When Care Became a Commodity: Remembering What Capitalism Made Us Forget
“When we remember that care is not a cost but a covenant, we begin to rewrite the story of what it means to be human.” - Mary Coughlin
When Care Became a Commodity: Remembering What Capitalism Made Us Forget
The Wounding of the Human Spirit
B.U.F.F.E.R.: A Framework for Collective Repair
Lately, I’ve been asking myself a question that won’t let go: How did we arrive here, inside an economic story that feels so tragic, so inhumane?
We call it capitalism, but underneath the policies and profits, it’s really a story of disconnection. A long arc of forgetting who we are to one another.
The Anatomy of Disconnection
In trauma-informed care, we understand trauma as a rupture in relationship—a loss of safety, trust, and belonging. Look closely and you’ll see the same pattern at the level of culture.
For most of human history, we lived within webs of reciprocity. Land, water, and community were shared. The commons was not a concept but a way of being: I thrive because we thrive.
Then came enclosure, the fencing of land, the privatizing of what had been held in common. Peasants were displaced; survival became contingent on selling labor to those who owned the fences. It was the first large-scale relational breach: between people and place, between labor and meaning, between care and survival.
Over centuries, that breach deepened through colonization, slavery, and industrialization. Bodies were turned into instruments of production; Earth into resource; time into currency. Trauma, once personal, became systemic, an inherited wound of separation.
Capitalism didn’t just reorganize economies. It reorganized our nervous systems.
The Wounding of the Human Spirit
Caring Science teaches that to care is to connect. Jean Watson reminds us that caring is the moral ideal of nursing, and of being human. Yet in a capitalist frame, caring is reclassified as labor: a cost to minimize, a service to bill, a transaction to complete.
In healthcare we feel this tension viscerally. Moral distress, burnout, and compassion fatigue are not personal failures; they’re symptoms of a system that has forgotten what care is for. When efficiency becomes the highest virtue, presence becomes a liability. When productivity is prized over relationship, clinicians and families alike begin to fracture.
This is not merely operational strain—it is spiritual injury.
B.U.F.F.E.R.: A Framework for Collective Repair
If capitalism is the architecture of disconnection, B.U.F.F.E.R.™ offers an architecture of remembrance, a way to re-pattern our systems toward healing.
Belonging invites us back to the commons. It reminds us that care is not competitive but communal.
Understanding asks us to see the historical trauma beneath our institutions so we can respond with truth rather than denial.
Forgiveness allows us to grieve the harm without being paralyzed by shame, to begin again with compassion.
Frameworks give shape to the future: policies, practices, and pedagogies rooted in relational ethics.
Equanimity steadies us in the messy middle—where anger meets grace, and resistance meets love.
Respect restores dignity as the foundation of every interaction, from bedside to boardroom.
Each element is a thread; together they form a weave strong enough to hold the weight of collective healing.
From Extraction to Regeneration
Trauma-Informed Developmental Care (TIDC) offers a living blueprint for what a post-capitalist ethic could look like. Its Principles: Safety, Trust & Transparency, Empowerment, Voice & Choice, Healthy Relationships & Interactions, and Equity & Cultural Affirmation mirror precisely what our broader social systems need to heal.
Safety becomes economic and psychological security.
Trust becomes transparency in governance.
Voice & Choice become participatory democracy.
Equity & Cultural Affirmation become justice and inclusion.
TIDC reminds us that healing does not emerge from control or compliance, but through co-regulation, compassion, and shared agency. These same principles can guide the redesign of any human system, from a NICU to a nation.
Nowhere is this truth more visible than in the NICU. Every moment of care, every gentle touch, every pause to honor an infant’s cues embodies a quiet resistance to the culture of efficiency and extraction. Healing here is relational, not transactional. When clinicians center attunement, trust, and presence, they nurture more than fragile lives; they illuminate what it looks like to build a world where connection, not productivity, defines our worth.
Remembering as Resistance
Capitalism taught us that care is expensive and that worth must be earned.
Caring Science, TIDC, and B.U.F.F.E.R. remind us that care is generative and worth is inherent.
Every trauma-informed act, every moment of presence, every choice to honor dignity over efficiency, is a quiet rebellion. It’s how we begin to outgrow the system that keeps us small and separate.
Perhaps the revolution we need is not one of markets but of meaning. A re-membering, a stitching back together of what was torn.
Closing Reflection
When we remember that care is not a cost but a covenant, we begin to rewrite the story of what it means to be human.
So let’s keep remembering.
Let’s keep weaving.
Let’s keep choosing care as the measure of our success.
Weave on, my friend.
Mary
P.S. Becoming a Trauma-Informed Professional is one way to begin reweaving what capitalism unraveled—to bring the science, soul, and skill of healing back into our work, our systems, and ourselves.
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