Trauma Hides our Authentic Self

In all my years as an addiction psychotherapist, I have found unresolved trauma to be the most common underpinning of addictive behaviors. A trauma-informed therapy approach realizes that trauma is widespread, recognizes the signs and symptoms, responds by integrating knowledge about trauma, and (most importantly) seeks not to re-traumatize the person seeking recovery treatment.

When my mother was in the hospital, my father stayed at my place. One night after dinner, he reminisced about growing up in the UK. This was the first time he’d spoken to me about his horrific memories of WWII. I knew he was a child living in London during the bombings because I have a locket my grandmother said he’d found in the remains of a bombed house, but that night, while he sat on my sofa, he told me he’d found the locket in what was left of his best friend’s house, who had lived across the road. His young friend and his whole family perished in that bomb attack. My father spoke very softly about this loss and how that bomb could have easily landed on his house.

Trauma is often defined as either big ‘T’ or small ‘t’ trauma. Big ‘T’ trauma are acute events such as war or a bad accident, while small ‘t’ trauma are more common life events such as moving to a new house or school, getting lost, losing a job, or even making a mistake. There’s also cultural and multigenerational trauma, as well as vicarious or secondary trauma.

These categories are all objective descriptions of highly subjective experiences. In every case, fear is the common factor, which is sometimes why we minimize our traumatic experience, especially with small ‘t’ trauma where fear can easily morph into shame. What child hasn’t pretended they aren’t scared? When we do this, we lose our authentic connection to self, others, and the present moment.

Shame can turn external traumatic experiences into frozen internal trauma states.

My father was a heavy drinker, but if he drank whiskey, we had to watch out; he could become scarily angry. A lot of stuff got broken in our home if he went from beer to spirits. I’ve been working on healing my relationship with my father for a long time, but that night on my sofa, I understood his explosive outbursts from a trauma-informed perspective because I realized he was suffering unresolved trauma. I began to hear the fear in his anger. This understanding opened a path of healing compassion in our relationship that lasted till he eventually passed.

Trauma is like a time machine. When we experience a strong threatening event, it is imprinted onto parts of our brain and nervous system that keep it real and present so we can survive anything like it happening again. This process effectively makes the past disappear by making it feel NOW. A person doesn’t remember a traumatic event; they relive it, over and over in a loop.

We can’t stop this process from happening because it is an automatic protective brain function separate from the everyday process of making ordinary recall memories, which is why we often can’t even remember the triggering event that sets off the trauma response.

Allowing ourselves to feel the pain safely, rather than numbing the pain with addictive behaviors, can let trauma become a doorway to healing.

I believe one of the most painful aspects of trauma is that it deeply impacts our ability to experience the feeling of being our authentic self. This is often felt as a perpetual emptiness or loneliness, which we want to fill with experiences in addictive ways. But we never get our fill. Gabor Maté goes as far as to say, “trauma is suppressed authenticity [and] underneath the traumatized person is a healthy person not knowing how to express their authenticity.” I strongly agree.

Healing trauma helps us connect to and express our true sense of authenticity by giving us access to our free-adult-self who is living the reality of our present life, not the reliving of a past trauma.