When Trauma Causes You To Lose Your Sense of Who You Are
By Leah Eppen
It’s important to note that God has given us therapy as a gift and tool to help us. Seeking professional therapeutic help to work through traumatic experiences is encouraged. Faith and prayer do not replace the need for therapy–rather, they are most useful in addition to it!
How many truths can you name about the character of God?
This past summer I was asked this question in a virtual bible study and, honestly, I was stumped. So, I gave myself time to stew over this provoking question. What do I know to be true about God’s character? Who has He shown himself to be?
I came up with many answers: Healer. All-knowing. Loving. Merciful. Kind. Forgiver and Forgetter. Pursuer. Wild. Timeless. As true as these all were, I felt I was missing one, an important one. One morning, I found the answer in contemplation, a truth about God I had forgotten: He is unwaveringly constant.
When we experience trauma, we can lose many things: our ability to be still, our peace, our ability to see beyond what we vehemently decide is unworthy, or even our ability to experience life without triggers. One of the most painful things trauma can cause us to lose, though, is our sense of self. It is in this loss of identity that God’s constancy seeks us out.
When we struggle to know who we are, we can remind ourselves of who He is. In matters of faith, our self-knowledge is invariably linked to knowledge of God. St. Teresa of Avila once said to the Christ-child, “I am Teresa of Jesus. Who are you?” To which, he replied, “I am Jesus of Teresa.” Our identity is found in the God who created us. While trauma can make us strangers to ourselves, He reminds us who we are and gives us a home when we feel foreign to our own mind and body.
What is Trauma?
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) explains that individual trauma results from “an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”
Everyone’s experience and reactions to trauma are different, but many of the effects and symptoms of trauma are shared in common. One of the most confounding things about trauma is its ability to strip bare someone’s sense of self. Who am I now? I don’t feel the same. Something’s changed and I don’t feel like “me.” You get lost––you forget who you are and define yourself by the traumatic experience(s) within your life––through absolutely no fault of your own.
If I could summarily illustrate my own experience of trauma, I might say it was like holding a pen that suddenly broke and when I looked down, I was covered in ink that was quickly drying and leaving a stain. This analogy is over-simplistic and doesn’t even begin to cover the nitty-gritty; however, what I believed about myself became muddled and tainted and I was afraid I’d be ink-stained forever. My brokenness felt as permanent as spilled ink, and resigning myself to my “fate” became a daily temptation. My thoughts got stuck on a broken record: Just give up. Look at all these pieces. This is who you are now.
It is incredibly common for people affected by trauma to experience a loss of their sense of self. Trauma challenges who you have known yourself to be and your beliefs about others and the world. But, the very real truth is that your trauma does not define you and the thoughts of despair that might cross the planes of your mind are lies.
When we focus too hard on anything apart from God, we might start to look to those things to tell us who we are. Carrying around the effects and symptoms of trauma can be a heavy burden that consumes your focus, making it easy to turn your gaze away from the God who moves mountains and breathes stars. When your suffering feels that big, it’s easy to forget the very real vastness and depth of God’s mercy and wild love for you.
God uses all tools at his disposal to reach you––your traumatic experiences and your suffering do not stand in His way. All your pain and deep aching call out to Him because He took them on when He picked up His Holy Cross. Christ is intimately acquainted with your trauma and the pain it causes, but He can look beyond the trauma to find you. He finds you, His lamb that got lost. And He knows exactly who you are, even if you lost yourself in all the pain.
Why Trauma Lingers
“Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body,” writes Dr. Bessel van der Kolk in his book, The Body Keeps the Score. “Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on––unchanged––as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.”
The imprint from a traumatic experience can be compared to a thief or parasite. This imprint is like a thief because it is so very good at pickpocketing someone’s beliefs about themselves––who they are, what they are capable of, who they can trust. It’s also akin to a parasite because it can leech onto someone’s heart and mind, breathing fear, anxiety, panic, paranoia, shame, and guilt, down their neck.
Despite my metaphor, the symptoms caused by this resulting imprint are very real physical manifestations. Many of these physical reactions stem from the brain and this is why trauma lingers.
In his book, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk calls the amygdala a “smoke detector.” The amygdala is good at identifying if we’re in danger or not. So, just like a smoke detector sounds an alarm if there’s a fire, the amygdala sounds an alarm in the brain if it senses danger. Trauma injures the functioning of this system within our brain, so that when a perceived danger arises––real or not––the amygdala sends a swift message to stimulate the adrenal glands, sending us into a stress response like fight, flight, or freeze.
Living with trauma often means living in a body on edge, ready to be triggered into a stress response at any time. And when someone is re-triggered, they’re likely to shift into the fight, flight, or freeze states of mind and body; aggression, panic, crippling shame, dissociation, and immobility, are just a few examples of how these states manifest.
As you can imagine, this is exhausting, and living in this type of hypervigilant state is what can make knowing yourself confusing––you can’t even trust how your body will respond to situations that may trigger your trauma!
A body that lives in fight, flight, or freeze has to work extra hard to relearn how to rest, make peace, and be still, but it can be done. It requires remembering who you are; luckily, you don’t have to figure that out. Just turn to the one who created you––he knows exactly who you are and is eager to remind you. When you are lost, God will find you.
Finding a Home within Yourself
Fr. Nathan Sparks, SJ, (find him on Instagram @the.nomadic.monk), writes,
The first and most crucial step to life with God is also a step we never completely move beyond. It is, first and foremost, to be lost. A saint, a holy one, is someone who is continually lost, so that they may be continually found. We can be sure that if we lose the freshness of being found by God, it is then that we really are losing the way.
Trauma can make one feel lost, out of sync, and strange to one’s own body, but you can find a home in yourself again by turning to the God who lives within you. It’s not wrong to be lost, and it’s not wrong to desperately crave being found. But despairing that you’ll never be found risks believing a lie about God’s very nature. No matter your suffering or how distant you feel from yourself, Christ wants to make a home with you, within you.
Practically speaking, it’s helpful to imagine a space within yourself where you and He can meet.
When I close my eyes, I imagine a garden: lush, wild, flooded in sunshine, and green, green, green––teeming with life. There, I can breathe. I can unabashedly be myself because, in this garden, Christ is there constantly and persistently reminding me of who I am, because He knows me better than I ever will.
I encourage you to take time in prayer to create a mental space where you can meet with Jesus too. Use this mental space as a way to visualize your relationship with Him. This is your space, so make it what you like––a room with a view of the sky, a bench in a park, or a café in Paris. Whatever it is, never forget that Jesus is always there, waiting for you.
Even if you feel like you’ve been shattered and you’ll never be whole again, God knows where each piece belongs and He’ll help guide every piece back to its home within you––just allow Him to remind you who you are. He is Jesus of [your name] and you are [your name] of Jesus, His beloved daughter before all else.
