6 Common Trauma Responses
#1 Self Betrayal: abandonment of yourself, your desires, + your
needs in order to be loved or chosen by another person.
#2 People-pleasing: fear around
saying no, avoidance of any type of conflict, guilt or shame around wanting to do things just for you.
#3 Addiction: using a substance or an activity to avoid uncomfortable emotions + to regulate the nervous system.
#4 Catastrophic Perspective:
adopting a lens to see the world( + people in the world) as a dangerous, terrible place where people are out to get you + no one has good or pure intentions.
#5 Hypervigilance: a survival-fear based nervous system state where a person is hyper-aware of their environment, how other people perceive them, Often diagnosed as ‘social anxiety disorder’ or ‘generalized anxiety disorder’
#6 Dissociation: when a person is physically there + mentally gone from their body + environment. This results in losing memories and/or feeling like you’re in a haze or detached from reality.
Many people are re-enacting trauma responses every day—believing it’s their personality. Or just ‘the way they are.
When we have trauma, our mind + body learn 3 things:
1. I am not safe.
2. I cannot trust myself or I cannot trust those around me.
3. I must disconnect from myself + my own needs in order
to be loved + accepted by other person.
All of this is an unconscious protective response in order to avoid experiencing more of the same wounding.
Many trauma responses are highly misunderstood (especially addiction) + leave people in cycles of deep shame + self judgement.
Trauma cannot be measured. It cannot be qualified. No two people are impacted the same— it’s a unique human experience.
In my work, it’s important to help people understand *why* we engage in behaviors. They’re adaptations. They’re protection that we’ve been practicing often since we were children.
Healing is about becoming conscious to trauma responses + teaching the wise adult self that we can respond in new ways in alignment with who we actually are