What Bridgerton Teaches Us About Trauma

This post may contain spoilers.

Like many of you, gentle reader, I have also watched the ever-popular, Netflix-made regency flick titled Bridgerton. I must admit I did initially scoff at the idea of watching it, thinking myself beyond such tomfoolery. Only to find myself finishing a whole season in one sitting. What can I say? Therapists are human too.

The blessing and curse of a therapeutically-trained mind is that every entertainment that crosses our path tends to be looked at through the lens of self, trauma and development. Shortly after finishing the second season, I found myself jotting down a few questions while pondering how trauma impacts our functioning in the world, as well as our relationships with others.

So today, to both sprinkle some humor into my blog reel and to invite you into learning more about trauma, I shall briefly explore trauma and our responses to it by using a few Bridgerton characters as examples.

But first, what is trauma?

Trauma is defined as an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening, and that has lasting adverse effects. Traumatic events range from one-time incidences to experiences that are chronic, systemic and generational.

Trauma can be widely categorized as:

• Acute

• Chronic

• Complex

• Intergenerational/historic

• Racial/cultural/systemic

What happens in our bodies when we experience trauma?

During a traumatic occurrence, our brain's primary function is to survive at all costs. When our survival systems are activated, responses to trauma become available. You likely have heard about all of them: fight, flight and freeze. There is also a fourth response - fawn - which activates our appeasing capacities in order to survive trauma (that one deserves a whole blog post of its own).

When our trauma responses become activated, we “flip our lid”. The part of the brain responsible for decision making, speech and higher cognitive functions goes offline, leaving us with the most basic physiological responses: fight, run away, or play dead/freeze.

In these moments, there is no capacity for social connection and engagement. We feel isolated, stranded, alone.

But where does Bridgerton come in?

Patience, dear reader, we are nearly there. Here is how this all ties together.

Experiencing trauma feels so horrible that many of us will do whatever it takes to never feel like that again.

In order to find a semblance of control over our environment, we ruthlessly search for a way to ensure that whatever we just lived through, whatever we just felt, will never happen in the future. Ever.

So we make vows to ourselves.

In these moments of darkness, we begin forming promises of “I will never…”, “No one will ever…” and “This is the last time that…”.

Let’s look at several Bridgerton characters for examples.

Simon

Simon arrives on the scene as the most eligible bachelor, yet one uninterested in relationships. As we watch, we learn of the vow Simon has made to his father, and to himself as well: he will never marry or sire an heir because of the traumatic upbringing he was forced to undergo as the heir to the duke. Through the shattering pain of rejection and conditionality of the love and approval of his father, as well as the rigid ideas of what a duke’s son should be like, Simon vowed to himself to be the last heir that undergoes such destiny.

We see how Simon’s trauma led him to take control in whatever way he felt he was able, yet his desire to control his fate contradicts his feelings, creating tension and conflict in his relationships. He actively represses his feelings in order to uphold his promise to himself.

Anthony

In a similar fashion to Simon, we find out in season two how Anthony’s vows keep him from experiencing feelings of love, joy and freedom. Witnessing his father’s untimely, traumatic death and following that seeing his mother fiercely grieve the loss of her husband, Anthony decided to never subject anyone else to such agony again.

When he begins developing feelings for Kate, he goes as far as to propose to someone else just to cement his promise to himself. His rejection of the part of himself that feels creates torment, pain and suffering both for him and for others, who see the aspects of himself he has locked away for self-protection.

Kate

Fierce, brave and intelligent, Kate is the classic parentified child, one that had to take the responsibility of raising a sibling as the mother was not fully available to do so. Kate sacrifices her own wishes and needs for the sake of her sister, denying herself the love and care she so clearly also desires. She cultivates her fierce independence as a defense mechanism against feeling unworthy of love, vowing to herself that she will do whatever it takes to secure a good life for her sister, even if it is at her own expense.

Kate’s trauma of growing up in poverty, as well as the harsh oppression of the systems of class and rank in 19th century England, forces her to vow to never let anyone else go through what she had gone through. She chooses to kill her feelings, wants and needs to keep others from reliving her destiny.

Yet as we know…

The parts of ourselves we vow to keep on a tight leash always have a way of getting out. In order to quiet down these rejected self parts, we begin searching for ways out. This is where we may begin to engaging in addictive behaviors: drinking, smoking, gaming, eating, etc. We may begin experiencing pain in different parts of our body, without being able to identify a clear reason. We may begin to ramp up our productivity and speed of accomplishing things, ensuring we never slow down to hear the parts we locked away.

These vows made out of fear, loss and desire to be in charge of our own destiny become shackles we put ourselves in.

Thinking we are choosing freedom, we are actively imprisoning our desires and our flexibility along with them. Rigidity settles in as the only conceivable way of coping. We think that if only we stay on this narrow path the vow laid out for us, we will never feel that awful pain again.

Where do we go from here?

The only person who has the key to these shackles is our own self. But under which circumstances do we finally become brave enough and feel safe enough to unlock ourselves from the vows we have made? What aids us in this process and who comes alongside it?

While our desires, caged like a bird and whose beating wings we hear yet refuse to listen to, make their presence known, it is our responsibility to pay attention.

It is, in many cases, the work of a lifetime to begin to reconcile who we truly are with who we forced ourselves to become in order to self-protect.

And it is work truly worth undertaking, dear reader.