The Purpose of a Human is Sometimes (Not) What They Do

I’ve recently been reading The Courage to be Disliked. The book presents a philosophy of life in the form of a dialog between a young person and a philosopher. Truly in line with the name of the book, the authors open the book with its most controversial idea — that one must deny trauma. If you’ve read any of the online discourse surrounding the book, you’ll know that this part of the book gets a lot of discussion. Reviewers often mention it as the toughest part of the book to accept ¹ and it appears to be the most talked about idea by readers reviewing the book on Amazon ². In discussions on trauma focused subreddits, many show similar strong reactions and have cited this part of the book as the reason that they stopped reading the book, with many describing it as victim-blaming or trauma denial. I think the authors’ choice to put this as the very first chapter is certainly very brave. You might even say they had the courage to be disliked. (I’ll see myself out.) More seriously, and I can’t help but wonder whether they were using a polarizing claim to hook potential readers who are more open to having their ideas challenged. While I don’t consider the claims in the chapter as literally true, I want to try to steel-man the position of the book and try to interpret it in the best possible terms.

Deny Trauma

No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining. — Alfred Adler

The Courage to be Disliked asks you to deny trauma very directly, no exceptions. Why? The position of the book boils down to essentially that the purpose of a system is what it does. So the purpose of people’s apparently self-sabotaging behaviour is what they actually do regardless of their stated goals or preferences. Using Adlerian psychology as the basis it suggests that any experience that we have—traumatic or otherwise—are assigned some meaning by us. And that this assigned meaning is what determines who we become. As a basis for this position the authors draw a distinction between two ways of explaining human behavior. One way is etiology: explaining the present by looking backward. For example, you might say that someone gets anxious in social situations because they were bullied as a child, or that they avoid relationships and fear abandonment because their parent abandoned them as a child. The other way is teleology: explaining behavior by asking what purpose it serves. Instead of asking Where did this come from?, ask What is this behavior accomplishing?.

The book takes the teleological position, arguing that explaining behaviour as being caused by past trauma and then reassuring people that the behaviour is “not their fault” is looking at things backward. In fact it goes as far as to claim that looking at things this way treats humans as deterministic machines incapable of free will. Instead, the book proposes that we approach things from the perspective that when a person exhibits a certain type of behaviour, it is because they have adopted certain goals — whether consciously or unconsciously — and that their behaviour is always in service of these adopted goals.

One of the examples in the book is that of a shut-in or hikikomori who cannot leave his room. The etiological explanation is that they are anxious, and their anxiety prevents them from going outside. And this anxiety is caused by past trauma involving parents, classmates or other external events that have caused deep psychic wounds in the person. Teleology says that the shut-in remains indoors because consciously or unconsciously, they have adopted the goal of not going out. The purpose of the shut-in is to not go out. His anxiety, fear and other physical symptoms are not the cause. Rather, they are behaviours that are in service of this goal.

The book swerves away from this example before exploring it fully but offers up a few other examples to illustrate that behaviour is in the service of goals which come first, rather than being the effect of proximal causes.

The youth offers another example that seems, at first glance, even harder to explain teleologically. A waiter accidentally spills coffee over his new jacket and he immediately explodes in anger, shouting so loudly that the whole café hears him. The philosopher insists on reversing the usual sequence, arguing that the youth did not shout because he was angry. Rather, he became angry in order to shout. Anger, in this account, is not the driving force but the instrument. The purpose of the youth in that moment was to make the waiter submit, to avoid the slower and more effortful process of calmly explaining the situation, and to compel an immediate response through intimidation, and the anger was a tool to achieve this goal. The philosopher pushes this argument to its uncomfortable conclusion by asking whether, if the youth had stabbed the waiter instead, he could also excuse himself by saying that anger had made him do it. The position of the philosopher essentially seems to be that treating emotions — whether they are from mundane day to day events or from traumatic events — as irresistible external forces ultimately strips people of responsibility for their actions.

Is Trauma Real?

So what should we make of this? My instinct is that the book is overstating its case. There is a substantial body of evidence that traumatic experiences are real in the sense that they cause changes in the risk of several lifelong medical outcomes including depression, heart disease, obesity and poorer physical health and has a lasting impact on the way the body processes sensory information. ³ Longitudinal studies show that childhood maltreatment predicts things like lower educational attainment and anxiety and also is a big piece of evidence that the trauma does indeed cause problems years later and that moving away from the traumatic situation in adulthood didn’t quite heal all the damage. ⁴ Mental states like depression has also been associated with measurable changes in sensory processing. Researchers have found that people with major depression exhibit reduced visual contrast sensitivity and altered retinal responses, making the world literally appear less vivid⁵. Bessel van der Kolk’s now-famous book The Body Keeps the Score also describes an early brain-imaging study in which people with PTSD listened to scripts recounting their traumatic experiences. During this provocation, researchers observed decreased activity in a region associated with language production alongside increased activity in areas involved in emotional arousal. Van der Kolk interprets this as one reason people may struggle to put traumatic flashbacks into words. So there’s plenty of evidence that the effects of trauma are real and some of the effects show up even in things like biomarkers for inflammation that may be completely out of conscious control. It is difficult for me to reconcile the existence of such evidence with the strongest reading of the claim that trauma has no causal effects.

But causal influence $\neq$ determinism. A key point in all the studies is that these are averages and trends. The literature is not all doom and gloom about how you’re forever locked out of a good future if you’ve been traumatized. It seems like only about 25% of the people who experienced severe trauma go on to develop PTSD. ⁶ So what’s happening in the remaining 75%? While It really does seem like some people are built different when it comes to resilience, a combination of early intervention, good support systems and other external factors can in fact let people not develop lasting damage. If understanding these causes can meaningfully improve outcomes⁷, then I’m not convinced the book is right to dismiss asking why something happened as unhelpful.

And while I agree that the teleological stance is valuable in some ways, I’m not totally convinced that a person’s purpose is simply whatever they do.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey. Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee’s existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first, the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes, the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our comprehension. -Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace⁸

Observed effects are not the same as purpose, and many of the outcomes of people’s actions are merely side effects. If a man spends all day picking at the skin around his fingernails while thinking, it would be odd to conclude that his purpose at the moment is to damage his fingers. If I spend every afternoon scrolling on my phone instead of writing, it would be absurd to conclude that my purpose in the afternoon is to refresh social media feeds. We naturally distinguish between what an activity happens to produce and what it is actually in service of. I think the same distinction applies here.

Another thing that gives me pause is that the book seems to be arguing against a somewhat simplified straw-man of modern psychology. It repeatedly contrasts etiological thinking—asking “Why did this happen?”—with teleological thinking—asking “What should I do now?”—as though modern psychology concerns itself only with explaining the past. But that no longer seems to reflect the field. Contemporary clinical psychology certainly tries to understand how adverse experiences shape later behaviour, yet it is equally concerned with helping people move forward. Therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and exposure therapy are not exercises in endlessly excavating childhood experiences; they are practical attempts to help people change patterns of thought and behaviour in the present. Understanding where a problem came from is often only the beginning. The ultimate goal is usually the same one the book claims to value: helping people build lives that are no longer constrained by those earlier experiences. In other words, contemporary psychology is already deeply teleological in one important sense: it is not only interested in explaining suffering. It is in fact interested in helping people move beyond it.

What’s the Book Really Trying to Say?

But if I were to try to be really charitable to the book’s position for a bit; I don’t think its central claim is really “trauma isn’t real.” Rather, I think it is trying to attack a particular mindset: the belief that because something happened to you, your future behaviour is therefore determined. The phrase “deny trauma” feels wrong because it’s meant to be provocative and force the reader to consider things from a fresh perspective. Perhaps an attempt at asking the reader to reject an identity built around being damaged before they can even entertain the possibility of changing.

This interpretation also strikes me as having an interesting parallel to the idea of predictive processing in neuroscience. The idea is that roughly speaking, the brain is not a passive camera recording reality. It is constantly generating predictions about what is about to happen and using incoming sensory evidence to update those predictions. Existing beliefs become priors on future perception and action. If you strongly expect rejection, danger or failure, you become more likely to notice evidence confirming those expectations while discounting evidence that contradicts them. In other words, your current model of the world shapes the world you experience. In fact The Body Keeps the Score itself admits in places how strong of placebo effect is present in most studies that investigate the effect of drugs on symptoms of PTSD, suggesting that the mindset that one takes towards their trauma can have significant effect on their physical symptoms. Seen from this perspective, the book’s advice about denying your trauma can be interpreted as an attempt to inject (prompt injection?) an updated belief about the world into the mind of the reader. Our expectations influence perception, and changing expectations can gradually update the model through prediction error.

Interestingly, even the recent paper titled The Body Does Not Keep the Score — whose title is clearly responding to Bessel van der Kolk’s book — doesn’t really argue that trauma has no bodily effects. Instead, it argues that the metaphor of trauma being “stored” in the body is misleading. The authors propose that trauma is better understood as a nervous system that has become trapped in overly confident predictions about danger. The symptoms are real, but they arise because the brain continually recreates those expectations rather than because the past is literally archived somewhere in muscle or fascia ⁹.

Whether or not that theory ultimately turns out to be correct is almost beside the point here. What struck me is how similar it feels, psychologically, to the advice in The Courage to be Disliked. Predictive processing based theory says that we give the predictive brain enough new evidence that it updates the internal model of the world that was “overfit” on the past trauma. The Courage to be Disliked says assume that your predictions are not destiny (assume trauma doesn’t exist) and behave accordingly which will end up creating new experiences that will indeed update the internal model of the world.

Personally, I’ve found this type of mindset useful way before I ever heard of this book.

When something difficult has happened in my life, asking “Why did this happen?” has almost never helped me move forward. In fact, it often led me to feel even worse and spend too much time ruminating on what happened and what could have been. A much more productive and positive question has been: “What is this behaviour accomplishing for me right now?” Am I avoiding embarrassment? Protecting myself from failure? Avoiding uncertainty? Even if the answers aren’t flattering, they usually point toward something actionable. Even if trauma has genuine causal effects, adopting a more agentic frame may still produce better outcomes.

I also think keeping the intended audience in mind may be really important here. A scientist’s job is to describe reality as accurately as possible in terms of cause and effect. And a therapist’s job is to understand the causes of suffering and help another person recover. But the individual’s challenge is less to explain human behaviour in general than to find ways of interpreting their own experience that help them move forward. So my understanding is that books like The Body Keeps the Score are, in large part, trying to describe what researchers observe across thousands of people. Their goal is to identify, document, classify and analyze why certain patterns exist. And of course if you are a therapist whose goal is to help people overcome behaviours that they learned during traumatic experiences, it makes total sense to acknowledge the existence of trauma as a concept first before trying to find ways to treat and overcome it. They are looking at the problem as an outsider to the person that they are trying to help, and if they want to help people they first have to build trust and rapport with their patients. Acknowledging that their traumatic experiences are real, and that those experiences may genuinely contribute to their present difficulties, is often an important step in building trust.

The Courage to be Disliked feels like it is trying to do something else. Rather than speaking broadly to an academic audience or to therapists trying to understand how to help other people, it is speaking to you, the individual, sitting alone in a chair with the book in their hands. To the individual, knowing that “dancing for five minutes every day is associated with a 20% average reduction in PTSD symptom severity in a study of 50 participants” is often less useful than having a mental model that helps you understand why you’re doing the things that you do and motivates you to change. And to the book’s credit it does emphasize that Adlerian psychology is an “individual psychology”.

If you look at it from this perspective, the directive to “deny trauma” reads to me like a piece of self talk for you to adopt. It belongs in the same family as advice like “take radical responsibility for your life.”. It sounds mean spirited when spoken to others but can be surprisingly powerful if you choose to apply it to yourself.

Consider the problem of smoking. Suppose someone has the goal of quitting and recovering from nicotine addiction. At the scientific level, it is important to understand the mechanisms involved. Nicotine changes the brain’s reward circuitry, leading to tolerance, craving, and withdrawal. When someone stops smoking, they may experience irritability, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and intense cravings because the brain has adapted to the presence of nicotine and must gradually recalibrate in its absence. These are genuine physiological effects, not failures of willpower. From a therapeutic perspective, this understanding matters because it informs treatment. Clinicians study relapse triggers, recommend nicotine replacement therapies such as patches or gum, prescribe medications like varenicline or bupropion when appropriate, and teach behavioural strategies to help people cope with cravings.

But the person trying to quit faces a different question. They are not trying to explain addiction or design a treatment programme—they are trying to make it through today without lighting another cigarette. Here, the most useful mindset may be quite different. Research has found that how people think about their identity predicts their attempts to quit and their long-term success. Smokers who develop a stronger “quitter” or “non-smoker” identity are generally more likely to initiate quit attempts and maintain abstinence than those who continue to see themselves primarily as smokers^{10 11 12}. James Clear popularises this idea in Atomic Habits by arguing that lasting behavioural change comes not from repeatedly telling yourself “I’m trying to quit smoking,” but from adopting the identity of someone who simply does not smoke ¹³.

Is it really Etiology vs. Teleology?

I also think there may be a false dichotomy running through the book. It often frames etiology and teleology as mutually exclusive explanations. It assumes that we must either believe that our past determines us or believe that only our present goals matter. But I don’t think we have to choose. Etiology can tell us why we developed a particular pattern of behaviour, while teleology can tell us what purpose that pattern is serving now. These are different questions, and they need not compete with one another. One can seek an understanding for potential reasons for behaviour before or concurrently with trying to change behaviour to align with one’s goals.

Let’s take another look at the example of the hikikomori. An etiological account might reveal that bullying or harsh parenting might be what led them to develop overwhelming social anxiety. This explains why leaving the house feels genuinely threatening. But once that pattern has formed, a teleological perspective can ask the question: What function is staying inside serving today? Perhaps it protects them from the possibility of humiliation, rejection, or failure. Seen this way, the two perspectives fit together naturally. The traumatic experiences explain how the goal of safety became so dominant in the first place. The teleological perspective then points toward change by asking whether that goal is still worth pursuing in the same way.

Some of the other examples used in the book to illustrate this point also invite a similar critique. For example the philosopher presents the youth with the example of going to a doctor for a cold.

Philosopher: Suppose you’ve got a cold with a high fever, and you go to see the doctor. Then, suppose the doctor says the reason for your sickness is that yesterday, when you went out, you weren’t dressed properly, and that’s why you caught a cold. Now, would you be satisfied with that?

Youth: Of course I wouldn’t. It wouldn’t matter to me what the reason was—the way I was dressed or because it was raining or whatever. It’s the symptoms, the fact that I’m suffering with a high fever now that would matter to me. If he’s a doctor, I’d need him to treat me by prescribing medicine, giving shots, or taking whatever specialized measures are necessary.

But this doesn’t really make sense to me completely. As a patient I would be interested in knowing the causes of the cold so that I can make informed decisions in the future about whether I should go out in the cold without a jacket. The same reasoning holds for other types of illnesses. It’s worth trying to understand what caused the symptoms so that you can treat the underlying cause of the disease rather than just the symptoms. You’re allowed to both understand causes and try to treat the symptoms at the same time.

A steel-man of the book’s position is that this is simply a rhetorical device. The philosopher is trying to state something extreme so that the youth does not fall into the opposite trap of endlessly splitting the difference between agency and circumstance until no meaningful action remains and he is frozen in analysis paralysis. There is a tendency in discussion to assume that the most reasonable position must always lie somewhere in the middle, and that every disagreement ought to be resolved by averaging the two sides. But this can itself become a cognitive bias. Sometimes it is useful to temporarily inhabit an extreme position to reveal consequences that are otherwise too easy to ignore ¹⁴. Negotiations for example naturally rewards overstating your position. Staking out an extreme position can be a rational bargaining strategy because the eventual compromise lands closer to the position you actually wanted ¹⁵. By insisting that trauma should be “denied,” the book is staking out this more extreme position to force the reader to ask what their life would look like if they acted as though the past were not an excuse. Adopting this type of stance for a moment can be a useful heuristic for escaping the inertia of perpetual moderation.

Closing Thoughts

So, overall, I think that the most charitable interpretation of this section of the book is that it is trying to speak to the individual who wants to instigate change from within. It’s trying to prescribe a mindset that you can adopt to help you feel better about life and to help you take action. It is trying to roleplay a demanding coach who will start the training session by yelling at you in an inspiring way, that your past need not have the final say over who you become. For someone who may hold a conscious or unconscious belief they are permanently shaped by what happened to them—as I certainly did when I was much younger—that is probably an important idea to encounter.

At the same time, I think this section of the book invites much of the criticism it receives. Telling readers to “deny trauma” is an unnecessarily provocative way of expressing what could have been worded a touch more carefully. It can easily come across as denying genuine suffering or blaming victims, particularly when removed from the broader context of the argument. I suspect many readers understandably stop there. But I also suspect the authors knew exactly what they were doing. They were likely writing for the kind of reader willing to suspend disbelief for a moment, adopt a student mindset, and ask, “What is this really trying to tell me?”

But regardless of how correct Adler was about trauma, I think he may have been correct about something important: explanations of behaviour are tools. Some tools are good for understanding people. Others are good for changing yourself. Perhaps that’s why this chapter remains so controversial. Readers expecting a scientific claim encounter what is really a prescription for how to think about themselves. Whether that prescription is wise is ultimately a personal question. And personally, I’ve found the book’s mindset to be a useful one.

References

Footnotes

1. The Courage to Be Disliked review - Book Notes | Nate Kadlac ↩

2. Trauma from the Perspective of Adlerian Psychology (Independent Researcher: Chiharu Kogo) #ThinkingAboutTrauma｜「こころ」のための専門メディア　金子書房 ↩

3. Kirlic N, Cohen ZP, Singh MK. Is There an Ace Up Our Sleeve? A Review of Interventions and Strategies for Addressing Behavioral and Neurobiological Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences in Youth. Advers Resil Sci. 2020 Mar;1(1):5-28. doi: 10.1007/s42844-020-00001-x. Epub 2020 Mar 13. PMID: 34278327; PMCID: PMC8281391. ↩

4. Poulton R, Moffitt TE, Silva PA. The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study: overview of the first 40 years, with an eye to the future. Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol. 2015 May;50(5):679-93. doi: 10.1007/s00127-015-1048-8. Epub 2015 Apr 3. PMID: 25835958; PMCID: PMC4412685. ↩

5. Bubl E, Kern E, Ebert D, Bach M, Tebartz van Elst L. Seeing gray when feeling blue? Depression can be measured in the eye of the diseased. Biol Psychiatry. 2010 Jul 15;68(2):205-8. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.02.009. Epub 2010 Mar 31. PMID: 20359698. ↩

6. Ressler, K.J., Berretta, S., Bolshakov, V.Y. et al. Post-traumatic stress disorder: clinical and translational neuroscience from cells to circuits. Nat Rev Neurol 18, 273–288 (2022). ↩

7. Why 70% of Trauma Survivors Don’t Develop PTSD: The Science of Human Resilience ↩

8. Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Oxford University Press, 2010. ↩

9. Kotler S, Mannino M, Fox G and Friston K (2026) The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Front. Syst. Neurosci. 20:1812957. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957 ↩

10. van den Putte B, Yzer M, Willemsen MC, de Bruijn GJ. The effects of smoking self-identity and quitting self-identity on attempts to quit smoking. Health Psychol. 2009 Sep;28(5):535-44. doi: 10.1037/a0015199. PMID: 19751079. ↩

11. Meijer, Eline, et al. “A longitudinal study into the reciprocal effects of identities and smoking behaviour: Findings from the ITC Netherlands Survey.” Social Science & Medicine 200 (2018): 249-257. ↩

12. Tombor I, Shahab L, Brown J, Notley C, West R. Does non-smoker identity following quitting predict long-term abstinence? Evidence from a population survey in England. Addict Behav. 2015 Jun;45:99-103. doi: 10.1016/j.addbeh.2015.01.026. Epub 2015 Jan 19. PMID: 25658770; PMCID: PMC4376294. ↩

13. Clear, James. Atomic habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. Penguin, 2018. ↩

14. Unspoken Ground Assumptions Of Discussion ↩

15. Highlights From The Comments On Conflict Vs. Mistake ↩