WHO: What do you think the show says about dealing with lying, trauma and secrets?
Shailene: Trauma is such an individual journey. And the way that things affect us, the way that certain events occur, affects people differently and either causes trauma or not. But I think a lot of the problem with trauma, speaking from somebody who grew up in America, is it’s not talked about widely and it’s also something that is widely accepted to be a very solitary experience instead of something where group therapy or group communication or even individual one-on-one communication can be something of a healing tool for the trauma that existed.
And I think that really the biggest problem we’re facing at the moment is we all suffer from experiences when we were children or when we were older. Age doesn’t really matter as much as how we’re still allowing ourselves emotion, our emotional bodies function based on past traumatic events.
My mother always used to say, ‘Truth without compassion is cruelty’. And so when it comes to somebody asking you to hold a secret, or for you to decide not to be truthful and to lie, not condoning a lie, not saying that that’s something you should do, but also being truthful and being honest at the expense of somebody else’s emotional reaction in a way that negatively hurts them at their core is something to be aware.
You can read the rest of the article in this week's WHO magazine.