Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

Content Warning: This part of the guide contains descriptions of mental illness, sexual abuse, bullying, and traumatic events relayed to the author from his patients. 

When someone has a traumatic experience, they will often devote themselves to making sure such a thing never happens again. This is an understandable human reaction, but it makes it much less likely that one will learn from the past. There is no way to approach the future without some measure of uncertainty, but failure to grapple with the mistakes of the past will cause a person to become enmeshed in self-doubt and regret. The prospect of something terrifying makes us “bound by implacable fate to transform raw horror into understanding, or suffer the consequences” (234). Peterson turns to the example of a client who had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a family member when they were both young children. As an adult, she recalled the instance as though she was very young, so Peterson asked her to reconsider it as though “you and your cousin were very poorly supervised children” (235), undermining the narrative of her helplessly falling victim to a malevolent force. This example led Peterson to the conclusion that revised memories can in many instances be more accurate than immediate impressions of a lived event.