The Wisdom of Trauma quotes and reviews: a transformative documentary that can deepen our understanding of ourselves, the world, illness and trauma.
Do you have questions about your life, the world, human behavior, addictions, or why certain illnesses happen to some people? Are you interested in understanding how trauma, illness, addiction, and society are interconnected? Are you looking to discover your authentic self and ways to heal yourself and others? In this article, you will find my reviews and some insightful and mind-expanding dialogues and quotes from The Wisdom of Trauma that I find very useful and that provide answers to many of my questions, and perhaps will answer yours too.
(Cover photo credit: IMDb)
List of Contents
The Wisdom of Trauma Review
“Trauma is not the bad things that happen to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you”- The Wisdom of Trauma.
“Are we free? Are we conscious? Are we making a decision based on full awareness or are we driven by unconscious dynamics that we’ve inherited or that we developed as a response to childhood trauma? As far as we’re not conscious, we are not free”- The Wisdom of Trauma.
My Greek friend showed me Gabor Mate’s documentary, The Wisdom Of Trauma, when I was confused and sad about the situations in the world with so much chaos and conflict causing civilian suffering. I was questioning why people harm others for self-benefit and power, why some people have specific behaviours or addictions, why some people look so sad, and why many of us change and lose our true selves as we grow up. Where is the authenticity we had as children?
This documentary answered many of my questions and provided numerous reminders, insightful points of view, and stories based on the trauma expert, Dr. Gabor Mate’s medical practice and research.
It deepened my belief that if we want a better and more peaceful world, it has to start with ourselves. Each of us must develop self-awareness, identify our own trauma, and find ways to heal, so we don’t pass it on to others or the world. Then, perhaps, more people can bring light and compassion to the world, leading to a better world for us all.
I couldn’t help but watch it 5 times, and I would do more. Because, it is really informative and great film. And as I watched the film, I started to reflect on my behaviours and experiences. I looked into the way I interact with people and my patterns over time. Even though I don’t engage in the following behaviours anymore, I still wonder why, in my 20s, I changed partners so often and always sought things from outside. Why did I feel the need to go out all the time? And also I thought about other traits I had. Could all these behaviours resulted from trauma that I didn’t recognise or admit? Were they addictions or ways of escaping emptiness? This introspection helped me develop more self-awareness and motivated me to explore further and improve myself. So I believe this film has a positive impact on personal growth for people.
The Wisdom Of Trauma Quotes and Dialogues
If you find the below dialogues and quotes from The Wisdom of Trauma useful or give you new point of view, I highly recommend watching the entire film, especially if you want to gain a deeper understanding of the world and yourself, or of the people around you, wish to heal, are considering helping others, or if you are parents, educators, healthcare workers, or social workers, it’s a really great source to start.
The Wisdom of Trauma Quote- About The Connections Between Trauma and Self and The World
- ”A Greek playwright wrote that the Gods created us human beings so that we have to suffer into truth. Our job as human beings is to learn from our suffering and to grow from it. We don’t have to keep perpetuating pain for ourselves and inflicting suffering onto others”. – Gabor Mate
- “Working through trauma can teach us so much wisdom and can reveal the beauty of our existence, that because of trauma, you had lost sight of”. – Gabor Mate
- “Every human being has a true, genuine authentic self. and that true, genuine authentic self can never be destroyed”. – Gabor Mate
- “As a child, we have two fundamental needs, one is absolute and is not negotiable is attachment. The other need is authenticity“.
“Authenticity, is the connection to ourselves, without authenticity, without a connection to our gut feelings, just how long do you survive out there in nature?”
“Authenticity is actually a survival necessity. What happens if in order to survive or to adjust to your environment , you have to suppress your gut feelings, you have to suppress your authenticity?” – Gabor Mate’s dialogues from The Wisdom of Trauma
- “Trauma fundamentally means a disconnection from self. Why do we get disconnected? Because it’s too painful to be ourselves. That then becomes a lifelong dynamic. He/she no longer know how to deal with emotions. It means that in relationships when the person feels a bit hurt, he/she immediately withdraws so he/she doesn’t have to feel those emotions that he/she doesn’t know what to do with. So there’s a disconnect. It also means that when the person has gut feelings, he/she doesn’t follow them”. – Gabor Mate
- “The trauma also affects how our brains develop. Certain key brain circuits that have to do with how we react and respond and regulate ourselves, how we handle stress, how we interact with other people, how much empathy and insight we have. These functions of the mid-frontal cortex are limited and constricted by trauma because we now know that the brain develops in interaction with the environment”.– Gabor Mate
- “The criminal justice system has no understanding or even acquaintance with the concept of trauma. In fact, they often create policies that further deepen people’s trauma. That these institutions need to be informed of what trauma is and how to respond to it”. – Gabor Mate
- “The society got prison wrong and they are seeing what’s wrong with people instead of what happened to people. – Fritzi Hortsman, Founder of Compassion Prison Project
“When we start the journey of being compassionate with ourselves, not only does it change ourselves, it changes our communities and our society”. – Fritzi Hortsman, Founder of Compassion Prison Project
My thoughts: in the video it shows there’s a group healing session at the prison, the first is when the organisation asked a group of criminals to step forward if they have experienced childhood abuse, or simply were swearing at or humiliated by or insulted, slapped or threw something at or hitted by their parents or adults. And almost all of them stepped forward…
And I was shocked, and realised and assured how powerful adults/parents/teachers are to influence kids- the future of the world. So as adults, well, actually everyone, we must heal to stop ourselves from letting our pain/trauma affect others, so the world can be a better place.
- “Underneath the traumatised persona, there’s the healthy individual who has never found expression in this life. If you see that, then you are trauma informed, it’s not a question of healing the trauma, or of ever getting rid of the memory of what happened, but to help that person expand so that there’s space for all those emotions”.- Gabor Mate
- “It’s through a dynamic, emergent process of confrontation with the truth that solutions will arise. Trauma involves a lifelong pushing down, a tremendous expenditure of energy, and not feeling the pain. As we heal, that same energy is liberated for life and for being in the present. so the energy of trauma can be transformed into the energy of life”. – Gabor Mate’s quote from The Wisdom of Trauma
- “Effects of trauma are multi-generational. You can’t pick out who’s at fault here. It didn’t begin with anybody, it goes on and on and on from one generation to the next”. – Gabor Mate
- “For trauma to happen, you just need parents who are so alienated from their own gut feeling that they will let their infants cry without picking them up and that child is desperate for a relationship. That’s all it takes”. – Gabor Mate’s quotes from The Wisdom of Trauma
- “Children don’t get traumatised because they get hurt, children get traumatised because they are alone with the hurt”. – Gabor Mate
“When you felt bad as a kid, who did you speak to? When the pain is there and there’s no one to share it with, and the child’s got very limited resources to deal with that, what they do is they disconnect from themselves. When you disconnect from yourself, you no longer have yourself. You’ve lost yourself“. – Gabor Mate
- Dialogues from The Wisdom of Trauma:
Gabor Mate: “when you do all the stuff for the people, what are you doing to yourself?”
The patient: “I’m abandoning me”.
- “Trauma is not the bad things that happen to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you”. – Gabor Mate
- “Are we free? Are we conscious? Are we making a decision based on full awareness or are we driven by unconscious dynamics that we’ve inherited or that we developed as a response to childhood trauma? As long as we are not conscious, we are not free”. – Gabor Mate’s quotes from The Wisdom of Trauma
- “With our minds we create the world. So if I have a worldview that the world is a horrible place, then I’m going to live in a world where I have to be aggressive, suspicious, competitive, and make myself as big as possible so I don’t get eaten up. So I have to be grandiose and cunning because that’s the world I’m living in. and these are the people that our society rewards with power (in The Wisdom of Trauma, this part shows clips of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and wars)”. – Gabor Mate
- “We don’t respond to what happens, we respond to our perception of what happens. We don’t respond to the present moment, we respond to the past. – Gabor Mate
- “The beauty of healing is when you trace back to what happened in the past that shaped your perception, and then you reframe things, you can actually see the source within ourselves, instead of blaming all on others. All of a sudden that’s liberating, because if you are feeling that way because this guy did this or didn’t do that, that makes you a victim. But if you see that you are the source, now you are powerful”. – Gabor Mate
The Wisdom of Trauma Quote- About The Connections Between Trauma and Illness
- “The common template for virtually all afflictions, mental illness, physical disease is in fact trauma. And there’s a wisdom in trauma when we realise that our traumatic responses and imprints are not ourselves and that we can work them through and thus become ourselves”. – Gabor Mate
- “Most chronic illness is a way of the body saying no when the person suppresses their NO in order to fit in“. – Gabor Mate
“As part of that healing process, we can actually ask ourselves what does the illness mean about my life and my relationships, and particularly about how I treat myself? What can I learn from it? “ – Gabor Mate
- “People that develop cancer tend to be nice people who are more concerned with the emotional needs of others than their own. They have a hard time expressing healthy anger, and also they have this belief that they must not disappoint anybody”. – Gabor Mate
- “The truth is inside all of us, we just have to ask the right questions to help people arrive at the truth”. – Gabor Mate
The Wisdom of Trauma Quote- About The Connections Between Trauma and Addiction
- “There are so many addictions, could be drugs obviously, alcohol, nicotine, could also be sex, could be gambling, could be shopping, could be eating, could be pornography, could be the internet, could be gaming, could be work, could be relationships. That’s what an addiction is”. – Gabor Mate’s quotes from The Wisdom of Trauma
- “An addiction is any behaviour that a person finds relief in the short term and craves but suffers negative consequences and can not give it up”. – Gabor Mate
- “First issue is not why the addiction but why the pain? Why people really get addicted, which has got nothing to do with disease. It’s among the normal human responses to trauma. When people are suffering, they want to escape their suffering. That’s normal”. – Gabor Mate
- Dialogues from The Wisdom of Trauma:
“Our society just doesn’t understand addiction. Without the addiction, those addicted people feel incomplete, they feel this huge emptiness inside, It’s as if the addiction was to complete themselves, and to somehow temporarily cover up the emptiness“. – Gabor Mate
“Why the finger-pointing, why the judgements on a particular group of people who are addicted who happen to use substances? They were that desperate to escape from reality because reality had been so cruel to them”. – Gabor Mate
Social worker: “probably at a younger age they have been reinforced that their value is not as significant as others. The pain is the root cause of people trying to feel comfortable in this world. Addiction is their behaviour to support something that is uncomfortable”.
- “The people with additions and the homeless people are the human not being identified in the light in which they deserve to be. Caretakers in this world need to see the human in front of us, not the problem”.- a social worker
- “Underneath that traumatised persona, there’s the healthy individual who has never found expression in this life because they were never given the venue for expression, never given the relationships, in which they could, their all authentic humanity could be expressed”. – Gabor Mate
- “If we understand that the addiction is not the primary problem, but really a response to trauma, then it becomes obvious that in order to heal addiction, you have to heal the trauma. But it means that you see the wound that’s driving that person”. – Gabor Mate
- “By meeting people where they are at and treating them like human beings and not trying to change them can actually open up the possibility of transformation for them”. – Gabor Mate’s quotes from The Wisdom of Trauma
- “We gotta start seeing each other for what happened to us and not what’s wrong with us”- Fritzi Hortsman, Founder of Compassion Prison Project
Where to watch Gabor Mate’s The Wisdom of Trauma?
If you like above quotes and dialogues from the The Wisdom of Trauma documentary, I highly recommend you to watch the entire film, as those are only some of it, there is lots more wisdom from the film.
To watch The Wisdom of Trauma, you can watch it on the official website.
In order to benefit and help people from different backgrounds of the world, the film provides subtitles in 32 languages. It is very thoughtful.
The organisation (SAND) also provides another great resource about the film and the topic- Companion booklet of The Wisdom of Trauma.
Enjoy the film, hope it helps you and the people around you!
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