The day after Georgetown Law School dean Bill Treanor put lya Shapiro on administrative leave, the Black Law Students Association held a sit-in. Treanor attended, telling the students that the school would reimburse them for the cost of any food they ordered in, because what’s a protest without a nosh. The students in turn, informed Treanor that they needed a space to cry.

Cry? If one’s traumatized, one cries. And it appears that people are crying a lot. If you break a bone, you can see it on an x-ray. If you’re cut, you can see a wound and blood will come out. But if the pain is emotional, there is no visible proof that it happened, that it exists. Crying would be an outward signal of the pain, the trauma, and if people cry a lot, then they are traumatized a lot.

But why is that happening now when we didn’t used to cry all the time? Some will argue that crying was frowned upon, so we toughened up and didn’t do it even though we really wanted to. Others may argue that crying reflects a strength of character, that criers are strong enough to face their emotions and let it out, unafraid of being laughed at for indulging in such a flagrant display of emotion. Were people just in denial about their emotional trauma before, or has what’s perceived, and more importantly, what’s claimed to be trauma changed?

Call it post-traumatic hyperbole. Or TikTok pseudo-psychology. Or even therapy-speak. There are plenty of horrible things going on in the world, and serious mental health crises that warrant such severe language. But when did we start using the language of harm to describe, well, everything?

The curious thing about trauma is that it’s become an irrefutable fact upon nothing more than proclaiming it. You’re offended? You’re hurt? You’re traumatized? There may be no open wound, not even a paper cut, but there are the wounds within. And as anyone who has ever made the mistake of questioning whether a feeling may be as traumatic as claimed swiftly learns, you do so at your peril because ten thousand gnats will swarm to tell you how the pain is real. Just as you can’t see any wound to prove it exists, you can’t prove any mental wound doesn’t.

The phrase “semantic creep” has been used to describe how the meaning of words change over time. What we’re seeing today, according to the psychologist Nick Haslam, a professor at the University of Melbourne, could be called “trauma creep,” — when the language of the clinical, or at least the clinical-adjacent, is used to refer to an increasingly expansive set of everyday experiences.

Beneath our collective embrace of such language, Mr. Haslam argues, is in fact a better understanding — and in turn, sensitivity — to the psychological aspects of harm. Which, to be clear, can be a good thing. “We’re calling out bad behavior that was previously tolerated, identifying harm that was previously ignored,” he said.

Is there such a thing as psychological harm? Of course. We’ve all experienced, to one extent or another. But are you feeling the blues or clinical depression? Did the person who just  used an unflattering word in your presence cause you to suffer PTSD or annoy you. Or are you really annoyed or pretending to be hurt because you know that’s the way you’re supposed to react when that word is spoken in your presence?

The word “trauma” comes from the ancient Greeks, who defined it as physical injury. And while the term is still used to describe physical harm, today it’s more commonly expressed in the context of the emotional. That shift was critical in the 1990s and early 2000s to legitimizing the concept of domestic abuse, said the sociologist Paige Sweet, the author “The Politics of Surviving”— and even helped shelters gain government resources because it “medicalized” the concept.

In the early days of domestic abuse, the problem to be addressed was the lack of seriousness, concern and recognition people had, and the law had, with regard to the actions of one spouse or partner on the other. It wasn’t like walking down the street and getting mugged, a discrete act that was easily described and universally understood to be bad. Daily abuse, sometimes physical but mostly psychological, took its toll, like death by a thousand cuts. And advocates needed a way to explain this, to express it, so that others understood and took it seriously. The language of physical harm was introduced into the realm of emotional and mental harm. Yes, it was real.

And from there, it crept. It became the coin of the realm in sexual relations, a mere baby step from domestic abuse. It has since found its way into all forms of victimhood as the unseen wound of horribles suffered.

But as words gain useful new meanings, over time, they can also lose precision.

Precision seems overly kind. Words begin by losing specific meaning, and devolve into such malleability that they mean whatever the user wants the word to mean. But more importantly with trauma creep, you cannot dispute it. If challenge were permissible, than the house of pain would collapse on itself, as no one can prove that their hurt feelings are more real, more serious, than anyone else’s hurt feelings. In a tacit mutual validation pact, you back up my trauma and I’ll back up yours, and isn’t that really for the best because bad things do happen and our cries of pain serve to end them? That makes criers virtuous, and rewards them with validation and sympathy.

It is not a huge leap, then, to imagine that deploying the language of trauma, or of harm, or even of personal struggle, carries cultural capital.

Is Georgetown Law School so mentally horrific that its students need a crying room? Or have the students figured out the secret thing to say that will get them whatever they believe they want, or should want. There is no doubt that mental anguish can be real, but when claiming it over every trivial hurt, real or perceived, is sufficient to make it incontrovertible, who’s “gaslighting” whom?

We can distinguish between a scratch and a bullet wound, but we are forbidden to question the trauma of hearing a harsh word that makes you cry. As law becomes increasing cognizant of the grievances prominent on campus and in social media, we are facing a future of faux emotional trauma that will suffice to not merely cancel, or even expel, but imprison. And the only “proof” needed is to cry.