Trauma Repair by Route Correction
Go back to the crossroad where you took the wrong road, and specify the road you should have taken
- Difficulty
- Expert
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 91%
Peterson rejects the idea that traumas can be papered over — the holes have to be filled. His mechanism is a route correction: the brain keeps raising the past precisely because no proper road forward has been specified. So you locate the suffering, identify the decision point that produced it, determine which road you should have taken, and adopt that as the forward path. Once a viable road forward exists, the past event stops being traumatic, because its function — flagging an unresolved navigation error — has been discharged. He explicitly maps this onto atonement, confession, and repentance, and says the same move is what you do when negotiating a solution with your partner.
Origin
Developed from Peterson's clinical work on trauma and the observation that in therapy you find out what people did upstream, framed with the cartoon trope of the angel and devil at a crossroad.
Core principles
- 01You cannot put planks of wood over the holes; they have to be filled.
- 02The brain surfaces the past because the proper road forward has not been specified.
- 03Trauma is an unresolved problem deep enough to unsettle you, which halts maturation at that point.
- 04A fixation means you face present situations with only the tools you had at the age it occurred.
- 05Solving the deepest problem often dissolves a whole set of peripheral ones.
How to run it
- 1
Name the suffering
Identify precisely what is going wrong now and what the recurring problem actually is, rather than the story around it.
Pro tip Recurring problems with a partner or boss are prime candidates — they usually run on an outdated conceptual structure.
- 2
Find the upstream decision
Trace back to the crossroad — the point where a choice was made that set the current consequences in motion.
Pro tip Peterson claims people can often recall knowing at the time that it was a bad decision.
Watch out Positions where all options are bad usually mean the real error is further upstream, not in the current moment.
- 3
Determine which road you should have taken
Work out explicitly what the correct choice would have been at that juncture, in concrete terms.
- 4
Replace the route
Substitute the road you should have taken for the road you did take, giving you a specified path forward from here.
Pro tip Peterson describes the complete move as atonement, confession, repentance, and specification of the pathway forward.
Watch out Without a specified forward road, the memory keeps returning because it is still doing its job.
- 5
Run the same move with your partner
Apply the identical structure to relationship problems: here's the problem, here's what we did wrong, here's what we'll do in future.
Pro tip If the new future map works, the past trauma is rendered irrelevant.
In the wild
A person has a recurring problem with their boss. Tracing it, the situation is reminiscent of what their father did when they were four, and they are construing the boss with the same conceptual structure.
→ The reaction is identified as an unmatured response to an unresolved earlier problem, which can then be re-routed rather than re-lived.
Someone finds themselves in a situation where every available answer is a lie — Peterson cites Leonard Cohen's line that there's no decent place to stand in a massacre.
→ The conclusion is not that the lie was fine but that they should not have been there to begin with; the fix is honesty further upstream.
Common mistakes
Papering over the hole
Mapping where the holes are so you can walk around them is better than nothing, but Peterson is explicit that you cannot lay planks over them — they must actually be filled.
Stopping at the story without the forward road
Recounting what happened produces insight but no relief, because the reason the memory keeps surfacing is the missing specification of the correct path forward.
Fixing at the point of the bad option instead of upstream
When all your options are bad, the error was made earlier. Optimising within a compromised position does not repair anything.
Is it for you?
Best for
People with recurring, disproportionate reactions traceable to earlier unresolved events.
Not ideal for
Acute crisis or severe trauma requiring qualified clinical support rather than self-directed work.
From the transcript
“You you can't put planks of wood over them. You have to fill them.”
“You you replace the road you did take with the road you should have taken.”
“Your brain brings up the past because you have not specified the proper road forward.”
“you've atoned, you've confessed, you've repented, and you have specified the proper pathway forward”
From the episode
Doctor Jordan Peterson: "The NUMBER ONE Reason For Divorce!" & "The One Small Step You Have To Take To Turn Your Whole Life Around!"
Jordan Peterson