An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey

Peter Levine is candid in An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey.  He shares about himself, his pains, and his family dynamics as well.  I’d previously read In an Unspoken Voice and Trauma and Memory.  (I’ve not read Waking the Tiger, though it is the book for which he is most well-known.)  While I don’t frequently read biographies, I wanted to understand how Levine was able to develop his theories and to understand his back story.

Capacity to Heal

Whether reading Peter Levine’s story, Marsha Linehan’s Building a Life Worth Living, or the stories of others who have been Transformed by Trauma, I’m in awe of our capacity to heal.  People with unspeakable traumas have found ways to recover and to be happy.  Once you’ve read or listened to a few stories, two things become apparent.  First, people learning to heal from trauma is not rare.  Everywhere you look, you will find people who have learned to survive and thrive after traumas that you’d not believe were survivable.

Second, there’s no one path that leads people to discover their capacity to heal.  For each person, it seems like the path is unique.  The only constants are the awareness that there is the capacity – if they can find it.

Generational Trauma

While we may not be able to track every mechanism that allows for stressors and trauma to be transmitted from one generation to the next, we’re clear it’s happening.  Owing to careful research, we know that some cues are being transmitted genetically from generation to generation.  The precise mechanisms for genetics and epigenetics aren’t important for this conversation.  What is important is that the traumas you carry with you can influence your children – and their children – for generations.  While the studies are most frequently performed with smell recognition, the results have much broader implications.

In the United States, we’ve had a shameful history with slavery and, even after slavery was abolished, oppression of Black Americans.  (See A Class Divided for more.)  It’s impossible to know how much this has shaped Blacks of today – in addition to the continued societal inequalities.

The Meetings with Einstein

Levine recounts meetings with Albert Einstein.  These meetings did a great deal of good for Levine.  They helped him solve problems and accept his situation.  However, the meetings were likely not real in the physical, tangible sense.  They were dreams or imaginations.  However, as Levine points out, whether the meetings were real or not misses the point.  The point is that these meetings helped him.

Various forms of guided imagery have been used, including writing and burning letters to people who have been harmful and are no longer reachable either due to death or because contact with them wouldn’t be productive.  Trauma patients use various forms of reimaging their trauma to help them cope with it.  Meetings with someone who can provide wisdom and advice doesn’t seem all that different than the “WWJD” bracelets signifying What Would Jesus Do?  In this case, Levine asked, “What Would Einstein Do?”

Vulnerable Child

One of the types of imagery that appears to be particularly valuable – and one Levine appears to support – is imagining coming back as an adult to support your younger self.  Marsha Linehan in Building a Life Worth Living recommends it as well – even though she admits feeling disconnected from the scared little girl.

Grief is Love with Nowhere to Go

Levine asserts that grief is love with nowhere to go.  This takes a bit of unpacking.  First, grief is coping with loss.  It’s our response to the loss regardless of the reason for the loss.  One powerful loss is loss by death, because it’s a final loss.  This necessarily removes the relationship that had some value to the person left behind.

It’s this relationship that Levine is referring to as love.  Some suggest that it may be healthier for people to view the death of someone as a change in relationship rather than a total loss.  For instance, Handbook of Bereavement makes the suggestion that the relationship becomes more internal.  In my own world, I can imagine conversations with people who I have lost—and it can make it a little bit easier.

Self-Generating Wellbeing

Levine speaks of his growing capacity to self-generate wellbeing.  While the entire book can be taken as a framework for the kind of self-acceptance and acceptance of the world that leads to self-generating wellbeing, there’s not a clear sense for exactly what creates that capacity.  I’ll share a few of my thoughts from other books.

The language I use most to describe the sense of self that I believe leads to this capacity is “integrated self-image.”  (See Braving the Wilderness.)  Brene Brown (and Harriet Lerner in Why Won’t You Apologize?) describes it as “wholeheartedness.”  (See Daring Greatly.)  At its core, it’s a sense that you know who you are.  This makes you less likely to be swayed by those around you – and better able to resist the forces that would pull you from wellbeing.

This happens by knowing who you are and how you’re motivated.  There are a number of tests that are purported to tell you about yourself – DISC, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, CliftonStrengths (see Strength Finder 2.0), Enneagram (see Personality Types), Reiss Motivational Profile (see Who Am I? and The Normal Personality), and Values in Action (VIA) to name a few.  While I don’t believe that any one of these tests can nail people, I do believe that doing several of them can help you understand different ways of seeing yourself.

Similarly, understanding your intrinsic motivations can help you understand why you’ll be pulled in certain directions.  Change or Die explains that changing behaviors is hard.  Immunity to Change identifies competing beliefs as one culprit for this lack of change.  However, more positively, Edward Deci explains that people are motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose.  (See Why We Do What We Do.)  Folks like Simon Sinek in Start with Why elevate the development of purpose.  The clarity of purpose and the alignment with the things that you’re motivated by is bound to help you integrate your self-image.

At a more tactical level, time spent in either flow (see Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman) or meditation seem to have positive effects that extend well beyond the bounds of the time spent.  (See Altered Traits for more on the impacts of meditation.)

Some people would argue that positive thinking has an impact on this.  Certainly, Rick Hanson makes this point in Hardwiring Happiness and Resilient.  The How of Happiness and Positivity echo the general sense that you’ll be better if you work at being happy by being appropriately positive.  While there are some criticisms of positive psychology, appropriate positivity can be helpful.  (See Bright-Sided for criticism.)

Finding Peace with Ourselves

Ultimately, Levine shares his gratefulness with being able to navigate the challenges of his life and to navigate it to the point where he could write An Autobiography of Trauma.