When trauma has become chronic and our stress responses become the mode of normal functioning in the world, we will notice an impact on our personality. The way we see ourselves and the world and how we act within the world are guided by defensive actions. We might develop patterns of behavior that are based on our most common stress responses. They easily become conditioned actions that happen automatically. We also pick up a collection of behaviors that we use to avoid feeling shame and to manage our fear. The protective behaviors are so firmly knit into our behavioral patterns that they have become part of who we seem to be on the outside and how we see ourselves. The diagnostic criteria for cPTSD describe a change in our personality in response to trauma. This is not rare or uncommon.
Trauma Types?
Pete Walker, an author who writes within the genre of popular psychology, invented the concept of trauma types. He mixes chronic defensive actions and traits found in personality disorders and suggests 4F Types for cPTSD. There is no scientific foundation for these types. No trauma scientist uses them. They are his personal observation and I have to admit, they upset me. I experience them as judgmental and limiting. In reality, we use the defensive actions that have been most successful in the past because it has become an automatic response. When there are chronic stress states we are stuck in, we tend to use defenses that go well with our stress state. People lean more towards hyperarousal or hypoarousal, these are the types that are recognized in trauma science, but that is not because of personality traits. People have their own protective patterns based on their life experience. Stress responses are on the surface of these protections and change relatively easily. I personally don’t think that people should mix concepts like that and define themselves as a trauma personality type.
Layers of trauma responses
My own experience is that there are layers to defensive actions and we change over time. Someone who has been in Freeze/Shutdown all their life will eventually feel a bit more powerful and capable in the world. Situations don’t seem utterly hopeless anymore because we don’t feel utterly powerless anymore. And that brings forth a new layer of defensive actions. More in touch with our body and emotions, we might experience a lot more Flight or Fight responses when something triggers us. We will find ourselves having more anxiety or more outbursts of anger when we are not chronically dissociated anymore. We did not develop a whole new profile of a trauma type. We just shifted from the most helpless defensive pattern to one that is more active.
New Coping
New defensive actions that become our responses to life’s challenges demand that we learn new strategies to cope with them. We got really good at managing our dissociation. Now we face a new experience and we might need to learn new strategies for anxiety, aggression or other things we haven’t felt in a long time. We change. The change will not always turn us into a newly healed person. First it might shift how our injuries and defenses express themselves. There can be moments where we long for being numb again because having so much anxiety does not feel like progress but it is. The exercises that never seemed to help much like breathing exercises or positive imagery may start to become valuable now. It is a good idea to return to a list of coping strategies to see what works now. Successful coping changes over time to adapt to our new experience. It looks different and makes us look different.
Trauma processing
Processing our memory and integrating it into our life story will help our mind-body system to recognize that we are safe now. The constant defenses aren’t needed anymore. Not even Flight or Fight. We are mostly safe in this world and we can reduce our protections accordingly. Trauma integration is the key that helps us to move ourselves out of the defensive actions and into normal actions that fit our current life. The threat is in the past and today, life is different. It is something that stabilization alone cannot provide. This will be the first time in many years or ever that we get a chance to get to know ourselves without a stress response; who we are when our perception and action is not determined by defensive actions, not even hypervigilance. It can feel like we are a completely different person when we relax and don’t watch out for danger all the time. Our relaxed self is someone we never knew before. Again, this will bring a change in how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. We find more of who we are underneath the layers of stress responses. The other versions of ourselves are not unreal or gone. Certain expressions of behavior are just not amplified anymore. We know better than normal people who we are in high stress. And there is also someone new that we discover when we are at rest. What used to be suppressed can surface.
Different protective layers
The journey is not over when we got out of the chronic physiological defenses.The things that hurt inside have shifted. It is human nature to protect the weak spots of our experience and there are a multitude of psychological defense mechanisms people use to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings like shame or fears, or hurtful memories. If we continue our inner work to eg improve our relationships or reach bigger life goals, we will run into things like normal avoidance, intellectualization, projection etc. that are not mainly driven by trauma memories and the avoidance of them anymore. Approaching these patterns earlier might result in ‘resistance to change’ because they are interwoven with our trauma defenses that need to be resolved first. Eventually, we are back in the field of normal psychology instead of trauma psychology. There is still a lot to explore here and doing so will help us with creating a new life for ourselves that is satisfying and stable. This is where some people like to do ‘shadow work’ or other explorations into the depth of who they are. It is probably wise only to go as far with it as it is useful to ourselves. Without a clear goal, these things can become a distraction from real life. If we truly have a personality disorder, this is where it will become clearly recognizable as something that is more than trauma. It will show in the layers of these protections that we dug out from underneath the trauma responses.
Becoming ourselves
This is a surprising and sometimes bewildering phase in our development. We learn a lot about ourselves that has been hidden because we were busy with very different problems. Our likes and dislikes might change. We might realize that we are not as strictly introverted as we thought we were. There might be more openness, flexibility and emotional range. We might find out that we are a different Myers-Briggs or Enneagramme type than we used to be (if we are into types and tests and that is what made Walker’s types look interesting. Those are not scientific tests but they are places where change might show). The person that shows up beneath the defensive actions might be a stranger to us and we are surprised and even confused to find out how we think and act when we don’t feel permanently threatened. Other traits become amplified. Unexpected competences and passions might surface once they are not suppressed anymore. We are not our trauma. We have our own personality type.
Sessions of trauma processing can sometimes push us up to new levels of experiences within a short period of time. We feel courage we didn’t expect and find ourselves doing things we never thought possible. Someone emerges from the ruins. The process is not a clearly linear one (even if we made it sound like that for simplification). We move through defenses and layers in different areas at a different pace. In DID, different parts will move through changes with their own inner processes and the development will not be in sync with other parts. Therefore we get bits of pieces of new inner experiences of ourselves and it doesn’t happen all at once. That might even be necessary to be able to integrate the new experiences. We need time to get used to who we are becoming. A shift that is too sudden can potentially cause an identity crisis.
Personality in motion
Not everyone will have the chance to dig out everything that was affected by trauma. We will never fully find out who we could have been and our healing process adds its own experiences that form us. There is no going back to who we originally were. We have moved on from that and transformed through many stages. I believe it is wise to not be overly identified with our trauma. We are not our stress responses, We have them. They have a significant effect on how we experience the world and how the world experiences us but they don’t define who we are. We are not an F type. We are getting better all the time and with every bit of trauma that moves out of the way there is something different that emerges. A lifetime might not be enough to finish this process but it will stay in motion and we will get to know ourselves in new ways all the time. I hope we all won’t limit ourselves or others to symptoms. They are not who we are. With every step that we take in recovery we are becoming someone new.