Honestly, this was pretty basic. I think the contents of the book are useful for those not already informed on philosophy, but for me, I have more orHonestly, this was pretty basic. I think the contents of the book are useful for those not already informed on philosophy, but for me, I have more or less read these things before. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations I think supersedes this by a long shot. I would still recommend it to somebody starting out in self-help / philosophy though....more
An incredible book focusing on the origins of trauma and what we can do about it individually and as a collective society. Watch my breakdown and discAn incredible book focusing on the origins of trauma and what we can do about it individually and as a collective society. Watch my breakdown and discussion of the book here:https://youtu.be/Eej0cVygc3Y
Below are personal highlights I took from the book, passages I found particularly interesting or at least worthy of keeping in mind:
Part 1: The Rediscovery of Trauma
“We learned from these Rorschach tests that traumatised people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them. There appeared to be little in between. We also learned that trauma affects the imagination. The five men who saw nothing in the blots had lost the capacity to let their minds play. But so, too, had the other sixteen men, for in viewing scenes from the past in those blots they were not displaying the mental flexibility that is the hallmark of imagination. They simply kept replaying an old reel.” // Pg.18-19
“Whether the trauma had occurred ten years in the past or more than forty, my patients could not bridge the gap between their wartime experiences and their current lives. Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.” // Pg.21
“Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. We have discovered that helping victims of trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them is profoundly meaningful, but usually it is not enough. The act of telling the story doesn't necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time. For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present. Our search to understand trauma has led us to think differently not only about the structure of the mind but also about the processes by which it heals.” // Pg.24
“If you do something to a patient that you would not do to your friends or children, consider whether you are unwittingly replicating trauma from the patient’s past.” // Pg.29
“Just as with drug addiction, we start to crave the activity and experience withdrawal when it’s not available. In the long run people become more preoccupied with the pain of withdrawal than the activity itself. The theory could explain why some people hire someone to beat them, or burn themselves with cigarettes, or why they are only attracted to people who hurt them. Fear and aversion, in some perverse way, can be transformed into pleasure.” // Pg.37
“We concluded that Beecher’s speculation that ‘strong emotions can block pain’ was the result of the released of morphinelike substances manufactured in the brain. This suggested that for many traumatised people, re-exposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety.” // Pg.38
“Over the past three decades psychiatric medications have become a mainstay in our culture, with dubious consequences. Consider the case of antidepressants. If they were indeed as effective as we have been led to believe, depression should by now have become a minor issue in our society. Instead, even as antidepressants use continues to increase, it has not made a dent in hospital admissions for depression. The number of people treated for depression has tripled over the past two decades, and one in ten Americans now take antidepressants.” // Pg.43
“For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. I am continually impressed by how difficult it is for people who have gone through the unspeakable to convey the essence of their experience. It is so much easier for them to talk about what has been done to them – to tell a story of victimisation and revenge – than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience.” // Pg.55
Part 2: This is Your Brain on Trauma
“The frontal lobes are responsible for the qualities that make us unique within the animal kingdom. They enable us to use language and abstract thought. They give us our ability to absorb and integrate vast amounts of information and attach meaning to it. Despite our excitement about the linguistic feats of chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, only human beings command the words and symbols necessary to create the communal, spiritual, and historical contexts that shape our lives. The frontal lobes allow us to plan and reflect, to imagine and play out future scenarios. They help us predict what will happen if we take one action (like applying for a new job) or neglect another (not paying the rent). They make choice possible and underlie our astonishing creativity. Generations of frontal loves, working in close collaboration, have created culture, which got us from dug-out canoes, horse-drawn carriages, and letters to jet planes, hybrid cars, and email.” // Pg.67
“The more intense the visceral, sensory input from the emotional brain, the less capacity the rational brain has to put a damper on it.” // Pg.69
“The challenge of trauma treatment is not only dealing with the past but, even more, enhancing the quality of day-to-day experience. One reason that traumatic memories became dominant in PTSD is that it’s so difficult to feel truly alive right now. When you can’t be fully here, you go to the places where you did feel alive – even if those places are filled with horror and misery. Many treatment approaches for traumatic stress focus on desensitising patients to their past, with the expectation that reexposure to their trauma will reduce emotional outbursts and flashbacks. I believe that this is based on a misunderstanding of what happens in traumatic stress. We must most of all help our patients to live fully and securely in the present. In order to do that, we need to help bring those brain structures that deserted them when they were overwhelmed by trauma back. Desensitisation may make you less reactive, but if you cannot feel satisfaction in ordinary everyday things like taking a walk, cooking a meal, or playing with your kids, life will pass you by.” // Pg.85
“[In Darwin’s ‘The Expression of the Emotions’ he notes the] physical organisations common to all mammals, including human beings – the lungs, kidneys, brains, digestive organs, and sexual organs that sustain and continue life. Although many scientists today would accuse him of anthropomorphism, Darwin stands with animal lovers when he proclaims ‘Man and the higher animals [also] have instincts in common. All have the same senses, intuition, sensation, passions, affections, and emotions, even the more complex ones such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity.’ He observes that we humans share some of the physical signs of animal emotion. Feeling the hair on the back of your neck stand up when you’re frightened or baring your teeth when you’re enraged can only be understood as vestiges of a long evolutionary process.” // Pg.86-7
“The disappearance of medical prefrontal activation could explain why so many traumatised people lose their sense of purpose and direction. I used to be surprised by how often my patients asked me for advice about the most ordinary things, and then by how rarely they followed it. Now I understood that their relationship with their own inner reality was impaired. How could they make decisions, or put any plan into action, if they couldn’t define what they wanted to, to be more precise, what the sensations in their bodies, the basis of all emotions, were trying to tell them?” // Pg.108
“Agency starts with what scientists call interoception, our awareness of our subtle sensory, body-based feelings: the greater that awareness, the greater our potential to control our lives. Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way. If we are aware of the constant changes in our inner and outer environment, we can mobilise to manage them. But we can’t do this unless our watchtower, the MPFC, learns to observe what is going on inside of us. This is why mindfulness practice, which strengthens the MPFC, is a cornerstone of recovery from trauma.” // Pg.112
“Because traumatised people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming ‘spaced out’ or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can’t tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization and also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning.” // Pg.117
Part 3: The Minds of Children
“Bowlby saw attachment as the secure base from which a child moves out into the world. Over the subsequent five decades research has firmly established that having a safe haven promotes self-reliance and instils a sense of sympathy and helpfulness to others in distress. From the intimate give-and-take of the attachment bond children learn that other people have feelings and thoughts that are both similar to and different from theirs. In other words, they get ‘in sync’ with their environment and with the people around them and develop the self-awareness, empathy, impulse control, and self-motivation that make it possible to become contributing members of the larger social culture.” // Pg.132
“If you have no internal sense of security, it is difficult to distinguish between safety and danger. If you feel chronically numbed out, potentially dangerous situations may make you feel alive. If you conclude that you must be a terrible person (because why else would your parents have you treated that way?), you start expecting other people to treat you horribly. You probably deserve it, and anyway, there is nothing you can do about it. When disorganised people carry self-perceptions like these, they are set up to be traumatised by subsequent experiences.” // Pg.142
“Our relationship maps are implicit, etched into the emotional brain and not reversible simply by understanding how they were created. You may realise that your fear of intimacy has something to do with your mother’s postpartum depression or with the fact that she herself was molested as a child, but that alone is unlikely to open you to happy, trusting engagement with others. However, that realisation may help you to start exploring other ways to connect in relationships – both for your own sake and in order to not pass on an insecure attachment to your own children.” // Pg.145
“In patients with histories of incest, the proportion of RA cells that are ready to pounce is larger than normal. This makes the immune system oversensitive to threat, so that it is prone to mount a defence when none is needed, even when this means attacking the body’s own cells. Our study showed that, on a deep level, the bodies incest victims have trouble distinguishing between danger and safety. This means that the imprint of past trauma does not consist only of distorted perceptions of information coming from the outside; the organism itself also has a problem knowing how to feel safe. The past is impressed not only on their minds, and in misinterpretations of innocuous events, but also on the very core of their beings: in the safety of their bodies.” // Pg.151-2
“Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions. One of my patients told me, ‘It is like hating your home, your kitchen and pots and pans, your bed, your chairs, your table, your rugs.’ Nothing feels safe – least of all in your own body.” // Pg.160
“The ACE study revealed that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence are far more common than expected. The study respondents were mostly white, middle class, middle aged, well educated, and financially secure enough to have good medical insurance, and yet only one-third of the respondents reported no adverse childhood experiences.” // Pg.173
“The ACE study group concluded: ‘Although widely understood to be harmful to health, each adaptation [such as smoking, drinking, drugs, obesity] is notably difficult to give up. Little consideration is given to the possibility that many long-term health risks might also be personally beneficial in the short term. We repeatedly hear from patients of the benefits of these ‘health risks’ The idea of the problem being a solution, while understandably disturbing to many, is certainly in keeping with the fact that opposing forces routinely coexist in biological systems… what one sees, the presenting problem, is often only the marker for the real problem, which lies buried in time, concealed by patient shame, secrecy and sometimes amnesia – and frequently clinician discomfort.’” // Pg.177
“Recent research has swept away the simple idea that ‘having’ a particular gene produces a particular result. It turns out that many genes work together to influence a single outcome. Even more important, genes are not fixed; life events can trigger biochemical messages that turn them on or off by attacking methyl groups, a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms, to the outside of the gene (a process called methylation), making it more or less sensitive to messages from the body. While life events can change the behaviour of the gene, they do not alter its fundamental structure. Methylation patterns, however, can be passed on to offspring - a phenomenon known as epigenetics. Once again, the body keeps the score, at the deepest levels of the organism.” // Pg.182
Part 4: The Imprint of Trauma
“Traumatised people simultaneously remember too little and too much.” // Pg.215
“Denial of the consequences of trauma can wreak havoc with the social fabric of society. The refusal to face the damage caused by the war and the intolerance of ‘weakness’ played an important role in the rise of fascism and militarism around the world in the 1930s. The extortionate war reparations of the Treaty of Versailles further humiliated an already disgraced Germany. German society, in turn, dealt ruthlessly with its own traumatised war veterans, who were treated as inferior creatures. This cascade of humiliations of the powerless set the stage for the ultimate debasement of human rights under the Nazi regime: the moral justification for the strong to vanquish the inferior – the rationale for the ensueing war.” // Pg.224
“One of the most interesting studies of repressed memory was conducted by Dr Linda Meyer Williams, which began when she was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. Williams interviewed 306 girls between the ages of ten and twelve who had been admitted to a hospital emergency following sexual abuse. Their laboratory tests, as well as the interviews with the children and their parents, were kept in the hospital’s medical records. Seventeen years later Williams was able to track down 136 of the children, now adults, witch whom she conducted extensive follow-up interviews. More than a third of the women (8 percent) did not recall the abuse that was documented in their medical records, while only fifteen women (12 percent) said that they had never been abused as children. More than two-thirds (68 per cent) reported other incidents of childhood sexual abuse. Women who were younger at the time of the incident and those who were molested by someone they knew were more likely to have forgotten their abuse.” // Pg.229
“Traumatic memories are fundamentally different from the stories we tell about the past. They are dissociated: The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography. Perhaps the most important finding in our study was that remembering the trauma with all its associated affects, does not, as Breuer and Freud claimed back in 1893, necessarily resolve it. Our research did not support the idea that language can substitute for action. Most of our study participants could tell a coherent story and also experience the pain associated with those stories, but they kept being haunted by unbearable images and physical sensations. Research in contemporary exposure treatment, a staple of cognitive behavioural therapy, has similarly disappointing results: The majority of patients treated with that method continue to have serious PTSD symptoms three months after the end of treatment. As we will see, finding words to describe what has happened to you can be transformative, but it does not always abolish flashbacks or improve concentration, stimulate vital involvement in your life or reduce hypersensitivity to disappointments and perceived injuries.” // Pg.233 ...more
A legitimately great self-help book before they were all the craze. The only difference is that this one is actually incredibly insightful and refreshA legitimately great self-help book before they were all the craze. The only difference is that this one is actually incredibly insightful and refreshing, even though it was written in 1930 - compared to the verbal diarrhoea that is splashed out onto the pages of the ones that are typically published today.
I discuss some of the most interesting ideas within the book in my YouTube review, also attempting to explain why the publishers of my edition seem to have a banana fetish... Watch here!https://youtu.be/Edtt0b8-26Q...more
(My BookTube Rule by Rule analysis of the book is linked at the end of this written review)
Peterson has managed to compile a piece that I'd argue is b(My BookTube Rule by Rule analysis of the book is linked at the end of this written review)
Peterson has managed to compile a piece that I'd argue is better than his '12 Rules for Life' in the sense that he surely had the time to reflect on its contents during his time being fatally unwell. The malicious and gritty laughter of the Grim Reaper as he came knocking is hard to not take any philosophy from, admittedly.
Nonetheless, however, I found this piece to be highly repetitive at times given he more or less subliminally links his previous book 12 Rules for Life and its teachings into this one too. Indeed, this isn't all bad but a lot of the time it felt like he was just repeating himself and simply explaining the same points he has already made just in a different way than before.
Another personal issue I had (which many are bound to disagree with) is his overuse of the Bible and Mythology throughout. At times it was appropriate and at others it fell flat for me. He is after all, as Sam Harris experienced, prone to "Jesus Smuggling" at any chance he can get which is honestly a bit irritating given his obviously promising intellect in many other regards.
With all of this said, I do genuinely think this is an insightful, informative, and very impressively articulated book for the most part like '12 Rules for Life' is; they work perfectly in duality in that respect - as well as both of them looking aesthetically and philosophically pleasing given their yin/yang black and white (order & chaos) cover design.
It took me a while to finish this one as I have dedicated myself to do a 12 video analysis series on each rule in the book on YouTube, and I'm glad i have chosen to do so because it has given me a greater dedication to interpret and understand Jordan Peterson's ideas within the piece.
There are many spiritual/self-help books out there, and this is one of the best that there is. Watch my review/discussion of the book over on YouTube:There are many spiritual/self-help books out there, and this is one of the best that there is. Watch my review/discussion of the book over on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67C3D......more
I did not finish this book. The very first words were "YOU ARE HERE TO ENABLE THE DIVINE PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE TO UNFOLD. THAT IS HOW IMPORTANT YOUI did not finish this book. The very first words were "YOU ARE HERE TO ENABLE THE DIVINE PURPOSE OF THE UNIVERSE TO UNFOLD. THAT IS HOW IMPORTANT YOU ARE!" - This summed the book up. It is a piece advocating free will and a rather solipsistic "Heroes Journey", explaining how we can live in the present and by doing so, emancipate ourselves from the suffering of life.
This is New Age spiritualism, and whilst I'm not traditionally against this, the book really rubbed me the wrong way with its writing style and a-prioi ontological assumptions about how important we are, when in fact, the contemporary evidence points to the contrary. We are arbitrary in relation to the cosmos. I don't have anything against those who enjoy this one but it does preach how "special" we all are, but really we're not. With this taken into consideration, however, this doesn't mean we can't live fulfilling (as far as we are individually concerned) lives.
I'm not big on solipsism, I find solace in realism instead. It's okay if the reader actually wants to believe that they have a spiritual purpose in the universe, but what I would ask is how that view is philosophically defended, exactly? It's wishful thinking, which, indeed, is useful to get things done sometimes (life as a whole), but on a personal level I can't blatantly lie to myself in such a way.
Being sympathetic to myself being possibly wrong, I will most likely return to this one in due time. But for now, I can't stand reading it....more
JCJBergman
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