Trauma and Responsibility (when Healing CPTSD)

It’s easy to shift responsibility for trauma healing onto our partners and even our closest family and friends. In the moment, when we are de-coping, it feels completely justified. “It’s not me, it’s my trauma,” we think as we speak harshly, shut down, or erupt into a firestorm.

That might well be true, but our behavior remains our responsibility. We’re no longer children, even if part of us wants to behave childishly. We’re adults, even if the emotional flashbacks rooted in our childhood leave us shaken and speechless like we are five years old.

When we act out of unresolved trauma, we usually lack empathy and an understanding of the negative consequences of our behavior. Our anger about the unfairness of the past can cloud our judgement. From this standpoint, we easily project responsibility for our behavior onto others — usually the people we care about the most. 

For example, we might lose our temper at a loved one, only to apologize with, "I'm sorry, I just have a lot of trauma coming up right now." And while that might be true, we must beware not to make our trauma burden somebody else's problem.

Early in our trauma healing, we might try to justify our present-moment poor behavior, by referencing what happened to us in the past. We might try to control other people’s behavior with unreasonable requests or demands.

“Please don’t raise your voice for any reason, it triggers me,” is one. “Please don’t play music, ever, it’s too much for my nervous system,” is another. And also common is, “Please don’t look at me like that,” referring to an entire range of emotive facial expressions.

Demands like these focus on the wrong thing: on someone else’s perfectly normal behavior, instead of resolving our trauma so we’re not activated in the first place. But, attempting to feel better by controlling others doesn’t work. The boundary overstep inherently disempowers them, which often leads to resentment.

We might dismiss our poor behavior by referring to the intensity of our trauma symptoms, which might appear harmless. But this minimizes our responsibility. "I'm sorry to yell, I just didn't sleep well because of nightmares," might be true, but we’re still responsible for relationship damaging behaviors.

Of course, trauma is not a free pass to behave badly. It might feel that way, when we’re in a flashback, overwhelmed, flooded by the intensity of our nervous system’s survival response.

Recognizing that what happened isn’t our fault, but healing is our responsibility can become the foundation of tremendous healing.

Healing trauma involves reconsolidating traumatic memories and forging new neural pathways. As we do this, the older, well-worn paths slowly become obsolete. But before they do, the old patterns fight for dominance.

Change is calorically expensive. Our bodies would rather not grieve and grow. It takes energy.

Maintaining the status quo, even if painful and relationally destructive, takes less energy. We can fight this inbuilt inertia by noticing where to take responsibility for our behaviors when they miss the mark.

Self-responsibility is a catalyst for moving out of blame, shame, shutdown, and overwhelm. We center our agency and work to change our behaviors. 

Doing so, we create more moments of quiet peace, warm calm, spacious understanding, and hesitant joy for ourselves. And then we thread those moments together until they become the new tapestry of our lives.

Trauma Healing as Grief

Taking responsibility for ourselves moves us out of reaction and into grief. 

As adults, it's our responsibility to wrestle with what happened and recognize the consequences as we make peace within ourselves. No one else — not our spouses, not our friends, not our parents — can do this for us.

They can't fix it. They can't heal it. And they can't protect us from it, no matter how much they might want to. It's ours. And true healing demands that we take responsibility.

At this stage in our healing journeys, it's not the wounds of the past that need our main focus and attention. It's the scars that cover those wounds — the parts of us who adapted to the trauma with unwanted and harmful behavior.

These adaptive parts of us learned to respond to terrifying or painful situations in ways that don't support healthy and happy adult relationships.

Those parts of us often feel entitled to endless accommodations that easily become excuses for not healing. Instead of letting those parts lead, we must take responsibility for guiding them, the way we would stop someone from running off a cliff.

3 Steps to Take Responsibility for Trauma-Activated Behavior in Relationships

Our adaptations to trauma, left unchecked, put our current relationships at risk. And it's no one else's job to deal with them but ours. Here's how we can do it.

1. Understand how trauma required us to adapt in ways that don’t work now.

Living in unhealthy environments, whether growing up in dysfunctional families or living through abusive relationships, warps our perspectives. We create false meaning about ourselves, others, and the world, with beliefs like "Other people will always hurt me." or "There's something wrong with me and no one will ever love me." These inner beliefs perpetuate trauma.

2. Take responsibility for the adaptations we learned.

We adapted to unhealthy environments to survive. But what was adaptive back then is maladaptive now. It's our job to guide these adaptive parts of us and lead our relationships, instead of abdicating to their reactivity and activation. When we see these adaptations and take responsibility for them, with kindness and not harshness, we create a new and different relationship with them. Our adult, present-moment awareness begins to lead — not our unresolved trauma.

3. Acknowledge the process (to people who are impacted by it).

It's useful to let the adults you trust, closest to you, know that you're in a learning process of behavior change and trauma resolution. It helps, when you need to apologize for hurtful behavior that damages your relationship, which will start to happen less and less frequently as you heal. Acknowledging that you're actively taking responsibility in this way creates intimacy through accountability, vulnerability, and empathy. This empathy isn’t just directed at you and all you’ve suffered, but towards how you’ve created suffering too.

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This kind of responsibility-taking is a powerful foundation for relational repair, which you can explore more here.

When we take responsibility for the impact of our trauma-activated behavior, healing creates a bridge to a better and more fulfilling life. We get better by becoming better. As we do so, our confidence grows alongside our self-esteem 

If we refuse to be accountable for the harm our unresolved trauma does to the people we love, we continue to damage our closest and most treasured relationships. We become who we never wanted to be — perpetrators perpetuating the unwanted legacy of trauma.

Now we know better, we can do better. And I know we will.

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Elie Losleben Calhoun supports individuals and couples internationally through trauma resolution and embodied healing. She brings extensive training in somatic approaches and a deep understanding of how the nervous system shapes our capacity for connection. To learn more about working together, you're welcome to reach out.