This morning, barefeet and overlooking a lush green backyard in full summer bloom, I sipped from my coffee mug as a friend and I exchanged our thoughts on how the past has shaped us. Did it make us better people? Did it hurt us, stifle us, hinder us? And how much of what we had grown through to become ourselves as we are today was created by the currents of trauma?

Thoughtfully my gaze shifted into the sea of green twigs dancing in the wind. “What trauma has shaped me? What do you think?”, my friend interrupted me.

I gave his question some thought. After all, trauma is a unique and personal experience. To me, he had always been the perfect rebel, not committing to anything but his freedom, yet when I got to know him better, I saw a boy on the run and sometimes, especially when his heart got involved, unable to make choices.

In a book, he’d be a character that rode through the world on his motorbike, unafraid to fight anyone that insulted him or those he loved. He’d be the mischief in a group of friends, someone that stole hearts and a great open-minded leader. He would also always be the bad guy in someone’s story, the one who hurt others simply by them placing their trust in him. In such a book, he’d be the one character that some woman always was furious about and so heartbroken, because he lied to her.

Taking a closer look and meeting this man beyond the superficial storyline, what I saw was not only his persona, the part that he showed the world, but a complex man shaped by trauma.

Trauma, the big one with a t. Ultimately, it is the personal experience of an overwhelming experience: too fast, too soon, too much, to make sense of what’s happening. And because every single one of us sees the world through a different lense and attaches meaning to experiences in varying ways, there was no way I could truly know. Yet,  as we talked, what was clear to both of us was how he had learned to betray himself in the face of making decisions, because he learned from society and caretakers that hurting someone by telling them what you truly feel or saying “no” would be a bad thing. And so, he avoided doing that. It was a coping mechanism, clearly: You know that saying “no” would be regarded as bad, but you want to be good, because you want to be loved, so you abandon the part of you that would authentically say “no”. It’s a form of self-protection to survive. And it’s a trade-off. This trade-off is how trauma shapes you in the long-term, because coping mechanisms become so automatic and ingrained in your behavior, that you can’t even tell where you begin and where the self-abandonment begins. Others begin to consider these as your identity, and you might do so yourself. When in truth, you are so much more than the behaviors you created around your self-protection. My friend smiled. One step forward on his own journey. The self-reflection was new to him. And for the first time, he had seen himself more clearly than all of the stories books would write about someone like him.

Tomorrow, he could ask himself, what he truly needed in those moments where he was unable to say “no”. Tomorrow, he could start taking action in another direction. The direction of his dreams, the direction of his authentic voice, the one that felt true to him. Tomorrow, he would take his life like a piece of clay shaped on a wheel and touch it with hands that are calmer, steadier. These new hands would shape his life differently than the traumatic experiences of his past did. He would in fact become more of what he is, true to himself.

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