Trauma Is Not “Real” (Part 2)

Psychological Case Against the Victimhood Economy and the End of the Therapeutic Self.

In There Will Be Blood, the central tension unfolds between Eli Sunday, a preacher who controls the land, and Daniel Plainview, an oilman who needs access to it. One of the most powerful moments in the film is when Eli pressures Daniel into confessing:

“I have abandoned my child! I have abandoned my child! I have abandoned my boy!”

The scene is heavy, but also laced with irony to make a point. The boy isn’t biologically Plainview’s son. He adopted him to play the part of a “family man,” using him to close deals and mask his own emotional and moral void. Plainview’s “son” came into his tutelage due to Plainview's decisions. He killed his father and then cost his “son’s” hearing. Plainview is deeply insecure with his uncontrollable desire to win in an assumed zero-sum world. He views every relationship as competitive. Plainview’s confession is both a lie and the truth. That’s the point. It depends on which narrative you choose.

At the same time, Eli isn’t some noble man of God. He uses religion as theater, a tool to control and to feel significant, not to heal and redeem. Sunday’s attempts to humble himself before Daniel aren’t pastoral; they’re a power move. Sunday wants Plainview to feel small and inferior. Sunday knows Plainview needs his and his family’s approval. Sunday hides his own insecurity behind the pulpit and petty games. He masks his striving for significance as he desperately wants his father's approval, not God’s, built upon an unhealthy jealousy of siblings. He may preach humility and Christianity, but he’s driven by the same competitive desires as Plainview: power, validation, and significance.

Both men are locked in the same trap: inferiority masked by superiority, control and power masked by righteousness and humility. Trauma drives their personal narratives, and they excuse their behavior with lies about life.

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In the first part of my trauma series on Adler, I provided a background on Adler and the current dominant Freudian concepts. I introduced their core ideas and set the stage for the next two posts in my three-part series.

Now, we go deeper into Adler’s work and focus on the essential first major dividing line: between you and everyone else. His first and foremost concern was the individual, not the collective and the world out there. His entire practice revolved around the person sitting before him and their story, not society, structures, or systems.

For Adler, reality is the choices you make, the power you give others, and the responsibility you take or avoid. There is no such thing as a shared fate or determined history, only the meaning we assign to our experiences and how we move through them.

This is where the “trauma-ists” argument breaks down. We operate today like trauma is a fixed external force, something done to us or something baked into who we are. Traumaists point the finger at history, a non-agentic force to which we all succumb. Woe is me.

But Adler stops our modern culture in its tracks. He argues that trauma isn’t what happens to you. It’s how you relate to it. You are not a victim of reality, but you’re the author of your interpretation. Your social connections and how you view your history determine that interpretation. In Adlerian psychology, everything starts and ends with relationships and social connections. How you see yourself and how you see others is directly connected; whether you choose to grow or stay stuck is in your excuse narrative.

Every Problem is an Interpersonal Relationship Problem

“Every psychological problem we experience, be it anxiety, depression, inferiority, anger, or avoidance, can be traced to difficulties in how we relate to other people.”
— Alfred Adler

“All problems are interpersonal relationship problems... and most people use life lies to escape them.”
— Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked

This is one of Adler’s most disruptive ideas. At first glance, it feels too simplistic and shallow. After you sit in his claim and ponder it, his idea begins to hold and take root.

He believed that every psychological struggle, no matter how private or internal it appears, is at its core relational. That all our personal dysfunctions, anxiety, depression, shame, procrastination, can be traced back to how we relate to others and how we believe others relate to us.

Adler’s view of human nature wasn’t abstract. He saw people as fundamentally social, not isolated. We’re built for belonging, recognition, and contribution. Our identity is formed in relationships with others (a blend of family, community, and society), and we falsely believe we are more individualistic than we are. Our culture presses “we are all a wallflower,” and then, we get blindsided by mimetic narratives that provide addictive external meaning and purpose. Even the emotions we label “private” come from how we imagine we’ll be judged, accepted, or rejected. All of those are statements of how we relate to others. To Adler, there’s no such thing as a personal problem. All problems are social problems in disguise.

Here’s what Adler would say to common idioms we hear today:

• “I have social anxiety.” → You fear judgment or rejection.

• “I’m not confident.” → You feel like you don’t measure up.

• “I’m depressed.” → You feel disconnected, unseen, or useless.

• “I procrastinate.” → You fear failure and disappointing others.

• “I feel worthless.” → You feel like no one needs you.

Adler called the modern tendency to manage other people’s expectations and perceptions a form of self-deception. It’s how we cope, but it’s not how we grow. Instead of managing expectations, he proposed something different: manage your integrity. Don’t live to avoid being disliked; live with clarity, honesty, and direction.

He warned that we often confuse our responsibilities with those of other people. We spend energy fixing their reactions, dodging criticism, or performing for their approval. Adler drew a hard line: focus on your tasks and your life. Let others focus on theirs. This is the root of agency: knowing what’s yours and letting go of what isn’t. Modern culture considers agency and goals individualistic, but they are fundamentally interpersonal and relational concerns. People don’t have either because of how they view themselves in the context of others, not based on the failures of a solitary human.

At the center of Adler’s thought is a radical, often misunderstood term: Gemeinschaftsgefühl, translated as “social interest.” It’s the belief that a meaningful life is rooted in cooperation and contribution. It is the “feeling” of belonging to specific individuals and the broader community. The cure for self-obsession, for inferiority, even for depression, is not more self-analysis but a reorientation toward service, toward connection. Mental health isn’t a solo pursuit. It’s a byproduct of healthy relationships. Adler believed this communal feeling (aka social interest) is essential for personal development and mental health.

“Social interest is the only gauge to be used in judging the worth of a person. As the barometer of normality, it is the standard to be used in determining the usefulness of a life.”

— Alfred Adler

Without that sense of cooperation, connection, and meaning, psychoses and neuroses begin to develop. The root of symptomatic personality defects is the web of interpersonal problems frayed or avoided entirely.

Adler broke decisively from Freud on the root of neurosis and psychosis. Freud emphasized internal conflict, unconscious drives, repression, and the weight of personal history. Adler brought the focus to the present. He believed identity is not formed in isolation, but through individual sovereignty in relationship with others. We understand ourselves not in the absence of people, but in proximity to them. Our pathologies aren’t just personal stories we tell ourselves. They’re relational in nature and cannot be devoid of other humans who contribute to your life. Freud saw identity as shaped by internal forces; Adler saw it as shaped by the pursuit of communal goals, meaning, and contribution.

"The ego is not master in its own house."

— Sigmund Freud

Our modern obsession with self-discovery and hyper-individual meaning-making is, to Adler, a life lie. The idea that the individual is the sole architect of their reality is a fundamentally Freudian myth. Adler would question how much you truly know about yourself apart from the community, relationships, and responsibilities that make you who you are; however, we’ve built an entire culture around the idea that the self is the answer. Popular therapy and self-help teach solutions are found by excavating the inner world, and if other people enter the room, it’s only to blame them, not to reconcile and to restore.

Adler insisted that social interest must be cultivated to overcome pathology. This isn’t optional but essential. If all problems are interpersonal, then healing begins with the courage to re-enter reality and relationships as they are. Developing a connection with others creates social interest. As you establish and develop social interest, you stop hiding behind pain, superiority, and fictional narratives designed to avoid responsibility. You stop playing the victim, the martyr, or the misunderstood “genius”.

Being free comes from community and showing up for others. Healing is in contribution and not self-protection from feelings of inferiority. Inferiority isn’t a flaw to be psychoanalyzed to death. It’s the baseline of being human; what matters is how you respond and what you do with it.

"Seek Unity and you will find neither Unity nor Truth. Seek the light of truth, and you will find Unity and Truth."

— C.S. Lewis

Compensation, from Inferiority to Superiority

"Everyone (...) has a feeling of inferiority. But the feeling of inferiority is not a disease; it is rather a stimulant to healthy, normal striving and development. It becomes a pathological condition only when the sense of inadequacy overwhelms the individual and, far from stimulating them to useful activity, makes them depressed and incapable of development."

— Alfred Adler

"A superiority complex is a defense mechanism that develops over time to help a person cope with feelings of inferiority."

— Alfred Adler

“A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others; it comes from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self."

— Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked

"If one really has confidence in oneself, one doesn’t feel the need to boast. It’s because one’s feeling of inferiority is strong that one boasts."

— Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked

Everyone feels inadequate. It is a universal truth and an inescapable part of the human condition. But that feeling isn’t a flaw. In Adlerian psychology, it’s fuel for change and feelings of inferiority are the inner signal that something better is possible if we’re willing to grow and to have courage. Inferiority isn’t the problem; the problem is avoiding it.

Adler’s genius was naming what most people hide. He believed that inferiority is a normal and necessary part of life. It happens to everyone. What matters is how we respond to it. Do we grow from it, or escape it? That’s where compensation comes in. If you avoid feelings of inferiority, you prevent its benefits. Going through the pain is the only way you become more of who you weren’t to be.

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

In Adler’s individual psychology, compensation is the mechanism we use to confront or avoid our perceived shortcomings. There are two paths: one is healthy and the other pathological. In the healthy version, we acknowledge what’s lacking and move toward strength and improvement. In the unhealthy version, we deny what’s real and build a persona to mask it, either by shrinking ourselves (inferiority complex) or inflating ourselves (superiority complex). We distort our character, disposition, and relationships when we deny or overreact to impediments, as seen with Plainview and Sunday. Both wanted to mask their true selves but took two superficially opposite paths. Both are rooted in the same psychological tendency. This deflection and distraction inhibit growth and stem resiliency.

Freud first introduced the “compensation” concept, framing it as a defense mechanism. In his view, people unconsciously use compensation to protect the ego (Freudian ego) from anxiety or unresolved internal conflict. If someone feels inadequate in one area, they might overperform in another to cover it up. Freud’s interpretation of inferiority was rooted in his broader framework, everything goes back to childhood and the unconscious mind running the show.

Jung built on Freud’s ideas but took them in a different direction. He saw compensation not just as an internal defense mechanism, but as a balance. When the conscious mind fixates too heavily on one trait or identity, the unconscious supplies the opposite. For Jung, compensation wasn’t about avoiding discomfort but about how the psyche kept itself whole and bartered between competing ideas.

"The sense of inferiority has strong erotic roots."

— Sigmund Freud

Where Freud introduced the notion of compensation, Adler introduced the inferiority complex. The inferiority complex essentially says, “I can’t change.” It thrives in self-doubt, excuses, and powerlessness. The superiority complex essentially says, “I don’t need to change.” It thrives in performance, arrogance, and control. Both are illusions, and both are ways of avoiding responsibility and resilience. They are two faces of the same defense mechanism. The root is the same: fear.

The overarching goal of Adlerian psychotherapy is to help the patient overcome feelings of inferiority by taking action. Courage to strive is the courage to fail. Courage to pursue a better version of yourself, not for validation or superiority, but to contribute, to live a life that matters beyond your own insecurity. Adler argued that when we stop striving, we start compensating. If you can’t be strong, you act weak. If you can’t be honest, you act powerful. Neither one leads to freedom. At best, they lead to personality distortion, at worst, to deep neurosis.

At the core, Adler argued that no person can live indefinitely in a state of feeling less than. Eventually, they will adopt tactics to escape that feeling, whether it’s reframing life through trauma narratives, blaming external systems, or clinging to pride and performance. These become strategies to avoid taking ownership, being seen, being known, and ultimately, avoiding change.

Feelings of inferiority become a trap when they're disconnected from purpose and others. When directed outward, toward meaning, contribution, and something larger, it becomes a launchpad for transformation. Ultimately, everyone strives for superiority, and it’s just a matter of what kind. Real strength isn’t about hiding your weakness. It’s about using it to become useful. Inferiority is an invitation, a teacher, a guidepost to become better.

You can see these unhealthy patterns everywhere now. An endless stream of campaigns led by self-proclaimed “victims” demanding that the world compensate them for their supposed damage. These movements are built on emphatic slogans meant to shield the traumatized from further harm, but curiously, there’s rarely a clear aggressor. The villain is always vague, abstract, and conveniently unspecific. That’s by design. It gives the “traumatized” free rein to craft any solution they want, no matter how unreasonable, and demand the world bend to it.

It is a shared inferiority complex turned into a power play. Instead of facing and growing through the perfectly normal and human feeling of inferiority, it gets radicalized and weaponized, utilized to manipulate the goodwill of others. It’s our contemporary culture’s mask for insecurity and cowardice. Until the victim economy finds the courage to drop the blame game and own up to its problems being its own, it will keep turning its sights on the next convenient target to shift fault and therefore, never having to change. In its wake is a steady cycle of innocent sacrifices given to their altar, a narcissistic demi-god of self-absorbed despair. The cycle won’t stop with validation, they so desperately seek. It ends with ownership. If only they could believe they’d be okay, no matter what happened. It’s the narrative they have chosen.

How you see your inferiority and how you respond is determined by the narratives you tell yourself. Our mental models and relationships form these. Whether they are fiction or non-fiction isn’t as important as how they guide you through life.

Fictional Finalism

“A man’s worth lies not in what he is, but in what he aspires to be.”

— Alfred Adler

“The truth is often less important than the usefulness of the fiction in moving us toward a goal.”

— Alfred Adler

“People fabricate anger. They create it themselves. And it is a lie.”

— Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked

Adler’s theory of fictional finalism is one of the most profound yet misunderstood contributions to psychology. He believed people aren’t primarily driven by the past, but by the future, specifically the futures they imagine. These imagined outcomes are our “finalisms”. They become the silent architects of our behavior. They may not be rational, or even attainable, but they serve as internal compasses.

These finalisms are fictions, not because they’re lies, but because they’re constructs. These finalisms are stories we create to make sense of ourselves, the world, and our place in it. We don’t always know where they come from, yet we choose to live by them anyway.

Here are some examples of finalisms you have probably heard.

• “I must be better to be loved.”

• “If I have this profession, I’ll have meaning.”

• “If I work hard enough, I will be worthwhile.”

• “Life should be fair.”

• “My spouse is my best friend.”

These beliefs aren’t rooted in objective truth. Instead, they’re narratives, emotional heuristics, and internalized mantras. Most of them form early, so we mistake them for fact. They are not facts but are built and constructed as internal dialogues. No one enforces fairness in life or defines worth, yet people regurgitate these finalisms. Once built, finalisms guide the trajectory of our lives.

Adler borrowed the foundational concept of finalisms from philosopher Hans Vaihinger. He observed that humans regularly operate on assumptions they know aren’t entirely true or accurate but are still helpful. These “fictions,” as he called them, help us function in a world that is too complex to navigate with certainty. It’s not deception but mental pragmatism.

“An idea may be theoretically false, but still practically useful."

— Hans Vaihinger

Adler applied this to the psyche. We don’t just function with mental fictions, but we live by them. These fictional finalisms become internal blueprints for how we act, how we relate to others, and what we believe is possible. Whether or not they are “true” isn’t the point. Their usefulness in directing our behavior is the point.

This was a direct break from Freud. While Freud taught that “we are what we’ve been,” Adler argued that “we are what we aim for.” Freud saw behavior as backward-looking, driven by repressed memories, childhood traumas, and unconscious conflict. Adler saw behavior as forward-facing, shaped by goals, purpose, and our chosen response to life.

“We are what we are because we have been what we have been.”

— Sigmund Freud

You can see the difference everywhere in modern life. People will say, “Because my parents did X, I am this way.” Or, “I experienced Y, so I can’t change.” This is deterministic etiology, backward-looking forward causality. It removes agency from the present. Adler rejected this passivity. He argued that the problem is not what happened, but what narrative you're still using to explain it.

And those narratives? They’re often false. Not because nothing happened, but because we interpret those events as being shaped by what we want to believe, what we want to avoid, and what makes us feel safest.

Adler didn’t see these stories as inherently bad. He saw them as directional and informational. They can pull us forward or they can keep us stuck. His goal in therapy was to expose the fiction, question it, and align it with reality. Once you know the script running your life, you can ask the only question that matters: Is this helping me become who I want to be?

He called the most destructive internal fictions “life lies.” These are the stories we tell to avoid change, to deflect responsibility, and to shield ourselves from discomfort. Life lies always looks like the truth in the moment, but they don’t move us forward. They keep us orbiting the same cycle and hurt ourselves and those around us.

Here are a few familiar life lies:

• “I can’t do that because of my past.”

• “No one gets me, so why bother?”

• “If I had different parents, a different job, a different body…”

• “I’m just not wired for that.”

• “Life is unfair, so what’s the point?”

These beliefs become frameworks of avoidance. They trade agency for excuses. They turn wounds into worldviews. They feel protective, but they are maladaptive and cost us personal growth.

While Freud emphasized past experiences and unconscious drives, Adler's invitation was not to eliminate fictions, but to know them and to choose better ones. Adler wanted us to write better stories for ourselves. Freud wanted us to discover the pre-written story in our repressed memories and internal conflicts. To Adler, we must orient ourselves toward values and histories that call us upward to strive and become useful. These internal narratives are powerful not because of their veracity, but because they pragmatically shape our lives today.

“Man proceeds in the fog,” Milan Kundera once wrote. “But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path.” That’s the illusion. We forget that we are living forward, not backward. We’re navigating life through stories we often haven’t questioned, and the most straightforward path forward isn’t behind us. It’s in “fiction” that we choose to believe next.

Choose Your Lifestyle

“Everything can also be different... and if the individual lives according to a certain guiding line, everything must be as it is.”

— Alfred Adler

“You are not controlled by emotion. You control it.”

— Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked

Adler’s “style of life” concept is foundational to his theory of Individual Psychology. In modern terms, we’d call it your operating system or, in a simplified term, “lifestyle”. To Adler, lifestyle is not about morning routines, habits, or aesthetic preferences. Lifestyle is the deeply embedded strategy we use (usually unconsciously) to navigate life, relationships, and challenges. Each of us adopts a unique pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving in response to early life experiences, feelings of inferiority, and our internalized goals.

This style begins in childhood and is influenced by how we perceive our place in the world, within our family, community, and social settings. Critically, Adler emphasized that lifestyle is not fixed. We create our lifestyle through interpretation and choice, which means we can revise it. Put another way, you’re not a slave to your wiring or wounds; you’re the architect of your adaptation.

Adler diverged sharply from Freud’s obsession with typologies and trauma-based determinism. While Freud saw people as passengers locked into psychosexual stages and unconscious drives, Adler believed in creative power. He believed in agency, uber alles. To him, personality was not an identity but a semi-coping strategy. It is an individualized strategy of how you learned to strive for superiority and avoid perceived failure. It’s a chosen way of living, not a deterministic prison.

You can see Freud’s fingerprints all over today’s obsession with personality labels and identity categories. The endless buffet of acronyms, tests, and trauma narratives tries to frame identity as a static result of the past. "I am X because Y happened." Adler would be opposed to today’s lexicon of identity linguistics. You are not your trauma. You are not your test result. You're not even your culture, class, or clinical label. You’re a human being making choices, some conscious and some not, about how to respond to the world around you.

Yes, I love personality tests like every other normal human being. Enneagram? I am a 3w4. Culture Index? Philosopher. Hogwarts? Slytherin, obviously. Out with muggles! But those things are just fun flavors, not foundation or real meat. Personality tests describe tendencies of your current lifestyle and narratives, but that is not the core truth. Whether you’re “shy,” “agreeable,” or “a people-pleaser,” Adler would say you are just picking these behaviors to get your needs met and to align with your spoken and unspoken goals. Personality traits should be viewed more as tools, not descriptors. Tools can be swapped out.

Adler believed these personality behaviors are shaped by early life experience, feelings of inferiority, and the imagined goals we build for ourselves to feel significant. Together, these form your “guiding line,“ an internal compass that tells you how to survive and succeed. If your compass is off, so is your trajectory.

Adlerian therapy made its mark by focusing on tomorrow, not yesterday. Individual Adlerian psychology aims not to wallow in your childhood or decode every memory. The goal is to reveal your guiding line (your internal compass) and ask a better question: “Is this actually working?” If not, rewrite it. You don’t need to fix your past. You need to clarify your aim and reorient your behavior toward something better.

The great lie of modern psychology is that your history defines you. You are not who you’ve been. You are always free to reorient toward who you want to be and you are becoming. The key is courage; the tool is choice. The path forward begins when you stop saying, “This is just who I am,” and start asking, “Who do I want to be?”

Trauma Is Not Real

“People are not driven by past causes but move toward goals they themselves set.”

— Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked

“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. Our experiences do not determine us, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”

— Ichiro Kishimi, The Courage to Be Disliked

Adler argued that what we call trauma today is less about pain and more about power. Taking offense and claiming victimhood isn’t always an honest emotional response, but a strategy designed to shift the dynamic. This strategy epitomizes today’s culture. It makes the “wounded” person the moral superior, allows them to frame whatever reaction as virtuous, and allows them to control the narrative over the normies. In our current cultural environment, offense only flows in one direction. Those labeled “oppressed” are allowed to offend, shame, and accuse without consequence. Their pain becomes sacred, and their anger is always justified. Their bad behavior gets rebranded as “valid.” That’s not trauma. It’s leverage.

When someone can rewrite the rules of engagement, avoid accountability, and still demand special treatment, they are not a victim. They’re in control. This is how the trauma fictional finalism is utilized today. Make no mistake: this model is deeply Freudian, even if most people invoking it have never read a single word of Freud.

Freud believed the past was the key to the present. He believed that trauma, especially in childhood, shaped the psyche forever. His whole framework was etiological, digging backward to find what went wrong. Whatever that is, it will explain today and the future. He saw trauma as a psychological wound stored in the unconscious, fueling neuroses and today’s symptoms. The job of therapy was to unearth and relive those memories, to “process” and purge. The solution was to “remember” the buried traumatic experiences and heal through reliving. If you don’t find these trauma gnostic nuggets, you will be forever locked in an unconscious prison. The past had power, and the present was its servant. Freud made the past the jailer and therapy the parole board.

"The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it... He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past."

— Sigmund Freud

Adler flipped the script. He said the question isn’t “What happened to you?” It’s “What are you doing with it?” He replaced Freud’s obsession with etiology with teleology. What matters is not what lies behind you but what you’re aiming at now. “What are your goals?”. That’s what’s pulling the strings and determining symptoms today.

Adler believed trauma wasn’t an objective reality. Two people can go through the same experience. One becomes stronger. The other says they’re broken. Why? Because what matters is the story they tell themselves, and that story is only the individual who chooses. That’s why PTSD rates hover around 5% to 10% of the population. That means 90% to 95% of people in the same conditions didn’t develop “trauma” despite every single one of us having struggles, pain, suffering, or being an actual victim of a traumatic event. Freud would say you’re repressed; Adler would say you’re resilient.