How Trauma Impacts Our Sense Of Identity
Our sense of identity has many dimensions, including the groups we feel we belong to and the roles we take in our lives. At the center of it is the felt experience of who we are deep inside. Our identity is not fixed in time but can shift throughout our life, as we redefine who we are and what it feels to be us. Our past experiences, our early relationships, and the narratives and communities we are part of, play a significant role in how our identity is shaped.
Trauma, or more specifically, what our mind was able to do with the trauma we endured, also plays a role in the development of our identity. Its impact is complex and it might include aspects of our identity that we take pride of; for example, trauma can be the source of resilience, creativity, drive, awareness, and vulnerability. However, trauma also has the capacity to disrupt and derail our sense of identity in a fundamental way.
The line between how trauma can make us or break us is blurry and overlapping, but important to understand. Trauma’s influence on our sense identity can manifest in both conscious and unconscious ways, shaping how we perceive ourselves and interact with the world.
Complex relational trauma, such as abuse, neglect, or abandonment, disrupts the child’s ability to form healthy internal representations of self and others. When caregivers are the source of trauma, the child is forced into a paradox: the caregiver, who should be a source of safety and security, becomes a source of fear or pain. This creates a deep conflict in the child’s internal world, as they struggle to reconcile the duality of needing the caregiver for survival while simultaneously fearing or mistrusting them.
Our mind might attempt to deal with this challenge through splitting, fragmentation, and dissociation. Splitting occurs when the child’s psyche cannot integrate the contradictory experiences of love and fear associated with the caregiver. For example, a child who experiences both nurturing and abuse from the same caregiver might split the internal representation of the caregiver into two: one who is loving and kind, and one who is cruel or neglectful. Because the latter might be too terrifying or hurtful to bear, it might remain dissociated and internalized. As a result, the child makes theirs a deep sense of “badness” and shame. The child’s sense of self-worth becomes dependent on the response of the caregiver, sometimes feeling valued, but at other times feeling deeply unworthy or unlovable.
This process leads to a fragmented or discontinuous sense of self, which impacts our ability to develop a sustained and cohesive sense of identity. Fragmentation is furthered as our mind continues to rely on dissociation to leave aspects of our traumatic experience outside of our awareness, never integrated into a sense of who we are. This protective mechanism comes at a high cost when it comes to identity development, as dissociated parts of the self remain inaccessible.
As adults, these early experiences continue to create challenges to our sense of identity. The internal fragmentation and dissociation might be experienced as distinct parts of ourselves that feel difficult to understand or integrate. They might also be experienced, conscious or not, as a sense of internal emptiness and void. The anxiety, fear, or pain we hold within ourselves, which might remain dissociated from awareness, can lead us to rigid ways of protecting ourselves from experiencing them again. Or we might find ourselves feeling, thinking, or behaving in ways we cannot understand or articulate, leading us to feel unsure about who we are.
From the day we come to this world, and throughout our life, our relational life shapes our sense of identity. Trauma can warp our experience of self and others, our ability to be emotionally open in relationships, and our capacity to tolerate closeness or separation. We might tend to repeat patterns from the past, reenacting old traumatic relationships and repeating cycles that reinforce our fragmented and conflicted identity.
Working through trauma and restoring our ability to develop a sense of identity that feels authentic requires the re-integration of fragmented or dissociated parts of the self. This cannot be done in isolation: complex trauma can only be healed in relationships. Trauma therapy provides a kind of relational experience where people can begin to recognize and integrate the split-off or dissociated parts of themselves, developing a more coherent and unified sense of self.
Therapy can offer both a renewed understanding of the ways in which trauma became internalized and, as importantly, the experience of being seen, understood, and accepted. This process can help people, over time, discover, re-create, and find themselves. If you are interested in exploring this process with one of our Chicago trauma therapists, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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Photo credit: Alexander Grey