What if you don't have childhood trauma?

If you wouldn't use the word "trauma" in describing your story, but you do have self-sabotaging behaviors that you desire to change.... this email is for you.

For most of my life, I felt like I had no story to process with God or others. I certainly would not have used the word "trauma" to describe my childhood.

Sure, I knew everybody has brokenness in their story; that's a part of being human. But growing up in a loving Christian family, the pain that I experienced seemed insignificant compared to the suffering of the world.

I mistakenly believed that trauma only encompassed experiences like sexual abuse, violence, natural disasters, neglect, none of which I had personally endured. So from my perspective, I was "too blessed to be stressed."

So, when I inevitably encountered pain in my life, it was bypassed and prematurely turned into a testimony for others and fuel for the "good work of the kingdom of God" in my personal and professional life.

The thing was, after a while, I could name that there were self sabotaging behaviors in my life like perfectionism and overworking and people pleasing, but what I could not name was why they were there in the first place.

These behaviors had deep root systems that connected to pain in my story. They were coping mechanisms that secured for me a place of love and joy and belonging in my family, in my church, in my friend groups. But as I matured into adult life, these adaptive behaviors became traps that kept me from true freedom in my relationship with myself and with God and with the people I love.

The truth is, we all have experienced trauma. Whether it's capital T-trauma or it's compounded lowercase t-traumas that are often much more nuanced and difficult to name. Trauma is not defined by the experience itself, but the meaning that we assign to the experience.

As psychologist Gaber Mait says, "trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside of you as a result of what happened to you."  

This damage in our story, and the ripple effect that it has in our minds, in our bodies, and in our relationships creates a lens through which we behold the world. No human life is exempt from damage in their stories.

We have an enemy who wages war against our souls, and his only pursuit is to steal and kill and destroy the goodness that God has created us to embody for his glory. The work of the enemy is found in the details of our stories and his goal is to shift our attention away from God and his perfect love and his perfect design and onto ourselves and others and the outcome of our circumstances as the problem and the solution.

When this happens, we respond to fear by seeking safety apart from God. This results in various forms of dysfunctional patterns of belief and behavior that we call self sabotage.

But when our trauma is named, and when it's given an empathetic witness by God and others, it loses it's power and a new perspective and meaning and response to what we have lived becomes available to us.

So healing from self sabotage requires us to invite the love of God into the places of harm in our stories, to re-establish safety with God.

For Eternity and Until, 

Tori Hein
Freedom Movement