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Why Trauma Survivors Keep Choosing Pain
Hear me out – this might be a bit triggering, but it’s important to understand.
When I learned this lesson for myself, it changed the game. I could finally choose better for myself, and my life finally hit an up-swing.
Trauma survivors are not wired for happiness. Our early life experiences wire our neural pathways for suffering.
Of course, it’s not that we enjoy pain. Rather, it is our most familiar feeling. And humans will always default to familiarity.
How we wire
Our first seven years of life are our most formative in terms of the brain. This is the period when we experience the most rapid growth and pruning of the synaptic connections which form our inner world.
Our personality, our habits and beliefs, our entire reality and view of the world is created in this time period.
Of course, as we mature we gain adult insights which change us too. But what I’m talking about in those first seven years is the foundation of who we are.
For those of us who were abused and traumatised in early childhood – this is where our familiarity with pain comes from.
