Peter Attia: Trauma Must Be Processed if You Want to Be Healthy

Have you experienced trauma? How is it affecting your well-being?

According to physician Peter Attia, trauma can be a detriment to your health. In his book Outlive, he shares practical advice on how to take care of your body and mind. Speaking from experience, he contends that your emotional health is something you shouldn’t ignore as you pursue well-being.

Read more to learn Attia’s recommendation for processing trauma as well as an alternative approach.

Peter Attia on Trauma

According to Peter Attia, trauma takes a toll on you. He wrote Outlive to be a practical guidebook that a general audience can use to improve and lengthen their lives. While he primarily addresses physical health, he also emphasizes the importance of taking care of your emotional health.

In the book, Attia recounts his own lifelong journey to overcome feelings of rage toward others and himself, both of which had roots in his childhood trauma.

Often, children who go through traumatic incidents (big and small) adopt emotional coping strategies that hurt them in later adulthood—like how Attia learned to feel angry at himself and others to avoid dealing with the shame from his childhood trauma. Attia recommends using psychotherapy as a tool to uncover how you’ve adapted to past traumas and to develop a plan to repair your unique emotional dysfunction. Doing so, he argues, is the surest way to achieve an emotionally fulfilling life.

Using Internal Family Systems to Resolve Trauma

Attia worked through his childhood trauma in a relatively emotionally detached way—using reason to dissect his past experiences and identify his coping strategies. In contrast, you may prefer the more emotion-driven method of imagining your coping strategies, both healthy and unhealthy, as “subpersonalities” within yourself—a therapy model called Internal Family Systems (IFS). In IFS, each “part” or version of yourself has its own perspective and goals, and they’re all trying to help you in their own ways.

One way you could heal your emotional scars with IFS is by asking yourself what each part of yourself is thinking and feeling about the trauma, listening to what that part of you has to say, and formulating a new plan that all parts of you can agree on. For instance, Attia could have asked the rage-filled part of himself why he was so angry at himself and other people, uncovering some of the emotional logic behind his own behavior. Then, he could have used this information to come up with healthier coping strategies that satisfied the angry part of himself. If this process appeals to you, consider looking for an IFS-certified therapist to work with.

Peter Attia: Trauma Must Be Processed if You Want to Be Healthy