How Trauma Impacts Your Sense of Self: Part I

Trauma unequivocally impacts your relationship with yourself and challenges and changes how you think about yourself.

Before a traumatic life experience, it is common to believe in your ability to make good decisions, control your environment, and keep yourself safe. Trauma smashes these beliefs and leads to new ones, namely being unable to count on your judgment: if you once judged a situation, person, or behavior to be safe, and it proved to be traumatic, it is easy to believe that your actions cannot change or influence things, that you cannot control your fate, and that forces beyond your power dictate your safety.

These new beliefs can feel more accurate and convincing than the ones you held pretrauma, and thereby lead to a reduced sense of agency and safety—and a natural consequence of that is more frequent and intense feelings of vulnerability and fearfulness.

A common way to try and reduce or manage this increased sense of vulnerability and fearfulness is to increase your sense of responsibility and control. You might find yourself claiming responsibility for the traumatic occurrence, ignoring the fact that no traumatic event is caused by the person who experiences it. Or you may try and control all facets of your life: scheduling every minute of the day, micromanaging the lives of those around you, or establishing impossible standards of perfection.

Even though these efforts at increasing your sense of control are entirely understandable, they do not lead to the desired outcome and often cause you to try and control more elements of your life. Not only does a control agenda not deliver the safety and security you are trying to achieve, but such an approach exacts a high psychological cost. Excessive activities exhaust the human body, mind, and spirit and excessive expectations lead to harsh criticisms and even self-hatred.

The damage that trauma exacts upon your self-esteem also feeds into the harshness and self-hatred that frequently arises following a traumatic life event. It is common to believe that if you had been smarter, faster, fought harder, yelled louder, or simply been a better person, then the trauma would not have occurred. These inaccurate beliefs, though understandable, cause damage by creating a falsely logical conclusion that since the trauma did happen, you must have deserved or caused it—and if you did, then all the shame and self-hatred you feel is warranted.

These beliefs grate away your self-esteem and stoke harsh opinions of yourself to the point where the ensuing self-loathing can become unbearable and paralyzing, leading you to want to hide, disappear, perpetually apologize for your existence, or desperately prove that you are worthy.

You deserve and need to work on challenging these beliefs in order to reclaim the fact that you can make good decisions, that you do have some control over the vagaries of life, and that you are able to impact your safety in the world. Stay connected with the friends and loved ones in your life who are emotionally healthy so that you can hear and give credence to their thoughts regarding your abilities and capabilities. Finally, don’t forget to reach out to a professional and harness her or his training, compassion, and expertise to help you heal and grow through these trauma-induced beliefs.

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