The Role of Self-Awareness in Healing Complex Trauma

I am so excited to be on this journey with you and to be able to support you in finding ways for you to thrive and to no longer feel like your trauma is in the driver's seat. I am going to share with you the essential role of self-awareness in healing complex trauma. This is the starting point that unlocks the healing process.

Self-awareness is essential for healing.

Having self-awareness seems like a given, but one of the things I find a lot with trauma survivors is that we are so good at abandoning ourselves.

If you grew up in a family where you were used to enmeshing, people pleasing, or enabling in order to not feel the threat in your environment, it is so easy as an adult to not know how to connect with yourself. Your trauma taught you to forget yourself. In fact, you may even feel like it is "selfish/bad" to be someone who considers their needs, advocates for themselves, and has boundaries.

If we are going to get to a place of responding to ourselves so that we can finally heal, we have to gain awareness around how we survived our trauma so that we can come back to ourselves. We have to get clear on how our survival skills are sabotaging our lives today and why they are doing this. We cannot respond to ourselves if we don't understand the purpose these self-sabotaging parts are trying to serve. 

In fact, self-awareness plays a vital part in our ability to rewire our neural pathways. Recent research in complex trauma has shown that the more resourced people are (self-awareness and understanding the dynamics of our maladaptive survival skills being a part of this), the more efficiently and quickly we are able to rewire these pathways. Without doing this work of understanding, we will keep following the same traumatized neural pathways. We need to gain this awareness if we want to begin to build a healthier neural pathway and make it more habituated than the traumatized pathway.

1. Self-awareness creates opportunities for choice.

One of the most impactful things in trauma healing is the ability to have choice. When we have the ability to make choices in our lives, we no longer feel like life is something that happens to  us, but instead, something that we have an active role in.

It is the difference between living with anxiety that at any moment that the next shoe is about to drop and feeling confident in your ability to handle whatever stressful situation comes your way. When we feel this sense of agency, we can life in the present moment rather than spending time anticipating future threats.

With choices comes the power to be our own gatekeepers in life. From the self-awareness we gain, we get to decide what we are comfortable exposing ourselves to, what people are healthy for us to have in our lives, and how much (or little) we want to push ourselves. Self-awareness creates an opportunity for us to respond to ourselves and make choices that support our well-being. We become our own care-takers and start to feel safe with ourselves.

2. Self-awareness helps us gather our tribe.

I cannot emphasize enough the power of having safe relationships in our lives. Safe relationships become the playground for building secure attachment and healing relational wounds. More than that, they become a sounding board for us when we forget who we are: they remind us of our strength and our goodness.

Let's talk about safe relationships for a moment: there is no such thing as a "good" or "bad" person. This is where self-awareness comes in. Your unique trauma--the specific ways you have been wounded by relationships in the past or have been emotionally neglected as a child will inform your relational needs, and therefore, the types of people that will feel safe for you. This is where generalizing people breaks down and self-awareness is so important. 

Take a moment and consider in what ways your emotional needs might not have been met as a child. Maybe you experienced a parent who was consistently emotionally unavailable. A person who has an avoidant attachment style or persistently disengages from you when you try to share something vulnerable will most likely not be a safe person in your life. Or perhaps you notice that your abandonment wounds are so painful that flakiness in friendships is incredibly triggering. By having this awareness about yourself, you can work this out in your relationships or decide that a relationship is not healthy for you. 

Learn about your needs and triggers so that you know how to identify people who can be a salve for these relational wounds rather than an irritant.

Conclusion

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of self-awareness. It is something that is often pushed aside because we want to get to the exciting work--trauma processing through EMDR, communication skills in our relationships, etc--but we have to know ourselves to have choices and rewire our brains in a way that supports our well-being.

If you are looking for a way to dive deep into this awareness and put this self-awareness into healing action, consider joining our Love After Complex Trauma mastermind! You will become a part of a vibrant community of other people like you seeking to understand themselves so that they can thrive in life and their relationships.