If you take anything away from this blog post, let it be this: we need to stop telling trauma survivors that what they went through made them stronger. This idea minimizes the real impact trauma has on an individual and can invalidate their experience.
My Trauma Didn’t Make Me Stronger
But what it did do was cause me to shape myself into someone I never asked to be.
Someone I misunderstood for the longest time.
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- It turned me into a people pleaser, afraid to speak up when I should.
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- It made me apologize too much, for things that weren’t my fault—even when I wasn’t wrong.
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- It pushed me into perfectionism, where my worth depended on being “good enough” in other people’s eyes.
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- It left me with low self-esteem, doubting whether I mattered at all.
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- It taught me to put everyone else’s needs above my own.
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- It made me hypervigilant, I was always looking out for danger—I was always prepared for the worst.
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- It left me with a nervous system stuck in fight or flight, where even small triggers felt like life-or-death situations.
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- It created this idea that I couldn’t trust others, I believed that getting too close to someone would always lead to pain.
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- And it made me emotionally reactive, feeling too much, too deeply, all at once.
When the weight of it all became too much, I swung to the other extreme, becoming hard as a rock, my outer shell was tough, so tough, I was unshakable, with a cold and closed exterior that made it impossible to feel anything. I was very rigid in my thinking. I thought I was emotionally present, but in reality, I was just a shell of myself—detached, avoidant, and incapable of connecting with anyone. I learned to hold back, keeping my heart tucked away because if I let myself care too much, well there’s a chance it could really hurt me. So, instead, I’d numb myself, shut down, and isolate. Cutting myself off from everything to protect the little I had left.
What My Trauma Did Do For Me
No, trauma didn’t make me stronger. But here’s what it did do:
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- It made me resourceful—adaptable. I learned how to figure things out on my own, picking up tools and strategies along the way—because when you don’t have a choice, you learn to make do.
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- It made me hyper-aware of people’s energy, emotions, and intentions—sometimes a gift, sometimes it’s a lot to feel.
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- It gave me a lens of compassion. Now I understand that everyone’s behaviour comes from somewhere—often from deep pain.
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- It made me aware of the ‘systems’ that fail people like me—like us.
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- And it made me curious about healing—not just for myself, but for others, and not from a place with an end goal in mind, but more through a lens of an ongoing process.
To be clear, this isn’t about putting a silver lining on what happened. I’m not thankful for my trauma. But instead of framing it through the language of “strength,” we can talk about what it actually gave me: adaptability, and eventually, awareness and a deeper understanding of the world around me.
The Rhetoric That When We Heal We Go Back To Who We Were
You’ve probably heard this rhetoric…
“You’ll go back to being the person you were before.”
“In time, you’ll feel like yourself again.”
But, here’s the hard truth: That’s not going to happen.
I get it. The idea of returning to a version of yourself that isn’t hurting—it sounds comforting. But the truth is, it’s exhausting. We spend so much time holding on to this belief, this idea. We spend so much time trying to go back home to someone who no longer exists. This idea that we’ll return to who we were before—before the trauma, before the pain, before everything got so complicated—creates this impossible pressure to heal—faster, to erase the pain of our past as if nothing ever happened.
Working through your trauma, though? That’s not about going back to the version of you that existed before. It’s not about “finding” the “old you” again. Trauma changes you—it rewires your brain, reshapes your nervous system, and leaves an imprint that lasts long past the original incident(s). You can’t go back. And you shouldn’t be expected to.
The real goal isn’t to erase the trauma or pretend it didn’t happen. It’s about learning how to live with it, how to integrate it, and how to acknowledge that it’s a part of you. But that doesn’t mean it needs to define you. You get to create a new version of yourself. One that sees the pain, acknowledges the struggle, and moves forward in spite of it, not because of it.
Final Thoughts
Don’t let anyone tell you that trauma makes you stronger. Instead, if it feels right, challenge that narrative. Share how your trauma shaped you, how it forced you to adapt, and how you learned to survive in ways you never should have had to.
It’s okay if you’re still struggling to move forward.
It’s okay to say that you are still healing.
and it’s okay to say that you’re still trying to figure it all out.