What the term means

"Fetish" is used here in its older sense: an object of excessive attachment. The phrase carries no sexual meaning. People apply "trauma fetish" to a fixation on trauma, whether it is their own, other people's or fictional, in which suffering is treated as the most revealing, valuable or interesting fact about a person or a story.

The term has no standing in DSM-5-TR or ICD-11, and there is no instrument that measures it. It works as a lens borrowed from cultural criticism and everyday usage. That limit matters for a body such as IIBP, which exists to say what is and is not supported by evidence. Nothing in this article should be read as a diagnosis of any person or group.

It also helps to separate the fixation from legitimate interest. Studying trauma, practising in a trauma-informed way, supporting a colleague through a bad year and reading a survivor's memoir are all reasonable activities. The line sits at how the other person is treated. In the fixated version, the person on the other end becomes material: a source of feeling, status, plot or proof.

Where the pattern shows up

Stories and news

The critic Parul Sehgal made the best-known version of this argument in a 2021 essay on what she called the trauma plot. Her case was that contemporary fiction and film lean on a revealed wound to explain a character, so that the past injury stands in for depth and the character shrinks to the injury. The same shortcut appears in journalism and fundraising, where the most distressing image or the most extreme personal account is chosen because it holds attention.

Disability studies offers a parallel. Stella Young (2014) described "inspiration porn": portraits of disabled people that exist mainly to make non-disabled viewers feel moved. The structure is the same. The subject's life is used for the viewer's emotional benefit.

Social media

Platforms reward content that provokes strong feeling. Brady and colleagues (2017) found that posts containing moral and emotional words travelled further within like-minded networks. Under those conditions, painful personal disclosure becomes a form of currency. The more raw the account, the more attention it draws, which nudges some people to share more than they intended. Audiences take part too: reacting, resharing and commenting on a stranger's worst day can feel like care while functioning as spectating.

Close relationships

Practitioners often describe people who are repeatedly drawn to partners or friends they see as wounded. Stephen Karpman's drama triangle (1968) offers a useful frame: the rescuer role needs someone to rescue. When the other person recovers, sets a boundary or declines help, the relationship can strain, because the arrangement depended on their need. This is an observation from practice and from theory. It has not been established as a measurable trait, and it should be held loosely.

Workplaces

Work is where the pattern touches business psychology most directly. Interviewers ask candidates to describe the hardest thing they have overcome, then score the quality of the story. Leadership conferences favour speakers with a dramatic origin. Wellbeing campaigns collect testimonials from employees who are encouraged to describe their lowest point. Resilience programmes put the burden of coping on the individual, while the conditions that produced the strain stay unexamined.

Each of these practices can be well meant. Together they create an expectation that a person with a hard history will narrate it, and that a person without a story, or with a preference for privacy, has less to offer.

Why the pull is so strong

No pathology is needed to explain the attraction. Several ordinary mechanisms point the same way.

The first is curiosity about threat. Oosterwijk (2017) reported that many people, given a choice, will look at negative scenes, and interpreted this as an interest in dangerous situations and in one's own reactions to them. Stories of suffering are vivid, and vivid stories absorb us. Green and Brock (2000) described this absorption as narrative transportation, and it tends to move beliefs and feelings toward the story's content.

The second is the reward of moral feeling. Compassion feels good, and being the person who listens, helps or "gets it" supports a favourable self-image. That reward can persist even when the help is of little use to the person receiving it.

The third is the wish for suffering to mean something. Melvin Lerner (1980) described a tendency to believe the world is fair, so that outcomes seem to be deserved or to carry a lesson. If pain must have a purpose, then stories of hardship that ends in growth are especially satisfying, and we look for the lesson before we have asked the person what they went through.

Growth after adversity is real. Tedeschi and Calhoun (2004), who developed the concept of post-traumatic growth, are explicit that it coexists with distress and does not happen to everyone. The popular version drops those qualifications. It turns a possible outcome into an expected one, and that expectation can pressure people to present their suffering as a source of strength.

What it costs

The people whose stories are used pay first. They can be reduced to the injury, asked to retell it on demand and left with little control over how their account is framed or shared. Audience expectations also shape the telling, since a story that satisfies listeners may differ from the one the person would choose to tell.

The audience pays as well. Charles Figley (1995) used the term compassion fatigue for the emotional cost of sustained exposure to other people's suffering, and it is well documented among helping professionals. Constant intake of distressing accounts can also leave a reader feeling that they have cared, while no action has followed.

Organisations pay in several ways. The first is selection quality. Sackett and colleagues (2022) re-examined the meta-analytic evidence on hiring methods and found structured interviews and work-sample tests among the stronger predictors of job performance. I am not aware of evidence that a candidate's narrated hardship predicts performance better than those methods. Scoring it risks rewarding storytelling skill and penalising privacy.

The second is psychological safety. Amy Edmondson (1999) showed that teams perform better when members believe they can speak up without being punished or humiliated. When disclosure of personal pain becomes an unspoken price of belonging, people who stay quiet may feel unsafe. The third is legal and ethical exposure. Information about health and personal history is personal data, and many jurisdictions apply strict rules to how it is collected and stored.

The person with the pattern pays too. Someone who is drawn mainly to suffering may find ordinary stability dull, and may find it harder to build relationships that continue after the crisis ends.

Telling care from fixation

The two can look alike from outside, and the same person can show both on different days. The table below compares them on five questions that anyone can ask about their own behaviour.

What organisations can do

The aim is to keep real support available while removing the incentive to perform pain. Five practices follow from the evidence above.

1. 01

   Assess job-relevant capability

   Use structured interviews with the same competency questions for every candidate. Leave out questions about hardship, health or family history, and score only what bears on the role.

2. 02

   Make disclosure optional and private

   Nobody should feel they must share a personal history to be taken seriously. Route support through confidential channels such as an employee assistance programme or occupational health, and keep what is shared there separate from performance and promotion decisions.

3. 03

   Get informed consent for stories

   If a campaign or conference uses an employee's account, obtain written consent, let the person review the final text and give them a clear right to withdraw. Avoid graphic detail, and do not attach incentives to sharing.

4. 04

   Apply trauma-informed principles

   SAMHSA's guidance (2014) names six: safety; trustworthiness and transparency; peer support; collaboration and mutuality; empowerment, voice and choice; and attention to cultural, historical and gender issues. The framework was written for service systems, and organisations will need to adapt it to a workplace.

5. 05

   Refer, and do not probe

   Managers are not therapists. Train them to listen, ask what the person needs, and refer to qualified support when a conversation goes beyond what work can hold.

Business psychologists carry a particular responsibility here. Assessment reports should cover constructs that relate to the purpose of the assessment, and sensitive information should be collected only when the purpose requires it and the person has agreed. Where a client request drifts toward personal history that has no bearing on the decision, the practitioner can decline to gather it and explain why.

A short reflection quiz

The eight statements below ask how you engage with other people's pain. Rate how often each one is true for you. The quiz is a prompt for reflection. It is not a psychometric instrument: it has no norms, no reliability or validity data, and no cut-offs beyond the loose bands used below. Your answers stay in your browser and are not sent anywhere.

References

• Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7313-7318.
• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.
• Figley, C. R. (Ed.) (1995). Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those Who Treat the Traumatized. Brunner/Mazel.
• Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701-721.
• Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1-17.
• Karpman, S. (1968). Fairy tales and script drama analysis. Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 7(26), 39-43.
• Lerner, M. J. (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Plenum Press.
• Oosterwijk, S. (2017). Choosing the negative: A behavioral demonstration of morbid curiosity. PLoS ONE, 12(7), e0178399.
• Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040-2068.
• Sehgal, P. (2021, December 27). The case against the trauma plot. The New Yorker.
• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (2014). SAMHSA's Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach. HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4884.
• Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (2004). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry, 15(1), 1-18.
• Young, S. (2014). I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much. TEDxSydney talk.