Choosing Who We Are When Trauma Has Shaped Who We've Been
Photo by Ben Hartley on Unsplash
About a decade ago, I was a few years into my healing journey, early into my discovery of the profound impact of yoga in my life, and in the first weeks of working with a new therapist.
Not just any therapist – the therapist.
If you’ve been in therapy and discovered your perfect therapist match, you know what I mean. And if you haven’t been in therapy or discovered that therapist for you, think of it like a therapy soulmate. Kind of. It’s not romantic, and not meant to last, but it’s the therapist you can stop hiding with, the therapist who can catalyze sometimes tectonic-level growth for you.
Sometimes, anyway.
And that growth isn’t neat or even pretty, trust me. Sometimes you don’t even recognize it as growth because it feels more like having a meltdown. Or shattering into pieces. Or imploding.
Or, like for me, all three at once.
I was in my early thirties. I was married, had two children, a lucrative and stable career, a beautiful home. And all of this, as well as every relationship in my life, was built on a solid foundation of who I understood myself to be.
Ultra responsible.
Unfailingly dependable.
Hard-working, self-sacrificing, endlessly supportive.
Exceptionally competent and organized.
A type-A personality who could always be counted on to be prepared, put out fires to save everyone else’s asses, and take the blame to keep everyone else looking squeaky clean.
This is how I was with family, friends, work… even acquaintances and complete strangers.
You know those ice-breaker kind of questions or personality self-assessments where you are asked to choose what three words you think your friends, family, or coworkers would use to describe you? And then, after you find out what they actually selected for you, the exercise is supposed to highlight the differences between how you viewed yourself and how others viewed you.
For me, though?
They were always the same: responsible, dependable, organized. Sometimes motivated or competent tossed in. No matter who was choosing the words.
They were hallmarks of my personality, hallmarks of who I was fundamentally as a person.
Right?
Right!
Until…
One day, my wonderful therapist asked me if I was familiar with “The Laundry List.”
I wasn’t, and like you may be doing right now, I wondered what it was and what it had to do with the trauma that was the reason I was sitting across from her. Instead of telling me, she assigned it to me as homework—to look it up and think about what I learned before our session the following week.
Like the responsible, studious, dependable people-pleaser I was, I went home and looked it up immediately, discovering that it was a list of 14 trademark personality traits of adult children of alcoholics, of which I am one. You can read the list here if you’re interested, but what I discovered was that I had several of these traits.
And by several, I mean all but two of them. (I actually had those as well, but didn’t see it until a few years later.)
Growing up in an abusive, substance-addicted household that contended with mental illness as well as extreme poverty and food insecurity, on top of abandonment, neglect, and sexual abuse, I’d become somewhat of an expert in dissociation. It simply happened automatically, and I didn’t even realize at the time that my most common state of being was, in fact, a state of dissociation.
So, when I read that list and felt numb, that felt normal to me.
Okay, new information, cool. Not a big deal, no surprise there. Homework done—I can check that off my to-do list and move on with my day.
But something happened that night while I was sleeping… my brain refused to just catalog this information away with my childhood memories and instead insisted on forcing conscious processing.
In short, I woke up into an identity crisis.
I was in a full-blown state of panic as soon as I opened my eyes, having lost all sense of who I was because every trademark of my personality, every way I identified myself and others identified me, was reflected in “The Laundry List.”
And if everything I thought I was was, in fact, just a trauma response…
Then who was I really?
Who would I be if I healed?
Who would be in my life if I became a different person?
How could I be a different person after 30+ years?
There’s a scene at the end of the children’s movie Inside Out when a pre-teen boy picks up the water bottle of the main character, Riley, a pre-teen girl, and inside his brain is total chaos: red lights flashing, sirens blaring, all the emotions that control his brain running amok, papers flying around… nuclear threat level panic.
That was my brain that morning.
I felt I hadn’t just hit rock bottom, but that I’d slammed into it at the speed of light.
I eventually reached out to my therapist in the middle of that meltdown, and she called me to talk me through it. I can still hear her voice when I think about that conversation.
What she helped me to understand was that maybe those traits were there because I had alcoholic parents, maybe they were there because they were simply part of who I was, or maybe they were both.
But that wasn’t what mattered.
What mattered was that I got to choose.
I got to choose which traits served me and I wanted to keep, and which traits didn’t serve me and I wanted to let go of.
Just because something may have developed as a response to my childhood trauma didn’t mean I had to reject it or that it had to disappear as I healed.
I got to choose who I was.
And I got to choose who I became.
That realization didn’t magically resolve the identity crisis I was having that morning, but it did give me something I desperately needed in that moment: a way forward.
I didn’t have to figure out, once and for all, which parts of me were trauma and which parts were me.
I didn’t have to tear myself apart trying to find some untouched, perfectly authentic version of myself underneath everything that had happened to me.
What I discovered in the ensuing days and weeks was that healing wasn’t about becoming someone completely different, but about choosing who I was rather than allowing my trauma to decide for me.
Instead of feeling powerless and like the ground was missing beneath me, I began to feel empowered by what I now knew. I could shape the person I wanted to be.
And for the first time, because I’d reached rock bottom, I had solid ground to stand on as I began.