The Gifts Of Coming From A Trauma Background.
Coming from a trauma background gives you things most people never develop: a finely tuned threat detector, a capacity to sit with hard things without flinching, a resilience that was hard-won and is genuinely yours. This post isn’t a silver-lining story. It’s an honest accounting of what some people who’ve survived real pain actually carry forward — and why those qualities matter.
- Why might people from trauma backgrounds actually handle crisis differently?
- Why is it both/and, not either/or, when it comes to your trauma background?
- But at the same time, I do want to acknowledge that there may also be gifts.
- Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
- How has Annie’s own trauma history shaped her perspective on these gifts?
- My trauma impacts are not just bad and unproductive. They can be good and helpful, too.
- Why can you trust that you have real gifts from your trauma background, even if you can’t see them yet?
- This list is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what kinds of treasures and gifts our histories may contain.
- Wrapping up.
- PS: That Facebook Post:
- Does living in a state of chronic uncertainty feel strangely familiar to you?
- Why do millions of people feel lost, scared, and at the mercy of forces outside their control?
- How can strengths-based therapy help you discover the treasures hidden in your trauma history?
- Frequently Asked Questions
The other Saturday morning, in a 15-minute window between my coffee kicking in and my daughter waking up, I wrote a quick little post on my business Facebook page, mostly to personally process what I went to bed thinking about and what I woke up reflecting on.
SUMMARY
Coming from a difficult background has real, significant costs—but it also produces genuine capacities that people raised in more sheltered environments often don’t develop in the same way. This is not a silver-lining narrative that erases the harm; it’s an honest account of what adversity can build: sensitivity, perceptiveness, resilience, depth of empathy, and a quality of hard-won self-knowledge that has its own value. These gifts are real, even if you’d trade them for a different childhood.
This little post – the content of which I’ll share later in the PS of this blog – went a bit viral.
It attracted over 1.7K likes and over 700 shares quite quickly.
It generated nearly 400 comments.
It struck a nerve. It resonated.
The topic?
- On the surface, it’s about why I don’t feel particularly panicked about COVID-19.
- Coming from a trauma background is both/and, not either/or.
- But at the same time, I do want to acknowledge that there may also be gifts.
- Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
- My own trauma history.
- My trauma impacts are not just bad and unproductive. They can be good and helpful, too.
- Getting to know your own gifts.
- But make no mistake: they are there.
- This list is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what kinds of treasures and gifts our histories may contain.
- Wrapping up.
- PS: That Facebook Post:
- Does this experience feel at all vaguely, weirdly familiar to you?
Why might people from trauma backgrounds actually handle crisis differently?
RELATIONAL TRAUMA
Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.
If you read on, if you read between the lines, the reason why, the Trojan Horse message is this: it’s about how we, as trauma survivors, have gifts, treasures inside of us.
POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH
Post-traumatic growth, a term coined by Richard G. Tedeschi, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Lawrence G. Calhoun, PhD, professor of psychology at UNC Charlotte, refers to positive psychological change that can emerge as a result of struggling with highly challenging life circumstances. It’s distinct from resilience — it describes not just surviving adversity but being genuinely transformed and expanded by it in ways that wouldn’t have occurred without the struggle.
In plain terms: Post-traumatic growth is when the thing that broke you open also opened you up. It doesn’t erase the harm or make the original wound worth it — but it describes something real that some people who’ve done the hard work of healing discover on the other side: that they are, in specific ways, larger and more capable people than they would have been without that struggle.
Hard- and well-earned from our many trying experiences and how sometimes, these gifts serve us incredibly well.
Like helping us keep calm in the midst of a global storm.
I realized over the week as I watched the post get more and more traction, that this – speaking to and highlighting the positive, the potentiality of our often negatively and sometimes tragically viewed trauma histories – is uncommon.
But it’s incredibly important to talk about.
Today, I want to explore this more with you.
I want to go inside the proverbial cave and unearth the gifts. The treasures, that coming from a trauma background may hold.
I want to explore spaces and parts of this experience that often don’t get the attention that they deserve.
I want to paint a richer, more complex picture of what it might mean to come from a trauma background.
Why is it both/and, not either/or, when it comes to your trauma background?
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen
Like with so many things in life, coming from a trauma background is not either/or, it’s both/and.
What do I mean by this?
Much has, very importantly, been written about the consequences of coming from a trauma background.
We know through decades of studies and rigorous clinical work that coming from a trauma background, particularly a childhood trauma background, can adversely affect an individual on physiological and psychological levels.
I’ve written extensively about the adverse effects and impact of trauma. Particularly complex relational trauma – before on my blog archive category: Healing Childhood Trauma.
My life’s work is oriented towards helping people overcome these adverse impacts of coming from a trauma background. So in no way do I want to underestimate, minimize, or make light of the far-reaching effects that coming from a trauma history can have.
But at the same time, I do want to acknowledge that there may also be gifts.
I deeply believe that when and if we turn towards, face, process, grieve, heal, and make sense of our trauma, what may have felt like a lifelong muddy heavy burden can sometimes or often look like and feel like glittering, golden treasure.
The very things that made us susceptible to trauma, or the very things that trauma caused within us and to us, may, instead of becoming our Achilles heels, become our greatest advantages and gifts.
Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
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Our secret weapons.
Our superpowers.
In my Facebook post of the other morning (the full text of which you can find in the PS of this post), I spoke to some of the gifts I’m witnessing in myself as COVID-19 unfolds across the world: a sense of emotional and mental preparedness for such times, a nervous system familiar and comfortable with the level of chaos and uncertainty unfolding in the world, an absence of panic (not to be interpreted as an absence of appropriate gravity and concern), and a toolbox elaborate and rigorous enough to not only support myself but also to support others in very trying times.
How has Annie’s own trauma history shaped her perspective on these gifts?
My own trauma history historically endowed me with, to name a few things, anxiety, hypervigilance, a predisposition towards catastrophic thinking, and an increased need for psychological and physiological coping mechanisms, a tendency to prepare and consciously cultivated and frequently employed tools to stay connected and to tolerate being alone.
Having done my own healing work now for almost two decades, I now no longer live with these trauma impacts being my default.
I have choice around them. I can regulate them.
Because I’ve done my own healing work, the trauma impacts I live with don’t rule me.
But the imprint of them is there, and I can call upon these ways of being and harness them when I need to.
The impacts of my background, which caused so much distress for me earlier in life, make me now feel more equipped to deal with and face the scary and uncertain reality that COVID-19 brings.
My trauma impacts are not just bad and unproductive. They can be good and helpful, too.
In this way, they are not either/or. They are both/and.
This – this under-discussed topic of how our trauma backgrounds might actually have gifts for us (particularly in such challenging times as these!) is, I think, important to acknowledge.
So often, when we come from trauma backgrounds, we self-describe and others describe us with a kind of pitying, victim lens.
Seeing only the downsides of what we went through and how it impacted us without acknowledging any possible strengths and gifts that also came from that experience.
Of course, it doesn’t feel good to be seen (by self or others) as a victim only endowed with weaknesses.
It’s also not the full, true picture.
Any of us who come from a background of trauma can claim both challenges and gifts from the impacts of this.
The next part of this post will help you find out what your gifts are, too.
How do you discover and acknowledge your own trauma-forged gifts?
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” – Mary Oliver
Let’s imagine you walk into a deep, sea-level cave, much like the one that’s featured as the photo of this post.
Let’s imagine that as you enter the cave and journey towards the back of the sloping rock walls, you see a wooden chest, strapped with brass, cracked open just a bit, something glimmering from within.
Step closer to the chest and lift the lid.
Inside you see a pile of golden coins. Doubloons. Florins. Guineas. Ducs.
This pile of ancient golden coins is the treasure from your trauma background.
Each side of each coin contains both a challenge and a gift.
One proverbial coin may, on one side contain hypervigilance and a hyperaroused nervous system.
The other side of the coin may contain preparedness, readiness.
Every attribute of your trauma impact has a twin characteristic that can be viewed as a positive, as a gift.
It’s up to you to identify what your unique gifts, your treasures from your personal experience might look like.
Why can you trust that you have real gifts from your trauma background, even if you can’t see them yet?
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”
MARY OLIVER, poet, Thirst
Here’s a sampling to catalyze your thinking, organized into one side of a proverbial coin and then the other, to help you better understand the possible coins in your proverbial treasure box:
- Hypersensitivity: Emotional attunement to self and others, heightened intuition.
- Anxiety/depression: Familiarity with and aptitude for these states and what we need in them.
- Emotional lability: A great capacity for feeling, for empathy.
- Hypervigilance: Readiness, preparedness, a nervous system ready to counter what arrives.
- A greater-than-average need for supports: Likely already adept at cultivating a robust toolbox of coping skills.
- Hardship: Familiarity with and possible acclimation to living through difficult situations.
- Relational distrust: An ability to tolerate withdrawal from relationships for safety and sanity.
- Rigid routines: A greater understanding of yourself and what you need on a daily basis to cope.
- Early pain and suffering: Awareness of and experience with what it is to be fully human.
- Chaos: Adeptness with this state inside and out, an ability to find calm in the eye of the storm.
- Catastrophic thinking: An ability to imagine into, to prepare for, to plan around.
- Adversity: Resiliency.
- Survival: Persevering.
- Early loneliness: A learned ability to be without contact.
- Neglect/abuse by caregivers: Not likely to be surprised when those in power let you down.
- A history of instability: An increased ability to live in this state.
- Ambiguous grief: Comfort and familiarity with abstract losses within us and outside of us.
- Dysfunction and abuse: Appreciation and gratitude for normalcy and regular “small” things.
- Coming from little: Resourcefulness.
- Exposed to pain early on: More recognition of and capacity for confronting existential issues.
Dani is a 41-year-old crisis communications consultant. Her childhood was, by any measure, chaotic: a father with untreated addiction, a mother who cycled through depressive episodes, a household where the ground was perpetually shifting. She spent her twenties in therapy, doing the kind of hard work that most people avoid. When she describes her current professional life, she says something I’ve heard in different versions from many driven women who’ve done this work: “I walk into rooms that are on fire and I feel my whole body settle. Not because I enjoy crisis — I don’t — but because my nervous system knows this territory intimately. I’ve been here before. I know how to think clearly when everything is moving fast.” What Dani is describing isn’t pathology. It’s a genuine competency, forged in difficult conditions, and consciously claimed through years of healing work.
Leila is a 38-year-old therapist — she chose her profession, she told me, precisely because she’d spent her childhood reading rooms, learning to decode other people’s emotional states before they knew them themselves. That hypervigilance had been agony in her family of origin. In her consulting room, working with her own clients, it was something else entirely: a finely calibrated capacity for attunement that her clients describe as making them feel seen in ways they’ve rarely experienced. “I know what it is to be in someone’s body when they’re trying not to show you what they’re feeling,” she told me. “I learned that skill the hard way. And I use it every day.” The coin has two sides. Leila had done the work to turn it toward the light.
This list is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what kinds of treasures and gifts our histories may contain.
I want you to think through a few questions to help you even better understand how your past, while painful, may have served you and be continuing to serve you well now:
- What did your background equip you with that peers and friends of yours who came from more “normal”, non-traumatic backgrounds may not possess?
- When crisis and emergencies hit, how do you respond and what qualities of yours are called forth? Are these gifts from your trauma background?
- What aspects of you, that once caused you pain, suffering or even derision, are sources of strength, power and even income generation for you now?
- What comes so naturally to you that you don’t even think about it consciously, that you may not even recognize as an impact of your trauma history?
- How have the gifts of your trauma background served you in the past? And how are the gifts of your trauma background serving you now in the time of COVID-19?
Wrapping up.
Take some time, imagine into the possibility that the very things you wish hadn’t happened, the very impacts of these things that did happen, are now serving you well.
What are the gifts from your own trauma background?
What treasures did your past experiences endow you with?
I want to acknowledge that it might feel like a stretch for you to do this, to see what happened to you and the impacts it had on you as anything but negative.
So if this exercise truly doesn’t feel supportive or possible, don’t push yourself.
You are where you are, and that’s okay.
But if this imaginal exercise does feel helpful, fruitful, productive and empowering in any small way, lean into it.
And please, let me know in the comments below, what you take away from this post. What your own personal gifts, your golden treasure coins from your own past experiences are. I’d love to hear from you.
Until the next post, stay well, stay healthy, and take such good care of yourself.
Warmly,
Annie
PS: That Facebook Post:
I want to share something: I don’t feel panicked about COVID-19.
Now, this is not because I don’t grasp the gravity of the human life or the economic tolls.
It’s not because I’ve got my head in the sand, ignoring news and science.
It’s not because I’m existing in magical thinking, imaging all will be back to normal by Easter…
It’s because I had a chaotic and dysfunctional childhood.
For me, like so many of us raised in dysfunction, there may be a sense of familiarity right now.
When you grow up being unable to visualize a positive future for yourself, when you grow up used to and expecting the adults at the helm to fail you, when you grow up hypervigilant and possibly needing to guard against catastrophe and threat to your body and soul, this time in our history, this experience of COVID-19, may feel normative in some way.
So like I said, I don’t feel panicked by COVID-19.
I do feel appropriately concerned, but I also feel in a way, as Simon and Garfunkel presciently sang, “Hello Darkness my old friend…”
I feel like I’m in familiar territory.
Can you relate?
Does living in a state of chronic uncertainty feel strangely familiar to you?
You know, in a bizarre way, in a way I wouldn’t have wished on myself or on any other child-turned-adult, I feel particularly equipped for these times (especially since I’ve done decades of my own healing work to re-write what normal is and what my nervous system can expect).
I feel like a kind of a guide in a foreign country to a bunch of new visitors who have never been to my strange land.
“Hello friends, welcome. I know this is overwhelming and scary. Here are safe places to rest, here are things we locals do, here’s what you can expect, try not to stray down this path but if you do, here’s how to get back onto the main road. I’m here to help answer any questions you have.”
My writings, which are normally geared towards adult survivors of childhood abuse and adverse early beginnings, include psychoeducation on childhood trauma, yes, but also essays on self-soothing, pep talks for hard times, coping with depression and anxiety, fundamental self-care supports.
Google analytics with all its magic and mystery is telling me that these articles are being shared and read more widely than ever before.
Which, to me, says, that there’s a surge of tourism to my land.
So if you, like so many of my regular blog readers, are someone who comes from a background of child abuse, chaos, neglect, dysfunction and adversity, know that we locals now have many new visitors to our land then ever before.
Many, many people are feeling collectively traumatized and upended.
Why do millions of people feel lost, scared, and at the mercy of forces outside their control?
They may experience, for the first time, what we grew up experiencing and what parts of us – deep down parts of us – still remember.
I’m saying this, not to celebrate how we might be particularly well-equipped (I think what’s also true is that trauma survivors can be particularly triggered right now – more on that in tomorrow’s blog post!) but rather to help normalize your experience if you, like me, haven’t been as panicked as you would imagine you would be.
If you – if any part of you – have felt a strange sense of calm and familiarity as COVID-19 has unfolded, if you’ve felt surprised by your response when you see so many different responses around you, please consider the possibility that the chaos and surreal gravity of what’s unfolding right now may be reminiscent of your childhood.
Don’t shame yourself for how you’re feeling.
Recognize that it makes sense you would be feeling this way given where you come from.
You and I have inhabited this land for a long time, and now there’s a surge in tourism.
We wouldn’t have wished it on anyone and yet here we are.
So what is there to do?
As ever, be kind to yourself. Be kind to others.
And please seek out those proverbial tour guides if you and they need extra support in your travels right now.
How can strengths-based therapy help you discover the treasures hidden in your trauma history?
When you enter therapy carrying shame about your trauma history, viewing yourself only through the lens of damage and deficit, your therapist helps you recognize that surviving when your past is present and trauma is triggered by COVID-19 revealed strengths you didn’t know you possessed—that feeling calm in chaos isn’t abnormal but evidence of hard-earned resilience.
They guide you to see how the very nervous system that once kept you hypervigilant for danger now gives you extraordinary emotional attunement. How the catastrophic thinking that tormented you enables you to plan for contingencies others don’t see coming. How your familiarity with darkness allows you to sit with others in their pain without flinching.
The therapeutic work involves differentiating between being unconsciously driven by trauma adaptations versus consciously wielding them as tools. Your therapist helps you recognize when hypervigilance is appropriate (actual danger) versus when it’s your trauma talking (safe situations triggering old alarms).
Together, you explore how to dial these adaptations up or down rather than having them run on autopilot. You learn to access your crisis management skills during actual crisis while letting your nervous system rest when genuinely safe.
This strengths-based approach doesn’t minimize trauma’s impact but expands your self-concept beyond victimhood. Your therapist helps you hold the both/and: yes, you were harmed, and yes, you developed remarkable capacities. Yes, you struggle with anxiety, and yes, that anxiety gave you emotional intelligence others lack.
Through this integration work, you begin to see yourself as someone who not only survived but developed superpowers—not in spite of your trauma but because your magnificent brain adapted brilliantly to impossible circumstances. The goal isn’t to be grateful for trauma but to reclaim all parts of yourself, including the strengths forged in that fire.
Your therapist helps you recognize that when COVID hit and others panicked while you felt strangely calm, when colleagues fall apart in crisis while you become clearer, when you can hold space for others’ pain because you know that territory intimately—these aren’t signs you’re broken but evidence of your profound resilience and the gifts your history, painful as it was, bestowed upon you.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
Related Reading
- What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?
- Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections
- Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots
- >
Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (
- ). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress.Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., … & Marks, J. S. (
- ). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine.van der Kolk, B. A. (
- ). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (
- ). Posttraumatic growth: Conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychological Inquiry.Seery, M. D., Holman, E. A., & Silver, R. C. (
- ). Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.Cloitre, M., Courtois, C. A., Charuvastra, A., Carapezza, R., Stolbach, B. C., & Green, B. L. (
- ). Treatment of complex PTSD: Results of the ISTSS expert clinician survey on best practices. Journal of Traumatic Stress.
Both/And: Holding the Full Truth of Your Trauma History
I want to be direct about something: this post is not asking you to be grateful for your trauma. I want to name that explicitly, because the gifts framing can sometimes land as toxic positivity — as a demand that you find the silver lining, that you perform gratitude for harm, that you protect the narrative of resilience at the expense of your actual grief.
That’s not what I’m describing. Both/and means you get to hold all of it. The harm was real and significant. The cost was real. The wounds are real. And also: some of those wounds produced capacities. Both. At the same time. Without either canceling the other.
What I find in my clinical work is that the ability to hold the both/and — to stop forcing a choice between “my past destroyed me” and “my past made me strong” — is itself a sign of significant healing. A nervous system that is still in survival mode tends toward either/or thinking. The both/and is available when enough of the healing work has been done that you can sit with complexity without needing resolution.
If you’re not there yet — if the gifts framing feels impossible right now because the wounds are still too present, too raw — that’s not a failure. It’s information about where you are in the process. Healing isn’t linear, and the ability to see the gifts often comes after a significant period of grief. You may not be ready for this particular reframe today. You may be ready in six months, or two years, or five. That’s okay. The coins will still be there when you’re ready to look at the other side.
The Systemic Lens: The Difference Between Trauma and Resilience Culture
There’s a way the “gifts from trauma” narrative can be co-opted by systems that benefit from people transcending hardship without the hardship being addressed. I want to be careful about that, because I think it matters.
The grit-and-resilience cultural narrative often functions as a way of celebrating individual adaptation to systemic failures without holding those systems accountable. “You survived, you’re stronger for it” can become a way of saying: “We don’t need to do anything about the conditions that created your suffering, because look how well you’ve adapted.” I don’t want to be part of that argument.
The systemic lens asks: why were these difficult conditions present in the first place? What would it look like to build environments — families, communities, institutions — where children weren’t required to develop hyper-resilience in order to survive? What does it mean that we celebrate the gifts of trauma without interrogating the structures that made trauma so prevalent?
Naming your gifts doesn’t mean the conditions that created them were acceptable. It means that you, with extraordinary ingenuity, found ways to build capacity in conditions that were not designed to support your flourishing. Both those things — your remarkable adaptation and the inadequacy of the conditions — can be true simultaneously. Your gifts belong to you. The structures that required you to develop them deserve honest examination.
What I see in my work with driven, ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds is that this systemic awareness is itself a gift — the ability to see systems clearly, including the ones that harmed you, is a capacity that emerges from having had to navigate those systems rather than simply float through them. It can be a profound source of the kind of insight that leads not only to personal healing but to meaningful work in the world.
This feeling is common for driven individuals with trauma backgrounds. Your past experiences, especially relational trauma, can deeply impact your sense of self-worth and safety, leading to an internal belief that something is inherently wrong. Recognizing this as a response to past wounds, rather than a personal failing, is a crucial step towards healing and integrating your experiences.
Embracing the ‘gifts’ from trauma isn’t about minimizing your pain, but rather acknowledging the resilience, empathy, and self-knowledge you’ve developed alongside your struggles. It’s a ‘both/and’ perspective, where you honor your past suffering while also recognizing the unexpected strengths that have emerged. Healing involves holding both these truths simultaneously.
Absolutely. This ‘both/and’ experience is a core aspect of post-traumatic growth. Your trauma background has likely forged immense strength and resilience within you, while also leaving behind deep wounds. It’s a testament to your capacity to survive and adapt, and recognizing this duality is a powerful part of your healing journey.
Your heightened perceptiveness and empathy can indeed be hard-won gifts developed from navigating challenging environments. While these qualities can be incredibly valuable, they can also lead to overwhelm. Learning to set boundaries and practice self-regulation can help you harness these strengths without becoming exhausted by them.
Healing from relational trauma involves deeply processing and making sense of your past, not dismissing it. The goal is to integrate your experiences, acknowledging the profound impact they had, while also allowing for growth and new possibilities. This process honors your past while empowering you to build a more secure and fulfilling future.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.
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LMFT #95719 · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
