When we have experiences and trauma that remain unresolved it can significantly and negatively affect our sense of self – who we know ourselves to be. As a result, we can experience a range of symptoms including self-loathing, self-sabotage, anxiety, depression and more.
So how does this happen? When we have an experience or a trauma and we don’t understand why it happened, it becomes unresolved. We might not understand our role in the experience or how we responded. We become confused about who we are now. For example, if I have a my-fault car accident, does that now mean that I am a bad driver? Should I have been paying more attention? I always thought I was a good driver. I don’t understand.
It is our self-beliefs that are challenged in a scenario like this that causes us to question who we are and importantly who we are NOW given what has happened.
The younger we are when we have an experience or trauma that we don’t understand, the harder it is to answer the question: can I still be me given what has happened? If we answer with a “no” or an “I don’t know”, we now have to find a way to continue to live our lives with this question looming over us. We have to be more careful of living now just in case we were the problem, the reason, for the experience/trauma. Cue our survival system – fight and flight kicks in so we can focus on being safe.
Why safe? If we don’t know who we are, we don’t know how to respond – to anything. We stop trusting ourselves to respond appropriately in any given situation i.e., we lose our self-trust. This realisation makes the world unsafe for us because what if it happens again AND it’s my fault? This is all about perception (I am responsible for the problem) and possibility (what if it happens again), not reality (I had an experience) and probability (it’s less likely to happen again because I learned from it).
The longer the event goes unresolved, the more we remain in a sustained or prolonged fight and flight response. The changes this can create in us can be profound. We are not designed to remain in a survival/defence response for years and subsequently we start to develop symptoms – in our physical state, our emotional and mental wellbeing, and crucially our ability, capacity and trust to put ourselves into the world with confidence. Sound like you?
The only way to solve this is to resolve your understanding of the experience so you can thrive.
