A Grand Unified Theory of Trauma Discourse and The Real Housewives of New York

The trauma-ification of reality TV reaches a nadir

Two years ago, I posted about the trauma-ification of reality television. In the video, I discussed how for the last decade, reality TV has sought to build audience goodwill by forcing participants to disclose their darkest secrets on camera.

Rupaul’s Drag Race has been guilty of this for years. A season six contestant, Kelly Mantle, discussed how producer intervention forces these traumatic mirror moments, and how they prodded her to ask about another contestant’s (Vivacious) experiences with homophobia in Jamaica. Overwhelmed while doing her makeup and rushed by the production team, Kelly barely has time to feel the emotional impact of Vivacious’s words.

Last season, Q revealed she was living with HIV. Plane Jane responded with…this.

In no particular order, we’ve gotten queens discussing: burying friends during the HIV epidemic in the 80s, discussions of eating disorders, family estrangement, conversion therapy, non-binary and trans identities, sobriety, Black Lives Matter and police brutality—the list goes on. It’s become embedded in the identity of the show, with the expectation now being that every scene of the queens getting ready will include a mirror confession of some fresh new trauma. In 2023, Paste Magazine noted that if the show becomes solely about queer trauma, elements of queer joy could potentially be erased.

The Bachelor has attempted this in recent years by having contestants disclose traumatic pasts immediately upon meeting the leads. We’ve watched widowers admit their reluctance toward dating again, 23 year olds talk about being dumped by the “loves of their lives”, and solemn conversations about bullying. Due to the casting pool being mostly proto-influencers from Middle America, the traumas are nowhere near the level of those of the Drag Race cast, but I couldn’t help but notice the shift in how participants are introduced to the audience over the last few years.

After a tumultuous 13th season roiled by accusations of racism (Ramona Singer continues to insist she did not say the n word— she simply texted the first half of the word to a reporter), Bravo did the unthinkable and fired the entire cast of The Real Housewives of New York, replacing them with a diverse set of younger, sleeker women meant to represent the beating heart of the city.

I want it on the record that I was a champion of the reboot: on TikTok, I talked about how the original RHONY had reached a narrative inflection point before the racism scandal. The cornerstones of the show (Luann De Lesseps, Ramona Singer, Sonja Morgan, and the fired Dorinda Medley) were women in their sixties with a range of emotional issues and literally nothing else going on. Their entire lives had become the show: they had no jobs, careers, husbands, children, passion projects, etc. It was an open secret that Sonja didn’t even live in New York when the show wasn’t filming.

I’m not saying their stories stopped mattering because they reached a certain age and they were single: I’m saying it’s hard to make a reality show about women’s lives when they don’t do much of anything except meet for dinner and drunkenly scream at each other. Luann had her cabaret, but outside of that, there was no story or narrative tension for audiences to glom onto—there was no meat left on the bone.

Not to get too in the weeds with minutiae, but many fans who cry about the reboot forget that Bravo originally wanted to commission two separate shows: a new RHONY (what we eventually got) and a show about the original women that was derailed by an original cast member stalling contract negotiations. For what it’s worth, these women could have had their own show had one of their own not played hardball.

The first season of the reboot premiered on July 16th, 2023. Within a few episodes, it was clear that the tenor of the show had completely changed. Gone were the days of women erupting into screaming matches at dinners in the Hamptons or whispering threats during charity functions. The new Housewives were media trained to a frightening degree, revealing information about themselves in prepackaged narratives that were both palatable and relatable to audiences. The only issue? Over half the episodes of the first season became mired in conversations about trauma, with the women sitting around in circles discussing the various childhood maladies that forged them. Backstory as bonding, if you will.

A quick rundown of the cast:

L-R: Brynn Whitfield, Erin Lichy, Sai De Silva, Jenna Lyons, Jessel Taank, Ubah Hassan

• Brynn Whitfield: A PR maven who worked on the BP side of the BP oil spill, Brynn’s personality of “sexiest baby in the world” quickly became grating to fans. During the first season, she flirted with both Erin’s father and husband and united the conservative subreddit against her forevermore. She revealed that her parents died due to struggles with addiction and she was raised by her white grandmother as the only biracial child at her school.

• Erin Lichy: A native New Yorker, Erin is smug, judgemental, and takes herself and everything in her life extremely seriously while lacking both self-awareness and a sense of humor. All of this makes for great television. She got married at 24 years old, which I feel says everything you need to know about her (24 in New York is basically 16 anywhere else).

• Sai De Silva: A Brooklyn Nuyorican, I know so many women like Sai and I went to bat defending her on TikTok after a very rough first season. Her blunt communication style rubbed people the wrong way, but Sai spoke at length about her mother’s alcoholism and death, and how growing up in New York made her tough and emotionless. She underwent serious PR training before the second season, rarely speaking (she did call Brynn a gaslighting liar during the S15 premiere, this generation of Housewives loves weaponizing therapy speak) except to say that meditating and therapy have done wonders for her. Sure thing.

• Jenna Lyons: THE Jenna Lyons, former head of J. Crew and the person who “defined the look of the Obama years”. A celesbian icon of queer New York, Lyons engaged in a masterful reimagining of her public persona on the show. Brushing aside years of whispers and accusations of being a toxic boss to present an image of herself as an introvert struggling with her body image, the fandom can’t square the two Jennas: is she a badass iconoclast who parties with celebrities and calls herself Jenna Fucking Lyons? Or is she the shrinking violet who shies away from confrontation and spends her free time hating herself?

• Jessel Taank: Another PR professional, Jessel partied with Lynn Yaeger and bumbled her way into fan favorite status by being blissfully unaware of shady implications during interactions with other castmates. Jessel introduced interesting cultural conversations to the HW universe by bringing up her IVF journey (which she kept a secret from her mother) and her South Asian upbringing.

• Ubah Hassan: A Somali model by way of Canada, Ubah was barely in the first season before becoming the center of drama in the second. Describing her tendency to erupt into screaming fits whenever she’s unhappy as a “cultural difference”, Ubah’s conflict style is markedly different from that of the other women.

A Grand Unified Theory of Trauma Discourse

As someone who has spent way too much time online, it’s unsurprising to me that Brynn weaponized both her racial identity and a traumatic experience against another cast member. As I’ve been warning for years, it’s the natural next step in discourse.

I’ve found that there are three paths these sorts of arguments can take:

1. Trauma as identity

2. Trauma as shield

3. Trauma as cudgel

Disclosure: I am not a therapist or mental health professional, and I understand that people with diagnosed CPTSD have been fundamentally altered on a neurological level by what they have experienced. In this specific context, I am discussing average people online and reality stars.

Identity

Millennial culture championed the over-identification with trauma, with people putting diagnoses in their Instagram bios and opening conversations with the worst thing that had ever happened to them. As Leslie Jamison warned in The Empathy Exams, it is very easy to be consumed by trauma, and having your sense of self wrapped up in a wound doesn’t often help:

These are the dangers of a wound: that the self will be subsumed by it (“personal vanishing point”) or unable to see outside its gravity (“everything led to it”). The wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it…

While millennial culture did introduce greater levels of mental health awareness, it also led to the rise of therapy-speak and overly corporatized friendships. How many cultural conversations have we had about boundaries, gaslighting, narcissists, etc? The Buzzfeediciation of Mental Health goes into this at length.

The over-identification with both trauma and mental health conditions are part of what many have called “diagnosis culture”, where the diagnosis of a condition or generalized trauma become the endpoint rather than the beginning of a “healing journey”.

As an anonymous therapist wrote in Mental Hellth:

It’s understandable to worry that over-identification with psych disorders has become too casual, creating something like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is referenced here:

In his 2015 book, The Nocebo Effect: Overdiagnosis and its Costs, Stewart Justman observed how the medicalisation of everyday problems actually invites people to feel ill and encourages them to live up to their diagnoses. This is especially the case when it comes to mental-health problems. Attributing one’s difficulties to depression or anxiety can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Again, I am not talking about people who are victims of SA or DV who are raising awareness about how common these things are, or building platforms to prevent this from happening to other people. I’m talking about conversations that are derailed when people tie their entire identity to a traumatic past experience or a diagnosis.

Shield

The most common of the three arguments, this is one we’re all deeply familiar with. Anyone who’s spent any time on the internet has seen arguments spiral into “you can’t accuse me of this because of x, y, or z.” The famous “neurodivergent minor” argument, or one of my personal load-bearing posts: “god forbid you disagree with a white person and now they gotta bring up the fact that they non-binary or gay or got ADHD…”

This is a joke but somehow also exactly what the right is saying.

This plays out across trauma culture, diagnosis culture, and identity politics and is uniformly used in bad faith to prevent accountability. We’re seeing it play out in the Autism community (this particular group schemed to remove BIPOC members of their organization and then said they weren’t racist because they’re neurodivergent) and in the news right now after Elon Musk’s salute (he can’t be anti-Semitic because he’s neurodivergent). I once had to take a TikTok about Jameela Jamil’s bee scandal (what a sentence!) down because commenters said she couldn’t be held responsible for her constant lies due to her Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

On RHONY, Brynn used the idpol version of this when she used her identity as a Black woman to avoid taking accountability when she called Ubah an “angry Black woman”. An INSANE thing to say to someone regardless of identity, but when called out, Brynn doubled down and said that she couldn’t get in trouble for saying it since she is also Black. The situation is obviously complicated, but the colorist implications of a half Black woman raised in culturally white spaces policing the behavior of a fellow Black woman and then sidestepping responsibility for saying it… yikes.

Cudgel

The reason for this post. On the Real Housewives of New York finale this week, Brynn and Ubah continued their season-long battle. Ubah accused Brynn of sleeping with someone to get on the show, and later that week, Brynn asks why Ubah would keep accusing her of sexual impropriety when she knows she was a victim of sexual assault. The tenor of the episode immediately shifts, and all of the women go into high alert: Ubah’s been slut-shaming Brynn all season. To attack a woman who is a victim of something so serious is shocking.

The actual scandal comes later when it’s revealed that Ubah never knew about Brynn’s assault. Brynn says that she told Ubah in a moment of passion (while hysterically crying on the phone between seasons) and that “maybe she didn’t clock it”. Ubah maintains that she never knew and would never attack her had she known. At the top of the episode, the editors included a montage of Brynn’s lies throughout the season. Erin and a new cast member immediately put two and two together: Brynn is lying. The implication then becomes that Brynn is using her sexual assault as a weapon to make Ubah look like she was slut shaming a victim of sexual assault.

This is reprehensible. The Housewives franchise has gone dark before: there was an accusation that a cast member on Atlanta had a “dungeon” where she would drug and assault other women. This was proven to be a lie and the accuser was fired. Salt Lake City and Beverly Hills briefly pivoted to the true crime genre when Jen Shah was accused and found guilty of stealing money from the pensions of elderly victims, and when Erika Jayne’s husband was accused (and found guilty in 2024) of stealing millions from the settlements of plane crash and gas explosion victims.

However, a cast member saying that another cast member knew about her assault and then going back on it reaches a different level of darkness.

I’m a veteran of internet battles: I know how these arguments go. I’ve been going back and forth with someone when they bring out something you could have no knowledge of in an attempt to shame you and weaponize their trauma/diagnosis/identity. For Brynn to both accuse Ubah of knowing and double down on the accusation represents a natural escalation of internet based logical fallacies breaching the gossamer-thin wall between the web and real life.

I’m a student of reality television and an observer of online ephemera. I watched as reality shows sought to represent the new normal native to discourse and how it won Drag Race a number of Emmys while making The Bachelor franchise suffer. As I stated above, the real surprise is watching a tactic native to the internet make it onto television. Many of my cultural observations have been about how the way we act online affects society at the macro level— I should have known it was only a matter of time before I’d be watching the behavior of the chronically online play out on TV as well.