How Trauma Affects Decision-Making and Risk-Taking
When people think about the effects of trauma, they often picture flashbacks, nightmares, or the persistent weight of anxiety. In addition, trauma can also impact more subtle and ongoing aspects of our everyday life: how we make choices. Decisions about relationships, work, or even small daily matters can feel distorted, too risky, or too dangerous. Or on the contrary, decisions that might warrant more consideration are taken impulsively without much thought.
In trauma therapy, exploring this aspect of the hidden impact of our past on becomes crucial, because decision-making is not just a rational process. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, for example, distinguished two types of decision-making processes. “System 1” is fast, automatic, intuitive, and emotional, while “System 2” is slow, deliberate, and effortful. Both are important and need to act together. Moreover, decision-making is not purely a cognitive process, but is deeply influenced by unconscious dynamics and early relational templates. Trauma can shape all these layers: it can make “System 1” hyperreactive, undermine our capacity to engage “System 2,” and lead to dissociation, out of awareness, of crucial parts of our experience and our inner world.
The Hidden Legacy of Trauma in Everyday Choices
Trauma is not just an event in the past, it is an experience that lingers in our mind and body. Our nervous system and unconscious memory continue to carry traces of what was overwhelming, terrifying, desolating, or unbearable. Decisions are rarely made in a vacuum; they are colored by our expectations of safety, danger, rejection, abandonment, or pain. For someone who has endured trauma, especially relational complex trauma, the inner world may be organized around vigilance and survival.
In this sense, a decision is not just about weighing pros and cons, but it becomes about navigating an internal constellation of fears, wishes, and memories, many of which have remained disavowed or dissociated. What looks, from the outside, like indecisiveness or recklessness may actually be a reflection of how trauma has reshaped the person’s relationship to risk, safety, and loss.
One of the paradoxes of trauma is that it can lead to opposite tendencies in decision-making. Some people find themselves unable to move forward, second-guessing every step, paralyzed by the possibility of making a “wrong” choice. Others, often unconsciously, leap into risky situations. Both patterns reflect the same internal struggle: how to live with uncertainty and vulnerability. Hyper-caution may serve as a defense against repeating past harm, while impulsivity can function as a way to override fear, flooding the system with action before doubt or dread can take hold. In trauma treatment, these patterns are not judged as “bad decisions,” but understood as creative attempts by the mind to manage unbearable feelings.
How Our Past Remains In The Present
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the unconscious plays a central role in decision-making. Trauma often creates internal conflicts between the wish to feel safe and the desire for connection, excitement, or aliveness. A choice that seems irrational on the surface, like entering a relationship with someone who feels unstable, may actually be driven by an unconscious identification with earlier roles as a caretaker, fueled by the hope that emotional intensity will allow for meaning and intimacy, or express a repetition of past relationships as an attempt to master what was once overwhelming.
Complex trauma therapy helps uncover these unconscious dynamics. By bringing hidden fears, longings, and identifications into awareness, therapy allows for a greater sense of agency. Decisions become less about reenacting the past and more about engaging with the present.
Risk-taking, too, is deeply affected by trauma. To take a risk requires a certain trust, in oneself, in others, and in the world. Trauma undermines this sense of basic trust, or thwarted its development to begin with during our early years. If the world has shown itself to be unpredictable or unsafe, risk can feel synonymous with catastrophe. Alternatively, the absence of a stable internal sense of safety can make danger feel strangely familiar, even comforting.
For example, someone who grew up in a volatile household may unconsciously associate intensity and unpredictability with love. Choosing a calm, stable partner might feel “boring” or even unsafe, while a chaotic relationship feels alive and known. These dynamics illustrate how trauma treatment must go beyond surface behaviors, asking what unconscious meanings risk holds for each individual.
How Therapy Can Help
In trauma therapy, decision-making and risk-taking are not treated as isolated “problems” to fix. Instead, they are approached as windows into the deeper organization of the psyche. Through careful listening and reflection, therapy helps people notice the unconscious assumptions that shape their choices, assumptions about safety, trust, worthiness, and survival.
For those struggling with hyper-caution, therapy can provide a safe space to experiment with taking small risks, while understanding the fears that arise. For those prone to impulsivity, therapy can slow down the rush to action, helping the person tolerate the anxiety that emerges in moments of pause. Complex trauma therapy, in particular, emphasizes the cumulative effects of early relational trauma, working to expand the person’s capacity for choice and freedom.
Over time, trauma treatment helps decision-making become less reactive and more intentional. Or less rigid and freer to take risks in a way that feels authentic and meaningful. Instead of being driven by the echoes of the past, choices can reflect present desires, needs, and values.
At Fermata Psychotherapy, we think of trauma not as a set of symptoms, but as an ongoing dialogue between the past and present. Our therapists look beyond surface behaviors to understand the unconscious meanings behind them, helping our patients recognize that trauma affects not only how people feel, but how they choose, risk, and relate.
If you find yourself struggling with decisions—whether through paralyzing caution or impulsive risk-taking—trauma therapy can help you understand and shift these patterns. You don’t have to navigate this alone. We are looking forward to join you in this journey. Contact us today.
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Photo credit: Ian Taylor