As Americans moved around more and traditional communities eroded, he argued, school was “the one place communities can turn to for correctives to children’s deficiencies” using “tensions and trauma of children’s lives.” These traumas and tensions, he said, were everywhere, since “the same circuitry that can be seen so boldly imprinting traumatic memories is…at work in…the more ordinary travails of childhood, such as being chronically ignored…or social rejection.”

Soon after, Goleman founded a nonprofit to promote what he called “Social Emotional Learning” (SEL) with backing from Yale University and funding from philanthropic foundations. Thanks to their support, his extremely expansive vision of trauma has spread through the school system and then outside it, into the heart of communities as far away from New Haven as St. Louis, Missouri—a city I called home.

Whether Goleman’s vision is treating trauma or generating it isn’t clear.

For anyone like me who grew up within a two-hour radius of St. Louis during the 1990s and early 2000s, the city was a regional hub in a confident America and looked that way. Like a lot of American cities after 1960, the flight of industry and the rise of the suburbs hadn’t come gently to St. Louis, diminishing its tax base and its urban communities, but the businessmen who lived there had pushed back with public-private improvement projects: the Gateway Arch in 1965; Busch Memorial Stadium for the Cardinals in 1966; and later the Union Station rehabilitation, the St. Louis Centre, the MetroLink light rail line, the Kiel Civic Center for hockey and the Trans World Dome for the Rams Football Team. Eventually, people began finding beauty in old, abandoned buildings in neighborhoods the city was turning into historic preservation sites; with the help of tax breaks and seed money, they started relocating businesses there.

By the end of the century, St. Louis was a corporate center with research universities and hospitals as well as major sports franchises. It had an international airport as well as Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America, Firstar, five Fortune 500 company headquarters, Washington University in St. Louis, and Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

Mark McGwire, the star first baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals, was a hero in regional elementary schools, and when the St. Louis Rams won the Superbowl their quarterback, Kurt Warner, became the “life goal” on my fourth-grade classmates’ “Life Timelines.”

The other half of St. Louis, though fading, was ethnic and Catholic. A popular destination for a day trip for dinner was the Hill, the old Italian neighborhood where sixty-year-old men still wore wife beaters and gold necklaces; the Basilica and its collection of mosaics drew high school classes and city choirs; and St. Louis University, shorthanded SLOO, the Jesuit College which also had its own hospital, was a major destination for high school seniors.

The ethos that had revived the city—boosterish and pragmatic, solving one problem at a time— also lived in places where post-industrial landscapes were grimmer: Ferguson and Normandy and East St. Louis, where labor outsourcing had hit Black men just as they got the chance to enter the workforce on equal terms. To drivers, these areas signaled nothing more than turnoffs to avoid, but change was happening on the inside through state-sponsored programs like Missouri Options. A teacher friend who taught in a similar district in another part of the state described it this way:

The program would find kids who are totally at risk—drugs, gangs, the whole works. But you see that they’re smart and let them know it, and they go off and take standardized tests and we’re one year in and we have thirty graduates. So they hire a new person. And now there are two of us: there are no fights, it’s uplifting these kids. One of them, he was so smart, but his mother said, ‘That boy has been in trouble since the minute he stepped into kindergarten.’ But the program worked for him. Now he’s a lineman at Ameren UE.

One of the reasons the program worked was that teachers were equipped with books like William Jenkins’ Understanding and Educating African American Children, distributed by districts for practical reasons: “You have standards; you know the differences in culture without making excuses,” as my friend put it, “there’s a whole list of stereotypes to avoid. And it works. [Jenkins] put out a whole set of cassette tapes; I bought them all.”

None of this, not the building projects nor the remedial programs, were broad fixes to the problems of late twentieth century American cities: the labor outsourcing, the decline of churches, the falling away of thick and durable communities as people moved and moved again. But they were improvements all the same, and they made it possible to imagine that St. Louis, like Missouri, like much of the country, was a flawed but decent place—making progress for its citizens and helping them make progress for themselves.

It’s becoming less possible to imagine this now.

What’s changed in St. Louis isn’t obvious from a drive-through; it comes through at the margins, in new 501c filings for charitable organizations, or in an innocuous newspaper article about a new nonprofit partnering with the state. Still, these small items add up to something larger. In the last ten years, a kind of asteroid has hit St. Louis’s civic organs, collateral of Daniel Goleman’s SEL: a concerted effort to re-envision the city as a “trauma-informed community.”

The first hint I got of the change was six years ago, listening to St. Louis Public Radio when a segment about “toxic stress” came on the air. One of the guests, representing a three-year-old nonprofit called Alive and Well Communities, estimated that more than half the people in the region suffered from the “trauma” of everyday life and compared it to PTSD. Alive and Well’s goal, this guest said, was to awaken people and rescue them by creating “trauma-informed communities” with a special focus on the trauma of racism. Its main business was contracting with schools in St. Louis and Kansas City to provide Social-Emotional Learning for kids.

The idea that more than half the people in the city suffered from toxic stress from everyday life seemed high to me, and I remembered Alive and Well’s name. It wouldn’t be the last time I heard it. In the past six years, Alive and Well has spread rapidly, backed by state agencies like the Departments of Education and Mental Health and out-of-state “affiliate associations,” as well as the Republican-dominated state legislature.

A whole new civic world has sprung up alongside Alive and Well. When I first heard about the organizations supporting their initiative, I was surprised—they were legacy organizations, not specialists in trauma therapy. But a baton-passing seems to be occurring in St. Louis civic life: older models of community ceding ground to nonprofits staffed from consultancies and universities, in the name of “making way for change” or “evolving with the times.”

This is less of an evolution and more of a shift. The needs these new organizations try to meet are the same human needs as always—purpose, belonging, togetherness. But their practitioners come to St. Louis by way of PhD programs or HR departments, and their solutions don’t create room for service or engagement with the community. Instead, they mostly operate in schools and businesses, where they offer personal therapy backed by expert authority, which isn’t always “people-focused.”

Recently, a friend of mine who’d dropped out of law school and was unsure what he wanted to do with his life went to an area psychiatrist. “You’re lucky you came to me,” the man told him. “Most of the rest would’ve said your issue was childhood trauma or some sort of racial guilt…they have all their categories…and given you a prescription. Nobody wants to solve the problems anymore—they want to categorize them, manage them, send you back to work, and make money while they do it.” This isn’t a recipe for improving a city, bit by bit; it’s a recipe for helping people cope with conditions that they think are beyond their control.

Judging by traditional metrics, this approach is not helping St. Louis, where crime is up and the economy is cratering, restaurants closing and downtown a crime scene. Nor is it helping the neighborhoods already left behind. In some districts, according to my friend, the Missouri Options programs have been limited. Meantime, William Jenkins’ book is a thing of the past, replaced by books about racism as a psychological affliction. “Wellness coordinators” are being hired; kids use claims of trauma to explain acting out in class; substance abuse goes unpunished in the name of “coping” with post-COVID trauma; and violence as well as teacher walkouts are on the rise. The few higher-income parents in my friend’s district are supportive of the new focus, but the vast majority, who don’t have the luxury of worrying about wellness and don’t feel confident arguing with the experts, are concerned that their kids won’t get through school.

Still, the messengers of wellness aren’t deterred, and the tidings of trauma keep coming. In March of this year, I took a plane from St. Louis to Washington, D.C., and what I remember about the trip out was the people behind me: two white work colleagues a few years younger than me talking loudly about the St. Louis health equity nonprofit they worked for and the conference they were attending in DC. They talked about “state fellowship programs” and “buried trauma”; about “disengaging from toxicity” and “guiding people towards mindfulness”; they talked about the racism and homophobia and “knowing the problem but not the solution.” Above all, they talked about how soon they could move back East.

As the pair behind me continued to talk, my seatmate looked at me and said, very quietly, “I grew up in St. Louis, I still live there—I don’t think it’s so bad as they say.” She was a forty-something-year-old blonde with artsy, frayed jeans who had ordered a double vodka and then asked me to split one of the mini-bottles with her. I’d learned she was a pharmaceutical rep and a single mother who lived with her son in an apartment downtown. Now she sighed and shivered and made a resigned gesture toward the bottle on the tray table in front of her. “I’m not perfect, that’s for sure. I sin—a lot. But I just try to be kind. I just try to have some grace. That ought to be enough.”

In the context of 2020s America, this felt like an ethos for community: limited, practical, realistic. But, as older communities fade and practical fixes get kicked to the curb, the choice we’re being offered is between imagined communities and no communities at all.