The trauma response that tells you that you are always doing something wrong.
Sitting down to write this blog post feels deeply personal. This is one of my own trauma responses that has caused me much confusion & heart ache over the years. I share this because I want you to know that this isn’t written from a place of trauma theory but lived experience. And I believe that so many of us are quietly carrying this burden.
This isn’t a dramatic trauma response, it’s often a quiet one that deeply shapes how we move through the world and our relationships. It lives deep inside the body, a tightness in the solar plexus or throat, the clenched jaw, the rumination and the rise of anxiety after any sort of vulnerability. It’s a constant scanning of the self to seek out any wrongdoing, imagined or real. An inward facing hyper-vigilence that outwardly can look like a high level of self awareness or that we are a ‘good’ person. It’s exhausting.
It’s the saying sorry when someone bumps into you.
It’s the sinking feeling after voicing a need.
It’s the collapse of boundaries and the over-giving of care.
It’s the yes when you want to say no.
It’s the shame when you rest.
It’s the rise of dread when a client emails.
It’s the small lies we tell to keep ourselves safe.
It’s the moment of panic when you hear someone come home.
It’s the over-explaining and over-apologising.
The feeling of responsibility for other people’s discomfort.
The sense of always being in trouble.
The terror of being wrong so we protect with self righteousness or self erasure.
The relentless replaying of conversations.
Living in the tension of always feeling too much and never enough.
Do you recognise any of these? How long has your body been carrying burdens that were not yours to carry?
How much of your life force has been spent trying to not ever be wrong, while chronically believing that you always are?
Let’s be really clear on something… this response is not a flaw in you, it’s a highly intelligent survival adaption rooted in a deep longing for connection. This pattern often develops when as children we might have experienced the following:
Neglect or abuse, harm inflicted with no witness or accountability.
Parents or caregivers who were unpredictable, shaming or emotionally unsafe.
Love & safety that was conditional and often withdrawn without explanation.
When we were blamed for adults emotions.
Continuous rupture without repair.
So our bodies, hearts and psyche internalised the blame to keep us safe. Our nervous systems learned that it’s always our fault, that when we are wrong something terrible will happen, that connection will always be conditional on not causing harm, disruption or discomfort to others and that we always need to stay one step ahead of accusation to survive.
The core belief is always; I must have done something wrong.
I see this in my practice every single day and it lives inside my own body, my own painful & chaotic childhood taught my nervous system that safety lives in anticipation. This has echoed throughout my entire life, through work, relationships and the ways in which I have treated myself. Even in loving or neutral environments we might be asking What did I miss? What have I done? When will I be found out? Somatically this shows up as constant tension that drives moral & relational hyper-vigilance.
This is the embodied belief that our safety is earned by being good, careful, attuned and never the cause of rupture. Our nervous systems will be constantly scanning not just for danger but for any internal error. Did I do something wrong? Did I upset someone? Am I about to lose connection? Over time we become exhausted through this constant tracking of ourselves and others, the weight of over responsibility and all of this cuts us off from the ease, pleasure and aliveness that emerges when we no longer have to earn our belonging.
Now something important, this is not just individual. This relentless policing of ourselves doesn’t just come from our own individual traumatic experiences, it also lives within the wider systems of harm. This pattern is rewarded and intensified by…
Capitalism (How productive we are determines our value)
Colonial logic (Survival is dependent on our compliance, obedience and surveillance of ourselves and others)
Ableism (You are a problem if you have needs or can not meet the expectations of capitalism)
White supremacy (perfectionism, purity, urgency and never making mistakes)
This isn’t just personal trauma it’s socially reinforced.
Passed down from generation to generation, body to body, alive in our blood and bones.
Healing is long and slow.
Quite often we make the mistake of thinking that insight alone will heal our trauma. We can be left feeling confused as to why we might still be performing old patterns when we know whats ‘wrong’ with us, forgetting that the body needs time, compassion and consistency. The biggest frustration with this in particular though is that quite often the recovery can make us feel worse for a time.
As we start to cultivate a sense of safety and relaxation the internal scanning can get more intense for a while because it feels threatened by rest, connection, pleasure and ease. Our bodies will be afraid to stop monitoring out of fear of being hurt. Self expression and boundaries will feel threatening at first. And there could be collapse in our external life and relationships that might validate the original wound as we change the way we relate to ourselves and the world.
We might think that reassurance, positive thinking or reality checking are the keys to healing this but quite often they can reinforce the narrative.
We soften and remember our wholeness through consistent relational safety over time, embodied repair after rupture, learning that conflict & accountability doesn’t mean abandonment, letting our bodies experience neutrality over ‘goodness’ and boundaries being met with compassion not defensiveness. The healing doesn’t come from having to convince yourself that you haven’t done anything wrong, it’s rooted in; being wrong no longer means danger. This can’t and won’t be rushed.
And there will be grief, so much grief.
Grief for not being protected.
Grief for having to grow up too early.
Grief for how we learned to disappear, fawn or over function.
Grief for our caregivers who didn’t know how to love us.
And the grief that emerges from the softening of the shame that was protecting the parts of us that have never known love.
This is Francis Weller’s second gate of grief and it matters in this conversation as you will see from the quotes below…
“What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we can not grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth.
Shame ruptures our connection with life and with our soul. It is, indeed a sickness of the soul. When feelings of shame arise, we pull back from the world, avoiding contact that could cause or risk exposure. The last thing we want in times of excruciating self-consciousness is to be seen. We find ourselves avoiding the gaze of others, we become silent and withdrawn, all in hopes of slipping under the radar. I remember sharing with the audience that the goal of the shame bound person was to get from birth to death without ever being an echo on the radar of life. My tombstone was going to read: Safe at Last.”
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow
Healing lives in the softening of the shame that we no longer need to protect us and grieving whats underneath. And I love the three suggestions that Francis makes in his book on how to loosen shames grip on us. Again this is shared from my own process and experience. He writes…
“The first is from feeling worthless to seeing ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing. As long as we see our suffering as evidence of worthlessness, we will not move toward our wounds with anything but judgement”
This is something that can be explored in the therapeutic relationship which can become the non-judgemental and consistent space our bodies need. But it also needs to be something that we begin to explore in our lives. And it begin simply with locating where in our bodies we experience the “I’ve done something wrong”. Is it a tightening in the belly? Contraction in the throat? A rising of panic? Can you start to be curious, interested? And can you start to hold it a little more tenderly?
Below are a couple more offerings that you can play with…
The trauma response that we are always doing something wrong is quite often rooted in our childhood. The self blame and the shame would have begun here. So I invite you dig out some photos of you as a child. How do you feel when looking at them? Can you capture how you felt at this time? When you see yourself next to adults, can you see how small and vulnerable you were? You might like to write a letter to yourself when you were child, what would you like to say to them? (I would recommend having support for this practice, either with a therapist or close friend who will simply bear witness)
In a journal you could explore: Who taught me that I am always doing something wrong? Is this my voice or someone else’s?
Gratitude can also be a tool here. When the anxiety, dread or panic arises, see if you can pause for a moment, place your hand on where you feel it and extend gratitude for how it has kept you safe.
I would also suggest movement, when this arises in me, I often take myself to the floor. I will stretch and breath into where the tension lives. Seeing if it can soften. Dance has been powerful as well as high intensity movement and shaking. Allowing the body space to just let it move through, grief quite often appears after.
Lastly, when you are ready, you might like to take this exploration into group spaces. It can be deeply powerful to listen to others and be listened too. Community grief spaces, sharing circles and group therapy offer us the opportunity to see and feel that this is a collective experience and this softens the shame that protects us.
To close, I am sharing something I wrote after a deeply profound moment in a movement practice. I experience this mostly in my Solar Plexus area and it had been appearing to me as this tar like substance that held the child version of me. In the movement practice the tar freed my child self and was absorbed by my Liver. It was a big shift for me, but it’s important to note that the tar still makes appearances but I have a lot of compassion for it these days.
I am enough in my too muchness
My trauma, yes mine. It has spent many years protecting us. This part of me learned the only way to stay safe was to believe that we are annoying and always doing something wrong. Believing this meant we had to stay small and isolated. Constantly vigilant, always waiting to be abandoned, screamed at or reminded of our worthlessness.
Life has been lived in the constant rhythm of feeling in the way, always holding back my expression, affection and love. Building a carefully constructed mask that kept me small safe.
The practice (shake the dust) has been a container that has showed this very scared part that perhaps we can soften the hold, that we can ease out of the sticky dread and soften the mask. That we can reach for life and that it’s always been there waiting for us.
Waiting for us to remember and reclaim one another.
That we can express affection, that we can have needs, that we can be love and loved, that we really are enough and too muchness is a gift of aliveness.
As we move, as the body frees itself, it all returns to me. Strange, liberated, magical me.
Fully alive and always whole.
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