They may be sixty years old, yet they’re still fixated on how their mom or dad ignored them at ten, endlessly crying ‘my trauma this, my trauma that’ for the whole world to hear. I used to try to help people like this, but eventually I realized it was a pointless effort. Their parents might have been gone for forty years, and they’re still fighting them in their head! At some point, you can’t help but think, ‘Let them deal with it themselves’
According to psychiatrist Alfred Adler, the founder of the school of Individual Psychology, ‘A person is not a product of the past, but of the choices they make about that past.’ In other words, pain, loss, and abuse from the past are, of course, impactful, but they do not determine our fate. What truly matters is how an individual interprets those experiences. People can use their traumas as excuses to avoid taking responsibility, and they certainly do!
Japanese philosopher and Adlerian psychologist Ichiro Kishimi and author Fumitake Koga’s book ‘The Courage to Be Disliked’ (Kirawereru Yūki) unfolds as a dialogue between a wise philosopher and a young man, set within the framework of Adlerian psychology. The book is written in a clear, easy-to-grasp style. You can think of it as a guide, profound yet simple. As the young man and the wise philosopher discuss topics such as how past traumas do not define you, the freedom found in not seeking others’ approval, the psychological meaning of responsibility and freedom, the courage to accept yourself and not control others, and the two very different concepts of feelings of inferiority and the inferiority complex (as well as feelings of superiority and the superiority complex), the reader feels like a third person sitting alongside them, listening in.
