30 “inner self” observations about Trauma

Harry Ven
3 min readApr 12, 2022

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“Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you” — Dr. Gabor Mate, author of Scattered Minds

Trauma — an important trigger for mental health issues, has been widely discussed in the context of wars, childhood abuse, and natural disasters.

While the concept of trauma is well-known, what is lesser understood is the psychological repercussions in the individual with a traumatized inner-self.

What we all see as social problems today — smoking, drinking, drug addiction, obesity, anger problems, emotional outbursts, violence, etc., many times are coping mechanisms for people to find temporary relief from their traumatized selves.

source: https://www.konvos.me

While the external symptoms of trauma — on how it affects our behaviors have been well-documented, there’s not been much conversation on what kind of debilitating effect trauma has on our inner selves.

How does it feel to be traumatized? What does it feel like to carry the scars of trauma all our lives? How does it debilitate our wellbeing? How does it impact our happiness? These are the questions that we need to ask ourselves if at all we are to find a humane solution to what is called “one of the biggest public health risks in the US”.

As someone who has gone through Trauma and a researcher on the subject, here are thirty of my “inner self” observations of how a traumatized mind perceives and feels.

  1. Trauma is never being able to see my whole self
  2. Trauma is a million broken reflections of me
  3. Trauma is invisibility
  4. Trauma is the hurt of a social promise broken
  5. Trauma is feeling guilty for protecting self
  6. Trauma is an alienation of the self
  7. Trauma is seeing myself from a distance
  8. Trauma is like being in exile from myself
  9. Trauma is trying to find me in other’s faces
  10. Trauma is the inability to see my own reflections
  11. Trauma is being broken and acting like not
  12. Trauma is being guided by other’s reactions to Who I am
  13. Trauma is operating from a place of brokenness
  14. Trauma is fragmentation
  15. Trauma is like experiencing day and night at the same time
  16. Trauma is a broken connection to myself
  17. Trauma is reliving the original pain every day
  18. Trauma is seeing myself through a broken mirror
  19. Trauma is being flooded with emotions
  20. Trauma is entrapment
  21. Trauma is voices shouting at you all the time
  22. Trauma is a constant reminder of the threat
  23. Trauma is a bodily reaction to an unhealed wound
  24. Trauma is the scar that hasn’t healed inside
  25. The opposite of Trauma is safety
  26. Trauma is the constant feeling of losing control of myself
  27. Trauma is feeling stuck forever in a helpless state of horror
  28. Trauma is the visceral reaction to the pain I had years ago
  29. Trauma is the constant fear of losing sight of myself
  30. The opposite of Trauma is inner harmony

Harry builds tech-based extended cognition to aid in emotional processing at Konvos

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Harry Ven

Enabling mind conversations that matter at https://www.konvos.me. Tech enabled extended cognition .