6 Ways Unhealed Emotional Trauma Shows Up
Empaths and sensitive souls carry the weight of being emotionally overwhelmed constantly, yet many people don’t realize this stems from unhealed emotional trauma. It’s easy to say you’re an empath because you feel the pain and fear of the world around you. It’s hard to admit that as a sensitive soul you are carrying layers of unhealed emotional trauma that is negatively impacting the way you experience life.
My purpose in this life, as a Spiritual Mentor and Intuitive Guide, is to support empaths in healing their emotional state in order to live as a peaceful and empowered being. Your gift as an empath is your ability to transmute energy from pain to peace and fear to faith; but you are unable to fully offer your nurturing kindness to the world right now because you feel exhausted, drained, and disconnected from your true self.
In this blog I will share 6 ways unhealed emotional trauma shows up in your life. This is not about judging yourself, instead it’s to see how the patterns you carry right now might not be the truth of who you are, your soul. These patterns were formed for protection, creating a false self to shield you from experiencing more emotional pain.
There are many different ways you could be carrying unhealed emotional trauma that is affecting you on a subconscious (or unconscious) level. The unsupportive and unhealthy thought patterns and behavioural patterns you have often stem from the emotional trauma you experienced at a young age.
Most often when I talk about emotional trauma my clients and community members believe they’ve never had a traumatic experience. The problem is that what we associate trauma with as an adult looks completely different than what we experience as trauma as a child or young adult. The moment you shift your mindset towards your inner child, you are able to see how a situation could feel emotionally traumatizing and how it influenced the way you grew up.
Let’s take a look at the different ways your unhealed emotional trauma may be showing up in your life.
1 - People Pleasing Tendencies
As an empath the most common behavioural pattern created from a young age is people pleasing. You witness the people around you experiencing a difficult emotion and you feel the weight of that emotion. This immediately forces you into a state of wanting to protect everyone you love from emotional heart-ache.
Most often there is a key moment in your life where your empathic abilities took a 180 and turned into people pleasing tendencies. Deep within your subconscious you feel as if you are worthy of love and acceptance only after you ensure everyone around you is in a positive emotional state.
You were emotionally traumatized by seeing other people express their emotions in an unhealthy way.
2 - Self-Doubt & Insecurities
Across the globe sensitive souls experience self-doubt and insecurities brought on by the self-judgment, self-criticism, guilt and blame we put on ourselves. This is a layer of the false self that we are taught to carry and is not our true nature. There is not a single soul who was born with self-doubt, it is something we were taught to do either by society at large, or by someone specific in our lives.
Your self-doubt and insecurity comes from you not feeling worthy in being your true self because someone told you either “you aren’t good enough”, “you’re too much”, “you don’t try enough”, or “you won’t be able to”. Hearing these types of phrases, whether directly or indirectly, created emotional trauma within you leading you to not believe in yourself.
You might not believe in who you are or what you are capable of, no matter what it stems from a disconnection of your true self. You carry self-doubt as a way to protect yourself, because your subconscious mind says “what if the true you isn’t accepted”.
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Back to the blog - 6 Ways Unhealed Emotional Trauma Shows Up
3 - Codependency
All of these patterns can stem from many different situations in your past, and codependency is no exception. At a young age you may have grown up quickly without a proper guardian role, which can lead you to becoming codependent as an adult for fear of being left on your own again. Of course this type of situation could also lead you to being hyper-independent because you have trust issues.
Your codependency typically stems from receiving a sense of acceptance or validation by the other person and needing that constant support to feel whole in who you are. This is a false self protection pattern because you don’t feel trust yourself, love yourself, or support yourself. You are unable to accept who you are and rather than take a deeper look into your own self-perception, it’s easier to be codependent on someone else.
4 - Hustle Mentality
It’s so much easier to focus on taking action and the growing to-do list then it is to slow down and pay attention to how you feel. The hustle mentality is a global issue that has become a societal norm in this day and age. I see hustle and the pressure to take action as a coping mechanism to avoid and deny how you truly feel.
Your feminine energy is wounded because you’ve been taught to suppress your emotions. Especially if you were led to believe from a young age that you are “too sensitive” or “too emotional”, your protective pattern has become to throw yourself into your work.
5 - Control Issues
As a child you don’t have control over most of your life, as there is someone else in charge of protecting you or taking care of you. If for some reason you felt like the people around you didn’t understand your needs fully or weren’t listening to you this could trigger a pattern of controlling.
The emotional pain you experienced in voicing your needs and not being heard, or being shut down has now resulted in you needing to be in control in order to make sure everything goes your way.
There are definitely other experiences that could be the root of your control issues. It’s important for you to see that having control issues is a way to protect yourself from experiencing emotional pain again.
6 - Toxic Positivity
Empaths and sensitive souls want to bring more light into the world, and this is why many of us are light-beings. However, there is a classic trait of being positive to a toxic level when you are masking your own emotional trauma.
“Just put on a brave face and smile” is not a healthy way to approach life because all the heavy emotions you end up suppressing will produce unsupportive thought patterns and behaviour patterns. In life we cannot just experience the positive emotions, we need to learn how to flow through the difficult emotions in a supportive manner.
Although there are many other ways your unhealed emotional trauma could show up, I wanted to share 3 honourable mentions.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
7 - Closing Off/Avoiding Vulnerability
8 - Being Indecisive
9 - Being Confrontational/ Avoiding Confrontation
The reason why I wanted to bring this topic forward is not because it’s a great way to show you where you need to work on yourself and heal. Instead I wanted to show you how easily it’s become, as an empath, to carry conditioning and patterns from your life that add weight to your emotional experience.
Being an empath is hard, and continuing to avoid or suppress your emotions actually makes it even harder for you.
This is why I created a membership community called The Soul Care Space where we focus on emotional healing, nurturing your feminine side, and connecting with your soul. There is enough messaging in society trying to tell you who you should be in order to feel worthy and enough. The Soul Care Space is about coming back into alignment with your true, authentic self and learning to feel worthy in your own self-perception.
Whether you are wanting to release and heal the layers of ego/false self that limit you, or you are wanting to awaken and connect with your soul and the Universe, The Soul Care Space will guide you on your journey.
Until next time, sending love & light on your spiritual journey,
Sydney Smith
Spiritual Mentor
Founder of Adventuring with Poseidon Wellness
