Could behaviors we see as personality traits actually be rooted in trauma response? What happens when we become accustomed to staying in survival mode? Bridgette and Lindsey explore how our strongest traits can also be longstanding indicators of stress, leading to adaptations in our lives as a result. Most importantly, our response to our behavior can greatly affect our future healing.

Key Takeaways

• Survival mode is not always short-term; over time, our “safety” behaviors can transform into prolonged adaptations to our personalities.
• For many people, this includes hyperindependence, vigilance, and overproductivity; these behaviors are not inherently harmful, but can indicate continued stress.
• When we see these traits as integral to our lives, pausing or ending the pattern can feel like we lose a part of our identity.
• While the initial trauma may have created the adaptation, it also indicates a measure of resilience in how we integrate healing into our everyday lives.
• Growth, trauma, and resilience coexist together, not in spite of one another.

Resources Mentioned

• No mentions this week!

Connect and Learn More

☑️ Bridgette Stumpf | LinkedIn

☑️ Lindsey Silverberg | LinkedIn

☑️ Volare | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

☑️ Subscribe to the TraumaTies newsletter

☑️ TraumaTies Website | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube

☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Brought to you by Volare, TraumaTies: Untangling Societal Harm & Healing After Crime is a podcast that creates space and conversations to dissect the structural and systemic knots that keep us from addressing trauma.

Rooted in a belief that survivors of crime deserve respect for their dignity in the aftermath of victimization, Volare seeks to empower survivors by informing them of all of the options available and working to transform existing response systems to be more inclusive of the diverse needs that survivors often have after crime.

Volare also provides free, holistic, and comprehensive advocacy, therapeutic, and legal services to survivors of all crime types. Visit our website to learn more about how to access our trauma-informed education training and how to partner with us to expand survivor-defined justice.

Welcome back to TraumaTies where we believe trauma is a common thread of the human connection. I'm Bridgette Stumpf, and I'm here as always with my co-host, Lindsey Silverberg.

A lot of people spend years living in survival mode without fully realizing it. Sometimes survival mode looks obvious. Constant stress, hypervigilance, emotional shutdown, or feeling like you're always bracing for something bad to happen. But other times it can look like being overly responsible, always staying productive, taking care of everyone else, never slowing down, or becoming the person who holds everything together.

And many of the traits we're praised for can actually begin as adaptations to stress or instability. Being independent, highly aware of other people's emotions, overachieving, staying emotionally guarded, learning how to anticipate problems before they happen. These responses often develop because the nervous system is trying to create safety, predictability, or control.

But healing can create a complicated question. Who are we when we're no longer organizing our lives entirely around survival? Because when the nervous system finally experiences moments of safety, people sometimes realize they've spent years functioning in protection rather than connection, presence, or choice.

So today, we're talking again about survival mode, post-traumatic growth in the nervous system, how trauma shapes identity, what happens when safety begins to return, and why healing is often less about becoming someone new and more about integrating the parts of ourself that develop to help us survive.

Yeah, so this is interesting. What some of the research points to is that survival mode and identity are very tied, which I don't think is surprising

to you and

[Laughing]

I. That trauma doesn't just affect emotions. It really can shape an individual's identity, their behavior, their relationships, and the way that people move through the world, which you and I have been talking a lot about lately as it comes to communication.

So, you know, this is an interesting topic and time to bring

Mm-hmm.

this up. What we know is that over time, survival responses can become so familiar. We've talked about that in a prior episode, that they start to feel like personality traits rather than adaptations.

Research on post-traumatic growth explores how people can experience meaningful psychological change after struggling with highly distressing life events. I think importantly what this does is it doesn't mean that the trauma is beneficial or that suffering disappears, rather that it focuses on growth exists alongside pain, not in place of it. I'm just gonna say that again, because I think that's an important one.

Growth exists alongside pain, not in place of it. And we talk a lot about that with this concept of toxic positivity, where

Mm-hmm.

it's as if you're supposed to move on, get over it. And we know that that is not only not possible, but also not healthy. And so the research found that many people report shifts in areas like relationships, personal strength, priorities, meaning, and appreciation for life after trauma.

But that growth often emerges through reflection, emotional processing, and rebuilding a sense of self after the core beliefs or assumptions have been disrupted. Trauma forces people into survival-focused ways of functioning, right? Like, you

Mm hmm.

have to be able to meet your very basic needs. But what we know is that over time, healing may create opportunities to ask deeper questions about identity and purpose, values, and connection.

Sometimes the very qualities that can help someone survive can eventually become exhausting once danger is no longer present. So when we think about healing, it's not always about getting rid of survival strategies.

Mm-hmm.

It's about understanding where they came from, appreciating how they protected us, and then deciding whether we still need them in the same way.

We have been talking about this a lot in the context of adulting, you will, like adult relationships that come into your life when you're navigating all the communities that our kids occupy, whether that's school communities, neighborhood communities, sports communities, activities.

So this does have me thinking about a bit more of an empathetic lens towards how I might experience people in complicated ways and how much of that is probably their own adaptations, right, throughout life.

Yeah.

So, know, Lindsey, I guess I'm thinking about how so many people build these identities and it is that internal narrative, right, of telling them about either who they are, who they have to be, maybe being strong, self-sufficient, always prepared.

And often that is because folks have had to survive difficult environments. I'm even thinking not about, you know, in the research they were looking at sort of like suffering and acute trauma experiences, like profoundly what we would think about probably as like the kind of common nomenclature of a trauma exposure. But when we think about what we now understand to be threatening, dangerous out of my control, so parentification of children, right?

Things that maybe someone wouldn't have put in the of capital T space of a trauma can really drive some of these adaptations. And so I guess with that lens in mind, what do you think it can feel like? Or I guess it's not even a what, it's more of a why do you think it can feel so unsettling to separate out the role of what survival taught us to be and kind of who we are?

Oof.

I think for me, the thing it brings up most acutely is that if we're sort of taking off the survival identities, behaviors, mechanisms that we use to make it through whatever that hard time was, whether we identify it as trauma or not, you're basically saying to your brain, this is how you kept me safe. This is how I survived 100 % of my hard days. And now I need to do something

Mm-hmm.

different. And so I have to imagine,

from like a brain standpoint, that feels very in conflict about how you map to safety. Because

Mm-hmm.

you have the right, like you've created these neural pathways of what feels safe, and now you're saying, okay, I need to do something different. And so what we know about when something's unknown is that it can also, it can create more uncertainty and, you know,

Pain activation, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And so for me, that is the part that is probably has to be the most complicated. Whether you recognize your brain is sort of going through that or not, your brain is probably very resistant to wanting to not engage in those survival mechanisms anymore.

So I wanna talk about two things here that's coming up for me. One is a recent anecdote that you and I were sort of toying around with about our calendar views. And the other is research on entrepreneurs and leaders. And we

Yes.

cite to this in our vicarious trauma training, there's really interesting research that some of the most successful entrepreneurial leaders, so people that are able to sort of create new things, thrive in high stress, high risk environments.

They've found this thread that several of those top performing entrepreneurial leaders have histories of childhood trauma. And they actually were able to identify in this particular research that that experience, while, again, not positive, right? Overall, we're not saying like that was a good thing to experience. What it helped them develop as adaptations is often creative problem solving, and good risk assessment, right?

Scanning environments, identifying safe, unsafe, and then being creative about how do I navigate to sort of either control this outcome or prevent lack of safety. And so I think that's a really fascinating research to point to when we think about adaptations and leadership, right? Because some of our best performing leaders are also the ones that are at the highest risk for burning out because they come

Yeah.

into this space really, really effective high performers and

we know that history of childhood trauma exposure increases the risk of vicarious trauma and burnout. So just like a complicated space to sit in. So I have that kind of coming up for me. The other side of my brain is thinking about our conversation, I think it was this morning, right, around calendar views. And

Yes. Yeah.

I learned...late in the game that you were using two different colors for internal and external meetings and that explained a lot about why I was scheduling meetings over your time that was already booked.

And you made this reference to like, well, maybe it's because you look at your calendar in the month view and not the weekly, daily, which you and I have joked about a lot. We had this like epiphany where I was like, why do I feel like that is more conducive to how my brain works?

I think I said something to the effect of I always feel better having a more global view, right? And this is sort of true of my personality, right?

Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Like if you know me, it's like I want all the connections, all the information. And the more my brain feels a sense of information overload for predictability sake, the better I feel.

I think it's chaotic for a lot of other people, but when you sort of untangle like the narrative of where that came from, it makes so much sense to me.

Of course, well, and so the other side of that story was, I just need to paint a picture. Bridgette looks at our Google calendar at the month view and then goes through, like, hovers over the day. There's a long list of like 15 events in a day. I prefer, my brain prefers to look at it on the day, just the day, right? I don't want any other information.

All I wanna know is what do I have to today, what's coming next, and that's it. And like we talked about, that is also sort of how I function. I very much am not, I don't need the future and I don't actually like it. It doesn't make me, it makes me feel less safe to have to sort of forecast, here's all the different things that could happen. I'd much rather deal with it in the moment. And so it was just this funny, sort of

so funny.

revelation of the way that the two of our brains function around safety and predictability.

What a learning moment for leaders, right? We were talking about how certain people have organized like systems and Excel sheets and the design and the color. And I think when you understand that someone's narrative and personality and adaptations, right?

Not personality, but maybe it is adaptation is a driving force of how they create systems in their life, and how they navigate the world as a leader, you get a lot more compassion and understanding of something that feels very chaotic for you if you can really feel clear on the driver of why

Yeah.

that is working for them.

Yeah, it's wild how at least you and I can always make the connection about how this all goes back to trauma and

Yeah.

you know, our sense of safety, I just think it's such a driving force, which is why when we think about survival coping mechanisms, it makes a whole lot of sense that people might not even know that that is something they're engaging in and that it's as a result of something that they experienced in the past that felt hard.

Yeah, I'm thinking about too, when we start to really untangle this certain behaviors that we either engage in or experience things like people pleasing, emotional, self-control, caretaking, right? We were just talking about this, like the need for caretaking environments and people's experiences within those environments. You know, Lindsey, how do you think that makes it harder for people to recognize when they're functioning from fear or protection?

Because so many of those approaches are really celebrated and help people perform well. So, how do we develop a deeper awareness of what is a helpful adaptation versus what might actually not be as helpful?

Therapy, I don't have a better answer for that. The amount of self-awareness that you have to have about traumas you've experienced, how that impacts your day-to-day functioning feels unlikely for the vast majority of folks to just sort of stumble across that, not because people aren't smart or they don't care.

But I think unless you're having honest conversations, like you have an accountability partner that knows

Mm-hmm.

your trauma history to be like, huh, I wonder if you do that thing because of this thing that happened to you. I think it would be, right?

That's exactly what I was gonna say is like, for leaders, I think in teams, it is having an accountability partner that's like, you've almost, you we've talked to some of the folks we train in resilient leadership about a communication manual. Like this is how I communicate

Mm-hmm.

as a leader. This is how, you know, survivors respond under stress. Like if we road mapped a communication, experiential communication manual for me, right?

I would love for someone like you who operates as my accountability partner to be able to say, hey, remember how you said when you get stressed, you communicate this way? I saw you doing that in this moment. Do we want to unpack like, what was going on with you? How we might want to respond to the way that communication landed. I just think there's so many helpful ways of leading better understanding this, but creating someone who can give you the awareness when in the moment you're too in the red to actually be self-aware.

100%. And that's not an, I would argue, I don't know that I think that's like an easy thing to find necessarily. Like I hope for everybody that they have an accountability

Yeah.

partner like I have in you. And I think a lot of people don't.

Or that's not the priority, right? Because I think the other piece is like, it takes a lot of time and

Yeah.

trust to be able to say in a loving way to somebody, hey, I noticed you showing up kind of stressed,

do you wanna talk about that? Can we unpack that? In so many corporate spaces, that's not the focus, right? And so we are big believers in trauma-informed communication and building teams where people are resilient and can stay in the work, but I don't know as a system, we are there yet.

Hmm.

So talk to me about the nervous system and safety.

Yeah, the nervous, this one is always so tricky to me because I think I'm still trying to understand this delineation between nervous system dysregulation and trauma responses. Like I'm still trying to sort of walk the line of like where are they overlapping and where are they distinct distinctly different.

So what we know, you when we look at things like polyvagal theory, it's helped us kind of explain why safety changes so much about how we think, feel and connect or at least our perceptions of safety, right? The theory describes how the nervous system constantly scans for cues of safety, danger or threat and then processes this, you know, through neuroception.

And when the nervous system perceives safety, this ventral vagal state supports calmness, connection, emotional regulation, things like oxytocin, like when we can feel love and comfort and trust for the people that we're engaging with.

And people are generally more able to be present, curious, connected, and flexible in the state. And as a leader, I'm always like, huh, how do we keep people in this ventral vagal state, right? Like I almost want to just like come up with an acronym that we use to like flag for people we need to stay in this curious, connected place. But of course, when the nervous system gets dysregulated or starts to in that scan detect some level of danger, our survival stakes start to take over and the most simplistic way of framing this is that trauma response or the fight, flight, freeze, fawn that people are more familiar with.

And that of course leads to long-term, can think about irritability, hyper independence, anxiety, overperforming, constant vigilance. And I think if I were to frame myself as sort of that global view that I always need to have is really about constant vigilance.

And I feel like, if you spend any amount of time with me, that is just how I always joke, I like live in my limbic system, but I feel like I literally move through the world, right? In this constant vigilance and–

It makes me think of the, in our training, when you and I do the line, like where somebody, thank you,

Mm-hmm. The stress spectrum, yeah.

that word, thank you, how you do this thing with your hands where you're like, and

Uhuh.

it's the person who you bump into in the hallway and it's like jumpy, right? And I'm fully over here, X'd out, like, you know, off somewhere in my head. What's happening? I'm falling asleep.

What's going on? What is it?

Nap time. Yeah, it is interesting to really be honest with yourself about where do you go, right? What is your sort of, and we all depend and vary based on the situation, but that is one that really resonates with me. And so when we start to think about this challenge, right, is that people can become so accustomed to these survival states that they've learned to adapt to that they, as you were describing,

when something starts to feel different, even if it's a healthier way of responding in an environment, it might feel uncomfortable, unfamiliar, even unsafe when in fact, that's not true. Sometimes people mistake hypervigilance for productivity and emotional shutdown for strength or even chronic stress for motivation because those states have been normalized for so long. Woof.

Yeah, and they're

celebrated, right? Like I do think that there's a

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

lot that is celebrated about those things, especially the chronic stress piece.

Yeah.

Yeah. When we think about our culture and the culture of high performance and I think about this, was actually sitting in a, doing this, the review board that we engage in. And someone said to me, Bridgette, when's the last time you took like an actual long vacation where you did no work? I literally was like staring and I was like, I know I can come up with this. And I was like, okay, well I was pretty off then.

And then I was thinking about the last time I was off was not really a vacation. It wasn't like relaxing, right? So I'm really thinking

Right. Right.

about it. I'm like, this is really this idea of chronic stress versus productivity is something that I think I often conflate, right?

I know, but then my immediate thing goes, I think it stressed you out more to be disconnected, right? And then.

Yes, I said that. I literally said that. I literally said it's less stressful for me to not have to come back to all the emails. Yeah.

Right, but then I guess it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this episode, is it's probably because the sense of safety around, even if maybe

Yeah.

that's the healthy thing to do, right? Healthy, in quotes, thing to do is to disconnect. It works for you to

It works for me.

stay engaged.

Yeah, I do feel that way. And this could just be me justifying my adaptation, but I feel very

You

strongly that I have a good balance of like, how that works in my life. And of course, healing often involves helping the nervous system experience enough safety to move out of these kind of constant protection responses to experience greater connection and regulation. And some of it probably in the balance that I feel is I do feel very connected, right?

Right.

And in aspects of my life, really all of them. And I think that's

not as common as we would hope, right? To have

Yeah.

really deep, meaningful connections and work and personal life and community. I think that is really a protective factor for some of the maybe adaptations that I've been using my entire life that still show up in my adulthood.

Well, I guess the other piece is like, it doesn't, because you have an adaptation, right, it doesn't mean it doesn't serve you. So I think some of it is being honest with yourself about if you do have one of these adaptations and it is no longer serving you. I also think it's okay for people to make the decision that I would, to be connected, right? Like I'd rather

Mm-hmm.

know what's going on in my email or I like the productivity because it helps me feel safe.

It might actually cause more harm to sort of make a change

Mm.

in an adaptation that you've had your entire life, right, and to move into something. Now, I don't know the impact, obviously, on your body with something like that, but I don't know that anybody's going to. And so, I guess my point is, it's also okay to have some of these adaptations

Yeah.

and decide that you want to keep it, but it might

Yeah.

work for you and it suits you and who you are and where you are and you can still get things like rest and you can still regulate

Mm-hmm.

your nervous system through other means.

Yeah,

it's interesting because, you know, certainly there's going to be lots of places I can think where these adaptations really serve you. And I think a lot of people fear that if they stop operating in the survival mode that they might even lose the traits that have made them successful or dependable. Just saying, I'm sure there are people out there that feel that way. Have you, Lindsey, have you seen or experienced people struggling with the idea that healing might change how others perceive them or even maybe how they perceive themselves?

I'm sure. I mean, yeah, I guess I think about this a little bit more broadly, maybe not so directly connected to my life, but we know people in the victim services field where they've experienced a trauma and they have sort of reorganized their entire life around this cause. And this

Mm.

is not a judgment because I think, like we were talking about, for some people, it doesn't mean–growth doesn't mean ignoring the pain, and I wonder if there is ever an internal conversation about, well, if I didn't do this anymore, if I retire from this work that I've spent my entire life doing, and I have these sort of adaptations would stepping away, would removing myself from whatever I've created change how people perceive me or who I believe to be is my identity.

And I have to imagine that's true for a lot of people that get into work that's hard, right? Where you're dealing with traumas and helping people.

That stepping away or out of it somehow changes the perception of who you are as an individual. I know that to be true for myself when I stopped doing hospital response, right? I felt like that was what my identity was. I was this person

Mm. Mm-hmm.

and I loved it so much, which I know is a weird thing to maybe say, but people are so incredibly resilient. It was just this really beautiful place that you got to share

Yeah.

with someone and stepping away from that, I was like, well, what value do I have?

Mm.

And that's a little bit more tied to not, to healing necessarily, but to people's perceptions

Identity. Mm

of themselves.

hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's really interesting you have me sort of thinking about this concept of integration, you know, and, and the role that agency and choice plays in healing. And of course, I think one of the most important parts of healing is integration.

So it's not like you're saying erasing the past or pretending that we didn't survive difficult things or experience suffering, but rather becoming a, you know, rather than becoming a completely different person, we're sort of learning how to hold on to those parts and experience together kind of who we are now and the beautiful parts of our adaptations that have really helped us grow and evolve and be aware.

And ultimately that awareness brings choice, I think, in our post-traumatic growth. And there's been research around this that suggests that many people really do begin reevaluating their priorities after adversity. Like the meaning-making thing is real, right? So

Yeah.

I think that's like,

maybe a good place to transition us to close out is to just leave our listeners to think about what I often refer to as sort of the shadow side of suffering. Like the shadow side of suffering is resiliency. And that doesn't mean that we wish or want or hope that anyone has to experience suffering in their life.

But for those who know that feeling, I think the beautiful part of the other side of that horizon is resiliency. And there's just something really incredible in that shared common experience and connection of knowing the feeling of resiliency and seeing it in other people like you described in the hospital response scene and people we've had as guests, each other, our

Yeah.

teams. It's just, it's a beautiful thing to get to be a part of. So any final thoughts, Lindsey, before we close out for our listeners?

Lots of them but I'll save them for another episode.

Well, of course, as always, thank you for joining us on this episode of TraumaTies and for taking time to sit with us through this conversation. If you want to keep exploring these topics, you can of course follow along by subscribing, reading, and reviewing the TraumaTies podcast wherever you listen.

We really appreciate you being here with us. Thanks for listening and we'll be back soon for more untangling.