(Pervious post)
When we say trauma, we usually mean Shock Trauma: a single, harmful event that clashes with some basic assumptions that the afflicted person had about reality. 
The most simple example of this is a person being bitten by a dog, and subsequently developing a phobia of dogs. 
Complex Trauma is a term that was first explained to me as repeated Shock Trauma, which made me think about the person from the example above being repeatedly bitten by different dogs - but that, surprisingly, doesn’t qualify as Complex Trauma. 
Clinically speaking, in order for an event to be considered Complex Trauma it needs to be both repetitive AND relational in nature - to happen between people, usually parent /child or prisoner/captor. 
I’m going to go on a limb and guess that you’ve already came up with several examples for this - a girl being viciously bullied at school over the span of several months, a boy repeatedly failing to protect the women in his life from violent men, a borderline-feral girl being taken to a foster home where she is often punished for not complying with demands with which she is unequipped to comply.
While the person suffering from Shock Trauma can return to their normal life to recover, for the person going through Complex Trauma there is no “normal” to return to - they live in a constant state of tension, and so it’s not surprising that the post-traumatic-stress that is caused by Complex Trauma is characterized by symptoms that are more severe than those of Shock Trauma and a greater negative effect on one's ability to maintain social relations. 
But while Complex Trauma has to have a relational element, it doesn’t have to come in the form of repeated Shock Trauma. Another example of Complex Trauma would be a girl growing up with a single father who demands that she provide his emotional needs while he ignores hers.
When looking for a reason why the suffering of Pale’s protagonists feels so different from the suffering in Worm and Pact, I initially went for the angle of Shock vs. Complex Trauma. But as I began to research for this essay, I realized that’s not the right way to slice it - first of all, Verona, Taylor, and Blake all suffer from clear cut cases of Complex Trauma, while Lucy and Avery are borderline cases[6]. 
Looking for another definition that would capture the difference, I tried going with Invisible Trauma, a term referring to either Shock or Complex Trauma that is hard to diagnose because the person is high functioning. Again, this was true for Verona and Brian, but not so much for Lucy and Avery. 
In order to resolve this issue we're going to use the non-clinical terms Loud Trauma and Quiet Trauma. 
In Loud Trauma, the person knows that something bad happened and likely knows that they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress. More importantly, they have a clear name for their trauma - something they can say and instantly get sympathy from other people, (perhaps over a fugly burger,) or at the very least get acknowledgement.  
Someone suffering from Quiet Trauma, however, will find it difficult to communicate the gravity of their situation to other people. 
It’s very easy to imagine a younger Verona failing to explain how neglected she felt by her father:
“It’s like he doesn’t care about me at all!”
“What, he ignores you?”
“No, he… He actually wants us to spend time together, pretty much all of the time.” 
“So what’s the problem?”
But the real kicker of Quiet Trauma is in the fact that the afflicted person might not even know that they are suffering from it. 
Pale provides many small, quiet heartbreaks, and my favorite one might be the moment where
Verona narrates the guilt she feels over having it so easy, compared to her friends - after all, she is straight and white, so what is she complaining about?
That guilt comes in sharp contrast with the fact that from a clinical point of view, the trauma that she endured is significantly more severe than theirs, as are its symptoms.
This shouldn’t be taken as a diminishment of Avery’s and Lucy’s suffering. Whether or not the girls’ suffering clinically qualifies as trauma, it’s intense, constant, and damaging. That damage is worsened by the lack of solidarity or empathy. Just like with Verona, it’s easy to imagine someone well-meaning-but-ignorant trying to talk to the girls and not really getting it:

“I’m the only black kid in a white town.” 
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Are they, like, racist to you?” 
“Actually… I don’t know.”
“So… What’s the problem?” 

Or in Avery’s case:

“I don’t have any friends.” 
“Oh, maybe you should play some sports.”
“I’m already playing sports.”
“So… what’s the problem? Just make friends there, or maybe talk to some people in class. If you’re feeling lonely, you can always play with your siblings!”

For a person going through Quiet Trauma, it’s easy to take society’s cue that there’s nothing wrong, and be swayed away from seeking a pragmatic solution to their problems, therapy, or even a name for their situation. 
There’s a lot of comfort in being diagnosed. It’s not just that the diagnosed person can be relieved of the guilt that comes with seeing themselves as “just weird/weak/stupid”, but it also allows them to seek external knowledge and learn how to manage the condition. 
All of these benefits are often denied from the person suffering from Quiet Trauma, that is by definition undiagnosed. 
This is one of the most important ways in which Pale informs the reader about the real world - after diving into those perspectives, seeing the girls’ troubles up close, the reader is transformed into someone who is far less likely to make the same mistake as the well-meaning-but-ignorant person depicted above. Someone that, hopefully, will know when to validate someone's experience of nameless suffering. 
Like other works by this author, Pale champions the value of seeing more perspectives, urging and luring the reader into expanding their view, into acknowledging how little we know about the lives that other people live.
While Worm expanded our views on Loud Trauma (be it Shock or Complex, Visible or Invisible), Pale aims to do so with Quiet Trauma, as it is the main source of suffering for heroes, villains, and everyone in between. From characters as unmemorable as Henrrietta, who is unable to bed the man she loves after years of unconsenting proximity to her “brothers”, all the way to Carmine Beast who’s at the heart of this bloody mess, slowly eroded by the oppressive denial of her very nature.   

“What about Melissa?” You ask, your eyebrows furrowed. “Her trauma is breaking her ankle so badly it almost snapped off. That sounds like Loud Trauma to me.” 

Pun intended? No? Okay, it’s tempting to think of Melissa’s ankle-snapping incident as a single event that ruins her life, and it is, but notice that her suffering doesn’t stem from the event itself (she doesn’t have nightmares about the fall itself or pain, and she isn’t triggered by heights) but from her isolation. The social connections that were reliant on her ability to land a backflip are now gone and, to add insult to injury, she’s now unable to do the one thing she was actually proud of.  
Nicolette's case is similar. Her trauma isn’t being pushed into a bathtub and breaking her skull - it’s being surrounded by people who simply don't care about her suffering. 

“What about Drowne, though?” you ask, eyes narrowed. “He was beaten so badly his face was disfigured. That has to be Loud Trauma.” 

Fair enough, I’ll give you that one. Loud Trauma does exist in this book, but it’s not at the focus. While we’re talking about Drowne, I should say that he provides one of the clearest examples of a traumatized person recreating their trauma. This is easy to see in the case of Loud Trauma (such as Drowne intentionally disfiguring Reid Musser’s face, or most characters in Worm doing basically anything), but it’s harder to catch in cases of Quiet Trauma - such as Verona’s avoidant attachment actively making it harder for Jeremy to meet the needs her father didn’t; Lucy’s hostility alienating her from her classmates; and Avery’s loneliness motivating her plans to become a solo traveler (maybe?).
Mellissa can be seen as recreating her rejection, or attempting to, by being so deeply obnoxious to the trio instead of jumping[7] at the opportunity to befriend them. 
Nicolette might be seen as replicating the cold environment she grew up in by working for Alexander (who makes it clear how little he cares by gainsaying her on a regular basis), or it might be a pragmatic decision that has nothing to do with her trauma. I don’t know. 
The further away we get from the protagonists, the harder it becomes to see these things clearly, but I think that’s the point - it’s easy to interact with people suffering from Quiet Trauma and have no idea what kind of internal despair they’re struggling with. 
Despair, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say desperation, is the keystone of the worldbuilding of Pale. There is a sense in which every single being in this world is barely holding on - not just recovering from the trauma of having their needs unmet for an extended period of time, but living those unmet needs.
This translates to an underlying tension, the feeling that getting what you want always comes at the price of denying someone what they need. 
This is true across timescales. On the one hand we have Reggie, the composite kid, who survives one week at a time, unable to afford not to screw others over. On the other hand, we have the ancient Carmine Beast and Guilherme, who likewise find themselves crushed over centuries by forces beyond their control. 
That quiet desperation, or more accurately the perspective through which it could be used to excuse cruelty, is the real antagonist of this book. 
Beyond any particular adversity, beyond any particular challenge, the girls’ true goal is to defeat that desperation and the systems that perpetuate it, to prove that we can make this world one where sentient beings help one another. While Taylor aspired to get everyone to work together, the wild practitioners aim to cultivate paradise one relationship at a time, each one in their own way. 

At first I thought that the strong friendship between the girls was a literary tool, alleviating the suffering that was so ubiquitous in the author’s works - and let me tell you, I was not complaining.

It’s so nice to enjoy the unique beauty and sophistication of the author’s writing without having to endure a constant psychic assault…

(You nod in enthusiastic agreement.)

… but now I realize it’s more than that - it’s a proof of concept. The girls prove, with their own none-transactional alliance, that such a thing is possible - the first small step from which they seek to expand the garden through the bonds they form. 
And the word prove is important here - because desperation isn’t the real enemy, but the lie that things have to be this way, that the world isn’t nice so we can’t afford to be nice. This is what the girls aim to disprove, from the very first scene (not including the prologue), from the very first interaction between my most hated character in this book and my favorite one, who is, of course…

Verona - I'm In This Picture And I Don't Like It

(Which I'll post on the subreddit and link here as soon as I'm done writing it.)

Footnotes:
[6] On paper, Lucy’s case doesn’t qualify as Complex Trauma precisely because she has one healthy and loving parental relationship, something that Verona doesn’t. Whether or not Avery suffers from Complex Trauma would be even harder to diagnose. 
According to the therapist I consulted for the writing of this essay, in order to make a diagnosis someone would have to sit down and talk to the girls, and evaluate the severity of the symptoms. Even then, there is no clear threshold to what qualifies as Post-Traumatic-Stress and what doesn’t. The word "Spectrum" was brought up several times.

[7] Pun fully intended, lol.

(Edit: I was asked by the moderators to unite the first two posts into a post and followup post, but because the character limit doesn't allow for comments, I'm putting them both the post body. The reader is requested to pretend that this is not a super long read but instead two reads of convenient length.)

Abstract

Pale is a wild ride. I’ve read about a third of it (to the point of the Alcazarization of the Furs), and it made me shed many a manly tear, laugh loud enough for my neighbors to comment, it scared me to my bones, and even offended me at times[1]. 
And still, when a friend asked if I was planning to make a video about it, like the ones I’ve been doing about Worm, my initial response was a no. I thought that Pale simply doesn’t have enough meat to bite into to make for a satisfying analysis[2]. 
It is with great pride and joy that I report to you that I was wrong. 
I gave it a shot, expecting to end up with a short essay focusing on the characters’ engineering, but the more I wrote the more themes and patterns emerged until it became clear that this book is what we call in the world of literary analysis “hella juicy” - something that I wouldn’t have known had I not decided to write this analysis. 
Like the author’s other works, Pale praises the choice to take on suffering for the sake of other people as the highest grace, followed closely by the choice to see other people’s perspectives. 
This grace, as always, is coupled with a sin, but that sin is very different from the one presented in Worm. (I’m going to use Worm as a go-to reference for the simple reason that it makes it easier and shorter to express observations about Pale, but I’ll keep the comparisons to a useful minimum.) 
While Worm’s antagonists were fueled by spite, a mostly unconscious desire to hurt others in order to alleviate their own suffering, the antagonists of Pale are driven by desperation and necessity, a suffocating lack of options - or more accurately, they are driven by a worldview in which that necessity excuses selfishness and cruelty. 
In this analysis (=series of Reddit posts) we’ll examine the way these worldviews clash; practice as metaphor for writing, or speaking, or both; the unique way this book handles trauma (Loud and Quiet); the underlying Horror of Being Composite; and what it is that makes the main characters so gosh darn loveable and their friendship so precious. 
Thank you for giving this essay a shot. Let’s begin by talking about…

The Practice As a Metaphor

My father once asked me what’s the point of fantasy, as a literary genre. 
Why should we waste our time with speculative realities, he wondered, when it’s obviously more useful to learn about things that exist?
There are many good answers to this question, but here’s the one I find most valuable: 
Fantasy is absolutely about “things that exist”. It’s about people: the way they think and feel, the way they act, the way they are.  
The fantastical elements, be them lightsabers or rings of power, are used not to take the place of the human beings in the story, but to facilitate their examination, and Pale is a champion of this. 
Like many of the author's works, it takes something that already existed in the literary world and takes it further than the reader thought was possible. 
Pale’s examination of human beings happens on three different levels - independent of the practice, directly through the practice, and metaphorically through the practice. 
Independently from the practice, the girls were suffering real, invisible pain even before of their Awakening - Verona with her torturous relationship with her father, Avery with her silent drowning and Lucy with her loud one, as much as it was emblematic of her life as the only black girl in a very white town. 
Directly, the practice is used to give the reader a view of real-life fates that would be difficult to explore through a natural progression of the narrative. One example of this is the scene of Lucy creating her eavesdropping implement and listening, in a past vision, to the conversation that took place before her step father left, a display of how “quiet” racism can wound someone in a way that never quite heals. 
Another example is the scene where Verona is taken by Alpeana into a nightmare where we join her in a horrifyingly credible depiction of what it’s like to be a social dropout in small-town-Ontario, an existence in which her only solace comes from a pipe. (That scene, btw, is the example I used when justifying the existence of fantasy to my father.)
The metaphorical element is trickier to point at. While Worm’s metaphor was clear to even the least-analytically inclined reader, with Pale it’s slightly harder to answer the question - what is this book about?

“But No-Am” you say, hesitant. “You already said that in the abstract - The practice is a metaphor for writing and speaking, or something?”

Yeah, I guess I spoiled that one for myself. Does that make sense to you?

“Not really? The practice is a magic system. It’s reliant on the way that humans think, and so it might have some similarities with human communications, but that doesn’t make it about writing. What does it even mean, for something to be about something else?”

A tough question to answer, but let’s try it together. It certainly isn’t a question of what the author, dead or alive, means for the work to be about, and it’s not about what interpretation we like the most, either. 
To me, the work being about something means that while reading it, while processing its  dynamics, the reader is gently led to contemplate similar real world dynamics. This is easier to demonstrate with the practice-as-a-metaphor-for-speaking interpretation of Pale: By paying attention to matters of claim, rule of three, gainsaying and foreswearing, the reader is made to think about how in real life shaping public opinion affects what one gets or doesn’t get; how setting the tone early in an argument shapes the rest of discussion; how a threefold repetition solidifies what it is that’s being said[3]; how proving someone wrong is, in real life,  a form of attack; and my favorite - how lying drains one of their power. 

“Wait a second, that’s wrong. It’s not lying that drains one’s power, it’s the being caught in a lie and judged to be a liar that makes one unable to practice.”

Correct! And you see how that’s much more powerful as an analogy to real-life-lying, right? If you lie and nobody ever finds out, you’re in the clear. But if you break a promise and someone calls you out publicly, your word loses value, and you’re no longer able to make pacts[4]. 
The practice also offers more subtle parallels, like how breaking bread with your enemy literally makes it harder to attack you - in real life, serving barbecue to the detectives coming to question you about a murder probably won’t stop them from coming up with correct conclusions, but if you want to resolve a fight with someone you care about, few things are more effective than making them a nice meal.

“Okay, so the mechanism takes the reader through thinking about all these vibes-based things, like the traditions of hospitality and all that, I get that. But I don’t think that it has much to do with writing.”

I didn’t either, initially, but the more I read, the more I found this interpretation necessary. 
Relatively early on, Verona says that she believes Avery could endure having a boring job if she could still practice in her free time. 
This baffled me. Why would Avery need a job? Capes never had to worry about finding a job, so why would a practitioner, who is similarly much more powerful than an ordinary human being? Wouldn’t they be able to provide and exchange value in a way that’s more time efficient? 
That made me think of practice as symbolic to something other than speaking - something that is so fun to do that it can keep you going through a really boring job (putting up drywall comes to mind, for some reason), something that you can live off of if you’re good at it or well connected. There’s also the matter of conjuring beings that can be powerful and useful, while at the same time being non-existent to most people - some very old and known, others new, strange, and quick to pass. 

“Like you conjured up a representation of the reader in order to make your essay more engaging?”

Yes, exactly! The similarities between practice and writing kept popping up, but I wasn’t quite convinced until I tried to apply this parallel to the wild practitioners. While the establishment practitioner learns from textbooks and teachers, being told what to do and how, the wild practitioner interacts with the Others themselves and learns in a way that’s unmediated by another person. 
This reminded me of the author's works. For one, the thing that makes the works so refreshing is the fact that the writing doesn’t follow some guidebook, or at the very least doesn’t feel like it does. It feels like it was learned by direct interaction with the concepts, by understanding and questioning them, and these questions are at the heart of this book.
These questions can be “What if a Buffy-esque story would be, instead of about horny 17 year olds, about horny 13 year olds?” or “What if instead of it being about longing for a normal life, it would show how horrible normal life can be?” 
But it can also be deeper, more universal questions, like “What makes a friendship stable and loving?” 
This is a question that we’re going to get into in a big way, but for now we all can agree that what makes the girls’ friendship so beautiful is not that they understand each other - but that they try to. 
The wild practice, as I understand it, is a metaphor for the writing of this very book, but it extends beyond that. Just like our teenage witches, the author is not limited to a single paradigm, and so he is free to learn from many different sources, and to switch up the elements constructing his stories - from superpowers/scifi to supernatural drama; from constant, crushing loneliness to supportive, heartwarming friendships; from self deception to the deception of others (and Others); from the horror of being composite (as it is explored through the characters finding out that they have different brain parts aiming to achieve different goals), to another, more fluid form of that very same horror (as it is explored in cases like Edith betraying Matthew, inviting the reader to wonder if the part of her that succumbed to addictive behavior is the echo of the pyromaniac turned nymphomaniac and drug addict.)
I’m sure you can find many more examples of this. 

“Yeah, I see the parallel, but I don’t know if it’s intentional, or if it means what you think it means.” 

That’s fine - as we go over the characters and their relationship with the practice, we’re going to find more locks to use this analytic key on, and each one will give more weight to the claim. 
But before we start analyzing the characters themselves, there’s one more concept we need to introduce, one more difference between Worm and Pale that we need to examine. This difference is complex and radical, and though I felt it from the very beginning, it took me a long time to point it out. It’s so fundamental that I didn’t even know what to call it, and we can’t discuss things without naming them. As you probably know - Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power[5].

And the name that I ended up finding for this concept is…

Loud and Quiet Trauma

When we say trauma, we usually mean Shock Trauma: a single, harmful event that clashes with some basic assumptions that the afflicted person had about reality. 
The most simple example of this is a person being bitten by a dog, and subsequently developing a phobia of dogs. 
Complex Trauma is a term that was first explained to me as repeated Shock Trauma, which made me think about the person from the example above being repeatedly bitten by different dogs - but that, surprisingly, doesn’t qualify as Complex Trauma. 
Clinically speaking, in order for an event to be considered Complex Trauma it needs to be both repetitive AND relational in nature - to happen between people, usually parent /child or prisoner/captor. 
I’m going to go on a limb and guess that you’ve already came up with several examples for this - a girl being viciously bullied at school over the span of several months, a boy repeatedly failing to protect the women in his life from violent men, a borderline-feral girl being taken to a foster home where she is often punished for not complying with demands with which she is unequipped to comply.
While the person suffering from Shock Trauma can return to their normal life to recover, for the person going through Complex Trauma there is no “normal” to return to - they live in a constant state of tension, and so it’s not surprising that the post-traumatic-stress that is caused by Complex Trauma is characterized by symptoms that are more severe than those of Shock Trauma and a greater negative effect on one's ability to maintain social relations. 
But while Complex Trauma has to have a relational element, it doesn’t have to come in the form of repeated Shock Trauma. Another example of Complex Trauma would be a girl growing up with a single father who demands that she provide his emotional needs while he ignores hers.
When looking for a reason why the suffering of Pale’s protagonists feels so different from the suffering in Worm and Pact, I initially went for the angle of Shock vs. Complex Trauma. But as I began to research for this essay, I realized that’s not the right way to slice it - first of all, Verona, Taylor, and Blake all suffer from clear cut cases of Complex Trauma, while Lucy and Avery are borderline cases[6]. 
Looking for another definition that would capture the difference, I tried going with Invisible Trauma, a term referring to either Shock or Complex Trauma that is hard to diagnose because the person is high functioning. Again, this was true for Verona and Brian, but not so much for Lucy and Avery. 
In order to resolve this issue we're going to use the non-clinical terms Loud Trauma and Quiet Trauma. 
In Loud Trauma, the person knows that something bad happened and likely knows that they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress. More importantly, they have a clear name for their trauma - something they can say and instantly get sympathy from other people, (perhaps over a fugly burger,) or at the very least get acknowledgement.  
Someone suffering from Quiet Trauma, however, will find it difficult to communicate the gravity of their situation to other people. 
It’s very easy to imagine a younger Verona failing to explain how neglected she felt by her father:
“It’s like he doesn’t care about me at all!”
“What, he ignores you?”
“No, he… He actually wants us to spend time together, pretty much all of the time.” 
“So what’s the problem?”
But the real kicker of Quiet Trauma is in the fact that the afflicted person might not even know that they are suffering from it. 
Pale provides many small, quiet heartbreaks, and my favorite one might be the moment where
Verona narrates the guilt she feels over having it so easy, compared to her friends - after all, she is straight and white, so what is she complaining about?
That guilt comes in sharp contrast with the fact that from a clinical point of view, the trauma that she endured is significantly more severe than theirs, as are its symptoms.
This shouldn’t be taken as a diminishment of Avery’s and Lucy’s suffering. Whether or not the girls’ suffering clinically qualifies as trauma, it’s intense, constant, and damaging. That damage is worsened by the lack of solidarity or empathy. Just like with Verona, it’s easy to imagine someone well-meaning-but-ignorant trying to talk to the girls and not really getting it:

“I’m the only black kid in a white town.” 
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Are they, like, racist to you?” 
“Actually… I don’t know.”
“So… What’s the problem?” 

Or in Avery’s case:

“I don’t have any friends.” 
“Oh, maybe you should play some sports.”
“I’m already playing sports.”
“So… what’s the problem? Just make friends there, or maybe talk to some people in class. If you’re feeling lonely, you can always play with your siblings!”

For a person going through Quiet Trauma, it’s easy to take society’s cue that there’s nothing wrong, and be swayed away from seeking a pragmatic solution to their problems, therapy, or even a name for their situation. 
There’s a lot of comfort in being diagnosed. It’s not just that the diagnosed person can be relieved of the guilt that comes with seeing themselves as “just weird/weak/stupid”, but it also allows them to seek external knowledge and learn how to manage the condition. 
All of these benefits are often denied from the person suffering from Quiet Trauma, that is by definition undiagnosed. 
This is one of the most important ways in which Pale informs the reader about the real world - after diving into those perspectives, seeing the girls’ troubles up close, the reader is transformed into someone who is far less likely to make the same mistake as the well-meaning-but-ignorant person depicted above. Someone that, hopefully, will know when to validate someone's experience of nameless suffering. 
Like other works by this author, Pale champions the value of seeing more perspectives, urging and luring the reader into expanding their view, into acknowledging how little we know about the lives that other people live.
While Worm expanded our views on Loud Trauma (be it Shock or Complex, Visible or Invisible), Pale aims to do so with Quiet Trauma, as it is the main source of suffering for heroes, villains, and everyone in between. From characters as unmemorable as Henrietta, who is unable to bed the man she loves after years of unconsenting proximity to her “brothers”, all the way to Carmine Beast who’s at the heart of this bloody mess, slowly eroded by the oppressive denial of her very nature.   

“What about Melissa?” You ask, your eyebrows furrowed. “Her trauma is breaking her ankle so badly it almost snapped off. That sounds like Loud Trauma to me.” 

Pun intended? No? Okay, it’s tempting to think of Melissa’s ankle-snapping incident as a single event that ruins her life, and it is, but notice that her suffering doesn’t stem from the event itself (she doesn’t have nightmares about the fall itself or pain, and she isn’t triggered by heights) but from her isolation. The social connections that were reliant on her ability to land a backflip are now gone and, to add insult to injury, she’s now unable to do the one thing she was actually proud of.  
Nicolette's case is similar. Her trauma isn’t being pushed into a bathtub and breaking her skull - it’s being surrounded by people who simply don't care about her suffering. 

“What about Drowne, though?” you ask, eyes narrowed. “He was beaten so badly his face was disfigured. That has to be Loud Trauma.” 

Fair enough, I’ll give you that one. Loud Trauma does exist in this book, but it’s not at the focus. While we’re talking about Drowne, I should say that he provides one of the clearest examples of a traumatized person recreating their trauma. This is easy to see in the case of Loud Trauma (such as Drowne intentionally disfiguring Reid Musser’s face, or most characters in Worm doing basically anything), but it’s harder to catch in cases of Quiet Trauma - such as Verona’s avoidant attachment actively making it harder for Jeremy to meet the needs her father didn’t; Lucy’s hostility alienating her from her classmates; and Avery’s loneliness motivating her plans to become a solo traveler (maybe?).
Mellissa can be seen as recreating her rejection, or attempting to, by being so deeply obnoxious to the trio instead of jumping[7] at the opportunity to befriend them. 
Nicolette might be seen as replicating the cold environment she grew up in by working for Alexander (who makes it clear how little he cares by gainsaying her on a regular basis), or it might be a pragmatic decision that has nothing to do with her trauma. I don’t know. 
The further away we get from the protagonists, the harder it becomes to see these things clearly, but I think that’s the point - it’s easy to interact with people suffering from Quiet Trauma and have no idea what kind of internal despair they’re struggling with. 
Despair, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say desperation, is the keystone of the worldbuilding of Pale. There is a sense in which every single being in this world is barely holding on - not just recovering from the trauma of having their needs unmet for an extended period of time, but living those unmet needs.
This translates to an underlying tension, the feeling that getting what you want always comes at the price of denying someone what they need. 
This is true across timescales. On the one hand we have Reggie, the composite kid, who survives one week at a time, unable to afford not to screw others over. On the other hand, we have the ancient Carmine Beast and Guilherme, who likewise find themselves crushed over centuries by forces beyond their control. 
That quiet desperation, or more accurately the perspective through which it could be used to excuse cruelty, is the real antagonist of this book. 
Beyond any particular adversity, beyond any particular challenge, the girls’ true goal is to defeat that desperation and the systems that perpetuate it, to prove that we can make this world one where sentient beings help one another. While Taylor aspired to get everyone to work together, the wild practitioners aim to cultivate paradise one relationship at a time, each one in their own way. 

At first I thought that the strong friendship between the girls was a literary tool, alleviating the suffering that was so ubiquitous in the author’s works - and let me tell you, I was not complaining.

It’s so nice to enjoy the unique beauty and sophistication of the author’s writing without having to endure a constant psychic assault…

(You nod in enthusiastic agreement.)

… but now I realize it’s more than that - it’s a proof of concept. The girls prove, with their own none-transactional alliance, that such a thing is possible - the first small step from which they seek to expand the garden through the bonds they form. 
And the word prove is important here - because desperation isn’t the real enemy, but the lie that things have to be this way, that the world isn’t nice so we can’t afford to be nice. This is what the girls aim to disprove, from the very first scene (not including the prologue), from the very first interaction between my most hated character in this book and my favorite one, who is, of course…

Verona - I'm In This Picture And I Don't Like It

(Which I'll post on the subreddit and link here as soon as I'm done writing it.)

Footnotes:

[1] At one point John quotes Sun Dze’s Art of War, to which Toadswallow, whose greatest joy is farting in another goblin’s face, responds with mockery and admonishment. "Art of war?” he asks. “You quoting that isn’t so different from [a] college douchehole quoting Nietzsche.”

This was a blow to my ego, considering my tendency to quote Friedrich in my essays, but fortunately I got over it because he who has a “why” can endure almost any “how”.

[2] I said it once and I’ll say it again - if you want to deepen your own understanding of a story, writing your own analysis is one of the better ways to go.

[3] Do you remember how in Fight Club, Tyler Durden tricks the protagonist into promising something three times, and the viewer intuitively understands how that makes the promise more meaningful?

[4] There’s a Talmudic tale that goes something like this: A man comes to his Rabbi asking for advice. 
“What’s the problem?” The Rabbi asks. 
“I’ve broken my promise to a friend, and now he won’t trust me no matter what I say. Is there anything I can do to fix it?”
“Yes, there is. It’s a two step ritual, and if you complete it your friend will trust you again. The first step is this - take a pillow stuffed with feathers to a tall rooftop, open up the pillow and disperse the feathers in the wind, every single one of them. After you do that, come back and I’ll tell you the second step.”
Hopeful and excited, the man thanks the Rabbi and leaves. Several hours later, he returns. “Okay, I did it. What’s the second step?”
The Rabbi smiles. “The second step is to put the feathers back in the pillow, motherfucker.”

[5] A quote from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a book we’ll talk more about later on. 

[6] On paper, Lucy’s case doesn’t qualify as Complex Trauma precisely because she has one healthy and loving parental relationship, something that Verona doesn’t. Whether or not Avery suffers from Complex Trauma would be even harder to diagnose. 
According to the therapist I consulted for the writing of this essay, in order to make a diagnosis someone would have to sit down and talk to the girls, and evaluate the severity of the symptoms. Even then, there is no clear threshold to what qualifies as Post-Traumatic-Stress and what doesn’t. The word "Spectrum" was brought up several times.

[7] Pun fully intended, lol.