You Can’t Heal From Trauma if You Hold It as Part of Your Identity

Opening Scene:

Your soul self sits on a clear crystalline chair in the brightly lit waiting room. The floor, walls and ceiling are pure shimmering white. A smooth jazz Bossa Nova fusion plays at low volume. After an eternity you are called and you head to the Contract Office. Inside you see the name you have been assigned and sign your agreement to The Amnesia. You take a deep breath. It’s time. You step through the portal to find it hot, the walls contracting and expanding, lights flickering, shadows moving, a woman screaming. It stops. The Amnesia kicks in. The mission you forgot you accepted is underway… And just like that, the forgetting begins. The identity you are about to construct will feel like truth. But it is just a story.

The identity you have accepted as truth is what stands between you and your truest self.

That probably sounds like a weird thing to say, because we are attached to our identities and think they are who we are.

But your identity is fluid.

Who you think you are is Not-You, it’s a conditioned version. The real version is the limitless You, before you were born… before the conditioning. The truest You is as close as you can get to the limitless one while inside a limited human experience.

The conditioning is the meaning you made of all the experiences you were part of as a child - the things your care-givers did and said, the things other people did and said, circumstances, events, and situations… All of it parts of a puzzle you were piecing together without knowing what the finished picture was meant to look like.

Most people don’t even know they’ve been subject to conditioning and that their identity is something they constructed to make sense of the world. They go through life saying “It’s just who I am”. And they will argue for their limitations to protect that identity.

But, you are not who you believe yourself to be.

Your identity is a story you tell yourself about who you are that keeps being retold and wired in. It becomes a blueprint. It’s the meaning you made about yourself.

Your habits are just predictable repeated patterns of behaviour produced by your identity, and the repetition of them provides evidence of the story of your identity. Those habits are simply “safety signals” that your nervous system knows and trusts (regardless if they are good for you or not).

And, because of that, identity change feels like death!

When you behave in a way that contradicts the story and veers from the blueprint, your subconscious sets off the alarms. And all the protective mechanisms kick in! Your nervous system fires up the cortisol and adrenaline, and your stomach tightens, your head hurts, your shoulders climb up to your ears, and your jaw burns with tension.

And your mind presses play on a tape recording of pre-programmed thoughts: “They will judge me”, “I don’t know enough”, “What if I fail?” (or whatever it sounds like for you). These are simply recordings made by the Guardians of your Blueprint (your protector parts), designed to keep you safe - to keep you aligned at all times with the blueprint.

So, we revert back to it. Your body calms down. The tape switches off.

One of my Blueprint Guardians was Bunny. She was the seven-year-old version of me wearing white bunny ears. She looked like that because as a child I made a connection, after watching Watership Down, that rabbits are vulnerable, but those antenna-like ears are brilliant at listening for danger (hello, hypervigilance!). The ears are a built in protection system.

So whenever I stepped too far outside the identity blueprint I’d unconsciously built, Bunny would arrive. If I was about to do something that felt too visible, too vulnerable, or too uncertain, those ears would go up and she’d sound the alarm. My body would tense and my mind would start telling stories. And before I knew it, I’d be back inside the blueprint, back where my nervous system believed it was safe.

Bunny wasn’t the problem. Her job was to pull me back into the identity that once kept me safe. She wasn’t trying to stop me living my life. She was trying to stop me dying (or so she believed).

That’s why fighting our Blueprint Guardians doesn’t work. They’re not our enemy, they’re doing exactly what we unconsciously hired them to do.

The blueprint changes first.

Then the Guardians can retire from their old jobs and take on new ones.

Our Blueprint Guardians don't just protect us through our behaviour. They protect us through our language too. Every time we describe ourselves, we're reinforcing the blueprint they were hired to defend. Words strengthen the wiring. The more often we repeat them, the more solid the blueprint feels.

In the same way, when you think or write or talk about the trauma your experienced as “my trauma” then you are acknowledging it as your identity.

“My” is the magic identity word.

My trauma, my diagnosis, my anxiety, my depression, my ADHD… You get the picture.

You make anything that comes after “my” your identity, so when the trauma you experienced is yours, and has become part of your blueprint, guess what happens when you try to heal it...

Your subconscious views healing as self-destruction, rather than recovery.

If "your" trauma defines who you are, then letting it go feels like erasing yourself. Your Blueprint Guardians will do whatever it takes to protect your existence, and their primary weapon of defence is the “trigger”.

Because they know you’ll want to avoid it…

(And yet, you could also see it as a message from You to you showing you where you need to look, couldn’t you?)

Triggers are your nervous system activating, reacting to something that reminds you of something else, a pattern you’ve recognised over and over again. They are echoes of the past. Something that brings up an emotion you don’t want to feel, or a memory you don’t want to relive.

The way you feel when you are triggered might feel like “who you are”, but they’re actually showing you who you are not, Not-You. And by healing the root cause of the trigger, and shifting your identity in the process, you get closer to You.

So, when you see your life through the lens of the trauma you experienced, everything relates back to it - your emotional reactions to other people or to situations and events, the way people relate to you, and the way you relate to yourself. And the way you respond to being triggered tells you everything about how deeply the trauma has become the blueprint.

Your safety in avoidance is a path of eggshells.

Avoiding being triggered means you are aligned with the blueprint of your identity, which means you are “safe”. Or at least that’s what you tell yourself.

(Tough-love incoming….)

It’s time to take your trauma-tinted glasses off, stop making it part of your identity, and start making meaning from it that actually works for you (because god knows you’re making it mean something one way or another). Then, live your life as an active participant who’s not living in a any kind of “retreat”, but has the tools to deal with life and all its ups and downs.

Now, when I say retreat I mean both a literal one (where you head to your nearest Vipassana and close your eyes for 10 days), or the one where you retreat from others, stay home, avoid socialising, prefer “me time”, get stressed out at the thought of going out and feel relief when social plans get cancelled.

Because what’s happening in both cases is that you’re avoiding being triggered.

(There’s a fine line between Me Time and isolation in order to avoid people who might trigger you)

But, and here’s the beautiful twist, triggers are your teacher-healers!

Triggers are not the enemy, even though they feel that way - they are the map. When you stop avoiding them and start welcoming them, allowing the emotions they bring up to move through you and complete, that completion becomes closure. And closure is how the blueprint changes.

This is where co-regulation becomes essential.

As most trauma happens in relation to other people, that’s where it heals… with other people. Your body needs to feel safe in the presence of another nervous system.

I can attest to this personally - in the last year, finally after more than half a century, I co-regulated with both a safe feminine energy and a safe masculine energy, and it had the most profound effect on my own healing and transformation. Of course it’s not the only part of the process but it’s the secret ingredient!

That nourishing co-regulation along with self-regulation, and the expansion of your emotional capacity is Step Zero. Before any identity change work, you have to learn how to feel safe in your body again. Without it, the deeper work stays stuck in a loop keeping you aligned with your blueprint.

After Step Zero, the deeper work becomes possible. You start embracing triggers as teacher-healers rather than running from them. And from there, you can embody and wire in a new identity and write the blueprint you’ve chosen for yourself as an adult instead of the story the child version of you has been telling you for years.

That’s the path to overcoming past conditioning (the Not-You), releasing inner blocks (the stories and meaning Not-You made about what you experienced), and changing your identity to one that gives you what you want (You).

We’re not talking about a decade of excavating “why am I this way”, or living through a healing journey that has itself become part of your identity. We’re talking about technques that work directly with the subconscious (mind and body), such as hypnosis, NLP and EFT. And these techniques mean change can happen faster than you expect.

What it takes though is courage. Courage to break the blueprint you’re living by and create a new one.

Like I said, identity change feels like death, because it is. You have to let one story die before you can replace it with another.

And, (I wish I could sugarcoat this but I can’t) identity death hurts.

But so does living as Not-You.

So you have to choose your pain…

You can live in your current identity for life - avoiding your emotions, suffering, unfulfilled, exhausted, believing the patterns of behaviour that leave you exhausted are your personality.

Or, you can choose short-term intentional discomfort to let go of the identity (that if you are honest with yourself you already know is Not-You) with an end in sight. And create that new blueprint that has you fulfilled, joyful, at ease, in flow… with more energy, improved health, better relationships, stronger leadership (of self and others)… More like the real You… the one you feel but fear stepping towards because “What if it doesn’t change anything?”

What if it does? What if it changes everything?

Closing Scene:

Bunny is sitting to my left. The office smells musty, the windows are dirty enough to obscure the view. There are files everywhere, on the desk in front of us, on top of the filing cabinets, and spilling out of the open drawers. In front of us is an open file. For a moment we both sit there. I know she's been writing my story for a long time. I apologise for everything she went through. I ask her to forgive me for not being there then, and I assure her I am here now. I thank her for everything she tried to do for me. I tell her I love her. She hugs me. I hug her back. When we let go, she’s smiling. I look down at my hand and realise I’m holding the pen now.

Leave a comment

🪩 People who recognise themselves in this tend to be exactly who I work with. The next step is finding out which subconscious pattern is dictating your “identity”. 📞 Book a free 15-minute Pattern Audit Call

^{| Subconscious Rewiring Coach | Hypnosis, EFT & NLP Practitioner | Creator of Neuro-Emotional Wisdom™ |}