Last Wednesday, while many of my fellow Americans tuned in to watch J.D. Vance speak at the Republican National Convention, I watched the docuseries “Simone Biles: Rising.” The two-part series skillfully presents the events of Simone’s withdrawal from all but one of her events at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, held in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As I hoped, the docuseries explored the context of Biles’ mental health crisis at the Olympics. In the series, she describes the experience as a “trauma response,” offering her fellow Americans powerful teaching about the impact of multi-layered trauma. 

I hope and pray we listen. 

When I witnessed the events of Tokyo 2021 as a trauma therapist and a survivor of developmental trauma and sexual assault, I knew what I was seeing: A trauma response of a body no longer cooperating with a brain that had reached its breaking point.

So much of what I saw in Biles’ face and heard in the words she managed to get out during interviews suggested dissociation, a fancy word meaning “sever” or “divide.” Dissociation is a protective mechanism of the brain that keeps us safe and helps us meet our needs. 

In the docuseries, Biles didn’t ask for pity or make excuses. She bravely recapped the many traumatic experiences in her life that were publicly known, even in 2021.

This began with the abandonment she experienced due to her birth mother’s struggle with addiction, causing her to spend time in the foster care system.

She recalled the degrading methods that USA Gymnastics endorsed at the notorious Karolyi Ranch training camps held in rural Texas.

And, of course, she reminded us of the negligence of USA Gymnastics’ failure to protect adolescent girls like herself from now-convicted felon and sexual abuser Larry Nasser.

Add to all of this the pressure of high-performance competition and public scrutiny in a sport where black and brown bodies have been historically excluded or unfairly judged.

All this created a perfect storm for a dissociative meltdown that almost anyone would experience under similar circumstances. The documentary explores all these factors of context and nuance that compound wounds and complicate the healing process.

For those who may find it too dramatic a term, “trauma,” translated from Greek, simply means “wound.” 

Most impressively, Biles revisited the scores of hateful posts from social media trolls, television “journalists” and pundits who condemned her as a “quitter.” These people scorned her, accusing Biles of letting down her team and country. They shamed her for being unable to push through and pull herself up by the bootstraps onto the gymnastics apparatus.

All these people ignored the fact that competing could have killed Biles, considering the condition she was in at the Tokyo Games. Not surprisingly, most of these critics were white, conservative men.

The most satisfying moment in the documentary was when Biles aptly observed that the people criticizing her from their couches couldn’t even do a cartwheel. As a Black woman in America, she was an easy target for those who would rather criticize a trauma survivor than admit their own wounds and insecurities.

How many of them, especially white men, watched and venerated J.D. Vance on Wednesday night as a hero of the working class? How many perceived him as someone who “didn’t make excuses” and who “pulled himself up by his bootstraps?”

These people will likely use Vance’s story as justification to denigrate others.

Vance became famous by his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which sought to tell a story of surviving trauma and brokenness. In the story, he also ends up shaming his own people. 

How can any American give someone like J.D. Vance credit for surviving trauma and not Simone Biles?

Because he is a white man and she is a Black woman. Because Biles and everything she represents is the real threat to an American psyche that just keeps moving on like the wounding never happened.  

I was not surprised to hear so many conservative Americans throw Simone Biles under the bus in 2021. As Americans, we chide the people who are strong enough to stop and ask for help. We praise those who can push through, even if doing so is dishonest and sets them up for further injury.

The push-through mentality of J.D. Vance and so much of the modern Republican party under Trumpism lacks vulnerability, honesty and compassion. It has the potential to leave our country with gaping emotional wounds, bleeding all over each other, possibly never to recover.