'The only way out is through': The flexibility and limits of trauma discourse in psychedelic contexts.

Abstract

"Trauma" has become a widely circulating cultural framework for making suffering intelligible. Sociological research has documented its institutional expansion but paid less attention to how people use it to organize experiences that disrupt orientation to body, self, and world. This article examines that situated process in non-clinical psychedelic contexts. Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews with people who defined their psychedelic experiences as challenging, we trace how participants mobilized trauma discourse in response to ontological rupture. The analysis identifies five configurations of therapeutic sense-making: somatic discovery of trauma, embodied re-experiencing, the experience as healing instruction, the recursive healing project, and the limits of therapeutic sense-making. Across the first four, trauma discourse condensed diverse suffering into an authoritative category and supplied vocabularies for sequencing experience and directing action; we use personalization to describe how this shared framework becomes biographically meaningful. The fifth captures the cases where personalization broke down: the framework felt imposed, became a performance for others, or disclosed memories and revelations participants could not hold as real. Our abductive analysis of these cases generated three dimensions of authenticity: subjective ownership, non-performance, and realness. The findings point to a structural tension: we suggest that circulating trauma discourse beyond credentialed clinical and ritual authorities both expands the framework's flexibility and leaves personalization vulnerable to social pressure, unaccountable authority, and unresolved epistemic uncertainty. This study extends sociological critiques of therapeutization by shifting attention from the diffusion of therapeutic frameworks to the conditions of their uptake.