Mercedes Coffman

But whenever there's unresolved trauma, right?

The narrative that is created from that is I can't trust intimacy.

I can't trust connection.

And so when a person then gets in a relationship, no matter how good the partner is, there's always that hypervigilance in the nervous system that just waits for this person to abandon or for this person to leave or harm them.

And so I think a lot of people who have not healed their trauma

tend to re-injure their own wounds subconsciously by doing that.

Yes.

So I think the reason why a lot of people do not want to explore their trauma is because they think that trauma has to look a certain way, right?

They think it has to be these big events, whether that was terrible physical or sexual abuse.

And that's not always the case.

Trauma could be anything that

made you feel incredibly dysregulated in your life, at any point in your life.

It doesn't have to just be childhood.

And so a lot of people have a discomfort talking about it.

And one of the ways that you could tell that there's unresolved trauma is based on a person's reactivity.

So a person who doesn't have trauma typically could sit through their feelings and not get easily triggered.

But when...

When relationships become increasingly more intimate and they get reactive in those relationships, it's usually unresolved trauma from childhood relationships with either a parent or a caregiver.

So that's a way that you could tell, okay, there's some unhealed stuff here.

If I tend to get reactive when someone just said something very simple to me, I probably need to look at what that is.