Ep 83 You Are Not Your Trauma - Understanding and Healing from Childhood Emotional Wounds

Do you ever wonder why you react a certain way in relationships, struggle with anxiety, or find yourself people pleasing and overachieving without knowing why?

In this powerful and personal episode, Lori Gouhin explores the long-term effects of childhood trauma, even the kinds that were never labeled as such. From emotional neglect and chronic criticism to silent treatments and manipulation, these early experiences wire our nervous system for survival, not safety.

Whether you’ve struggled with trust, control, emotional numbness, or perfectionism, this episode will help you understand how unresolved trauma is stored in the body and how to begin the healing process using real, practical tools.

This is not just about mindset work. This is about healing your nervous system, reclaiming your peace, and recognizing that you’re not broken, you’re just running on outdated survival strategies.

Episode Highlights:
 

• What childhood trauma really means (it’s not just big events)
• How trauma lives in the body and affects adult behavior and decision-making
• Signs of an unregulated nervous system and what it looks like day to day
• Why perfectionism, over explaining, or emotional shutdown might be coping mechanisms
• Why nervous system healing is deeper than mindset work
• Healing tools including breathwork, grounding techniques, gentle movement
• The power of creative expression, reframing, and inner child work in trauma recovery
• Why healing doesn’t require grand action, just self-awareness and compassion and one step at a time

Thank you for sharing your time with me and remember to show up in your life like the masterpiece you are because YOU are the ARTwork!!!

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Transcript

Lori Gouhin: [00:00:00] you don't need to fix yourself. What you need is to safety yourself. That's how you start to reclaim your responses and your choices and your peace. Hello my friends. I am so glad that you are here with me today because today I want to talk about trauma, not the kind that gets headlines or a diagnosis, but more specifically I wanna talk about childhood trauma because I think that so many of us were raised with the yelling, [00:01:00] the shaming, the silent treatment.

Possibly the physical punishments, maybe favoritism, manipulation, and that kind of trauma. It doesn't just disappear because we've grown up and you know, of course this episode is not coming from a clinical expert's perspective because clearly I am not one. But without getting into the details, let's just say that I've lived.

Through more than my fair share of trauma, and I've done a lot of work to recognize how my past shaped my nervous system and my behaviors and my beliefs about myself, and more importantly, a lot of work to figure out how I could finally start letting go of that and letting go of what wasn't mine to carry.

I also wanna say this because I think sometimes we forget that if you're still in relationship with the people who hurt you, especially if they've never taken accountability for it, You might still [00:02:00] find yourself triggered mentally, emotionally, and actually even physically just by being around them.

 And that doesn't mean that you're weak. It means that your body remembers, and that if you haven't worked through the trauma, it will keep showing up in ways that you might not be expecting. So in this episode, I wanna walk you through what trauma actually is. How it's stored in your body and how it shows up in your adult lives without you even realizing it.

And I also wanna share some tools and strategies that can help you to begin to feel safe in your own body again. And so if you did grow up in a time or in a family where certain types of abuse were dismissed and normalized, or maybe not ever talked about, I think this conversation will be helpful for you.

So let's start with this. 

Trauma isn't just something that happened to you. It's also what happened inside of you as a result. [00:03:00] It's how your body learned to protect you and how your nervous system got wired to survive and how if it's never been addressed, it keeps showing up. Even when the threat is long gone, and it can be tricky because trauma doesn't necessarily look like.

flashbacks or panic attacks. Sometimes it looks like being emotionally shut down. Sometimes it looks like being controlling or overly rigid or needing to have everything perfect to feel safe. Sometimes it might look like gaslighting other people. I. You were taught to disconnect from your own reality in a way, and not taught how to validate your own feelings.

Sometimes it shows up as narcissistic behaviors and not because you're a bad person, but because somewhere along the line your nervous system decided that the only way to survive was to self protect at all costs And when you've never felt [00:04:00] safe to feel your emotions, you can't just get rid of them.

You bury them and they don't disappear. They live in the body, in tension patterns, in chronic stress, maybe digestive issues, migraines, insomnia, and all kinds of ways they live in your relationships and the way that you defend yourself too quickly, or the way that you can't trust people fully or the way that you expect to be abandoned before anyone ever even gets a chance to stay.

And if you're still around the people who caused the trauma, your body can get triggered all over again. You might feel anxious for no clear reason. You might feel disconnected or defensive or like you've regressed. But again, that's not a weakness. That's your nervous system. Picking up on the old signal and doing exactly what it was trained to do.

And so if you ever wondered something like, why am I like this? [00:05:00] Or Why can't I just let things go? Please know that you are not overreacting. You are responding to what your body learned. And one of the hardest things about childhood trauma, especially when it wasn't acknowledged or label as such, is that you grow up thinking that your reactions and your behaviors are just part of your personality.

You might think you're just bad at relationships or too sensitive or too cold, or you think perfection is just ambition or that your inability to trust others is just being cautious. Again, it can also show up as a constant self-criticism. Maybe the belief that you have to earn your worth or you're staying in survival mode.

 Overreacting to perceived judgment, and that was a big one for me. Or it might show up. Something like emotional numbing or self isolating. Maybe you have impulsive decision making, or again, push people away the second you feel [00:06:00] close. And you might think that your need to control everything is just being responsible, but in reality, these behaviors are the coping strategies that your younger self-developed to feel safe, and they just followed you into adulthood.

I used to say to myself that I was lucky to be born with coping strategies. I'd say, oh, I was. Just lucky I was born with really good coping strategies and that my trauma didn't really affect me, but that couldn't be further from the truth because my coping strategies were the effect and they were definitely affecting the way I went through life.

And these behaviors, they can go unnoticed for a long time because they often look productive. Overachieving people pleasing, taking care of everyone else's needs while ignoring your own, being the fixer, the responsible one, the one who doesn't cause trouble. These are the responses to pain that was [00:07:00] never allowed to surface, and this is why healing is so important because.

Trauma doesn't stay in the past. It becomes your present, your relationships, your habits, your goals, or your lack of them. And the first step is not judgment, it's recognition, it's self-awareness, and it's being willing to look at your patterns with compassion instead of shame, 

The goal is to stop letting it run your life without your awareness or your permission. When you've been living with a dysregulated nervous system, one that'll swing between anxiety, numbness, defensiveness, or shut down, you can't think your way out of it.

This is why mindset work alone isn't always enough. you need to create new experiences of safety in your body. That's how the rewiring begins. So let's talk about what that actually looks like, because sometimes small, simple things [00:08:00] can make a big difference and let your body know that you're safe now. Here are a few things that I'll share that have helped me and helped some of the people that I have worked with.

The first thing is breath work, especially something like box breathing. And if you don't know what that is, it's very simple. You inhale for four seconds, you hold your breath for four seconds, then you exhale for four seconds, and then you hold your breath again for four seconds, and that slows down your system.

Especially if you find yourself spiraling or overstimulated. The second thing I would say that is helpful is grounding. And what I mean by that is using your senses to get back into your body. So for example, in the moment when you're feeling stress or anxiety or whatever it is that you are feeling in that moment, notice five things that you can see, four things that you can touch.

Three things that you can hear, two [00:09:00] things that you can smell and one thing that you can taste. The third thing I would say is gentle movement. So that can be stretching or going for a very slow walk with no goal in mind other than to be noticing your surroundings. So not listening to podcasts or music or anything like that, just being with your thoughts and noticing your surroundings.

 The fourth thing is reframing. Asking yourself, what story am I telling myself right now, and is it actually true or is it just familiar? Reframing has been one of the most powerful strategies for my own healing, and not because it changes what happened, but because it changes the meaning that I give to it.

Meaning really does matter. Sometimes reframing can look like writing from someone else's perspective, and I did a lot of that. And it's not to excuse the abuse or definitely not to accept it as okay, but to understand the possible reasons behind it. Maybe [00:10:00] your parent was emotionally stunted or deeply traumatized themselves.

Maybe they never learned to regulate their own nervous system. And then that spilled over into how they treated you. And again, that doesn't make it right, but it can loosen the impact that the story has on you. It might also mean speaking to your younger self with the words you wished you had heard when you were little, or writing a letter from your adult self to the child version of you who was scared or confused and trying to make sense of things that they were way too young to understand.

Number five, you can also try some form of creative expression. To get what's inside of you out without judgment. That might mean painting, writing, singing, even rearranging your furniture, because it's not about the result, it's about the release. As you can imagine, this one has had a really strong effect on me.

Number six, you can also journal so important, [00:11:00] especially stream of consciousness writing, where you give space to the version of you that had no voice back then. And this is how we begin to interrupt the cycle, not by forcing healing, but by giving ourselves new experiences of regulation again and again and again, bit by bit.

And I want you to remember, you don't need to fix yourself. What you need is to safety yourself. That's how you start to reclaim your responses and your choices and your peace. And to be clear, I didn't wake up one day magically. I was healed and I'm still not done, but I am also not where I used to be and I know what it's like to live inside of a nervous system that's always bracing for the worst, even when nothing bad around you is happening.

 And what started to shift things for me again, it wasn't one single breakthrough moment. 

It was small choices over time. Choosing to pause instead of react, choosing to get curious instead of [00:12:00] immediately assigning blame to myself or to someone else. Choosing to notice the physical sensations in my body and not run from them. And honestly, it was a learning how to reframe the story. not in some fake positive way, not in a just, I'll just think differently kind of way, but in a deeper, more honest way.

I began to realize that the people who hurt me were functioning from their own unhealed pain. And again, it didn't make it okay, but understanding why that it might have happened helped me to stop internalizing it as something that I caused or something that I was. I don't know that it meant that I wasn't enough, and it helped to change everything.

It really did because when you stop taking someone else's behavior personally, even when it's directed at you, you start to reclaim your power. And another thing, as I mentioned, creative expression, that also played a huge role for me because sometimes I [00:13:00] couldn't put into words what I was feeling. I wasn't comfortable putting it into words, but I could paint it.

I could get it out of my system, out of my head, and out into color and texture and shape. Something about that process made me feel more whole, more authentically me. I also learned to recognize what my body was telling me. The tension, the shutting down, the over-explaining the urge to disappear in certain moments.

My controlling nature. Boy did I have that. My fear of rejection again, another big one. All of that was old wiring. And then instead of shaming myself for it, I started to say. Okay, this is information. What do I need right now to feel safe? This is the work. It's not always comfortable, but it is deeply freeing because the more you learn to sit with yourself without judgment, the less power the past has to dictate your future.

So why does all this [00:14:00] matter? Well, again, because unprocessed trauma doesn't just stay tucked away in the past, it's subtly or usually not so subtly shapes your present. It shows up again in your relationships, in your decision making, in your self-talk and the way you set goals. Or maybe you don't set goals in the way that you trust or you don't trust, and in the way that you show up or shrink back from the life that you say that you want.

And most of the time you don't even realize that's what's happening. You just think you're stuck or unmotivated or broken when really your body is still running on old data, doing everything it can to protect you based on experiences that already happened but never got resolved. Healing matters because it gives you back choice.

The choice to respond instead of react. The choice to stop overexplaining or overcompensating, the choice to go after the thing that you want without self-sabotaging, [00:15:00] before you even begin the choice to stop letting your past become your blueprint. And I want to remind you. This work doesn't have to be perfect to be powerful.

You don't need to fix every pattern overnight to get to a place where you're never triggered again. You just need to create enough self-awareness and self safety that you can. So that you can catch it when it's happening, and you can choose something different, even if that different is just taking one breath, one pause, or one moment of honesty with yourself.

That's how it begins. That's how you take your power back, not by forgetting your story, but by no longer letting it be the only voice in the room. So to wrap it up. You are not your trauma, you are not your reactions, and you are absolutely not stuck no matter how long you've been carrying the same patterns.

Healing is possible and I am a perfect example of that, and it [00:16:00] doesn't mean pretending the past didn't happen. It means choosing to stop reliving it on autopilot. If this episode resonated with you, or if it helped you name something that you've been feeling but couldn't explain, I would love for you to share it with someone else who might benefit from hearing it too.

 And if you're looking for support, whether it's rebuilding self-trust, regulating your nervous system, or finally moving forward with your goals, I can help you with that. You can learn more about working with me by going to my website. Or by reaching out to me directly, you do not have to stay in survival mode forever.