The difference between someone’s personality and their trauma coping and survival strategies is often misunderstood, leading to increasingly pernicious misjudgments about individuals’ character, intentions, or behavior. While personality refers to enduring, largely context-independent traits, trauma-coping and survival strategies and behaviors developed in response to (mostly unhealed) traumatic events. For the most part, trauma-coping and survival strategies and behaviors were previously adaptive during one’s trauma, but are currently maladaptive in their present-day context. A basic example is a child whose natural personality is calm, relaxed, and patient. But, if he grew up in an environment of neglect and abandonment, he may learn to tantrum often to get his physical and emotional needs met. Thus, many may mistake his tantruming as part of his personality, but alas, it is only what he learned to get his basic needs met: trauma-survival coping. Understanding this distinction is critical for fostering healing, healthy self-worth, empathy, connection, boundaries, improving relationships, supporting Mental health, and eventually world peace.
Personality
Personality encompasses one’s consistent, long-term patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior. It is shaped by a complex interplay of genetics, biology, and environment. Psychologists often describe personality using frameworks such as the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). These traits influence how people approach relationships, work, and personal challenges.
Unlike trauma responses, personality traits are not inherently tied to specific events, developmental milestones, or circumstances. For example, a naturally introverted person might prefer solitude due to their innate temperament, not because of past trauma, unhealthy family dynamics, or other relevant contextual variables.
Trauma Coping strategies
Trauma-Coping strategies are behaviors and cognitive, emotional, and physiological patterns individuals develop to manage the impact of traumatic experiences. Trauma, whether from abuse, neglect, loss, or violence, can overwhelm a person’s ability to process emotions healthily. Coping strategies emerge as survival mechanisms, often operating subconsciously. Common examples include (but aren’t limited to):
- Hypervigilance: Constantly scanning the environment for threats to avoid potential harm.
- People-pleasing: Over-accommodating others to reduce conflict and ensure safety.
- Emotional numbing: Suppressing feelings to avoid overwhelming pain.
- Avoidance: Steering clear of reminders of trauma, whether through physical actions or emotional disengagement.
While these strategies likely helped individuals endure traumatic situations, they can persist long after the threat or trauma(s) have passed (as their bodies had likely learned they were necessary for survival), and thus risk becoming misinterpreted as “personality traits.”
Where the Confusion Arises
The Venn-diagram-like overlap between trauma responses and personality traits often engenders confusion, mislabeling, and mischaracterization. For instance, someone who is reserved and avoids confrontation might be equivocally labeled as introverted. However, their introversion could stem from trauma-induced people-pleasing (how did they have to be in the world to get their survival need met of their parents’ love and attention?) rather than innate, personality-based introversion. Similarly, a person exhibiting emotional detachment might be assumed to lack empathy on a personality level, when in fact, their emotional detachment was a survival and trauma coping strategy to grapple with unresolved emotional pain, overwhelm, shame, and/or feelings of defectiveness.
Trauma can also distort and obscure natural personality traits. A naturally gregarious individual might withdraw socially after facing trauma, not because their personality has changed but as a protective, trauma-coping measure. Conversely, someone who thrives on independence may become overly reliant on others due to feelings of helplessness. Likewise, a child may become increasingly mischievous from feeling chronically ignored/forgotten and thus earning since infancy that they’re more likely to get their emotional and physical needs met when being disruptive (think of the movie Home Alone). In this case, tantrums (as mentioned above as well) can be a hallmark of resilience. These shifts can lead to misjudgments, as outsiders might perceive these behaviors as intrinsic rather than circumstantial and contextually-survival-based.
The Danger of Misinterpretation
Misunderstanding the difference between personality and trauma Coping strategies has had serious consequences, including (but not limited to) stigmatization: labeling someone as “cold” or “difficult” without recognizing the underlying trauma can perpetuate feelings of isolation, shame, and strained relationships. We can help resolve the confusion by curiously examining how the supposedly upsetting behavior(s) actually had positive function and intention during the trauma they had faced (Winfrey & Perry, 2021). The tragedy I’ve periodically witnessed in my practice is when a child’s trauma and survival coping become continuously mislabeled as their personality over the years, it can actually reinforce these Coping strategies to the point where the person starts mistaking them as part of their personality when they never were, as they had only arisen adaptively in response to a traumatic context. I believe this is where a lot of the violence, aggression, and trauma-perpetuating behaviors in the world come from. A child comes to believe they are bad because they become labeled as “bad” by adults, when in fact, they were merely doing their best to cope with traumatizing circumstances.
Another key example arises from my work with veterans. How much combat exposure do you think you would tolerate until you gradually start to automatically reach for your weapon every time you hear a certain spontaneous noise, even if it’s now been four years since that exposure? Once the brain and body learn that a certain behavior promotes survival, it can increasingly struggle to unlearn it even in an entirely different context.
Conclusion
Traumatized people often develop seemingly maladaptive or “bad” behaviors that were actually adaptive during the trauma, but aren’t anymore, and then they become repeatedly labeled as part of their personality, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy of trauma that can spans intergenerationally over centuries and spread beyond neighborhoods, communities, cities, states, countries, and the world.
Accurately distinguishing one’s personality from their trauma-coping, especially when they’re behavior seems “bad,” can help curb this intergenerational trauma and become a potent force for good and healing in the world.
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