Signs of unresolved trauma can be tricky to recognize. Many of us live with trauma for years without a clue that life could be any different. For women with a trauma background, we may know that our past was “bad”, but we may not see how thoroughly our environment shaped us.
Trauma affects everything about us, from our work lives, relationships, and conscious emotional experiences, right down to the unconscious operations of our brains and bodies. Trauma molds how we process sense stimuli like sights and sounds, and how we store and recall memories. Trauma explains most of our tendencies: how we make eye contact, move our bodies, and hold ourselves upright.
Trauma is like the proverbial water to the fish. Until we have the opportunity to experience life on land, we won’t even have a word for “water”. The good news is that when we start to heal trauma at the root, we can experience widespread transformation in our lives.
The fact that trauma is so pervasive in its wounding effects is exactly why, when we heal it, we experience a beautiful change that flows into every part of us. In this post, we’ll look closer at some of the ways that unresolved trauma might be showing up.
How Unresolved Trauma Manifests in Everyday Life
Many people have heard by now that trauma has symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, and severe anxiety. What we may not have heard about are the ways that complex trauma, the kind that begins in childhood or even in the womb, gets woven into our very personalities.
For people who grew up in distressing circumstances, trauma is baked into our beliefs, emotions, and behavioral tendencies. We take it to be part of our identity. Years later, as adults, we may say, “I am insecure”, or “I am a procrastinator” or “I overeat” without really understanding why. We don’t know where these sides of us came from, nor what purpose they serve. It is likely that our inner world is soaked with shame.
People with complex trauma often blame ourselves for our supposed (or real) deficiencies. We do this even though every other traumatized woman in the world has the same symptoms, and the same shame about those symptoms. As Dr. Janina Fisher (https://janinafisher.com/resources/articles-and-links/) says in her work on shame and trauma, we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people with the same flu experience the same symptoms, would we?
It’s important to call things by their right name, and to recognize the true origin of personality traits and behavioral styles, when they actually come from trauma. For any woman with a substance use disorder, for example, you need to know that you have used substances for a good reason. The substance was a way to meet the demands of life…. in the context of a traumatized nervous system.
Here are some other very common, everyday ways that trauma shows up in women’s lives.
Perfectionism
Perfectionism means more than having a high standard. If you have a perfectionist side to your personality, you may feel severe emotional distress when you don’t meet your standard. If you associate achieving or striving for perfection with feeling safe and secure, to the point where it makes you anxious to be seen when you’re being imperfect, you may have a trauma-generated perfectionist part (to use the language of the Internal Family Systems (https://ifs-institute.com/) model).
Harsh Inner Critic
Hand in hand with the perfectionist Part, the Inner Critic is another common trauma-generated Part. Almost everyone can relate the description of a voice inside our heads that criticizes us. If you have an exceptionally mean inner critic, who berates you, shames you, and calls you names, you may have an over-empowered inner critic. Over-empowered inner critics are a legacy of trauma.
A Need for Control
Another common Part found in women with trauma is a high need for control. Being controlling may be considered a bad thing (by those affected by our behavior), but the attempt to make our environments more predictable stems from bad experiences with uncertainty in the past. If you have a very hard time letting go of outcomes and “seeing what happens”, this can be a sign of a controlling Part, another trauma-generated personality facet.
People Pleasing, Boundary Struggles, and Conflict Avoidance
Do you absolutely hate it when people are mad at you? Do you struggle to set boundaries (or even know what your boundaries are?) If you avoid conflict and boundary setting because you can’t stand feeling angry or having others be angry at you, you may have developed a submission-oriented Part. This Part typically feels it is her job to make sure you make others happy, no matter what. The “collapse and submit part”, Dr. Janina Fisher explains, represents a survival strategy. It was developed in environments where our maintaining our attachment bonds required us to give up our power.
The Psychology of Trauma: What Happens Beneath the Surface
Trauma begins with a basic premise – that we must “do or die”. In other words, something is required on our end – an action must be taken, to ensure that we make it.
To a certain extent, that’s true of all life, and there’s nothing wrong with developing agency. “Working for a living” – expending physical effort to stay alive – is part of being human the moment we leave the womb, as Dr. Daniel J. Siegel explains in his work on personality development (https://drdansiegel.com/book/personality-and-wholeness-in-therapy/). But in trauma-generating environments, we learn that we have to do extreme, almost impossible things to get our life needs met.
When you remember that as mammals, we will not make it to adulthood unless the adults take care of us, the extremity of our survival adaptations makes a little more sense. As babies we needed a lot from our caregivers: not only physical care but also emotional connection. Caregivers must provide relationally-attuned attention that helps us feel “safe, seen, and soothed” (https://drdansiegel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/POSU-Refrigerator-Sheet.pdf) for secure attachment to take root. We all adapted to available attachment conditions in ways that optimized our survival. Women who have trauma had to develop very extreme creative solutions to make it work.
There are many ways a child may take on an extreme burden. She may suppress and hide her needs and emotions, or take the role of parenting her parents. She may perform heroically in school to bring pride to the family, or clown around to make her parents smile. She may have to play nurse or try to control a parent’s drinking. Girls frequently develop strategies based on playing small, acting out, or hurting themselves.
All of these learned behaviors become habits. Double binds turn into permanent compartmentalization. The mental and nervous-system gymnastics we go through to stay safe and attached become personality traits later on. The greater the level of polarization and paradox inside our own psychology, the greater demands our environment must have asked of us.
Everyday Signs You Might Be Living with Unhealed Trauma
In the Internal Family Systems Therapy model, we look at polarizations between Parts of our personality that have opposing strategies. If a Part of you thinks you should stop drinking, and another Part drives you to drink, that’s a classic polarization between parts. Here are some other examples of polarities that sometimes arise in women who survived trauma-generating childhoods.
Work hard, Party Hard
Many women work to the brink of burnout (and beyond!), driving themselves into the ground trying to follow a strategy of finding relational safety through high performance. If I only achieve perfection, then I will at last be loved, is the logic of this Part.
In response to this, another Part, whose job it is to take away the feelings of exhaustion and anger at the requirement to meet this part’s demands, is likely to kick in with some way of numbing out. For women with substance addiction, this can be the typical “party hard” part. There are other ways to numb out and check out, including behavioral addictions like eating disorders, self-harm, compulsive shopping, and more.
Procrastination and Perfection
Procrastination is an avoidance strategy. It is frequently polarized with perfectionism. When we have extremely high standards and it makes us anxious not to meet those standards, we can develop a pattern of avoiding or delaying projects and daily tasks. We postpone because we don’t want to get sucked into horrible feelings associated with not meeting our standards of perfection. This polarity can keep us paralyzed, unable to move forward.
“Shameless” and Ashamed
Some women experience a polarization between an acting out Part, and another Part that feels deeply ashamed of that behavior. For example, a woman may act out sexually, by cheating on her partner. The survival benefit of that behavior is explained by the short term sensations created by the behavior: a sexual “high”, juicy romance or fantasy. The sensations created by acting out are used by a traumatized nervous system to soothe and distract from pain. Another Part of this woman’s personality then holds the shame, guilt, and regret about this behavior. Because these Parts are locked into a polarization, the end result is inner turmoil.
How Villa Kali Ma Helps Women Heal from Emotional Trauma
Villa Kali Ma is a unique treatment provider. We take a holistic approach to healing women, combining the best approaches from all relevant fields. For women who have trauma, we created a dedicated facility, the Retreat (https://villakalima.com/residential-trauma-treatment/). The Retreat is a licensed residential trauma treatment center.
The Retreat is an in-patient setting providing cutting-edge trauma-treatment modalities like brainspotting and ketamine assisted psychotherapy. We also help women through the most tried and true trauma healing approaches like somatic therapy (https://villakalima.com/sustainable-recovery/holistic-somatic-therapy/), Internal Family Systems Therapy (https://marthasweezy.com/project/internal_family_systems_therapy_for_addictions/), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (https://villakalima.com/sustainable-recovery/emdr-therapy/) – powerhouse modalities for restoring feelings of capacity, reprocessing traumatic memory, and bringing back joy.
If you’re ready to look deeper into the ways that trauma, mental illness, and addiction can be healed with compassion, we invite you to check out our many programs for women (https://villakalima.com/join-us/).
