Transcription
Recently, I ran a poll on Instagram asking what people wanted to focus on in 2025, and the overwhelming response was finding out who they are. So many of us don't know who we are, don't know what we need, or what our passion is. You might even feel yourself getting annoyed or getting irritated when someone tells you to just follow your passion because when you're disconnected from yourself, you don't know what your passion is, so it kind of just sounds like some far-off idea.
So today, I'm going to talk about what makes you, you, and why complex trauma makes a lot of us not understand who we are. And I'm going to go over four main causes for that. The first cause is in childhood, you had to suppress your authenticity. One of our core needs as a human being is to feel loved and accepted for being exactly who we are. And in an emotionally healthy home, we consistently feel these things. We're able to express what we're thinking and feeling. We have adults around us who validate what we feel while also giving us the space to explore and to learn about ourselves. So being authentic comes naturally because we've been consistently encouraged and we feel safe being ourselves.
Now, if we've experienced complex trauma, we have the opposite of that experience. We may have had disinterested or disconnected parents who just didn't want to or couldn't connect with us. We might have gotten shamed for expressing what we think or how we feel, or we might have been harshly punished when we make any mistakes or when we do anything that upset our parents. Over time, we learn that being authentic is actually not safe, and instead, we learn to become whatever is needed in that moment, playing roles and masking our authenticity in order to be what other people need us to be.
So I'm going to give you an example. Let's say you have a very high-strung and punishing father. When he's not home, you feel more carefree. You're able to laugh and play. But when he's home, your main focus is to not upset him or not make him angry. So instead of being yourself, you'll become a version of yourself that's less likely to upset your dad. This creates a core belief that you need to change who you are depending on who you're around, and over time, you end up losing yourself in the process.
Another cause for us not knowing who we are is that in childhood, you lacked space to explore your natural curiosity. Now, in order to learn about ourselves, we all go through a period of exploration. In healthy homes, parents give us the space to determine who we are by letting us make mistakes, by letting us follow our natural curiosities, and by letting us find our own hobbies or interests. Now, if we got this experience, we become adults with a strong self-knowing. But if we've experienced complex trauma, we're often raised in environments where exploration or curiosity is actually blocked.
Now, it can be blocked for many different reasons, and a couple of them are: we might have had a parent who wanted us to live their dream, choosing our future career or life path, choosing where we live, maybe even choosing our partners. Another way that our exploration is blocked is we might have had a parent who makes our interests or hobbies harshly competitive. Say sports no longer become fun because our parent places too much pressure on us. Or we might have had a parent who had an extremely rigid belief system, maybe a religious one, that they projected then onto us. And a final cause of blocked exploration might be that we are actually forced to take on roles that are too mature, adultlike roles to survive, whether it's taking care of our siblings, our homes, paying the bills, or a million different ways we are pushed beyond our level of maturity.
Now, while our parents might have had good intentions, these things teach us to disconnect from ourselves. We start to learn that in order to please our parents or to get their approval, we need to fulfill their dreams or become a version of ourselves that they approve of. I'll give you an example now. Let's say you grow up and you're really creative and artistic, but you constantly hear from your parents that you have to become a successful doctor or go to a specific school. They don't nurture your love of art, or they don't support you in getting you the things that you need to even create it. You're subconsciously getting a message that your creative side just simply is invaluable. We don't have the support or the resources we need to express our desires or our talents, which are a big part of our journey in discovering who we are.
Another underlying cause of not knowing who we are is in childhood, you had a disconnect from your inner world. In healthy homes, we can have our own thoughts and our own emotions. We can explore our inner world because we feel safe and we don't feel scared or conflicted expressing ourselves to other people. When we're able to explore our thoughts and our emotions, we get to know who we are. We get to understand ourselves, our passions, and even our purpose. But if we've experienced complex trauma, we often have to disconnect from our body and our thoughts in order to survive.
I'll give you another example now. Let's say you hear your parents fighting a lot growing up, and your dad is pretty mean to your mom when he's upset, but you love him very much. So you feel confused, and no one talks to you about these feelings or helps you make any sense of them. So you're left alone with these intense emotions, which is too much for any child. So you end up disconnecting from yourself and those feelings. You might end up zoning out, maybe even going into a fantasy world where you imagine that you're part of another family, a family on TV or even a movie. Spending most of your time disconnected like this, you don't get the opportunity to explore who you are.
And another cause of not knowing who you are is that in childhood, you had to build a survival persona. In healthy homes, you were in a safe and consistent environment, so your nervous system was regulated most of the time, allowing you to develop a true sense of self. If you experienced complex trauma, your environment wasn't safe and there was no consistency, sending your nervous system into fight or flight. So you end up developing a survival persona. You may fawn or please and appease others around you. You may become controlling or demanding, trying to be heard. Or you may feel extremely anxious, sometimes even developing OCD-like habits to gain some sense of control in an out-of-control feeling world. And a lot of people end up believing that their survival persona is their true personality, but it's not. It's essentially just the shield that you wore to protect yourself.
I would love to hear from you in the comments, which one of these resonates with your experience? And next time, I'm going to break down how it is that you can start a journey to actually learning who you are, and I'm going to share with you my four-step process for self-discovery. So make sure you're subscribed if you're not yet already.