The secret saboteur running all aspects of your life

Have you ever thought about a certain aspect of yourself or your personality and concluded – that’s just how I am? For example – being a perfectionist, clingy in relationships, feeling anxious, having difficulty setting boundaries etc.

Or wondered why some behavioural patterns seem to keep you from things that you desire in life?

Well, I have news for you. Many of our ‘ways of being’ are in fact not innate personality traits or patterns, but actually a trauma response. That’s right. 

While using the word ‘trauma’ might sound heavy, it’s true. Trauma is secretly impacting your life in more ways than you are likely aware of, EVEN if you think: ‘But nothing traumatic has ever happened to me’, or ‘I had the happiest childhood’.

Stay with me here, because understanding the impact of trauma has the potential to change how you view yourself (and other people) forever.

What is trauma?

At its core, trauma is any experience – big or small – that overwhelms your nervous system and leaves a lasting imprint on your body, mind, or emotions. However, it’s not the event itself that defines trauma, but how your system registers it and what patterns it leaves behind.

A very important thing to understand is that there’s a huge difference between trauma and trauma. In psychotherapy there are terms ‘little t trauma’ and ‘big T trauma’.

Big T trauma is obvious: abuse, accidents, war, loss, or any life-threatening event. This is what most people have in mind whenever they hear the term ‘trauma’.

Small t trauma is subtle but cumulative: for example neglect, chronic criticism, feeling unseen, repeated micro-stresses, or invalidation – often stemming from seemingly insignificant incidents that actually leave lasting marks. Marks often mistaken for personality quirks but actually are deeper wounds that hinder you in one or many aspects of your life – but thankfully can be healed.

In other words, trauma is an unresolved experience that continues to shape how you think, feel, and react – even when the danger is long gone.

And then there is generational trauma – trauma that has been passed down on you through (potentially multiple) generations. So things that you yourself have never experienced, might be impacting your life in the most profound ways – and most of us are totally clueless. (Yes it’s wild! I will be writing a separate blog post on generational trauma. But if you wonder how this is possible – look up epigenetics. Our cells carry the energetic blueprint of past traumas. It’s not woo, it’s science).

Examples of small t trauma and big T trauma

Here are some of the most common causes of big T and small t trauma. The lists are not complete but give you an idea.

Big T trauma – obvious, life-threatening or deeply destabilising events:

• Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse
• Severe accidents or life-threatening illness
• Witnessing or being involved in violence, war, or natural disasters
• Loss of a parent, sibling, or child
• Serious bullying or harassment that feels inescapable
• Being in a situation where your life or safety was genuinely at risk

Small t trauma – subtle, cumulative, often overlooked experiences:

• Chronic criticism or invalidation in childhood (“you’re too sensitive,” “stop overreacting”)
• Feeling unseen, unheard, or unsupported by caregivers or important people
• Repeated micro-stresses like being ignored, dismissed, or left out
• Emotional neglect or inconsistent parenting
• Humiliation or shaming (even minor, repeated incidents)
• Ongoing pressure to perform or overachieve
• Experiences of rejection or exclusion that feel intense at the time
• Witnessing family conflict, arguing, or emotional instability regularly

How trauma impacts behaviour

As you can see, big T trauma is obvious and easier to label. 

Small t trauma is sneaky, because it leaves a mark even if nothing seemingly ‘major’ happened.

Yet both can shape your nervous system, thought patterns, behaviours, and even beliefs about yourself and the world. 

In particular, it’s the small t trauma that most people aren’t aware is shaping their behaviour and quietly holding them back.

And that’s because trauma often shows up as survival strategies – defensiveness, avoidance, perfectionism, hyper-vigilance, or emotional suppression – responses that felt necessary at the time (self-protection) but can later limit freedom, joy, and connection.

Mental health, trauma, and what’s wrong with conventional medicine

With increased focus on mental health in recent years, awareness around therapy has grown, and the stigma of seeking help or working on yourself has slowly started to fade (which I’m incredibly pleased to see!). That being said, mainstream conversations about therapy still focus mostly on big T trauma.

And so as a result, many people who haven’t experienced obvious, life-shattering events don’t think they need support or healing. When in reality, these subtler patterns, born of small t trauma, may be secretly running their lives.

What’s more – many conditions we label as ‘mental illness’ today – like anxiety, depression, borderline personality disorder, or even addictions – are often not illnesses in the medical sense, but symptoms of unresolved trauma. And there is not enough talk about that.

This is one of the biggest issues with conventional medicine – the focus is only on treating physical symptoms, when a more holistic approach is required. In particular – understanding that physical symptoms very often have emotional root causes. 

While biology can play a role, what’s frequently overlooked is how these struggles can stem from the nervous system being stuck in survival mode after overwhelming experiences. Instead, these states are usually treated as if they are chemical imbalances or diseases of the brain, which completely ignores the bigger picture.

But when we see mental health challenges as trauma responses rather than permanent flaws or random disorders, it changes everything. Instead of ‘something is wrong with me and need fixing’, the truth becomes: ‘I’ve been hurt, and my body and mind adapted to protect me – but now I can heal’. This reframe is powerful because it shifts the focus from pathology to possibility.

Chances are, you carry small t trauma too

While you might not struggle with the more obvious trauma responses like anxiety or depression, the sad but undeniable fact is that most of us have experienced some sort of small t trauma over the course of our lifetime. 

Often, this kind of trauma happens in childhood. Because no matter how loving home someone comes from, there could have been all sorts of subtle ways that trauma could have been made manifest – through pressure to perform (get good grades, succeed in sports etc.), for example, or witnessing a home dynamic where the mother was self-sacrificing and as a result, unconsciously modelled a lack of boundaries to her children.

Or the parents could have just passed on the trauma from their own parents, who lived in a very different time under very different circumstances and set of values.

How childhood trauma shaped me

A couple of examples from my own life.

I, for example, was brought up with pressure to perform. My mum expected me to come home from school with only top grades. If I got anything less than a 5 (which was the highest grade in Estonian schools at the time), she would express her disappointment. 

So what would a small girl do? She would work harder to make her mum happy. And she would learn that hard work is what gets you love and appreciation in life. Of course not consciously, but it would be the subtle force that would turn her into a perfectionist and an over-achiever.

So she would go through life, working so hard and trying to be the best in everything… and if she didn’t succeed with that, she would feel like a failure.

It’s only when I started to do the inner work in my late 30s that I uncovered this pattern, where it came from, and how it was running my life. I now know that I’m worthy no matter what I achieve or don’t achieve, that I’m loveable whether my mum approves of my life choices or not (spoiler alert – she doesn’t), and that it’s safe not to work hard – and yet be thriving in life (I’ve written a blog post about how I stopped the hustle and took a more heart-led approach to business – opens in a new tab).

And the thing is – I know my mum was coming from a good place. I know she thought that getting good grades would set me up for success in life (which it did to some degree, but really, in the long run – it didn’t). But she didn’t know any better, and her expectations were based on the values and societal programming at the time, which, let’s be honest, are still very much alive among the majority of the population to this day.

Another example.

Someone close to me was brought up in a home with a lot of emotional instability. Their mother was incapable (due to her own trauma) of providing her children emotional safety and stability. Growing up in an emotionally unpredictable home turned this person into a hyper-vigilant worrier who constantly tries to control the world around them. 

And knowing what I know about their upbringing, I can see so clearly how their behaviour as an adult is a response to their childhood small t trauma. Basically, they are trying to create this inner safety they never had growing up – by trying to control life and external circumstances, in an attempt to avoid things ever going wrong. Because that would bring back the feeling of chaos and lack of control, all too familiar from their childhood.

Are you starting to see the cause and effect pattern here? How something minor in childhood can have significant impact on behaviour as an adult?

Awareness is the first step towards healing

But small t trauma can also be a result of events later in life. For example – through a toxic relationship, where someone’s self-worth is eaten away gradually and almost without them noticing.

There are truly countless ways small t trauma could have found a way to someone’s psyche. But here’s the thing: the goal is not to find who to blame. 

The goal is to bring this to your awareness, so you can heal yourself and stop letting trauma unconsciously impact your life. And also so you can get better at choosing romantic partners who have done healing, or at least are willing to admit they have work to do – and are doing something about it.

The truth is, most people’s parents did the best they could, with the (sadly often limited) awareness they had. But their own parents likely inflicted (unknowingly and unwillingly) trauma on them through their parenting, so it really is a vicious cycle that stops only when someone raises their awareness and decides to heal themselves.

The world needs more trauma cycle breakers

And you, my friend, have the opportunity to do exactly that. 

Not just for yourself (because the liberation that comes from it can completely change the course of your life), but for the people around you and for those who will come after you. 

THIS is actually one of my deepest desires for this planet – that people healed themselves before they had kids, so we stopped passing down the endless trauma cycles.

Because this is what is believe is one of the main causes why the world is so broken right now. It’s full of wounded people projecting their trauma onto the world, rather than looking into their shadows and healing themselves. Dictators projecting their unseen little inner child onto the world, politicians making decisions from unhealed wounds rather than wisdom, or even internet trolls ridiculing others so that they can feel better about themselves.

Once you understand trauma, you start seeing how people’s behaviour is first and foremost reflecting their own inner world and has often very little to do with you.

It’s very liberating to realise that if someone is being nasty with you, for example, either in real life or on the internet, it’s highly likely because they are jealous or triggered by you, or feeling less than, and their response is a projection of their wounds and NOT a reflection of you as person. 

Because here’s the thing – hurt people hurt people. And once you see that, you can no longer unsee it. It will suddenly make sense why there seems to be so much ‘evil’ in the world. 

And while trauma is by no means an excuse to behave viciously towards others, in some instances the awareness allows you to have compassion (rather than hate) towards them. Because you understand what is really going on under the surface: they are hurting and letting past traumas run the show. And you start to see that even ‘bad’ people are actually not inherently bad, but they likely have some very deep-rooted, unhealed trauma that distorts their behaviour.

Ways to heal trauma (beyond talk therapy)

So how do you break free from trauma – small t or big T?

There are a lot of different modalities that can help you heal your trauma. Most people instantly think of therapy as the solution. 

But the fact is, just doing talk therapy only gets you so far. It can help create awareness, make sense of what happened, and reduce the feeling of ‘aloneness’ around it, but on its own, it often doesn’t shift the body’s stored imprint of trauma. Because trauma isn’t just a memory, it’s stored in the nervous system and body. And that’s why many people might understand their trauma intellectually but still feel triggered, anxious, or dysregulated.

Therefore, just relying on talk therapy and endlessly reliving and recounting trauma can re-traumatise or keep you stuck in the ‘story.’ By itself, it rarely ‘releases’ trauma. 

The winning combination is talk + body/nervous system release + belief rewiring. Because healing needs integration of body, mind, and spirit.

Some of the modalities worth looking into:

• Somatic Experiencing (SE) – helps release trapped survival energy (fight/flight/freeze) from the body safely
• Breathwork – using breath to release stored emotions from the body
• TRE (Tension & Trauma Release Exercises) – activates the body’s natural shaking/tremor mechanism to discharge trauma
• Hypnotherapy – works with subconscious to reframe and release
• Family Constellations Therapy – to release generational trauma
• Reiki & energy healing – works with moving and releasing stuck energy
• Meditation and mindfulness – teaching the nervous system safety and presence
• Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) techniques / belief change work – to help shift deep-rooted beliefs like ‘I’m not safe’ or ‘I’m unworthy’ 

There’s a ton of information on trauma healing on the internet so I would just recommend doing a Google search or using AI to learn more about the different modalities, then finding a practitioner in your area.

A better life awaits on the other side of trauma

I can assure you that while looking into the shadows, approaching your wounded inner child, or shedding light on suppressed memories and emotions can feel scary and uncomfortable, this work is SO worth it. And with the right support, the process doesn’t have to be long and painful at all, some modalities help you release minor trauma in just a couple of sessions.

The liberation on the other side will transform you. It will impact how you show up in life – for yourself and your dreams, it will impact your relationships with others, and it will impact how you see the world around you.

And as a woman committed to living her most DELIGHTFUL LIFE (or you wouldn’t be reading this ;), you own your future self to become the most radiant, liberated and healed ‘you’ possible.

I’m rooting for you, beautiful soul.

[DISCLAIMER: I’m not a medical professional or a trauma specialist. I’m simply sharing what I myself have discovered about trauma and the way it impacts so many aspects of our lives. If you are dealing with serious trauma, I advise you to seek professional counsel. This piece is for educational purposes only.]

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