another, although they never refer to the practices as "trauma-informed" per se. Here are some i am familiar with.
Edosomwan, H. S., & Oguegbe, T. M. (2021). Examining team communication and mutual support as drivers of work performance among team members. Asian Research Journal of Arts & Social Sciences, 13(4), 45-54
Traylor, A., Dinh, J. … Salas, E. (2024). Teams need to be healthy too: Toward a definition and model of healthy teams. Team Performance Management, 29, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/TPM-09-2023-0071
Bell, E., Castillo, G. F., Khalid, M., Rufrano, G., Traylor, A. M., & Salas, E. (2024). Can effective teamwork enhance members' well-being? In Stress and Well-Being in Teams (Vol. 22, pp. 121-144). Emerald Publishing Limited.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work
Lacerenza, C. N., Marlow, S. L., Tannenbaum, S. I., & Salas, E. (2018). Team development interventions: Evidence-based approaches for improving teamwork. American Psychologist, 73(4), 517–531. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp00002
Wang, Y., Yu, Z., Lin, J., & Gong, D. (2024). Empathetic leadership and employees’ innovative behavior: A moderated mediation model. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 11150825. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.11150825
Trzeciak, S., & Mazzarelli, A. J. (2019). Compassionomics: The revolutionary scientific evidence that caring makes a difference. Studer Group.
Rogelberg, S. G. (2019). The surprising science of meetings: How you can lead your team to peak performance. Oxford University Press.
Gingerich, M., & Kaden, T. (2023). Healing the fragmented organization: How to lead beyond survival in a trauma-informed workplace. Herald Press.
This isn't the kind of research at issue. Do a search in Google Scholar on "trauma-informed librarianship" for some of the voluminous woo that literally identifies itself as "trauma-informed."
Right! And that's why it's so important to define one's terms. It sounds like trauma-informed librarianship, then, pretty much eschews trauma-informed practices. Unfortunate. But at least now i know of a movement that has commandeered some otherwise commonly understood terms.
Giving up the art of storytelling to any celebrity or political person by librarians was heedless. During COVID I worked with children. They initially wanted stories online by a librarian they knew, but that dimmed. The coolest purple haired librarian could not compete with the spangles and glitter or fame. What could compete is a story teller with empathy and connection-- but that seems less valued today.
This is the best explanation of what happened to my library that I have read. I don't regard it as toxic feminism (ideological). I see toxic feminization - the elevation of certain behaviors and beliefs as "good" and "right" and righteous. I think it has a religious nature.
Great job again, as usual. You have perfectly cornered librarianship's dismissal of library neutrality for partisan progressive politics. It is killing, and will eventually kill, the profession.
Great, well-explained article. I wonder how much the Devouring Mother correlates with the "Mean Girl" dynamic of adolescent females. Are you more or less likely to be a devouring mother if you are the mean girl or the victim of mean girl bullying? Is the behavior more malignant narcissism or trauma response? 🤔
This must explain why the most common issue amongst librarians is passive-aggression. Funny story-- when I first saw "microaggressions" as a topic at a conference I thought it had to do with the passive-aggressive behaviors of library staff!
I like your article. I have a suggestion though. In the future, when quoting survey statistics, such as “University reading lists should include fewer white or European authors.” (23.4% women somewhat agree; 55.4% men completely disagree)", don't compare apples with oranges. As written, it isn't inconsistent with "75% women disagree on some level; 44% of men agree on some level" which doesn't make the case you want. Another interpretation consistent with what you wrote is "75% of women don't care but only 44% of men don't care", which, of course, isn't what the study showed at all but fits the statement.
To make your case, you could combine either the positive or negative votes for the men and women, which would be that 77.8% of men disagreed but only 42.9% of women disagreed on some level. Or alternatively, only 19.2% of men verses 41.1% of women agreed on some level. More than twice as many. Sounds more dramatic and is true.
I always wonder when reading articles like this if the person writing has had much experience in the workforce, specifically with working in toxic workplaces.
I'm sorry that your co-workers are practicing "the cold shoulder, reputational harm, undermining others' success, forming cliques, and social exclusion" and that they're "tearing your life apart." And that they're "liberal white women," who you've decided all have mental health issues and forsake friendships. (By the way, if more liberal white women are diagnosed with mental health conditions, it's probably because they're more likely to seek diagnosis and to self-report their diagnosis. Although you probably just made that up anyway.)
Here's the thing: most people are shitty. Especially in a toxic workplace, which is most workplaces. Women are shitty. Men are shitty. The old, all the races, all sexual preferences, conservative and liberal. People regularly treat each other like shit. Welcome to adulthood.
The fact that you're going around in your workplace telling all your colleagues that they're "Devouring Mothers" probably makes you part of the problem.
I appreciate your disagreement, but your comment will be deleted if it is not edited. All posts and comments are required to follow the HxA Way. I invite you to share constructive disagreement in the form of a guest post if you’re interested! (Again, as long as it follows the HxA Way.) https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/information-for-writers
Two thoughts occur to me - any workplace becomes toxic when it is poorly managed. Attributing the behaviour of staff and colleagues (gossip, harassment, bullying, and ostracism) to a Jungian architype rather than a lack of trust and poor interpersonal skills seems counter productive in the context of what the author believes is an existential crisis. Second, Ranganathan pointed out, "Libraries are a changing thing" it sounds like libraries are changing and instead of confronting those changes and adapting the author prefers to retreat into received wisdom and stereotypes. However, I have to say that "the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets" is one of the funniest quotes I've read in a while. Paraphrasing Marx, "There is a spectre haunting libraries, liberal white women".
It’s no coincidence that most professional academic library conferences are now disproportionately dominated by women (their planning committees and speakers). Conferences that were roughly gender balanced two decades ago are now 85%-plus female. And that still doesn’t meet the demand: new conferences are created (e.g., CARE), defined around “me” topics rather than library services.
I joined this community because I believed in its mission; curiosity, discomfort, intellectual honesty, disagreement across difference. I engaged with the work. I genuinely wanted this to be a space where nuance could live.
But lately, I keep hitting the same wall. Not because I’m afraid of hard conversations—but because I see writing that trades in sweeping generalizations and cultural grievance, wrapped in the language of inquiry. That’s not heterodoxy. That’s ideology with a better vocabulary.
This piece is a prime example. It doesn’t challenge. It caricatures. And frankly, if a DEI training had used the same tone and rhetorical tactics to generalize about conservative white men the way this article speaks about liberal white women, the outrage here would be immediate. So if the acceptability of critique depends more on who’s being critiqued than how, are we really modeling heterodoxy, or just shifting who gets to condescend?
I’m not saying we can’t call out dysfunction. We should. There are problems in academia, in libraries, and in how ideologies calcify. But calling those out requires clarity, evidence, and humility, not performance. The tone of this article doesn’t invite inquiry—it performs superiority.
If we want to be a real alternative to intellectual polarization, then we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard than this. Otherwise, we’re not defending viewpoint diversity—we’re just cosplaying it.
I always call what other people call "surveys", "questionnaires". I once took a course in surveying and the idea of surveying is that you get the "lay of the land". I think that it's important to focus on the inadequacy of the instrument when talking about questionnaires, and so I always call them what they are. They constrain both the quality of the respondents and the quality of the responses, and I would never use the responses to try to prove much of anything (unless the questionnaire was a ballot filled out and cast during an election).
I rather like this quotation "Idiot compassion occurs when we stop serving individuals and replace them with abstract categories of victimhood". And I could write about 15 short stories based on actual experience with that as the theme. But I would not put much faith in the Jungian explanation. Someone, I forget who, said that social media has forced everybody to engage with politics, but many are not equipped to engage intellectually, and can only engage emotionally. Social media is actually still kind of new, and the integration of all the social medias into one vast social media monster is newer still. I think this is just one of several causes that I'd rank higher than any psychoanalytic one.
It's unfortunate to see in this venue that a set of practices are dismissed without ever being defined. I am referring to the apparent dismissal of trauma-informed practices. The author appears not to know what they are, or is dismissing a straw-man version of them that are assumed. Trauma-informed practices are actually pretty evidence-based and are described by other names in the extant I/O psychology and organizational behavior literature.
"Trauma-informed practices are actually pretty evidence-based"
No, they aren't:
See Joel Paris' compact book MYTHS OF TRAUMA (with a forward by Richard McNally):
https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/podcast-873-the-myths-of-trauma/
https://hxstem.substack.com/p/why-i-wrote-an-article-questioning
Also see George Bonanno's THE END OF TRAUMA:
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/building-resilience
* * * * *
Librarianship literature is a sponge for bullshitty fads -- by which I mean uncritical embrace and epistemically irresponsible promotion of evidentially dubious stuff that resonates with woke progressive pieties -- from education and psychology:
microaggression
implicit bias
stereotype threat
UDL
https://x.com/SicaRob/status/1924974483955204225
https://x.com/SicaRob/status/1924973729840562572
https://libguides.colostate.edu/critical-perspectives
Guess the sex of all who were behind this (which occurred in June 2018):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4uUMnIuF5s&t=179s
"Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings"
https://archive.ph/z9oR7#selection-2427.0-2427.67
Stay tuned for Cory Clark's forthcoming article appearing September in the special issue of Journal of Controversial Ideas based on material from her presentation earlier this year at the Censorship in Science conference:
"From Worriers to Warriors: The Rise of Women in Science and Society"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntzhb-7gmNg
Also, evolutionary psychologist Tracy Vaillancourt, a luminary in research on female intrasexual competition, has a forthcoming book MEAN GIRLS:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/u-of-o-study-sheds-light-on-the-psychology-of-mean-girls-1.7269893
Lastly, ever heard of an academic conference purporting to promote critical thinking that explicitly makes doxastic demands as a condition of entry?
"By attending CLAPS, it is agreed upon that participants believe the narratives"
https://clps.arizona.edu/code-conduct
Thanks for clarifying what you mean by trauma informed practices. This makes it clear that what you are referring to is not what I'm referring to. I am not referring to dealing with trauma, or treating people with trauma. I am referring to trauma-informed practices, which are effective without regard to the existence of trauma. It is unfortunate that these practices are associated with the trauma industry because there are a lot of myths pertaining to trauma. I agree with Bonanno that use of the word trauma just confuses people. The practices that I am referring to are evidence based practices that improve workplace efficiency, productivity, and longevity. And as i have pointed out already, they are evidence-based strategies found throughout the peer-reviewed literature. These are practices that promote transparency, psychological safety, collaboration, mutuality, relationship development, and others. It doesn't matter whether a person actually has a trauma-history to benefit from trauma-informed practices.
Thank you for your reply. Can you provide some citations to peer-reviewed literature that you believe supports your perspective?
Sure there are tons. It seems like most of the team efficacy literature addresses it one way or another, although they never refer to the practices as "trauma-informed" per se. Here are some i am familiar with.
Edosomwan, H. S., & Oguegbe, T. M. (2021). Examining team communication and mutual support as drivers of work performance among team members. Asian Research Journal of Arts & Social Sciences, 13(4), 45-54
Traylor, A., Dinh, J. … Salas, E. (2024). Teams need to be healthy too: Toward a definition and model of healthy teams. Team Performance Management, 29, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/TPM-09-2023-0071
Bell, E., Castillo, G. F., Khalid, M., Rufrano, G., Traylor, A. M., & Salas, E. (2024). Can effective teamwork enhance members' well-being? In Stress and Well-Being in Teams (Vol. 22, pp. 121-144). Emerald Publishing Limited.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work
teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. doi:10.2307/2666999
Lacerenza, C. N., Marlow, S. L., Tannenbaum, S. I., & Salas, E. (2018). Team development interventions: Evidence-based approaches for improving teamwork. American Psychologist, 73(4), 517–531. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp00002
Wang, Y., Yu, Z., Lin, J., & Gong, D. (2024). Empathetic leadership and employees’ innovative behavior: A moderated mediation model. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 11150825. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.11150825
Trzeciak, S., & Mazzarelli, A. J. (2019). Compassionomics: The revolutionary scientific evidence that caring makes a difference. Studer Group.
Rogelberg, S. G. (2019). The surprising science of meetings: How you can lead your team to peak performance. Oxford University Press.
Gingerich, M., & Kaden, T. (2023). Healing the fragmented organization: How to lead beyond survival in a trauma-informed workplace. Herald Press.
This isn't the kind of research at issue. Do a search in Google Scholar on "trauma-informed librarianship" for some of the voluminous woo that literally identifies itself as "trauma-informed."
Right! And that's why it's so important to define one's terms. It sounds like trauma-informed librarianship, then, pretty much eschews trauma-informed practices. Unfortunate. But at least now i know of a movement that has commandeered some otherwise commonly understood terms.
Giving up the art of storytelling to any celebrity or political person by librarians was heedless. During COVID I worked with children. They initially wanted stories online by a librarian they knew, but that dimmed. The coolest purple haired librarian could not compete with the spangles and glitter or fame. What could compete is a story teller with empathy and connection-- but that seems less valued today.
This is the best explanation of what happened to my library that I have read. I don't regard it as toxic feminism (ideological). I see toxic feminization - the elevation of certain behaviors and beliefs as "good" and "right" and righteous. I think it has a religious nature.
Great job again, as usual. You have perfectly cornered librarianship's dismissal of library neutrality for partisan progressive politics. It is killing, and will eventually kill, the profession.
Great, well-explained article. I wonder how much the Devouring Mother correlates with the "Mean Girl" dynamic of adolescent females. Are you more or less likely to be a devouring mother if you are the mean girl or the victim of mean girl bullying? Is the behavior more malignant narcissism or trauma response? 🤔
This must explain why the most common issue amongst librarians is passive-aggression. Funny story-- when I first saw "microaggressions" as a topic at a conference I thought it had to do with the passive-aggressive behaviors of library staff!
I like your article. I have a suggestion though. In the future, when quoting survey statistics, such as “University reading lists should include fewer white or European authors.” (23.4% women somewhat agree; 55.4% men completely disagree)", don't compare apples with oranges. As written, it isn't inconsistent with "75% women disagree on some level; 44% of men agree on some level" which doesn't make the case you want. Another interpretation consistent with what you wrote is "75% of women don't care but only 44% of men don't care", which, of course, isn't what the study showed at all but fits the statement.
To make your case, you could combine either the positive or negative votes for the men and women, which would be that 77.8% of men disagreed but only 42.9% of women disagreed on some level. Or alternatively, only 19.2% of men verses 41.1% of women agreed on some level. More than twice as many. Sounds more dramatic and is true.
I always wonder when reading articles like this if the person writing has had much experience in the workforce, specifically with working in toxic workplaces.
I'm sorry that your co-workers are practicing "the cold shoulder, reputational harm, undermining others' success, forming cliques, and social exclusion" and that they're "tearing your life apart." And that they're "liberal white women," who you've decided all have mental health issues and forsake friendships. (By the way, if more liberal white women are diagnosed with mental health conditions, it's probably because they're more likely to seek diagnosis and to self-report their diagnosis. Although you probably just made that up anyway.)
Here's the thing: most people are shitty. Especially in a toxic workplace, which is most workplaces. Women are shitty. Men are shitty. The old, all the races, all sexual preferences, conservative and liberal. People regularly treat each other like shit. Welcome to adulthood.
The fact that you're going around in your workplace telling all your colleagues that they're "Devouring Mothers" probably makes you part of the problem.
Reminder that comments must abide by the HxA Way: https://heterodoxacademy.org/resources/the-hxa-way/
I appreciate your disagreement, but your comment will be deleted if it is not edited. All posts and comments are required to follow the HxA Way. I invite you to share constructive disagreement in the form of a guest post if you’re interested! (Again, as long as it follows the HxA Way.) https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/information-for-writers
What racism and misogyny??
It's not correct to put something between quotation marks that is not actually a quotation from the source to which you are referring.
Two thoughts occur to me - any workplace becomes toxic when it is poorly managed. Attributing the behaviour of staff and colleagues (gossip, harassment, bullying, and ostracism) to a Jungian architype rather than a lack of trust and poor interpersonal skills seems counter productive in the context of what the author believes is an existential crisis. Second, Ranganathan pointed out, "Libraries are a changing thing" it sounds like libraries are changing and instead of confronting those changes and adapting the author prefers to retreat into received wisdom and stereotypes. However, I have to say that "the inability to implement optimal decisions when our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets" is one of the funniest quotes I've read in a while. Paraphrasing Marx, "There is a spectre haunting libraries, liberal white women".
It’s no coincidence that most professional academic library conferences are now disproportionately dominated by women (their planning committees and speakers). Conferences that were roughly gender balanced two decades ago are now 85%-plus female. And that still doesn’t meet the demand: new conferences are created (e.g., CARE), defined around “me” topics rather than library services.
I joined this community because I believed in its mission; curiosity, discomfort, intellectual honesty, disagreement across difference. I engaged with the work. I genuinely wanted this to be a space where nuance could live.
But lately, I keep hitting the same wall. Not because I’m afraid of hard conversations—but because I see writing that trades in sweeping generalizations and cultural grievance, wrapped in the language of inquiry. That’s not heterodoxy. That’s ideology with a better vocabulary.
This piece is a prime example. It doesn’t challenge. It caricatures. And frankly, if a DEI training had used the same tone and rhetorical tactics to generalize about conservative white men the way this article speaks about liberal white women, the outrage here would be immediate. So if the acceptability of critique depends more on who’s being critiqued than how, are we really modeling heterodoxy, or just shifting who gets to condescend?
I’m not saying we can’t call out dysfunction. We should. There are problems in academia, in libraries, and in how ideologies calcify. But calling those out requires clarity, evidence, and humility, not performance. The tone of this article doesn’t invite inquiry—it performs superiority.
If we want to be a real alternative to intellectual polarization, then we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard than this. Otherwise, we’re not defending viewpoint diversity—we’re just cosplaying it.
I always call what other people call "surveys", "questionnaires". I once took a course in surveying and the idea of surveying is that you get the "lay of the land". I think that it's important to focus on the inadequacy of the instrument when talking about questionnaires, and so I always call them what they are. They constrain both the quality of the respondents and the quality of the responses, and I would never use the responses to try to prove much of anything (unless the questionnaire was a ballot filled out and cast during an election).
I rather like this quotation "Idiot compassion occurs when we stop serving individuals and replace them with abstract categories of victimhood". And I could write about 15 short stories based on actual experience with that as the theme. But I would not put much faith in the Jungian explanation. Someone, I forget who, said that social media has forced everybody to engage with politics, but many are not equipped to engage intellectually, and can only engage emotionally. Social media is actually still kind of new, and the integration of all the social medias into one vast social media monster is newer still. I think this is just one of several causes that I'd rank higher than any psychoanalytic one.
Amen!