4 Dangerous Types Of Trauma Responses

Spotting whether we’re using these shame-based responses and don’t know it

“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.” — Bessel A. van der Kolk

If you’ve experienced trauma growing up, then I don’t have to remind you of its far-reaching effects on our sense of Self, on our ability to trust, or the emotional and physical toll it takes on our mind, body, and emotions.

We get it.

We understand how being born into a toxic family system ruled by patterns of generational abuse, emotional abandonment, distrust, narcissism, and mental illness can affect our sense of safety and consistency.

We learn early and we learn fast to fend for ourselves and to avoid another beating. We silently nod, head down, eyes to the floor, so as not to make eye contact with our caregiver, or be accused of being confrontational and disrespectful.

We’re taught to relate to the pain of feeling invalidated as normal — and we start seeing toxic as familiar and comfortable. We shut down around anyone outside the family, or live in toxic positivity to throw them off the trail while learning to distrust kindness as having an agenda.

We grow heavier armor, adding another brick each time an insult is hurled or a hug or kind word is withheld as punishment. Emotional neglect becomes a preferred way of instilling shame in us and erasing our value. We learn the patterns.

Anything that triggers their anger becomes another reason to silence us, to further invalidate our worth, to cause us to apologize for whatever we did to anger them this time, and to breed further shame and guilt.

After awhile, disappearing into the safety of our bedroom closet becomes comforting. We can sit there undisturbed for hours reading, escaping, and imagining what a home filled with love and acceptance would feel like.

Generational trauma will have us growing up believing hypocrisy as truth, feeling invisible as acceptable, and pleasing others as being more important than establishing boundaries for ourselves. If our caregivers learned it in their childhood and didn’t take the steps to heal themselves, they’re inclined to pass it along to the next generation; us.

If we grew up in survival mode, we learned to structure our lives around other people. We learned to put them first, to please them and to appease them. We were conditioned to believe we couldn’t speak for ourselves, advocate for ourselves, or think for ourselves. So, we learned to apologize for speaking up without asking, or for voicing an opinion.

When the rules of engagement get flipped upside down in childhood, we learn unsafe as “safe”, inconsistent as stable, and abandonment as not being “good enough”.

These are the messages of chronic trauma in childhood that unconsciously teach us about trauma responses.

There are two common types of trauma responses: those that are used to push away feelings of fear and those that are used to push away feelings of shame.

A single isolated incident can be traumatic and cause a fear-based trauma response such as flashbacks, anxiety, nightmares or hypervigilance. Hypervigilance and anxiety may be seen after a near-death event, a bad car accident, or a natural disaster where we may obsess on checking our car or home for safety, or staying away from the location that reminds us of the trauma. Nightmares and flashbacks are common intrusive symptoms that replay the traumatic event, often triggering another cycle of hypervigilance and anxiety.

Shame-based trauma responses affect us differently. Trauma that is shame-based is often longstanding, typically begins in childhood as chronic physical, emotional or sexual abuse or neglect, and its effects are carried into adulthood. This places us at an increased risk for intimate relationship abuse, and re-triggering unhealed early wounds.

Shame-based trauma responses are associated with cPTSD, and tap into our sense of Self, and our Self-worth.

Historically, studies have shown that trauma and symptoms of PTSD show hyperactivity in areas of the brain such as the amygdala that process emotions, including fear, and hypoactivity in other areas of the brain such as the prefrontal cortex. It’s these hyperactive regions in the brain that trigger symptoms (and trauma responses), and the hypoactive regions that slow or weaken our ability to shut off these symptoms.

Because trauma responses happen as a result of trauma experienced, understanding their significance and their purpose can help us in peeling back the layers and finding healthier ways of coping.

4 Shame-Based Trauma Responses

Four types of shame-based trauma responses include: over-thinking, over-sharing, over-trusting, and over-apologizing.

Overthinking

When we overthink, this keeps us stuck in a loop of questioning, wondering, and re-experiencing a situation over and over in our head. We may be stuck on what someone said, how a traumatic situation played out, our part in the situation, or how someone responded or hurt us. We may begin jumping to conclusions about a relationship and blaming ourselves in the process. We may feel too ashamed to sit down and be vulnerable with those in our life, so we can wind up pushing them away out of self-preservation..while staying stuck overthinking things.

Overthinking is a way of trying to find something wrong with ourselves, or to “validate” what we were conditioned to believe about ourselves as kids. This is how shame bubbles up in this trauma response. The more we overthink, the more shame we experience. We may try to overcompensate by being perfectionists, or shaming ourselves for feeling stuck and unable to make healthy choices for ourselves.

Overthinking often walks hand-in-hand with self-sabotage and self-defeating behaviors. We may find ourselves ruminating on trying be what we think others want us to be, which can lead to further overthinking. For example, if we have an Anxious or Disorganized attachment style, we may have learned early in life that our value is tied into pleasing others. This can create “people-pleasing” as a maladaptive way of coping, and triggering overthinking as a way to “figure out” what is wanted, or expected from us.

Overthinking is also tied into poor parenting, and traumatic early experiences. If an early caregiver was inconsistent or unpredictable, or we grew up around poverty, violence, or neglect, we can be “stuck” overthinking everyone’s agenda, or looking for angles with those in our lives as a way of self-preservation.

Oversharing

Oversharing is also a shame-based trauma response. Three common reasons for oversharing include: fear of rejection, fear of intimacy, and emotional addiction. When a fear of rejection is the underlying reason behind oversharing, we may impulsively try to talk our way out of sharing things about ourselves (out of shame), which can lead to us looking socially awkward. We may talk fast, say the wrong things at the wrong time, or not pick up on social cues because we’re afraid of being rejected by others, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

When a fear of intimacy is the underlying factor behind oversharing, we may find ourselves giving details of a traumatic event, randomly changing the subject, or tying in a painful experience to the conversation. A fear of intimacy is the flip-side of a fear of rejection where we “want” to push others away before they have a chance to reject us. Because trauma is at the core of trauma responses, by oversharing to people, we may be unconsciously trying to push them away to prevent feeling rejected, or to avoid having others see our True Self.

Oversharing may also be a trauma response associated with emotional addiction. In emotional addiction, some may look at potential partners, college classmates, or a new coworker as an instant “perfect” person. When emotional addiction is the underlying factor, some research has tied it into Borderline Personality Disorder, and the idealization phase associated with it where an intense “connection” with someone can trigger the propensity to overshare.

Overtrusting (or overly distrusting)

If we were raised in an unpredictable environment, or raised with selfish or negligent caregivers, we learn things backwards. We become comfortable in unsafe and unpredictable environments because they were taught as “normal”. Toxic feels comfortable, and healthy feels uncomfortable and not to be trusted.

Typically, if a child has experienced repeated trauma from adverse childhood experiences, they can become adults who sway on one end of the trust spectrum, or the other.

On one end, are those who believe they can only trust themselves and become overly distrusting of others. Underneath this pain, is a feeling of not being good enough, or feeling inherently “wrong” where there’s a constant fear that the people in their life are going to abuse their trust. Because of this, they may feel deep shame for not being able to be emotionally vulnerable with those in their life out of fear of being hurt again. Not ironically, when we have experienced significant trauma in our formative years, we often unconsciously gravitate to people who are toxic or narcissistic, and eventually betray our trust because this has been conditioned as “normal” behavior. Needless to say, this adds another brick to our emotional armor, and makes us that much more distrusting of others in our lives.

On the other end of the spectrum, are those who also experienced trauma but have become overtrusting of those in their lives. Typically, those who are in the habit of overtrusting people will make an immediate connection with a person believing they are kind, loving, or wanting to take care of them. Overtrusting and oversharing walk hand-in-hand. At the root of trusting too much are unmet basic needs to be loved and unconditionally accepted, which puts them at risk for being targeted by people who ultimately use them, abuse them, betray their trust, and trigger more shame. This cycle will inevitably replay over and over until the person has taken the time to recognize the pattern, and tighten their boundaries.

Overapologizing

First, there’s a difference between us accidentally breaking a social norm such as cutting in front of someone at the store, haphazardly changing lanes, or forgetting a date or appointment. This is part of the human condition. We’re imperfect, we’re flawed, and we can screw up every now and then. Thus, an apology for some things is in order.

Then, on the flip-side is the tendency to overapologize. This is a trauma response learned in our childhood when raised in a toxic environment. Caregivers may have misused their authority to withhold love or affection until we apologized. We may have been unfairly blamed for them abusing us as our fault, or we may have learned to overly apologize to avoid feeling abandoned. Over-apologizing is based on a power imbalance — usually a parent, older sibling, or caregiver will misuse their power to get the other person to apologize, and smooth things over. This ties hand-in-hand with scapegoating, where the scapegoat is blamed, and often learns to (overly) apologize as their “role” in the family.

In our adult relationships, if we have been taught the habit of overapologizing, we will usually find ourselves apologizing for everything that goes sideways in the relationship — from miscommunication, to avoiding conflict, to try and prevent being abandoned, or to even idealizing our partner as “perfect”, so any relationship issues must be our fault. This is where deep shame comes into play; if we are toting around the weight of the relationship’s lasting power on our shoulders, we’re also holding the weight of everything being our “fault” if things don’t work out.

Regardless of the type of trauma we may have experienced, we owe it to ourselves to learn when these patterns started, why they’re deeply ingrained, and how to break this cycle to recognize our value and worth.

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References

Blackhart, G., Williamson, J. & Nelson, L. (2015). Social anxiety in relation to self-control depletion following social interactions. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 34, 747–773.

Herman, J. L. (1997). Trauma and recovery. New York: BasicBooks.