If you’ve lived through trauma, you probably carry a quiet list of things you do that don’t make sense to you. You snap over a spilled drink. You can’t relax on a quiet weekend. Someone is kind to you, and your first thought is, what’s the catch? Some days you feel everything at full blast, and other days you can’t feel much of anything at all.
I want to start by saying this clearly: none of that means you’re broken. Every one of those reactions comes from a part of you that learned, at some point, how to keep you safe — and it is still doing that job. It just hasn’t realized the job has changed.
And trauma doesn’t have to be dramatic to leave that kind of mark. Some of it is the big stuff — an assault, a car accident, a war. But a lot of it is quieter: a parent’s comments about your body, a breakup that gutted you, being humiliated in front of people who mattered. Your threshold for what overwhelms you is yours alone. There’s no need to measure your pain against anyone else’s. If it changed how you move through the world, it counts.
Once you understand what’s happening in your brain and body, those confusing reactions start to make sense. And things that make sense can change.
Stuck too loud, or stuck too quiet
I like to think of the nervous system as having a volume knob. When life is manageable, it sits somewhere in the middle — you feel sad, frustrated, or happy without getting swept away. After trauma, that knob can get stuck. Some people get stuck turned way up, where everything is too loud and too much. Others get stuck turned way down. A lot of people bounce between the two. Neither one is your fault. Both are ways a nervous system survives something that was more than anyone should have to handle.
Turned up looks like the parent who screams when their kid spills a drink, then feels sick about it a second later — because it was just a drink. When your stress is already high, there’s no room left. Your cup is full to the brim, and one more drop sends it over the edge. The drink was never the problem. Everything underneath it was.
Turned down is harder to spot, because from the outside it can look like strength. People tell you how calm you are in a crisis, how well you handle things. But on the inside, the only time you feel truly alive is when something is going wrong, and the rest of the time there’s just not much there. That isn’t calm. Calm is connected; numb is disconnected. Calm lets you feel joy and sadness. Numb keeps them both at arm’s length. So if you’ve been numb for a long time, know this going in: when feelings start coming back, they may come slowly, and not always the comfortable ones first. That isn’t you getting worse. It’s your brain waking up.
This is also why coping tools aren’t one-size-fits-all. When you’re turned up — racing thoughts, big anger, anxiety that won’t quit — strong emotion crowds out your sense of your own body, so the work is bringing your attention back to it: slow breathing, a warm shower, a walk outside, writing it out. When you’re turned down and everything feels empty or far away, you need something with rhythm and movement to bring you back online: dancing, humming, playing with your pet, a run, even cleaning a room. Either way, the goal isn’t fixing one bad moment. It’s keeping your overall stress low enough that small things can stay small — and finding your way back to the middle more and more often.
The part of you that never got the news
So why does the knob get stuck in the first place? Your brain takes in everything you see, hear, and feel, and the first stop is the amygdala — the part of you whose only job is to spot danger. Most of the time, information passes right through to be thought about. But when something feels threatening, the amygdala steps in and reacts before the thinking part of your brain has had a chance to weigh in. That’s wonderful when you need to jump out of the way of a car. It’s not so wonderful when it starts treating a hand on your shoulder like a threat.
Your brain also responds to what it remembers, not just what’s actually there. If you’ve ever burned yourself on a curling iron, you’ve probably flinched at one that wasn’t even plugged in. That same wiring is what lets you feel for someone else when they get hurt. It’s also how a sound, a smell, or a tone of voice can pull you straight back into a memory you thought you’d left behind.
In other words, your brain isn’t only reacting to the present. It’s constantly predicting what comes next, based on your past. If love was unpredictable when you were growing up, or came with a cost, it makes complete sense that kindness now sets off alarms. Those predictions feel like facts, but they’re really educated guesses — running on old, outdated information.
This is why peace can feel so strange. You finally get a quiet weekend with nothing on the calendar, and you can’t settle. If chaos was normal growing up, calm feels suspicious. A kind partner feels boring. Relaxing feels like letting your guard down right before something goes wrong. That doesn’t mean you secretly want chaos. Familiar isn’t the same as wanted — your body just isn’t used to peace yet.
Sometimes, when something is simply too much, your mind doesn’t fight or run at all. It leaves. You’re in the middle of a conversation or sitting down to dinner, and suddenly you’re watching it from outside yourself, foggy and far away, or whole stretches of time seem to slip by. That’s dissociation, and it’s one of the most protective things a brain can do. When a child can’t escape, their mind finds a way to leave anyway.
Here’s the way I’ve come to understand all of this after more than fifteen years of sitting with people’s pain. When something overwhelming happens, a piece of you gets frozen in that moment. That younger version of you — a Peace of you, as I like to call it — doesn’t know what year it is. It doesn’t know you grew up, got out, built a different life. It’s still standing guard in the memory, doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you alive. Nobody ever went back and told it that it’s over.
Going back with loving curiosity
The instinct, when we notice these parts of ourselves, is to want them gone. Why do I keep doing this? What’s wrong with me? But I’ll be honest with you: a part of you that has been on guard for years usually doesn’t want to “get better.” It has a job. If you try to fire it, it holds on tighter. What it needs isn’t to be shamed out of existence. It needs to be understood, and then given a new role.
That takes empathy, which is different from sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone. Empathy is actually stepping into what they went through and understanding it from the inside. And the person you most need to offer that to is the younger you.
Think about the old trolley problem. A runaway trolley is headed toward five people, and you can pull a lever to send it toward one person instead. There’s no good answer. Whatever you choose, you’d hope nobody would call you stupid for it. You did the best you could with an impossible choice.
That’s what the frozen parts of you did. They made hard choices in hard moments, with the knowledge and beliefs they had at the time. Maybe that meant going quiet, staying hypervigilant, or leaving your body when you couldn’t leave the room. Those choices weren’t wrong. They got you here. Healing means honoring that, and no longer keeping secrets from yourself about why you react the way you do. You can look at your past without judgment, with something closer to loving curiosity: What were you protecting me from? What do you need to know now?
One peace at a time
Maybe you’ve tried so many times to react differently and still end up in the same old patterns, and you’re starting to wonder if you’re just wired this way. You’re not stuck with the brain you have today. Your memories aren’t stored like files on a computer, sealed and permanent. Every time you revisit a memory, your brain reshapes it with what you know now. That ability to change — neuroplasticity — stays with you your whole life.
It doesn’t happen overnight, though. It happens the way a path forms through tall grass: by walking it again and again. Every safe relationship, every time you speak up and nothing bad happens, every time you pause instead of react, you lay down a little more of that new path. And each time you go back to a frozen part of you — from a calm, steady place, not in the middle of the storm — and let it know you’re safe now, the memory loosens its grip. It starts to take up less room in your story. It becomes neither good nor bad, just part of who you are.
That’s why I always say healing starts with calm. First you find tools that help you get steady. Then you learn to hold onto that steadiness, both in the hard inner work and in your everyday life. And slowly, you get more of yourself back — more present with the people you love, more able to choose where your energy goes instead of being dragged around by the past.
There’s no finish line. Healing is a process, not an outcome. But it is real, and it happens one small moment of safety — one peace — at a time.