Why You Can’t Just Suck Up Trauma, Unlike What Adler Believed
Repressing how you feel about what you have lived is the best scientific recipe for dying earlier than you should from "natural causes."
"We like experiencing misfortune because it allows us to manipulate others."
"Trauma doesn't exist; we say we have it to avoid change."
"We pick negative emotions to serve our goals.
These are some ideas from The Courage to Be Disliked, a book that has sold over 3.5 million copies making the ideas of Alfred Adler, a 19th-century renowned psychologist, accessible.
Entrepreneurs, in particular, have loved this book. They can find "scientific evidence" backing some of their beliefs about how to make business and life decisions. Thus either downplaying wrong decisions or justifying past mistakes.
For example, the book says, "no matter what has occurred in your life...it should have no bearing on how you live from now on." So we can choose not to feel negative emotions about what we have lived.
I see why an entrepreneur would like to believe this. If they think they have control over their emotional reactions, they can always decide to feel positive. Did their husband cheat on them? "An inevitable result of human lust." Did their company get involved in a scandal? "Proof of how easy it is to misunderstand other humans. Keep going; it will soon be over." Did their fourth startup fail? "I knew I could fail, so it shouldn't surprise me."
The entrepreneurs I have interacted with also like Adler's position on misfortunes:
“No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure…we make out of them whatever suits our purposes."
Many hustlers associate claiming trauma with excuses. It's seen as a way out from "putting in the work."
Those familiar with modern psychology, epigenetics, and medicine literature know humans don't work as the book says, as you will see throughout this essay.
The hurtful and overwhelming events we live through affect the joy we get out of life, how fast we die, and the diseases we develop. These events leave inner psyche injuries, known as trauma. Thus, the mental and physical illnesses we get as adults are not random. We plant the seeds for them to grow.
Trauma affects your brain circuits, making it difficult for you to detect it. Even if you do, it makes your brain unable to reframe it by affecting your thinking capacity.
By learning what trauma is and its unforeseeable consequences, you will be better able to recognize it in yourself. This is crucial because you can't fix an issue you can't detect. Unlike Adler's followers, you will have a reason to heal your trauma instead of hiding it. This will reduce the odds of experiencing diseases in which trauma plays a role: cancer, depression, and anxiety.
What is actually trauma?
Trauma, says physician Gabor Maté, is an inner injury. "[It is] what happens within someone due to difficult or hurtful events." It isn't the events but the internal changes it leaves in us. Think of a car accident, says Maté. The accident is the event; the injury is what lasts.
In the case of trauma, you are suffering from a psychic injury. Your mind and body have scars that can trigger specific responses at any moment.
Trauma can change how you act in weeks. It can make you:
Have sleep problems
Lose interest in your passions
Become more self-centered and less cooperative
Unresolved trauma can lead to severe diseases in the long term.
A study followed almost ten thousand people from birth to age fifty. Part of these people experienced early-life adversities: abuse, dysfunctional families, or financial struggles. The people who experienced these adversities were more likely to develop cancer.
Women who lived through two or more hardships were twice as likely to have cancer by midlife.
The Two Types of Trauma You Might Have
Psychologists divide trauma into two categories based on the intensity of the event that caused it. Stress is, of course, subjective. Person A can feel excited about skydiving, and Person B can feel anxious. But, on average, some events are more likely to cause stress at a higher intensity than others for more people.
Capital T trauma: Trauma as an automatic response
Those who suffer a Capital-T trauma should not have lived through an incredibly painful or overwhelming event. Childhood divorces, living in a warzone, or experiencing an earthquake are examples of such events.
Capital-T trauma causes automatic responses that often take the form of diseases.
For example, a physician recently found that women are twice as likely as men to experience anxiety and depression. The reason is that women are more prone to repress how they feel. A 10-year study on around 2,000 women found that those who suppress their emotions for being in conflict with their spouses are four times more likely to die than those who show their feelings. Chances of heart disease are also higher among women who don't say how they feel at a job with an unsupportive boss.
Capital T trauma makes us vulnerable to physical illness.
Dr. April Thames found that African Americans die sooner than Whites because they grow up facing continuous acts of racism. These put them under chronic stress, affecting genes that cause inflammation, causing African Americans to experience hypertension, heart disease, and dementia more often than white ones.
"Racism and discrimination should be treated as a health risk factor," says Thames. "Just like smoking." "[It damages] the natural defenses our bodies use to fight infection and disease."
Small T trauma
Small T traumas are injuries left by hurtful events in everyday childhood life. Peer bullying, cruel comments from parents, or a lack of emotional connection with them can leave Small T trauma.
For example, a teenage boy who girls reject because of being fat can turn into an adult obsessed with the gym. Exercising is healthy, so this behavior wouldn't seem harmful at first. However, chronic stress from maintaining a particular physique is not.
Kids who grow up with parents obsessed with grades often turn into perfectionists. They seek their approval until college. Then they crave it from their professors and coworkers.
If they are self-employed, it can be particularly challenging, in my experience. No one will set the threshold of what is "acceptable" higher than a perfectionist, themselves. Part of the reason I am a workaholic is that I'm obsessed with seeing improvements in my life, even if it is perfect by everyone's standards.
Small T trauma (or any trauma) does not exist for Adler:
"We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead, we make out of them whatever suits our purposes.
The purpose of claiming we have truama, says the book, is often not to face our fears. For a fan of Adler, the fictional adult I described above might blame their genes for turning him into a perfectionist. In reality, they will say, he acts in such a way to avoid facing his fear of feeling inferior to others. This claim has potential truth, as a perfectionist might be afraid of a lack of praise. But that doesn't mean he developed harmful perfectionistic habits because of the hurtful situations he lived in his childhood.
Small T trauma can also happen when "things that should occur do not happen." Humans, especially children, have emotional needs. If their parents are distant, children can grow unattached to others. Or they can struggle to form relationships.
While Small T trauma doesn't come from extreme distress or loss, those who have it disconnect themselves from who they are. Thus, they are also more likely to develop physical and mental illnesses.
What trauma is not.
All traumatic events are stressful, hurtful, and overwhelming. But not every stressful, hurtful, or overwhelming event leads to trauma. For Maté, traumatic events come with six truths that prevail in the long term:
"It limits you.
It constricts you.
It diminishes your capacity to feel, think, trust, or assert yourself. And to suffer without succumbing to despair, to witness it with compassion.
It does not keep you from holding your pain, sorrow, and fear without being overwhelmed and having to escape habitually into work. Or to compulsive self-soothing or self-stimulating by whatever means.
You are not left compelled either to aggrandize yourself or to efface yourself to gain acceptance or to justify your existence.
It impairs your capacity to experience gratitude for the beauty and wonder of life."
If you see these chronic truths in yourself, there might be trauma in you. An injury you haven't healed.
These six components of trauma explain why you can't reframe a traumatizing situation into a good, expected, or normal one. According to psychologist Rollo May, humans can pause between stimulus and response:
"[Humans can] choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight."
Trauma robs us of that freedom by not making us able to think properly or to pinpoint the cause of our despair.
The chances of ever acting outside of the influence of trauma get lower if the trauma was early in life. Children aren't born knowing how to respond to life's unpredictability. The mid-frontal portion of the brain develops this ability based on instincts and reflexes. The earlier the trauma, the less development this part will have.
"The Courage to be Disliked: Good Intentions, Flawed Thinking"
The book on Adlerian theory has a hopeful message. It encourages people not to blame their past or environment. And to have the courage to look past these things and be happy. "You don't have the courage to choose to be happy," says the book. "That's why you are unhappy."
Unfortunately, the hopeful message communicates a flawed lesson: It's good to suppress emotions. Suck up how you feel, and you will change how you feel.
But suck up how you feel, and the fracture between reality and how you see it will grow bigger. You will grow up accumulating unsolved trauma that you might not even know exists because it is invisible to your brain. And you might never make it visible because you don't believe trauma exists.
"Our lives are what happens when life acts upon life," says Maté. Suppressing what you have experienced may get you faster to the moment at which none of us can suppress how we feel anymore, that is, death.