Tag: PTSD

Trauma Trumps Everything: How One Moment (or series of events) Can Rewrite Your Entire Operating System

Published on by Scott Williams1 Comment

Let’s get honest about trauma – it’s not just a thing that happens to you, it can be a full-system hijack of your entire psychological infrastructure.

Weird fact. Most people who’ve experienced serious trauma don’t even recognize how deeply it’s reshaping their entire existence. We’re walking around with an internal alarm system that’s permanently set to DefCon 1, and most of us don’t even know it.

Hypervigilance isn’t a choice. It’s survival mode hardwired into your nervous system. You’re not paranoid, you’re literally programmed to scan for threats constantly because once, in your past, not seeing the danger meant not surviving. People with trauma often describe themselves as empathic, or a person who is good at reading emotions or sensing danger, real or imaginary. You may be that way because it’s a skill or sense you possess, but often that skill is honed in trauma. If you aren’t sure what is walking through the door as a child you might just learn to keep your radar on, and some of you can’t turn it off.

Control issues? They’re not about being a difficult person, they may be about survival. When trauma strips away your sense of safety, control becomes your only perceived protection. Every micromanaged interaction, every rigid boundary, every meticulously planned moment is just your nervous system screaming, “I will NOT be vulnerable again.”

In our years of working with trauma survivors, I’ve seen how these survival mechanisms play out in relationships. You push people away before they can hurt you. You create impossible tests to see if they’ll leave. You oscillate between desperate connection and total emotional shutdown. It’s not manipulation. It’s protection. Your brain doesn’t understand the difference between past threat and present safety. Your body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk would say. Every trigger is a time machine taking you back to the moment everything broke.

Some of us have tried talk therapy. Some of us have done years of traditional counseling. But here’s the thing about trauma: It lives in your body, not just your mind. Advanced approaches like neurofeedback offer a way to actually reset those deeply ingrained neural pathways. It’s not magic, it’s neurological recalibration.

Relationship challenges? They’re practically guaranteed. Trust becomes this fragile, impossible thing. Intimacy feels like walking through a minefield blindfolded. You’re simultaneously craving connection and terrified of it. Your attachment style becomes this complex algorithm of protection and vulnerability.

I have no research to support this beyond decades of watching humans survive, but here’s what I know: trauma survivors are some of the most resilient, complex, brilliant humans on the planet. They don’t just survive, they reconstruct themselves, piece by painful piece. Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. The constant internal narrative. The exhaustion of being perpetually alert. The way your nervous system can shift from zero to nuclear in a microsecond.

But here’s the beautiful paradox: you can rewrite the story. You’re not just one story that you can never change. You can branch of the main storyline and create new and better adventures. Your hypervigilance? That’s keen awareness. Your control mechanisms? That’s adaptive intelligence. Your relationship complexity? That’s deep emotional understanding.

Trauma doesn’t have to be your identity, maybe its just a chapter in your story, not the whole damn book.

You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to become.

When Intuition Is A Curse

Published on by Scott Williams13 Comments

When people come into my office and tell me, very early in a conversation, that they are ‘intuitive’ and ‘can see into people’ I often wonder if they have had trauma. The longer I do this for a living the more I realize that some of us developed our insights into humanity as a protection mechanism. We never knew, when dad or mom walked into the room, whether we were safe or in danger. We had to develop the skill for knowing how to react around instability. We constantly had our radar on. To this day, when we walk into a room, we are keenly aware of how people are feeling and reacting. We have a ‘bead’ on people and think it’s a gift. For some people a gift born out of a curse.

Trauma does weird things to people. Some other day I will talk about the link between trauma and hoarding, or people who can’t seem to finish projects, or those who go from romantic relationship to romantic relationship and consistently make bad decisions. People with trauma often repaint their house too often, or have spending or drug addictions, or have difficulty making decisions. Most trauma survivors become control freaks. Trauma has a way of twisting us emotionally and relationally, of creating fear and insecurity.

A few days ago I went to Swiss Chalet with a close friend who is a 6th Dan Master at his martial art. As we walked to the restaurant I was not worried about being jumped or attacked. I was hoping. When I’m with my martial arts buddies there is little danger of violation. My radar is turned off. The world is a safe place and I am not even remotely worried. Most people grow up in a world that is safe, and therefore have no pressing need to become discerning when they are at home or on the playground. For them the world is a safe place and they have no need for emotional radar.

A few years ago, in a trauma group I was leading, a woman shared about her afternoon and the fearful event she had endured just prior to group. She was in a McDonalds parking lot when two men in hoodies, with the hoods up, approached her in the twilight. As a victim of trauma she was keenly aware of danger and had struggled all her life to trust men, especially strangers. Some time in her past she had been attacked by men, beaten and raped. That late afternoon in the parking lot her radar came on and the meter went through the roof. As she walked across the parking lot she felt her pulse quicken, she began to sweat. She started to panic. In her mind she imagined violations galore and began to catastophize and soon found herself running to the door of the restaurant, in a state of extreme duress. She grabbed the door, threw it open, and fled into the bright lights.

From where she was in the restaurant she watched in horror as the two predators entered the restaurant, pulled down their hoodies and…

… they were ten or eleven year old boys who were completely oblivious to her presence.

One the primary characteristics of PTSD and trauma is something called ‘hyper-vigilance’.

That night in group we talked at length about her fear, born in trauma and pain. It was the beginning of a journey for her, one that takes far longer than people want to admit, filled with counseling and discomfort and setbacks. A journey to freedom. As we say in counseling – trauma trumps everything. What that means is that if you have experienced severe trauma that depression or anxiety you are feeling may not just be because you have situational issues right now that are bringing you down. You need to deal with your emotional trauma, before it ruins the rest of your life. It is a difficult journey but a necessary one. Get help. Talk to a counselor who understands trauma and doesn’t suck.

You’re worth it.

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