There is a map from suffering back to love.

The pattern

Suffering follows a pattern.

What separates a traumatic experience from a stressful one? Both can be very painful. What makes a traumatic experience unique is that it makes a specific version of reality unacceptable. We don't just dislike it. We will do anything and everything to keep it away. Avoiding the unacceptable becomes the organizing principle of our lives. This is what we call fear.

Reality has no obligation to serve us. How exactly do we keep the unacceptable away? We distort reality.

We call this irrationality, and we usually see it as a thinking error. In reality, it is a way to keep the unacceptable away. Irrationality is a tragic solution that inevitably generates suffering.

The Trauma Logic Chain argues there is another way after a traumatic experience. We can sit with the unacceptable instead of organizing around it. When nothing has to be desperately pushed away, fear loses its role. Once fear stops distorting reality, we can see the truth. Once we live in truth, we naturally have love for ourselves, others and the world.

This process appears in students in South Korea, fashion models in Paris, gang members in Brazil and tech titans in Silicon Valley. The book explores the mechanisms of trauma and how they operate in all of us.