5 Trauma Personalities That Are Caused By Childhood Trauma

Childhood trauma helps give rise to specific personality traits. Are you codependent, a helper, fixer, perfectionistic, anxious or controlling person, and wonder how your childhood may have helped shape how you live in the world? If so, this episode is for you. Listen in as Lisa A. Romano carefully explains how growing up in a dysfunctional home impacts the developing personality.

As she explains, our authentic self is waiting to emerge, however, without inner child and emotional recovery work, our trauma personality remains a mask. The good news is that it is possible to find the road back to the authentic self, set healthy boundaries, and cope with troubling family dynamics in healthier and more productive ways.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

My name is Lisa A.

Romano.

I am a life coach,

Best-selling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

So today we're going to be talking about five personality traits or five personalities that emerge as a result of being raised and being exposed to childhood trauma.

I experienced both overt and covert childhood trauma.

I was raised by two unrecovered adult children of alcoholics who were highly critical,

Very controlling,

Very manipulative,

Very dismissive.

They would gaslight us as children.

And although this was taking place,

In their minds they weren't doing anything wrong.

And as I grew up and I developed things like eating disorders and I became a very anxious person,

I developed an anxious attachment style.

It manifested as codependency later on in my adult life.

It showed up as perfectionism.

I showed up as a fixer.

I showed up as a helper.

And interestingly enough,

I've been able to peel that back through learning how to explore my childhood from a state of curiosity.

Rather than reactivity,

Rather than resistance,

I really developed this ability to look into the past almost like I was looking over my shoulder and just peering into this looking glass and trying to figure out what exactly happened.

Childhood trauma relates to the things that happen in our experience that we cannot process fully and completely as children.

When you are brutalized in childhood,

When the people who should be protecting you are actually your persecutors,

You,

Dear one,

Have no place to run.

When you have no place to run and your fight or flight system has been highly activated,

You are stuck,

Right?

This is what they say when they refer to marinating in childhood trauma.

You cannot escape.

When you cannot escape a situation that's causing you to feel afraid,

Then trauma is occurring.

So stress is the type of thing that happens in our life when we experience a stressful experience,

But then things go back to homeostasis,

They go back to normal.

Trauma is the opposite.

Trauma is the result of what happened as a result of this traumatic experience.

This trauma is now stuck in my body.

I can't escape it.

So trauma shows up in the way that I walk.

Maybe I have hunched shoulders.

Trauma shows up in the way that I sleep.

I have a difficult time sleeping.

Trauma shows up in hypervigilance.

I think what is really transformational is when you recognize that trauma is in your body.

Trauma shows up in the way that you speak.

It shows up in the way that you think.

It shows up in the way that you relate to people.

It shows up in like,

Are you nervous when you hear a loud noise?

Do you flinch when you hear a loud noise?

Do you always feel on edge?

This is trauma that's been stored in your body,

And we can talk about how to release that trauma,

But it's really important that we understand that trauma is a residual effect.

It is complex post-traumatic stress,

What they call CPTSD,

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

We are reacting to experiences that have already happened,

But we're really reacting to the residual response of that experience that we were not able to process at the time that it occurred.

Let's say you have a dog or a pet that dies,

And it's really,

Really tragic.

You watch this dog get hit by a car.

It's really,

Really horrible to see,

But your parents act like it's like any other day in the neighborhood,

And they don't want to talk about it.

So that experience,

The emotions that you experience,

The overwhelm,

The fear,

The fight or flight response system gets activated in the brain.

That experience is still stuck in your body.

Your body remembers that,

And it was designed to,

Because the brain is designed to remember painful experiences,

And so our brains aren't doing anything wrong,

But we have to try to remember that trauma is what gets stuck in our body,

And trauma will manifest in things like anxious attachment style or codependency or in certain personality types,

And that's really important that you recognize that.

The reason I think that is so transformational is because if you see it,

It's like,

Wow,

Something happened in my childhood or a series of things happened in our childhood,

And let's face it,

Trauma is very common.

One in four women have experienced a sexual attack before they become adults.

I mean,

That is really serious,

And I believe it's one in six for little boys or for men.

So just that alone,

When you think about there are four women in a room,

At least one of them is going to have this trauma in the background.

That's serious.

If there are eight women in the room,

Two out of the eight will have experienced this type of trauma.

One of the last statistics I read was that one in four babies,

One in four kindergartens go home to an alcoholic parent.

That is trauma.

This is a child that's not able to escape that home.

The invalidation,

The unpredictability,

The gaslighting,

The feeling ignored,

The overt as well as covert trauma that's happening,

Not connecting to that child,

Not meeting those child's needs,

That causes trauma.

When I as a baby am not getting my needs met,

I am in trauma because I am unable to take care of those needs myself.

I need you.

I need someone outside of me.

I need an adult to be able to help me regulate and have this ability to feel safe,

To return to normal.

When you grow up in trauma and you have these unexperienced experiences,

If you will,

Then that trauma never gets to get expressed.

It manifests in different ways.

Like I said,

In our relationships,

In the way that we walk,

Our sleep patterns,

Our eating patterns,

Whether or not we exercise,

Whether or not we have hobbies,

Whether or not we isolate,

This is the way trauma manifests.

Let's talk about five ways that our personality is shaped by childhood trauma.

Number one,

If you have childhood trauma,

It is very possible that you may develop a achiever personality type.

This is somebody who feels like in order to feel safe,

They have to keep doing,

They have to keep active,

They have to keep achieving,

They have to keep busy.

This is part of,

I think,

This is part of us running away from that anxious feeling.

It's almost like an illusion.

It's like,

Catch me if you can.

As long as I keep it moving,

I'm not going to feel this trauma response.

We're really not in our bodies,

And that's what happened to us so often when we were children.

We weren't in our bodies when we were children.

We were out.

We were fantasizing.

We were dissociating.

I used to memorize the backs of license plates.

I would count letters of a sentence on my finger,

And if it landed on 10,

I had this weird sense of,

Okay,

I'm good.

These bizarre coping skills that I developed,

And they were all ways in which I was escaping this trauma that I felt in my body that I could feel,

But I couldn't name because part of the trauma in my childhood was we were consistently told that our perception of reality was wrong.

That is so common when you come from a narcissistic or an alcoholic home.

It's not your parents,

It's you,

It's your perception.

When parents gaslight you,

Then they are invalidating your perception.

Your inner reality never matches your outer reality,

And that is traumatic.

We can become this doer,

This achiever,

This person who has to run,

Run,

Run,

Run,

Run.

If you're somebody who is always moving,

You cannot sit still,

And you are always trying to .

.

.

You set a goal and you have to reach it,

Then it's very likely,

Or it would be good for you to become curious at least,

Do I have trauma in my background,

And has trauma,

And is affecting me,

And is the trauma that's now in my body that I've yet learned to process,

Is this why I behave this way,

And why my personality is what it is?

Another personality type that can emerge is the caretaker or the helper.

This is somebody whose sense of self and sense of safety comes from how well they are able to take care of someone else.

Now,

If you are a helper,

Then you have codependency traits as well.

You are someone whose sense of identity is tied to,

Oh no,

I have to help people.

If I help them,

Then I can avoid the trauma of being afraid or feeling like everything is going to explode.

Oftentimes that trauma personality is tied to being raised by parents who made you feel like it was your responsibility to keep the family safe.

Very common in alcoholic homes where we have the older children who are .

.

.

They're pretty much forced to take on responsibilities that they should have never had to take on.

As a result,

They're taking care of the younger siblings,

And sometimes even the parents.

You develop this sense of safety by taking care of other people.

If I can take care of everybody,

Everybody's going to be fine.

To be honest,

I'm still struggling with that trauma response.

I have such a mama bear.

I have to take care of everybody.

I really have to work consciously towards being really realistic about being able to separate myself from these other people,

Including my own children.

There's just so much I can do to take care of them.

I will do the best that I can,

But I do still have to work on feeling safe in my body,

Even though I can't control my children and I can't control them and take care of their lives.

Nor should I want to,

But I realize,

Because I have the curiosity to understand myself and the forgiveness and the grace,

I recognize that learning to be a helper was part of my trauma response.

Plus,

It was ingrained in me as a child that I should worry about everybody else but myself,

That it was bad to worry about myself.

I was selfish,

So I had a lot of cognitive dissonance around taking care of myself.

It was definitely encouraged to disown yourself and to worry about everybody else but yourself.

I recognize that it is not the healthiest disposition to have.

It is not a healthy personality trait to have,

And that there is balance,

That I have to work on being highly conscious about reminding myself that I am safe and that it is not realistic to try to control things that I can't control.

There's just so much I can do for my children.

There's just so much I can do for the world,

Just so much I can do for my dog,

Just so much I can do for my husband.

One of the personality types that emerges from childhood trauma is definitely the fixer,

The caretaker,

And the helper.

Another personality that emerges is this anxious personality.

When you have developed this type of a personality,

What you learned in childhood was that you have to think your way through things,

That you can't ever let go.

You have to always keep your eye on the ball.

You have to stay hypervigilant.

You have to stay in your head.

You have to anticipate when mom's going to lose her crap or when dad's going to lose his crap,

When your brother's going to fly off the handle,

When your uncle is going to walk in the door drunk.

So you're always trying to think your way through things.

The problem is with that type of personality is that you're staying in your head and you're not in your body,

And you're not feeling your feelings.

If you can't feel your feelings,

You can't process them.

You can't eliminate them.

You can't give them permission.

Holy grace to allow them to come through you.

This is what is so phenomenal about recovery work is because you can teach people who are interested in how to recover,

You can teach them these tools because they are teachable.

They are systems and they are practices and they're brilliant.

And so when you develop from or emerge from childhood,

All stuck in your head,

People might say to you,

I feel like you're aloof.

I feel like you're far off.

So you're the person in the group that people are trying to connect to,

But you're in your head constantly trying to anticipate when the next shoe is going to drop.

So you're someone who is using your mental juice to try to find ways to feel safe and to avoid feeling trapped,

To avoid criticism,

To avoid being put in a situation that you cannot escape.

So you're very much in your head.

Another personality type that evolves from childhood trauma is the perfectionist.

The super,

Super,

Super,

Super overachiever.

The person who is absolutely focused on doing the best job that they possibly can.

Unfortunately,

This is someone who thinks in black and white,

Who is afraid of making a mistake,

Who has learned that to feel safe,

You better be afraid of not being perfect.

That you have learned that the slightest thing that you don't do right,

The slightest thing that has the potential to bring you criticism is going to net you a very negative result.

But you've also been conditioned to think that,

Well,

If I'm perfect,

Then I could avoid criticism and also avoid abandonment.

And so it is tied to survival.

Remember that rejection is the supreme trauma.

Being rejected by your tribe,

Being rejected by your family,

Being rejected by your peers,

It is so primitive because the human brain is designed for socialization.

At least that's what we're supposed to achieve because being part of a pack,

Being part of a tribe secures our survival and allows for the species to move forward.

So it's very primitive and it makes a whole lot of sense.

So when you come from a dysfunctional home,

You've experienced childhood trauma,

You can emerge from that situation relying completely on yourself,

Thinking that I have to do it all by myself and the only way for me to feel safe is to make sure that I am perfect.

It can drive you to feeling isolated because you can develop workaholism.

You can be so focused on being perfect in your career or being the perfect mom or being the perfect wife or husband.

You are absolutely losing yourself and you don't realize that the perfectionism is you hedging your bets.

It's you fending off the trauma of rejection perhaps,

Or you fending off the emotions or the leftover residual emotions from trauma that you haven't been able to process yet.

Remember that these emerging personalities are symptoms of childhood trauma.

Childhood trauma absolutely shapes the personality that you become.

The thing to remember is that the real you is below these personality traits,

These characteristics.

Your authentic self is there.

Our goal in trauma recovery is to make our way back to the authentic self and the way that we do that,

One of the ways we do that is to acknowledge these things that have actually shaped our personality.

The fifth personality that can emerge is someone who is highly,

Highly controlling.

Somebody who is not the most trusting.

Somebody who cannot feel safe unless they are in charge.

This is somebody who wants to control you,

That wants to control where you go,

Wants to control what you think.

This is somebody who will do things in an attempt to feel in control over the situation.

When you're thinking about a controller,

This is somebody who felt out of control as a child.

Maybe there was incarceration in the family,

Or maybe there was alcoholism or addiction,

Or maybe there was a tremendous amount of financial struggle in the family system.

This is someone who has learned that if they remain in control,

If they control the money,

If they control the attitudes,

If they control the moods,

If they can control their families,

If they can just think about a family,

Then they can feel safe.

This is a trauma response.

This does not change until that person,

Again,

Becomes curious about their personality traits.

I think that's what we're trying to do here.

I think those of us who feel called to this work,

Obviously you do,

Otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this.

Those of us who feel like we're on a quest to get to the other side of this trauma,

Those of us who absolutely are willing to put in the work to heal from childhood trauma,

Then we recognize that becoming curious is sort of like the first stage,

Like,

Why am I this way?

Hopefully,

What you discover is that,

Dear one,

It's not your fault.

It could actually be no other way.

Childhood trauma shapes the way we turn out.

It shapes our personality.

It is neurological,

It is physiological,

And it is psychological.

It could be no other way.

If you are a child and you are born into such a stressful situation that your brain turns out in a certain way,

Your personality develops in such a way that all it's trying to do is run from the trauma response that's left over in your body.

What we can do on the healing journey is just become a little bit more observing,

Just become a little bit more curious about how we are showing up,

And that alone takes tremendous courage.

I think the key for us to remember,

Those of us who feel called to do this work,

Those of us who feel called to heal,

Those of us who feel called to get to the other side of trauma,

Those of us who really want to understand ourselves and we want to break the cycles for our children,

Those of us who recognize that we're carrying generational trauma and we just feel like it's part of our quest to heal it and break the cycle.

One of the things that you want to remember is that curiosity is an amazing thing because when I'm curious about why,

Then it's much easier for me to observe myself from a higher state of consciousness with objectivity and without embarrassment,

Without shame,

And without guilt,

And without resistance.

I really hope that what you're gaining from this session is this idea of being curious about your childhood,

Being curious about your personality type,

Your personality traits,

And also keep in mind that you can have any number of these personalities observed and you could cycle through them.

There have been times where I was the controlling person,

The perfectionistic person,

I was the helper,

I was the overachiever,

I was the rescuer,

I was all of these personalities.

When I began to realize that it could be no other way,

I felt so much relief because I always beat myself up for being this way.

I did have anxiety,

I was anxious,

I could get stuck in my head,

I was hypervigilant.

Once I understood that none of this was my fault,

That these were appropriate responses to childhood trauma,

That's when the real recovery work was able to begin because I wasn't afraid to look within so much anymore.

I was able to,

From a higher state of consciousness,

Recognize this is normal,

That had I been born to a different family,

A healthier family,

Let's say,

A family that wasn't plagued by alcoholism and gaslighting and narcissism and codependency,

If I wasn't born in that type of a family,

Then my personality would have been different.

Suddenly I'm looking at myself from a higher state of consciousness and I'm not so afraid to look.

I'm not so afraid to feel.

Over time,

This is where I developed the ability to have compassion for my inner child.

It's teaching you that it's okay to be where you are,

It's not your fault,

And that by gaining the ability to be curious regarding how your personality was shaped by these conditions that you,

Dear one,

Could not control,

This is not your fault.

When you really make that connection,

It's not my fault,

It could be no other way,

That's when I think the true healing work can begin,

Because we're no longer in resistance to what is.

At that stage of the journey,

It's a matter of learning how to focus on what you can control and surrender to what you can't control.

Although this might take you a year,

It could take you two years,

It could take you three years,

And although this type of work takes effort and diligence and waking up every day and deciding to do personal development work,

Deciding to learn how to feel your feelings,

How to process those emotions,

Deciding how to have compassion for your inner child,

Deciding to break the codependent patterns in your life,

Deciding to act differently,

Deciding to focus on a different emotion,

Deciding to hold on to your personal power,

Even though this might take work,

And it will take work,

Definitely,

The payoff is tremendous.

You're listening to someone that actually did this work,

And I was once .

.

.

I tell this story all the time because I think it's really profound.

People find it hard to believe,

But it's true.

There was a time where I was that woman in a fetal position between the toilet and the tub with my ex-husband screaming at me,

Threatening to not pay the mortgage,

Threatening to not pay the credit cards,

To financially ruin me,

To make it impossible for me to survive outside of that marriage,

Which of course is highly narcissistic and brutal to do to someone's psyche,

To want to cripple them and foster this dependency upon them just so that you can't leave them.

Very sick dynamic,

But that used to be me,

And I didn't have these life skills then.

I didn't have this knowledge then.

I didn't have this wisdom then,

But I was beginning to understand that what happened to me as a child was how I ended up in this narcissistic relationship in the first place.

It's why I was a fixer.

It's why I was a helper.

It was why I tended to be perfectionistic and so self-punishing.

Everything was beginning to make sense.

The personality that I developed began to make sense,

But that was only the very first and initial stages of my journey.

I had to learn how to fix it.

I had to learn how to transform my life,

And that's what I committed my life to,

And I hope that you are too.

I really hope this information has been beneficial,

Dear one.

Don't beat yourself up.

There's a reason for everything.

Become curious about what has been.

Become curious about who you are,

And remember that no matter what,

There is a light within you even if you can't see it,

And even if you can't feel it,

There is a light within you,

And you are entitled to find it and let it shine.

The goal of childhood emotional recovery work is to become authentic,

Is to reconnect with your true self,

With your inner self,

And that takes courage,

And I just hope this session has helped you even just a little bit.

Bye for now.

Reviews

So wonderful 🙏 You speak with such authenticity and it makes it obvious how important this work is to you and how devoted you are to helping those of us who have felt so lost, without purpose, and stuck.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Fascinating- I am all 5! Do I get a prize? 🤪
Seriously though, great information- thank you kindly! 🌹

Very informative & explains trauma and the personalities so well and I related to it so much. Thank you.

i have all five trauma personalities 🥹 hopefully awareness is the beginning of change and healing 😔💙😢😔💙😢😴💙😢😔💙😢

I am a combination of each of the personalities you describe; healing is a work in progress.