This piece references themes of trauma, deprivation, and survival. While it contains no plot spoilers, it refers to the emotional intensity of the show Yellowjackets, which includes depictions of violence and cannibalism. I include this not because I believe content warnings always work the way we hope they do—in fact, I’ll explore that complexity in the next essay—but because I still believe in giving readers a chance to orient themselves before diving in.
If Lord of the Flies and Mean Girls crashed into Lost, you’d get something close to Yellowjackets. The television series is part survival drama, part psychological thriller, and part meditation on trauma, adolescence, and the corrosive effects of secrecy and power. It cuts between two timelines: one following a high school girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash, and the other tracing the fragmented adult lives of the survivors decades later.
But Yellowjackets isn’t just about what happened in the woods. It’s about what the woods did to them—and what we bring into a crisis long before the crisis begins.
It’s brutal, mysterious, sometimes surreal—and deeply human. The horror is not just in what the girls do to survive, but in what survival does to them.
And that’s what I want to explore. Because what makes Yellowjackets so compelling isn’t the violence or the mythology. It’s how clearly it illustrates a psychological truth I return to again and again in my work: when our needs are unmet, our choices narrow—and the consequences of those choices don’t go away just because we make them in desperation.
Deprivation Decides Differently
One of the most corrosive forms of stress is impoverishment—not just financial, but emotional, relational, or systemic. It’s the condition of not having what you need, of being forced to improvise with inadequate resources, knowing full well that no solution will be enough. It’s the exhaustion of having to make compromised choices and then living through the fallout—again and again—not because you were careless or irresponsible, but because you were cornered. In Yellowjackets, the characters aren’t just starving for food—they’re starving for structure, for belonging, for a sense of future, for emotional containment. And in that state, the decisions they make begin to reflect not their character, but their condition.
As Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in How Emotions Are Made, the brain constructs emotional responses based on context and prior learning. That means behavior under threat is rarely about some fixed inner nature—it’s about prediction. When the body has learned that safety is fragile, and when the environment confirms that belief, even well-intentioned people can make devastating choices that feel, in the moment, like the only option.
In Behave, Robert Sapolsky explains how prolonged stress radically alters decision-making. Cortisol disrupts the capacity for long-term thinking. When our nervous systems are dysregulated—through trauma, hunger, isolation—we lose access to reflection and empathy. Morality becomes a luxury.
This is what Yellowjackets understands better than most: choice collapses under deprivation. And Yellowjackets dramatizes this not with caricatured villains, but with familiar adolescents, slowly shaped by context into people they themselves may no longer recognize.
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes two modes of thinking: System 1, which is fast, automatic, and emotion-driven, and System 2, which is slow, effortful, and logical. When we’re calm and resourced, we can engage System 2 to make thoughtful, ethical decisions. But under stress, we default to System 1—reacting on instinct, not reflection. When we are under threat, our brains shift into fast, reactive, shortcut-driven processing. We move from “what’s the right thing to do?” to “what gets me through the next few minutes?”
That’s not a personal failing. It’s biology.
In therapeutic and parenting work, we often say that behavior is communication. But it’s also adaptation. The more depleted someone is—whether by trauma, poverty, loneliness, or fear—the fewer choices they have access to. Not because they’re not trying hard enough. Because their bodies and brains are doing what evolution taught them: survive first, reflect later.
This is one of the most important lessons Yellowjackets has to offer. The decisions the characters make aren’t framed as shocking plot twists. They’re shown, step by step, as increasingly understandable trade-offs in a system that’s slowly eroding every protective layer they once had—family, community, morality, even hope.
And again, choice collapses under deprivation.
Leadership Under Fear
Season 3 leans heavily into a question that feels particularly relevant in the post-COVID world: what kind of leadership do we follow when we’re afraid?
The show presents two contrasting models—one grounded in fairness and collaboration, the other in domination and control. Both arise in response to the same crisis. But the group doesn’t simply respond to the logic of each approach. They respond to the feeling each one provides.
One character offers deliberation and mutual responsibility. Another offers decisiveness. And in an unregulated environment, decisiveness—no matter how cruel—can feel safer than ambiguity.
Dan Siegel’s concept of mindsight—the ability to perceive the mind of oneself and others—offers a crucial lens for understanding why leadership style matters, especially in high-stress environments. In his book The Developing Mind, Siegel describes how relationships, particularly with attuned and emotionally present others, can help regulate the nervous system. A well-regulated leader doesn’t just set the emotional tone metaphorically; they quite literally help co-regulate the group’s collective physiology.
When a leader is able to stay grounded, to tolerate ambiguity, and to respond with curiosity rather than reactivity, that regulation becomes contagious. Through tone of voice, body language, and pacing, they signal safety—what Siegel might call a “felt sense of connection.” This, in turn, makes it more likely that others in the group can access their own reflective capacities.
But this only works if the group can tolerate the slower, uncertain pace of reflection. And in trauma-impacted systems—whether in a wilderness survival setting, a family, or a post-pandemic political landscape—people often lose that capacity. They become dysregulated together. And in that state, calm leadership doesn’t feel safe. It feels ineffective. What feels safe is control.
In other words, mindsight allows for shared regulation—but only when people’s internal systems aren’t too overtaxed to receive it. Without that baseline of safety, even well-intentioned, collaborative leadership can be drowned out by fear.
This isn’t just a television dynamic. It’s how entire societies function under stress.
Following the pandemic, we witnessed a measurable global drift toward authoritarianism. Even in liberal democracies, people became more willing to accept monitoring, restriction, and strongman politics. This wasn’t necessarily about ideology—it was about regulation. When people are afraid, they don’t want nuance. They want containment. And the leader who offers clarity—no matter the cost—often wins.
Lord of the Flies Was Fiction. Mano Tatau Was Real.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has long served as a kind of cultural shorthand for the belief that children, without adult supervision, will revert to brutality. But it’s important to remember that Golding wasn’t writing from detached observation—he was writing from deep personal cynicism.
Golding admitted to violently bullying other boys in school and said later in life, “I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.” He saw his own impulses as dangerous and dark, and he projected that internal struggle onto his characters. His wartime service during World War II only reinforced this worldview. Lord of the Flies wasn’t based on developmental psychology—it was a confession, shaped by shame and distrust of human nature.
That’s why the novel’s message—that without rules, people descend into savagery—tells us more about Golding than it does about humanity. And when a story rooted in one man’s self-loathing becomes the dominant metaphor for childhood and society, it shapes how generations understand leadership, morality, and control.
In contrast, the real-life story of the Tongan boys shipwrecked on ʻAta Island in 1965—popularized as Mano Tatau—tells a very different story. These boys, stranded without adults, cooperated. They built shelter. They cared for each other. They created rules and honored rest days. When one of them broke his leg, the others took care of him for weeks.
The difference wasn’t in age or species. It was in what they had been taught before the crisis. And that’s the subtle brilliance of Yellowjackets. The show doesn’t suggest that people are inherently violent. It shows how systems—family, school, media, culture—train us to associate leadership with control, love with sacrifice, and self-worth with performance. The wilderness doesn’t create new values. Its the scarcity of the wilderness that strips away everything that once hid the old ones.
Trauma Is Not the Event. It’s the Residue
One of the most psychologically accurate choices the show makes is its dual timeline. We don’t just see what happened in the wilderness—we see what it did to the people who lived through it. The story cuts between survival and aftermath, and in doing so, Yellowjackets offers a powerful reflection of what trauma really is.
Clinically speaking, trauma is not defined solely by the objective severity of an event, but by its subjective and lasting impact. According to the DSM-5, PTSD requires exposure to a traumatic stressor and a set of persistent symptoms that impair functioning—such as intrusive memories, avoidance behaviors, hyperarousal, or negative changes in mood and cognition. In other words, it’s not the event itself that defines trauma—it’s the residue.
This distinction helps explain why not everyone exposed to the same traumatic experience develops chronic effects. As studies from trauma researcher Rachel Yehuda have shown, individual susceptibility to PTSD is shaped by multiple factors: prior trauma, genetic vulnerability, neuroendocrine responses, and access to supportive relationships (Yehuda et al., 1998; 2004). Put differently: the more stress you’ve experienced before the trauma, the more likely that new trauma will stick.
Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD—a psychiatrist and neuroscientist known for his work on developmental trauma—describes it this way:
“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”
Perry’s work, especially in partnership with educators and clinicians, has emphasized how trauma shapes the developing brain—not just in how we remember, but in how we regulate, relate, and make meaning.
This resonates with a useful physical analogy: two people can sustain the same serious injury. One heals fully. The other is left with chronic pain, reduced mobility, and compensation patterns that affect the rest of the body. The difference isn’t about the initial damage—it’s about whether repair was possible.
Trauma is similar. It’s not the presence of harm, but the absence of recovery, that makes it chronic.
That’s what Yellowjackets portrays so powerfully. The adult characters—especially Tai, Lottie, Shauna, and Natalie—represent different forms of unresolved trauma. They aren’t merely haunted by what happened; they’ve been shaped by it. Their coping mechanisms are diverse—dissociation, compartmentalization, control, addiction, avoidance—but all stem from the same root: they never had a safe place to process or integrate what they went through.
Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score that trauma lives on not just in memory, but in the body’s threat-detection system, in relational patterns, and in our very sense of self. “Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on,” he explains. “Every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.” (van der Kolk, 2014)
This is where Yellowjackets transcends simple survival drama. It asks: what happens when the threat is over, but your nervous system doesn’t know that yet? What does it look like to function in the world when your choices, relationships, and behaviors are still shaped by a map of danger you had to draw just to get through?
And this, again, is why trauma-informed approaches—in therapy, parenting, leadership, or storytelling—don’t focus solely on what happened to someone. They focus on what that experience taught their body and mind to expect. Healing, then, is not just about telling the story. It’s about changing the internal rules the trauma wrote.
Final Thought: Context Before Judgment
If there’s one takeaway I hope a reader walks away with, it’s this: when people’s needs go unmet—when they’re starved for safety, connection, or control—they don’t stop being human; they start making human decisions in inhuman conditions.
Yellowjackets may dramatize these conditions to an extreme, but the psychology is uncomfortably familiar. You don’t have to be stranded in the wilderness to feel cut off from support, forced to improvise your values in survival mode. Many people—especially those who have lived with poverty, oppression, neglect, or chronic threat—know exactly what it’s like to make decisions you wish you didn’t have to make. Not because you lacked morality, but because the system around you offered no good options.
We may not all face the same kind of wilderness, but we all live in systems that shape how wide or narrow our choices feel. Some of us are born into scaffolding that makes ethical, future-oriented decisions easier. Others are born into scarcity—where even maintaining dignity can feel like a daily negotiation.
Understanding behavior—our own and others’—requires looking at context, not just character.
That shift, from judgment to understanding, is where empathy begins. And where healing becomes possible.
That’s why stories like Yellowjackets matter—not because they offer solutions, but because they hold up a mirror. Even as a piece of television, it shows us something essential: that extreme behavior often grows from ordinary needs left unmet. It gives shape to dynamics we might otherwise overlook in our everyday lives, and makes visible the invisible forces—fear, hunger, isolation, control—that quietly shape how people act when they feel like they have no good options.
If we want to build more humane systems—families, classrooms, cultures, governments—we have to begin by recognizing that the worst outcomes often start with unmet needs. And that the work of mental health isn’t just helping people feel better. It’s helping them reclaim the freedom to choose something better when they finally can.
Note: This reflection was written shortly after the Season 3 finale of Yellowjackets, which premiered on April 11, 2025.
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