In addition to marks of childhood and adolescent problems long past, you may find other signs of heavy emotional burden and upheaval. Trauma lines are bars that dissect or cut through the life line, or another major line. The longer the line, the more pronounced or severe the problem in your life. As a rule of palmistry, trauma lines stay with you as long as you carry their burdens — or until you have learned the lesson you were obviously intended to learn from the experience.

Signs of trauma may also be conveyed by islands that cut through the life line — they indicate a time when your vitality or zest for living is low and you are in poor health. Islands are not necessarily bad omens, but can represent a period of being extremely susceptible to illness — or, worse yet, being accident-prone.

Lines of trauma can also appear on the other major lines — as well as on the mounts of the fingers and the mounts of the palm. If you want to know what kind of trauma you might be headed for, or which area of your life might be affected by the trauma, write down each area where you see lines of trauma and then look up its correspondence to a specific area of your life. For instance, if you have trauma lines that dissect your life line but also run through your mount of Venus, you may have a challenging, often turbulent love life.