The #1 Reason You Don’t Realize You Have Trauma
How your adult brain rewrites what your inner child never forgot
We assume that with age comes clarity — that we’ll be able to look back and finally see what happened. But often, the opposite is true.
And this is why so many people miss their childhood trauma: They’re viewing it through their adult mind.
The part that rationalizes, minimizes, and explains away what never should’ve happened in the first place. That keeps you from seeing the trauma that’s been hiding in plain sight and wreaking havoc to your life.
Let’s explore why:
1️⃣Your Adult Brain is a Master at Making Sense of the Senseless
When I say “making sense of the senseless,” I’m talking about how the adult mind rewrites painful childhood experiences to make them more tolerable — or to protect your attachment to the caregivers you once depended on.
Here’s why this happens:
Your brain craves coherence.
The mind is wired to create a narrative — to connect dots, fill gaps, and assign meaning. When we revisit childhood pain, the adult brain rushes in to make it make sense. But trauma, by nature, is senseless. It shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t your fault. And instead of sitting with that raw truth, your brain softens it. Rationalizes. Justifies.
🎧 A powerful real-life example of this is Jeannine Rashidi’s story from last week’s episode. She found herself in a relationship that mirrored the chaos of her childhood — but convinced herself it was just “a rough patch.” It wasn’t until her daughter started showing signs of trauma that she realized she hadn’t escaped the cycle — she was still living in it.
It’s especially common in survivors of developmental trauma.
When the person who hurt you was also the person you loved or needed, your nervous system couldn’t afford to see them as unsafe. So instead of “Dad scared me,” you learned to say, “He had a hard life.” Instead of “Mom didn’t show up for me,” you told yourself, “She did her best.”It’s not lying — it’s survival.
This isn’t denial. It’s your psyche’s attempt to protect you. The adult part of you tries to soothe the wounded child with grown-up reasoning — even when it invalidates your pain.Why this matters:
You can’t heal what you’ve explained away. As long as your adult brain keeps rewriting the story, your inner child stays unheard — and your body stays stuck in survival mode.
2️⃣The Trauma Didn’t Happen to the “You” Who Can Rationalize — It Happened to the Little You Who Couldn’t
One of the biggest reasons people miss their trauma is because they’re analyzing it through the adult they’ve become — not the child they were when it happened. But trauma isn’t stored as logic. It’s stored as feeling, fear, and fragmentation.
Here’s why this matters:
Your adult mind uses words. Your younger self only had sensations.
At five, you didn’t know terms like “emotional neglect” or “enmeshment.” You just knew what it felt like when no one came, when crying brought shame, or when love had conditions. That part of you doesn’t speak in language — it speaks in tight chests, flinching at touch, shame floods, and a deep sense of not being safe.Logic can’t undo what your nervous system learned.
Your adult self might say, “I understand why my mom was like that.” That’s empathy — and it has value. But it’s not a substitute for validation. Your nervous system still remembers what it felt like to be blamed, dismissed, or emotionally abandoned. Understanding it doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.You’re healing a child’s wound — not writing a memoir.
Many survivors treat healing like a research project — trying to piece together timelines or rational explanations. But you don’t heal by figuring it out. You heal by feeling it — by connecting with the child inside who lived it and giving them what they never received.Why this matters:
Until you stop intellectualizing your trauma and start tending to it emotionally and somatically, you’ll keep skipping over the part of you that actually needs the healing. Your inner child doesn’t need a perfectly explained story — they need to know they weren’t crazy, and they weren’t alone.
🎧 You can see this play out in this week’s Shitshow Saturday w/ Kristen, a mom who didn’t realize how much pain she was carrying until her son was abused by a family member. Her buried trauma came rushing back — not as memories, but as protective rage, emotional chaos, and the gut-wrenching clarity that she had to go no contact with her entire family.
3️⃣Your Logic May Be Gaslighting Your Pain
When you say things like “Other people had it worse” or “I turned out fine,” that’s not perspective — it’s self-gaslighting. Your adult mind is overriding the emotional truth of what you lived through, often without realizing it.
Here’s why this happens:
Minimizing was a survival strategy.
As a child, admitting how bad things were could’ve made you feel even more unsafe. So instead of “This hurts,” you defaulted to “It’s not that bad.” That script becomes automatic — even long after the danger is gone.You mistake functionality for healing.
You have a job. You show up. Maybe you’re even thriving. But being functional doesn’t mean you’re free. Many trauma survivors become hyper-capable — not because they’re healed, but because it was the only way to feel in control. “I turned out fine” often means “I got really good at pretending I was fine.”You’re afraid of what it means if it was trauma.
Acknowledging abuse or neglect might unravel your entire story — your identity, your family loyalty, the way you’ve made sense of your life. Logic helps you keep that door closed. But healing means opening it.Why this matters:
When you gaslight yourself, you abandon the part of you that needed compassion the most. Healing starts when you stop minimizing, stop comparing, and stop justifying your pain. You don’t have to prove your trauma — not to anyone, including yourself.
🎧 Have you listened to this week’s episodes?
• Jeannine’s Episode – A must-listen if you’ve ever found yourself in a toxic relationship and thought, How did I end up here again? Jeannine opens up about how trauma lives in the body, what talk therapy couldn’t reach, and how healing her inner child helped her show up for her kids.
• Kristen’s Shitshow Saturday – Kristen shares the devastating story of discovering her son was being abused by a family member — and the fallout that led her to go fully no contact. If you’ve ever minimized your trauma because “nothing big happened,” her story will challenge that in the most powerful way.
xo
Andrea