Peculiar cruelty

I'd like to explore how trauma can fracture or shape our sense of identity, and proposes the “third self” as the person we can consciously become rather than trying to return to who we once were. For those who have known trauma since childhood, it also honours the grief for the self they were never allowed to become, while opening the possibility of finally beginning to discover who they might be.

There can be a peculiar cruelty in the idea of “getting back to yourself” after trauma. It sounds hopeful. Somewhere beneath the hurt, we imagine, there is an earlier self waiting to be recovered. But sometimes there is no going back. And sometimes there was never a before to go back to. For some people, trauma divides life into before and after. There was the person who entered the experience, and the person who emerged from it.
We can become terribly homesick for that first self. Perhaps they trusted easily, were spontaneous, or simply assumed tomorrow would follow today.

Then there is the second self, shaped by what happened. This person may be vigilant where the first was trusting, guarded where they were once open. They may scan peaceful rooms for danger or expect abandonment before intimacy has had a chance.
These were often ways of surviving.

Yet eventually a strange internal argument can begin:
I want my life back.
That life wasn't safe.

Perhaps this is where we can imagine a third self. Not the person we were. Not merely the person trauma required us to become. But the person we might now choose to become.

When There Was No Before

For others, trauma arrived so early, or was so constant, that there is no remembered first self. They may have learned vigilance before trust, appeasement before assertion, survival before play.
For them, “becoming yourself again” can carry an unintended cruelty.

Again? Who was I before?
There is a particular grief here: grief for the person we were never allowed to become.
The carefree child. The teenager who might have explored rather than constantly assessed danger. The adult who might have made choices from curiosity rather than fear.
Not memories exactly. Possibilities. An unlived life.

When a child must organise themselves around survival, something of childhood's birthright is lost: the assumption that there will be time to discover who you are. They may become extraordinarily skilled at reading a room without ever having been given the space to read themselves.  There must be permission to say: I was entitled to a beginning.

For these people, perhaps the “third self” is actually the second.
The first is the person who had to survive. The second is the person who finally gets to ask: Who might I become when survival is no longer the only thing organising my life?

The number does not matter. The movement does. This person is not returning to themselves. They are meeting themselves, perhaps for the first time.

Honouring the Survivor

Whether we call the emerging person a second self or a third, they do not need to destroy the survivor in order to exist.

Instead of asking, Why can't I relax? Why do I need so much control? Why can't I just be normal?, perhaps we can ask: What did this way of being once do for me?
Perhaps it kept me safe. Made me invisible when being noticed was dangerous. Taught me not to depend upon people who could not be depended upon.

Seen this way, the survivor is not defective. The survivor is ingenious.
But ingenuity developed under terrible conditions can become exhausting when carried into every room for the rest of a life.

So the emerging self can say: I understand why you learned this. You got us here.
You have done enough. I will take it from here.

Authorship of What Comes Next

Perhaps healing is not restoration. Perhaps it is integration. And sometimes, creation.
Trauma is an experience of having authorship taken away. For the child raised within trauma, authorship may scarcely have been offered at all.
The emerging self offers something different: authorship of what comes next. 

That authorship can begin small. Discovering what we like. Resting without earning it. Saying no without constructing a defence. Saying yes because we genuinely want to. Being ordinary. Playing.
There is no compulsory transformation here. No requirement to emerge wiser, no obligation to make suffering meaningful, no timetable by which pain must become purpose.

The trauma remains part of the story, but the story can become larger than the trauma.
Perhaps the most compassionate question is no longer:
How do I become the person I was before this happened?
Nor even:
Who would I have been if this had never happened to me?
That question deserves to be asked. It deserves to be grieved.

But eventually another question may stand beside it: Given everything that has happened, and everything that should have happened but did not, who would I like to become now?
Call this person the third self.
Call them the second.
The number was never the important part.
There is still more of us to become.

And for some people, that can encompass some of the best days of their lives. Not because the trauma no longer matters, but because they have learned to walk alongside it with self-compassion and a deeply human curiosity about what life may still hold.

The trauma remains part of the story. It simply no longer has to take centre stage.

Steve Rothwell is a writer and experimenter who is always trying to sum up the essence of what he does. He wrote about his experiences from a young age; always trying to take others along with him. Self-taught; he has taken on projects in fields as varied as engineering and electronics, but always comes back to writing about the human experience. Nowadays he is focused on writing about mental health, in particular trauma and Complex-PTSD. You may visit his website to see Steve's latest projects. www.reliefandhope.com