This entry discusses trauma responses.

I used to think that being sensitive, intense and reactive was just part of who I was. I thought I was just… wired wrong.

I felt a great deal of shame because it seemed like my personality was the problem. If it was truly who I was, what could I do with that? I couldn’t exactly outgrow myself.

For so long, I tried to tone it down; be less affected, be easier, be less. And if I couldn’t do that, something was clearly wrong with me.

Things are slowly shifting since learning that what we call personality might actually just be adaptions we made to survive difficult situations. It felt uncomfortable to me at first because it meant that the way I reacted and felt things might have just been a consequence of my experiences. Research supports this: when someone grows up in an environment that feels unsafe or unpredictable, the brain and nervous system adapt for survival (Herman, 1992). These adaptions are not temporary, they become ingrained. Repeated patterns of thinking, feeling and reacting become automatic to the point where they stop feeling like patterns and just feel like you.

If you had to constantly read people to stay safe, for example, you might have grown up thinking you were just “good with people”, overly aware or anxious. If your emotions were dismissed or minimised, you might have started to think you were “too sensitive”. If love felt conditional and inconsistent, you might have labelled yourself as “needy” for needing reassurance, or “clingy” for struggling with distance.

But these aren’t random personality traits. They are responses that make sense in the context of your environment.

Trauma doesn’t just affect what we remember, it shapes how we experience ourselves, as discussed in The Body Keeps the Score (2014). Our sense of identity can become organised around survival strategies: hypervigilance, emotional reactivity, people-pleasing, avoidance. The very things that once helped us survive can become the lens through which we see everything, including ourselves.

When you have been a particular way for long enough, it is hard to separate what is you from what you learned to be.

The issue with calling it personality, I believe, is that it subtly reinforces self-blame. It turns “I learned this to cope” into “this is just how I am”, and that shift matters more than it may seem at first glance, because one leaves room for compassion while one doesn’t. Not only that, but it also erases the fact that these patterns were – at one point – protective.

Being hypervigilant might have helped you anticipate conflict.

Being emotionally reactive might have been the only way you were heard.

Being accommodating might have kept relationships from falling apart.

These reactions weren’t failures, they were adaptions. But that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt us now. It doesn’t mean they don’t interfere with relationships or make things harder than they need to be.

It does change how you understand them though. Not as evidence that you’re broken, but as evidence that you survived something. Still, that realisation isn’t tidy. It doesn’t instantly make things easier. If anything, it can feel quite disorientating.

If these patterns aren’t my personality, then who will I be without them? And how do I let go of something that once kept me safe? There is a weird sense of grief in that.

Grief for how long I have carried it.

Grief that there was a version of me that had to learn them in the first place.

According to Trauma and Recovery (1992), recovery is a journey of reconstructing a sense of self that isn’t centred around survival. This isn’t a quick transition. It’s gradual, inconsistent and very often uncomfortable.

You don’t simply wake up one day a different person, you gradually begin to question the narrative you’re held about yourself for years.

When I first got my diagnosis, I remember feeling this dull ache in my chest. I said to my psychiatrist, “if everything about me is a trauma response, who am I?” I was scared of getting better because I didn’t know who I would be without the very things that kept me safe. I’m going to be starting my own course of trauma therapies in the coming weeks and I’m still scared. But, with this information in mind, I have been trying to ask myself “why” instead of “what’(s)” (wrong with me).

Why does this feel so intense? Why do I react this way? Why does this situation feel familiar, even when it isn’t?

And more often than not, the answer isn’t that I’m too much, too sensitive or fundamentally flawed. It’s that I learned how to survive something, and those survival strategies stayed with me.

If any of this resonates with you, maybe the issue isn’t that you’re “too much”.

Maybe you adapted, too.

And maybe now – slowly, and in your own time – you have the opportunity to decide what you want to keep, and what you’re allowed to outgrow.

References:

Herman, J.L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery. Available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-97643-000 (Accessed: 29th March 2026)

van der Kolk, B.A. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score. Available at: https://ia601604.us.archive.org/35/items/the-body-keeps-the-score-pdf/The-Body-Keeps-the-Score-PDF.pdf