Trauma trains your brain to respond to your environment in unhealthy ways. The brain of a person who is exposed to trauma will be looking to keep itself from being subjected to harm again. Thus, you may wind up developing habits or responses that make sense for surviving a traumatic situation, but that can compromise your ability to live a healthy life.
These are called trauma responses, and they can undermine healthy relationships or situations in your life. Here are some of the most common.
1. You apologize constantly, even when it’s not your fault.
You may find yourself apologizing excessively, saying “sorry” for things beyond your control, and it’s not that you’re being polite. As trauma therapists inform us, it’s because you fear being blamed, labeled a burden, or making someone angry.
In situations like these, it’s often because you’ve been bullied and abused by someone, and it’s pushed you into taking on a peacemaker role. By saying sorry often, you’re attempting to preempt any abuse and keep the peace by just accepting responsibility for the problem. This behavior may also come from an environment where mistakes (real or not) were ridiculed, punished, or yelled about.
2. You dissociate, detach, or “go numb” during conflict.
Instead of engaging or defending yourself, you find that you mentally check out or zone out when things get tense. This can be a freeze response, or a form of self-protection that you developed when confrontations felt unsafe or dangerous. It’s a common way for children in abusive situations to respond because they don’t have any power to push back against their parents.
Freezing up during conflict is a big problem because conflict is going to happen. It’s just part of the human experience. Even the healthiest of relationships have some conflict at times. In fact, relationships are built and get healthier by resolving conflicts. It’s why communication is so important.
3. You’re hyper-independent to a fault.
Independence is a good thing. In an ideal world, no one would need someone else to take care of them. Hyper-independence, however, takes independence too far, to the point where it is actually hurting the person instead of helping.
Mental health experts advise that a hyper-independent person insists on doing everything themselves because they’ve learned they have to do it themselves. Their life experiences up to that point have caused them to learn that other people could not be relied on. Asking for help may lead to rejection, guilt, or disappointment.
Alternatively, they may have grown up with absent adults or a lack of emotional support in childhood. They developed hyper-independence because they fully understood from a young age that no one was going to help them.
4. You struggle with simple choices.
Simple choices may be a struggle if you were regularly punished for making choices. Your brain has been taught to associate making a choice at all with a negative outcome, so it struggles to make even simple choices and constantly second-guesses itself. That may look like verbal abuse, being mocked or treated badly by a romantic partner or adult to the point where you don’t feel capable.
I knew someone like this, let’s call her Sarah. Sarah struggled with this kind of decision-making because of her past experiences being mocked by her mother. No matter what Sarah did, her mom would yell at her for making a mistake or mock her when she chose to do something or be excited about it. As an adult, that struggle carried on for her in a serious way, making it harder for her to make and follow through with life decisions that she was faced with.
She needed therapy to work through that.
5. You feel guilty for doing nothing or relaxing.
People who feel anxious when they’re not being busy and productive often have trauma related to their self-worth. Their abuser traumatized them with the idea that they are only valuable if they are being useful to others, or if they’re doing something. As a result, they have a difficult time taking breaks, sitting still, or saying “no” when they need to.
That can lead to a high-stress lifestyle where they subject themselves to overworking and burnout. No one can just work and work and work and expect things to be okay. Everyone needs to be able to pause and take a rest to manage their stress from time to time.
6. You constantly read between the lines.
People who always read between the lines have been conditioned to look for hidden meanings in what others say or do because they’ve been taught not to trust what others will say. This is a common defensive behavior if you’ve ever experienced emotional manipulation or gaslighting, which are both the result of manipulative words and actions.
Your brain is trying to find where the actual truth is, so it can anticipate how to respond to whatever situation you’re in. It’s trying not to be caught as unprepared as it was when the abuse was ongoing. That’s a significant problem because many people say and do exactly what they mean.
Alternatively, you may think you’ve figured someone out, but it’s just something your brain has made up instead. No one can read minds, and nonverbal signals are frequently misinterpreted.
7. You joke or laugh when uncomfortable.
Using humor to deflect in serious moments isn’t always just a quirky habit, but it can also be a defense mechanism developed when it was unsafe to be vulnerable. Instead of sitting in the moment and going through it, it becomes an impulse to make a joke and break the tension. For some people, it can become a reflexive habit that they need to unlearn.
Of course, this can cause so many problems in your relationships because you have to be able to take serious matters seriously. If you’re having a serious discussion or something is emotionally charged, it needs to be resolved appropriately, or it will linger. Deflecting with humor is effective, but it doesn’t actually resolve the issue.
8. Kindness and praise make you feel uncomfortable.
Praise and kindness may cause you to feel uneasy or suspicious, and you likely struggle to accept compliments. It may be because positive attention was once used as a trap to hurt you, or you were taught that you weren’t worthy of it. There are some people who see kindness as weakness, and so they don’t have any problem with using it as a weapon against other people.
This kind of anxiety can dramatically hinder the development of friendships because mutual interest is generally built on positivity. Most people are likely to be kind and appreciative of the others around them. If that kind of positivity makes you uncomfortable, then you may find that you avoid making those relationships altogether, thus self-sabotaging your happiness.
9. You avoid setting boundaries.
Boundaries are necessary for any healthy relationship. They teach other people how to treat us. However, survivors of neglect or abuse may find they have a difficult time setting boundaries. They’ve been conditioned not to have boundaries, either to earn favor or because they were taught they were not deserving of consideration and care.
That often fuels resentment because you may feel like your needs aren’t being considered. Other people may be asking too much of you, but since you’re not establishing the boundary, they don’t know that they are. That resentment can fester and cause the relationship to turn sour.
Final thoughts…
A trauma response is formed because the brain is attempting to avoid pain from a similar situation. The problem is that many of these trauma responses can be quite damaging to your relationships. They can prevent you from really connecting because your brain is trying to keep you away so that you stay safe.
Identifying these behaviors and their causes gives you more power to take control over them. They are habits, but habits can be unlearned or relearned, given enough time and work. That way, these trauma responses won’t keep holding you back.
