Why You Don't Know Who You Are After Complex Trauma

As I was doing some research for this episode, I found a trauma support forum, and I wanna start with just a few things that people said in there, different people with different histories with very similar questions.

One person wrote that who they became was whoever it took to get their mother to love them, not who they actually were.

Another said, "I feel like a support unit for other people.

I don't know that I've ever had a self outside of that." Someone else asked a, a question that said, "Am I actually a sociable person, or did I just invent that version of myself because it worked? Can I even tell what's me, what's trauma, and what I adopted just to survive?" And one more, "I don't feel like the anxiety is part of me.

I don't feel like the way I learned to shrink is part of me either, so what is?" So if you've kind of sat with some of these questions yourself in your recovery, you're in good company.

I think that it might be one of the most common things that people carry after complex trauma in some form or another: "I don't know who I am.

Survival is the only thing that I've ever really known how to do." [upbeat music] Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to the Complex Trauma Podcast.

I wanna give you a little bit of a roadmap for where we're actually headed because I think that we're gonna cover a lot, and I really, I promise you, it's all connected.

We're going to start by talking about how a sense of self actually develops in the first place.

We're starting there because once you understand how we kind of come to know who we are, it becomes so much easier to understand why complex trauma can leave you feeling disconnected from yourself.

I like to do this because it disconnects you from being the problem, right? We can zoom out, and we can say the conditions in which you developed could have set the stage for some of the things that you're experiencing in the here and now.

Then we're gonna talk about what survival does to that process, how protective patterns, coping strategies, and the different survival states can really become the versions of ourselves that we know best.

And finally, I wanna leave you with a framework that I think is really helpful.

We'll talk about three capacities that healthy development gradually builds.

Those three, as a little preview, are the ability to know yourself, express yourself, and experience yourself, and they're a little bit different than how they sound.

We'll look at how trauma can interrupt each one and, more importantly, how recovery helps you slowly start rebuilding them.

So by the end of today's episode, my hope is that you'll walk away with a different way of understanding this question of "Who am I?" Not as something you need to figure out by thinking harder or trying harder, but as something that was built through experience and something that can keep growing through new experiences, too.