the wisdom of trauma
watching gabor maté talk about trauma, addiction, and survival made a lot of my story make more sense – especially the parts i’ve mostly tried to outrun.
i watched the wisdom of trauma (a documentary featuring gabor maté) in the middle of trying to untangle my own story – adoption, church, ministry, spiritual abuse, queerness.
quick note: the film talks pretty directly about abuse, addiction, and self-harm - it’s pretty heavy. if you watch it, pace yourself / don’t watch alone if possible.
in this film, maté keeps coming back to something really simple and really annoying to hear if you were raised to blame yourself: our reactions are not random. they are adaptations.
you’re not bad, things happened to you, and your strategies make sense, even if they’re hurting you now.
a few other big takeaways:
- trauma as disconnection – not just “something bad that happened,” but how alone we were while it was happening. not the event. the aloneness inside it.
- addiction as a relationship to pain (that most of what we call “addiction” is just someone trying to not be alone with what their body remembers), not a moral failure.
- how kids will almost always protect the parent (or pastor, or leader) in their own minds.
watching the wisdom of trauma made me softer toward the younger versions of me that were just trying to survive impossible contradictions.
i‘ve stopped asking, “what’s wrong with me?” and started asking, “what happened to me?” and then, “what did i have to become to live through that?”
credits / links
- watch / donate via the filmmakers: thewisdomoftrauma.com
- more on gabor maté’s work: drgabormate.com
- produced by science and nonduality (SAND): scienceandnonduality.com
