How We Retraumatize Ourselves (and What to Do About It)

Last time, I wrote about how seeking intense experiences can keep us from the self-connection and deep relationships that trauma healing requires. Today, I want to go one step further and explore what happens inside when we retraumatize ourselves — whether we intend to or not.

Much of what passes for "healing" or "personal development" can cross into risky territory for those of us with complex trauma. Pushing ourselves towards an outcome can easily override our own boundaries, preferences, and needs.

When we prefer to follow someone else’s protocol or process, instead of listening to the quiet wisdom of our bodies, we risk retraumatizing the most vulnerable, wounded parts of ourselves. Those parts of us don’t need anything external. They simply need our ongoing presence and care.  

We might think we’re using self-care tools to heal, but often we’re only keeping the pain at arm’s length — interpreting our wounds as weakness while not wanting to get close enough to care.

Many personal development approaches teach us to interpret our inner “no” as "resistance" that should be overcome. When this happens, “personal development” can become self-annihilation.

Our bodies are not machines.

What shows up as "resistance" always appears with good reasons. So when our inner voices tell us not to do something, how do we know when it's fear and when it’s time to listen?

If want to keep growing — without retraumatizing ourselves or overriding our nervous systems — we need a better way of discerning what's truly good for us.

How We Self-Override without Realizing It

Trauma healing and nervous system optimization go hand-in-hand. We want to release constraints from the past — carried in our bodies, memories, and emotions — while creating opportunities to thrive.

The journey looks different for each of us.

The skill lies in learning to listen to all aspects of ourselves while courageously leading from our most centered, values-based, and resourced center.

In a world of social media influencers and podcast experts flooding us with information, we can easily abdicate responsibility for our own self-listening in favor of the conventional trends of the day.

We might not notice we're overdoing it, rushing from self-care tip to productivity hack, autopiloting ourselves through our daily routine.

We might try to make ourselves feel better with constant effort, then turn resentful when our toolkits of self-care tactics don't reliably create the good feelings we want. 

Learning more about what we “should” be doing can become a way of avoiding the actual work of self-soothing. It can feel safer to manage ourselves through external focus than endure the discomfort required to listen and tend to ourselves.

Biohacking and other physically strenuous self-care approaches can quickly overwhelm already-burdened nervous systems, but we don’t always catch the signals from our bodies that we’re depleted. We don't need to push further or punish our bodies in order to self-optimize. We must give ourselves permission to listen to what we need and then give that to ourselves. 

We can ask ourselves, “Does this choice bring us into deeper alignment with our values? Does it create more, not less, self-connection? When we choose this, who are we becoming?”

And it’s not just physical experiences we need to watch out for.

Dissociative spiritual experiences can also retraumatize us because they mimic the mind-body split that happens during trauma. Anything that takes us out of our embodied experience can be a form of self-erasure and risk making things worse.

This gets confusing because, to a traumatized nervous system, expanded states of consciousness can feel like a tremendous relief. We finally feel part of something much larger than us, no longer alone. We might prioritize these larger energies, at the expense of mattering ourselves.

The dissolved ego-state often comes with a sense of beauty and awe, which can make life feel worthwhile after the seemingly endless wasteland of trauma. Yet within these expansive states (that often accompany energy work, psychedelics, or even silent meditation), we are often encouraged to “empty” ourselves or “ascend” out of our bodies. 

This is fundamentally depersonalizing and disempowering, subtly telling the wounded parts of us that the less of us there is, the better. Self-abandonment isn’t healing. And those “expansive” experiences often feel similar to the dissociation of our earlier traumas.

Intense experiences of overdoing it, pushing our physical limits, dissociating, and self-harshness can initiate a cascade of trauma flashbacks that we feel ill-equipped to handle, which leads to retraumatization.

Instead of trying to escape our bodies and the world, we need to learn how to be more here, more present, more authentically ourselves.

We want to live full, vibrant lives without reactivating old wounds. So, what do we do instead?

Parts Work and Inner Leadership

When I write about the Inner Child, I’m talking about the parts of us who adapted to trauma by toughing it out, and the parts of us who still carry old wounds. These aspects of self are helpful to differentiate, so we can connect with them and offer more support and choice.

Instead of seeing ourselves as traumatized, we can learn to center in our present-moment, adult awareness and turn towards the pain with curiosity and care.

Traumatized parts of us carry burdens from the past. These part of us startle and frighten easily, especially in situations that remind us of past trauma. When these parts of us get activated, they go into an intense stress response (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn/fix) that feels overwhelming.

In neurobiological terms, this is a “flashback.” And one of the things that differentiates my work from standard psychotherapy’s way of treating trauma is that I see flashbacks as a call for help.

What most people get wrong is that, when we try to “fix” flashbacks, we usually want them to go away. 

This is like telling the most vulnerable, wounded parts of ourselves (the parts of us holding the trauma) to stop crying, instead of consoling them.

No matter how nicely we do it — with distractions, logic, grounding, or expansive experiences — trying to heal our pain by turning away from it never works. Instead, this recreates the self-abandonment and the aloneness of the original trauma. It makes things worse.

Then, we’re left with even more wounded parts of ourselves, who we’ve retraumatized with our clumsiness — even though we were “only trying to help.”

It’s a tough place to be.

That’s why parts work (like the kind I offer in my trauma resolution practice) helps us listen to these wounded and traumatized aspects of ourselves. We learn how to turn towards them so we can heal.

It takes courage to approach the places of our deepest wounding without running away or dismissing our vulnerability as weakness. It takes self-leadership and a willingness to tolerate the pain of the past while staying anchored in the present.

When we do, we begin connecting to long-hidden layers of vulnerability that finally feel safe to be seen.

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Elie Losleben 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.