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Pausing at the Trauma Response

For most of my life, I was a walking reaction.

Something would happen — a tone of voice, a look, a situation that rhymed with something old — and I’d be off. Angry. Defensive. Gone, shut down, out the door. No thought in between. By the time my brain caught up, the damage was already done. That reaction cost me jobs. Friendships. Relationships I actually wanted. And I couldn’t figure out why I kept doing it.

Here’s what I eventually understood: I wasn’t reacting to what was in front of me. I was reacting to something that happened thirty years ago.

Why we react instead of respond

Recovery is change. Changing from who we were told we had to be to survive, into the person we actually were before all of it.

The parts of us that weren’t allowed — the anger, the need, the hurt — got split off and buried somewhere we can’t reach. But they don’t disappear. And every now and then, life hands us a situation that looks like the old danger, and our subconscious lights up: I know this. This hurt before.

The thing is, we can’t access those buried feelings to deal with the moment like an adult. So we don’t respond. We react. We go straight into the survival mode we learned as a kid — anger, defensiveness, withdrawal, blowing up, disappearing. Whatever kept us safe back then. And almost every time, it’s the wrong response to what’s actually happening now.

That’s an exhausting way to live. Always on guard. Always braced. Never trusting, because some part of you is always waiting to protect against the next trigger. You’re not living — you’re defending.

The pause

So here’s the work. And I won’t pretend it’s easy.

Pausing at the trigger and not reacting is about as hard as having a gun pointed at you and not feeling afraid. Your whole body is screaming at you to do the old thing. But the moment you feel that fear rise and you don’t react — that’s it. That’s the moment healing starts.

Because the first thing we reach for instead of reacting is blame. We blame ourselves, or we blame the person who set us off. They made me feel this way. It’s on them to never make me feel this way again. And I get it — blame is the easiest move there is. It hands the responsibility to someone else and lets us stay the victim. It feels like relief.

But it’s a trap. If you don’t take responsibility for your own emotions and your own reactions, you will never heal. You’ll just keep running the same loop — blame, react, blame, react — and your world will get smaller every year. Less joy. More reactivity. Until your whole life is just one long flinch.

Pausing breaks the loop. When you pause and don’t react, you’re forcing yourself to do the one thing you’ve spent your whole life avoiding: sit with the feeling you’re afraid of. Feel it. Face it. Grieve it. Own it. That’s the work. That’s the whole thing.

And here’s the part that makes it worth it. The more you let yourself feel what you fear, the less you fear it. The less power it has over you. The less it runs your life. And all that space inside that used to be taken up bracing for the next hit? That’s where joy finally gets room to live.

You don’t have to react. Not this time. Just pause — and feel it.

Done performing? Done pretending you’re fine? That’s where this work starts. Learn about coaching.