Bessel van der Kolk identifies what he considers the biggest thing about trauma: not the event itself, but hating the role you played in it. Not standing up for yourself. Going along with it. Sucking up to your abuser. You hate yourself for not being true to yourself during the trauma.
“The biggest thing about trauma is hating the role that you played in your own trauma.”
This self-directed shame runs deeper than the original wound. You need to go there — to understand the five-year-old, the fifteen-year-old, the fifty-year-old who complied because they were really scared. Joe adds that the watershed moment in healing is when people grieve the fact that they’ve been doing this to themselves for 20, 30, or 50 years — grieving all the missed years. That grief is often the precursor to genuine self-love.
This connects owning the dark parts of yourself to healing. Hiding yourself is shame. Every part of you needs to be known to the people you feel close to.
Related Concepts
- Shame dissolves when felt not fought
- Grief is necessary for transformation
- Grief of self-abandonment