The power we hold, p.12
The Power We Hold, page 12
It starts early. A child senses that her full range of emotions – her anger, sadness, excitement, curiosity – might disrupt the bond with her caregivers, peers, or community, so she does what every nervous system is wired to do: She prioritizes attachment over authenticity. She dims her enthusiasm to avoid being called ‘too much.’ She holds back her tears so she’s not ‘too sensitive.’ She swallows her anger because ‘good girls don’t talk back.’
In his book The Myth of Normal, Dr. Gabor Maté describes this as ‘ground zero for the most widespread trauma in our society.’ A trauma so normalized, so woven into the fabric of how we raise girls, that we mistake it for personality rather than adaptation.
The child learns that to belong, certain parts of her must be suppressed. And so, she adapts. She becomes agreeable. And over time, these adaptations solidify into her identity. What started out as survival strategies become the way she moves through the world. She mistakes her programming for personality. And she believes that who she had to be to survive, is who she is.
The Biology of Loss
Trauma’s impact isn’t limited to what did happen; it also affects what didn’t. The experiences we should have had yet never did. The love that wasn’t given, the safety that was missing, the validation for our unique self-expression that never came. This is the concept of the biology of loss – the absence of care, connection, and recognition that can be just as damaging to our mind and body.
Pause for Self-Reflection
Take a moment to think about or journal on the following questions:
Did you feel truly seen and understood as a child?
Were your emotions welcomed, or were you taught to suppress them?
Did you feel safe to express yourself authentically, or did you learn that love had conditions?
This kind of loss doesn’t feel or look like trauma in the traditional sense. There’s no defining moment, no clear wound to point to. Just a lingering belief that something’s missing. Or worse, that there’s something wrong with you. Healing, then, requires filling in the spaces where you were never fully held, seen, and loved for who you are: completely unique and irreplicable.
The Trauma Spectrum
Every experience in life has the power to shape how you perceive safety, trust, connection, and self-expression. A devastating betrayal? Yes, that leaves a mark. But so does the slow, quiet erosion of self-worth when you’re repeatedly overlooked, ignored, or belittled.
Every experience that shapes your sense of safety, identity, and self-worth falls somewhere on the trauma spectrum. Below is a checklist of experiences on this spectrum, grouped into ‘Big T’ and ‘little t’ traumas. All of them matter and all of them count.
Read through the list, and tick off the boxes that resonate with your lived experience. I invite you to go slowly. Before you begin, take a few deep, intentional breaths. Place a hand on your heart or belly. Let your body know: We’re safe to look at this now.
This is about noticing the moments your system adapted, the places your power got paused, and the roots of the patterns you’re ready to rewrite. It’s a practice of honoring the brilliance and intelligence of your survival. If you feel the urge to minimize, dismiss, or brush something off as ‘not that bad,’ pause. That’s often where the truth lives. Your nervous system doesn’t care how you feel about it now – it cares how you felt about it at the time.
And if emotion rises, let it. You’re not regressing by releasing emotions, you’re remembering. This is how you begin to take back your power: one truth, one breath, and one brave moment of recognition at a time.
Big T Trauma
Severe car accident, natural disaster, or house fire
Domestic violence or an abusive relationship
Physical assault
Witnessing or experiencing a violent crime
Near-death experience or severe illness
Childbirth trauma (e.g. emergency C-section, medical mistreatment, neonatal intensive-care unit experiences)
Racism, sexism, gender discrimination
Life-threatening medical diagnosis
Childhood neglect or extreme emotional deprivation
Experiencing war, political violence, or forced migration
Loss of a parent or primary caregiver during childhood
Sexual assault, abuse, or rape
Growing up in extreme poverty, experiencing food insecurity or homelessness
Being trapped in an unsafe environment with no escape (e.g. religious or cult abuse)
Little t Trauma
Emotional and Psychological
Growing up in a home where emotions were dismissed or shamed
Being told that you’re ‘too sensitive’ or ‘too much’
Chronic people-pleasing and fear of disappointing others
Feeling responsible for a parent’s emotions
Gaslighting in relationships or in the workplace
Bullying at school or at home
The death of a pet
Having your intuition repeatedly ignored or mocked
Cultural and Gender-Based
Being conditioned to put others first and shrink your needs
Religious purity culture, body shame, or sex negativity
Workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, or being overlooked
Being ridiculed for ambition, assertiveness, or setting boundaries
Feeling unsafe in public spaces or hyperaware of male dominance
Body
Chronic dieting, body shame, or disordered eating patterns
Medical gaslighting around period pain, PCOS, endometriosis, or other symptoms
Birth-control trauma – dismissal, side effects, or overprescription
Fertility struggles, miscarriage, or birth trauma
Feeling disconnected from or at war with your body
Relational
Being raised by emotionally unavailable caregivers
Betrayal, infidelity, or emotional abandonment in relationships
Fear of rejection or feeling unworthy of love
Repeated toxic friendships that leave you feeling drained or manipulated
Chronic loneliness or feeling like you never fully belong
Work and Financial
Growing up with financial instability or scarcity
Being underpaid or undervalued, or working in a toxic environment
Burnout from hustle culture or high-pressure careers
Feeling guilt around earning, spending, or taking up space professionally
Notice what resonates, and most importantly, don’t gaslight yourself into believing you don’t have trauma simply because your experiences don’t fit an outdated definition. And if you don’t have many memories of your childhood, that’s okay too. You don’t need to recall the exact memory to begin healing it. If you identified with the relational or behavioral patterns in the self-assessment, your nervous system is already pointing you toward the truth.
The Nuances of Female Trauma
While trauma may be universal, the way it imprints on the body and mind is deeply shaped by gender. Female trauma has a distinct texture, woven from a complex interplay of biology, social conditioning, and the specific types of harm women are more likely to endure.
Women are twice as likely as men to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – 10 to 12 percent of women versus 4 to 6 percent of men1 – because the nature of the trauma they endure is different, and because they often experience it at more vulnerable times in their lives.
Men’s trauma tends to be external: combat, physical assaults, accidents – events that are often isolated and occur later in life. In contrast, women’s trauma is more likely to occur within the context of relationships: intimate partner violence, childhood sexual abuse, coercion, and stalking. These experiences often happen at a younger age, during critical periods of development, which amplifies their psychological and physiological impact.2
Sexual assault, in particular, carries one of the highest risks for PTSD, with a lifetime prevalence of 50 percent among women who have experienced it.3 Unlike other forms of trauma, sexual violence deeply violates a person’s sense of safety and trust; often it’s committed by someone known to the victim, which compounds the emotional and relational aftermath.
But the impact of trauma doesn’t end with what happens to us – it continues in how we carry it. Men are more likely to externalize their pain through aggression, recklessness, or substance abuse. Their trauma seeks release through action, even if it’s destructive.4
Women tend to turn inward. Their trauma folds in on itself in a way that’s quieter but no less damaging. They ruminate, replaying painful memories on a loop. They pull back from the world to avoid further harm. They internalize the belief that their suffering is somehow their fault.5
The physiological systems designed to help women connect, regulate, and recover – driven by oxytocin – become disrupted. Instead of finding safety in connection, trauma teaches women that isolation is safer, trapping them in cycles of anxiety, depression, shame, and insomnia.
Your Body Is an Archive
Trauma isn’t just emotional – it’s biological. Consider the children of Holocaust survivors. Studies show they carry biological markers of their parents’ suffering, such as elevated stress hormones,6 altered nervous system function, changes to brain structure7 and increased susceptibility to anxiety and depression.8 Similar patterns also appear in the descendants of enslaved peoples, Indigenous communities subjected to colonization, children raised in foster care, and families that endured war, famine, or forced displacement.9
Research suggests that trauma from three to five generations ago is carried through the RNA of the paternal line.10 RNA (a molecule present in all living cells that’s structurally similar to DNA) plays a key role in gene expression – passing on not just your genetic blueprint, but instructions for how that code is read and activated in response to the world around you.
To put this into perspective: In just 300 years, 11 generations of roughly 4,094 people contributed to your genetic makeup. That’s 4,094 lives, decisions, hardships, and survival stories woven into your cells. The fact that we’ve only been able to study a handful of these generational impacts doesn’t mean the rest don’t exist, only that we haven’t yet developed the tools to measure what many of us already intuitively know: We’re carrying more than our own experience.
You’re the living result of unbroken resilience. You’re carrying stories of strength, bravery, and cellular memory of survival.
You may also carry inherited survival strategies – behaviors and emotional patterns shaped not only by your ancestors’ experiences but by the nervous systems of the caregivers who raised you. A mother who suppresses her emotions may teach her daughter, without ever saying a word, that feelings are unsafe. A family that lived through scarcity may unintentionally instill guilt around desire, rest, or abundance. These patterns aren’t always spoken, but they are absorbed.
Healed Women Heal Generations
Trauma is stored in the body. But it’s revealed in our relationships. And for women in marginalized communities, this inheritance is further layered by systemic forces that reach far beyond the family unit. Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color often carry not just personal trauma but also the accumulated physiological impact of racism, discrimination, and generational health inequities. The concept of ‘racial weathering’ explains how chronic exposure to these stressors compounds over time – leading to significantly higher rates of hypertension, autoimmune disease, and pregnancy complications.
Trans women, too – especially trans women of color – experience compounded trauma. Daily misgendering, social exclusion, gatekeeping in healthcare, and threats to physical safety all place an enormous burden on the nervous system, leading to disproportionate rates of anxiety, PTSD, and health disparities.
While this reality is neither fair nor just, lingering in that injustice without acting only deepens the wound. Anger is a valid and necessary response to oppression, but when it’s left unprocessed or not transformed into meaningful action, it drains our vitality and keeps us tethered to the systems we’re trying to transcend.
Healing ourselves, then, becomes a radical act of reclamation. It’s not self-indulgence, but subversion; not merely personal, but profoundly collective and ancestral. By choosing to heal, we not only restore ourselves, we also participate in rewriting the story for those who came before us and those yet to come. This is exactly where our journey turns in the next chapter: from naming the wounds to rewiring our beliefs and patterns, and shaping a new legacy of liberation.
A Note About Blame
Before we move on, I want to speak directly to a misconception that often surfaces when I begin exploring trauma with my clients: that parents or caregivers are to blame for the later development of illness or symptoms in the children they raised.
This is not the message I’m sharing, and it’s certainly not supported by any evidence. This work isn’t about pointing fingers – it’s about breaking patterns. Yes, our earliest environment shapes us, but all that means is that our parents or caregivers were shaped by theirs, too.
Love and trauma can coexist. If a parent’s ability to express love is constrained, it’s often because they, too, have experienced deep emotional pain. Most parents are simply doing the best they can with the resources, awareness, and capacity available to them at the time.
Just as children don’t consciously choose their adaptive behaviors, parents don’t either. Unless they’ve done the work to heal their own subconscious beliefs and regulate their nervous system, they’ll pass down what they learned unconsciously and automatically. And while they’re fully responsible for their children, they didn’t create the world in which they must parent, either.
Take comfort in knowing that parental love is primal and infinite. It’s hardwired into the brain. But love alone isn’t always enough to protect a child from internalizing stress or adapting in ways that later become symptoms.
Pause for Self-Reflection
How do you currently view your childhood and those who shaped it? Respond to these questions in your journal:
Is there a way to hold both your truth and others’ limitations at the same time?
Can you feel the difference between blame and clarity?
Can you feel the difference between carrying pain and letting it move through you?
If guilt, resistance, or defensiveness rises as you move through this work, take a breath. Let it move. You’re here to interrupt a pattern and do it differently, not shame the ones who came before you.
Reframing Trauma
The more you understand trauma, the more you appreciate that your nervous system did what it had to do to keep you alive, connected, and protected in a world that didn’t always feel safe. Gen Z has offered us a beautiful reframe for this: trauma as your origin story. Your hero’s journey. Not in the sense that what happened was justified or deserved, but in that it shaped you as a protagonist. The one who survived. The one who gets to choose what comes next.
When you start to see your trauma this way – not as baggage but as the raw material from which your strength was forged – you stop trying to go back to who you were before. And you start becoming who you were always meant to be.
•••
In the next chapter, we’ll explore how your earliest environments and relationships wired your nervous system and subconscious mind for safety or survival, and take a crucial step toward reclaiming your authentic self-expression.
Chapter 12
REWIRING OUR WOUNDS
‘The wound is where the light enters you.’
RUMI
I’ve lost count of the number of women who have come to me feeling exasperated because after years, sometimes decades, of talk therapy, they find themselves still trapped in the same patterns. They’ve unpacked their childhood trauma, dissected their triggers, and analyzed every relationship dynamic, yet their nervous system still reacts from a place of survival. They find themselves people-pleasing, overworking, jumping into fight mode, shutting down in conflict, binge eating, or feeling unsafe in moments that shouldn’t logically warrant it.
This isn’t because they’re incapable of getting better. It’s because trauma doesn’t just live in the mind. It lives in the body. While traditional talk therapy is incredible for cultivating awareness, it has an average effectiveness rate of just 30 percent in resolving post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).1
That statistic suggests that when trauma is only approached cognitively with the conscious mind, we miss the very place where it’s held: in the subconscious mind and nervous system. Often, talk therapy re-traumatizes the body by asking people to relive experiences of pain without giving them the proper physiological tools to process and release it. The following analogy explains why this is the case.
How Survival Gets Wired into the Body
Think of your inner world as a house equipped with a security system made up of the nervous system (the alarm), the subconscious mind (the alarm’s control panel), the impact of trauma (which shapes the control panel’s settings), and the conscious mind (the homeowner). Together, these components govern how you interpret, respond to, and protect yourself from perceived threats.
