Dr. John A. King argues that trauma either refines you or defines you. Many people get stuck in victimhood, seeking attention instead of healing. He says confront the root cause, not just the symptoms, and convert your scars into medals of honor.
The past will either refine you or define you. Be the very place that you anchor yourself in. A lot of people anchor themselves in trauma that way. They anchor themselves in the things that were done to them, not by them. We're very graceful with everybody else in our lives, very rarely with ourselves. And I realized I could not allow myself the room to be a victim or to tolerate the victim mentality. If I did that, it would be the death of me. A lot of people, they don't ever graduate from that. And probably the biggest thing that inhibits healing is allowing yourself to bask in the attention that comes with a victim mentality. Be it childhood sexual abuse, be it military, be it police, be it a divorce situation or a violent incident. At some point, we have to turn our scars of shame into medals of honor. That's a very important thing to do regardless of how you came upon it. Trauma's trauma. It grows different fruit. So if we're not dealing with the tree of this thing, we'll never deal with the fruit of the thing. I'm Dr. John A. King.
