5 Signs You Have an Unhealed Emotional Wound: Insights from a Trauma Therapist
Have you ever struggled to make sense of emotions, reactions, or patterns that are repeatedly getting in your way? Maybe you notice that you shut down when faced with conflict or that you procrastinate and leave things for the last minute to your detriment. Or perhaps you've noticed that you are struggling to identify the source of chronic anxiety, sadness, or relationship problems.
Often, we overfocus on the behavior or feeling that we want to change. It's common to direct blame towards ourselves and ask the age-old question, "What's wrong with me?" However, from a trauma-informed lens a more helpful question is, "What is happening inside me?” Often, what appears on the surface as a character flaw or part of our personality is a stress response related to an unhealed emotional wound.
What is an Emotional Wound?
Emotional wounds are lasting hurts from negative experiences or a set of experiences. When we experience threats to our emotional or physical safety that overwhelm us, these wounds can be considered traumas that can cause us to feel a deep sense of shame or a lack of safety. Emotional wounds impact how we see ourselves, experience relationships, and perceive the world. They can cause us to think that we must fix or hide something about ourselves to be acceptable, act in ways we later regret, and negatively impact our self-esteem. Our wounded parts are the places within us that are most tender and hurting, even if it's out of our conscious awareness. Unprocessed emotional wounds often manifest as behaviors, thinking styles, and ways of interacting with the world that do not serve us in the long run.
The paradox is that our mind utilizes these methods to self-protect. These parts of ourselves are often organized around fear of intense emotions. Often, the behaviors that we try so hard to get rid of are indicators of deeper, potentially overwhelming emotional states that our internal psychological system is trying to manage.
What causes an Emotional Wound?
When we have adverse experiences, particularly during childhood, our psychological system creates a series of defenses to manage our wounds. This is particularly present we experience trauma, experiences that threaten our sense of emotional and physical safety. It’s important to note that a traumatic experience can relate to a particular event, a series of events, or the absence of care and attention that we needed to receive. Often, we lack the awareness that we are carrying the burden of longstanding emotional hurts because we live in survival mode, managing the hustle of daily life or have normalized our experiences. It is common to have difficulty connecting the dots to how the past influences present-day problems.
Identifying Emotional Wounds - 5 Key Signs
One of the most crucial steps to inner healing and stopping cycles that are getting in our way is developing self-awareness. Becoming aware of signs of wounding can help us find direction toward uncovering where to focus our healing efforts and tend to the parts of ourselves that need attention.
Below is a brief, albeit not exhaustive, list of signs that you have an unhealed emotional wound. As you read this list, keep in mind these behaviors are your mind's ways of protecting you and trying to keep you safe.
Difficulty Showing Vulnerability
When we have had unprocessed emotional wounds, particularly surrounding relationships, vulnerability can feel like too much of an emotional risk. Some signs of difficulty with vulnerability are feeling uncomfortable with sharing your thoughts and feelings, keeping people at an emotional distance, fearing that you will be judged or rejected, and perfectionism. Fearing vulnerability can also show up as difficulty in allowing yourself to expect positive results to protect yourself from feelings of disappointment. Struggles in showing vulnerability indicate a lack of trust (either with others or ourselves) and make us feel that we must adjust our behavior to stay emotionally safe. Difficulties with showing vulnerability can be related to deeper wounds surrounding fears of rejection and abandonment.
2. You Struggle With Boundaries
Boundaries are the personal limits and rules we set in our relationship with ourselves and others to support our well-being. Struggles with setting boundaries signify allowing "too much," often at the expense of our well-being. Difficulty setting boundaries frequently signifies an underlying belief system that says we must put our needs on the back burner, always go the extra mile, and self-sacrifice to be of value and maintain our relationships.
Overly rigid boundaries suggest we struggle with letting in "enough" and often signify belief systems related to fears of becoming overwhelmed or engulfed. These can include not allowing people to get to know the real you, being overly controlling and keeping an emotional distance from others. Boundary problems often mirror attachment wounds during early childhood.
3. You Self-Sabotage
Self-sabotage occurs when we engage in self-defeating behaviors that hinder our growth and progress. It conflicts between what we want and what our psychological system is ready to allow. Some examples include procrastination, picking fights, overindulging in substances, spending too much, etc. Self-sabotage is a way that our psychological system self-protects. While this may sound counterintuitive, it is actually part of our mind's coping mechanism to help us avoid deeper feelings that we believe are overwhelming and unmanageable. Some examples are fears of failure, success, abandonment, and rejection. When we repeatedly engage in self-defeating behaviors despite efforts to change them, this suggests that we have unprocessed emotional wounds that we are not fully conscious of.
4. Relationships with Emotionally Unavailable Partners
If you often find yourself attracted to emotionally unavailable partners or caught in an on-and-off relationship, it is likely an underlying wound driving your behavior. A common stressor that brings individuals to therapy is struggling with a relationship characterized by push-pull dynamics, also known as the pursuer-distancer dynamic. Relationships with this relational stance often cause both partners anxiety, overwhelm, and frustration. Typically, both partners struggle with establishing secure attachments and have dynamics of anxious/avoidant attachment styles. Repeated relationship patterns with partners who do not meet our emotional needs often signify deeper attachment wounds and our minds' efforts to master past relational traumas.
5. You Struggle With People-Pleasing
People-pleasing is primarily oriented around keeping the peace, avoiding conflict, and needing to be liked. It's normal to want to have peaceful interactions, but when we prioritize the needs and comfort of others over our own, this suggests a deeper emotional issue. People-pleasing is often driven by efforts to avoid intense guilt and feeling like we have to prove our worth and is usually an attempt at soothing deeper attachment wounds.
Healing Emotional Wounds - There Is Hope
Our emotional wounds often cause us to lose touch with our true selves and take on other roles. They can lead us to put up emotional walls to protect ourselves or overcompensate for our "unworthiness" in various ways. These wounds often prevent us from connecting to the most authentic versions of ourselves and can prevent us from having fulfilling, healthy relationships with ourselves and others.
The work becomes uncovering the false narratives causing us to struggle and learning how to expand our nervous system's window of tolerance to address what feels unsafe on a physiological level. By cultivating deeper levels of self-awareness, we can develop different internal resources and get to the root of the pain our internal psychological system is protecting. Safely processing the pain of the past allows us to differentiate between who we authentically are and the protective responses we utilize from a wounded place.
Individual therapy can provide a safe place to begin internal attachment work and develop new resources to process past emotional hurts. We can build new skills to adjust our behavior and learn how to relate to ourselves with more compassion and grace.