5 Trauma Responses Mistaken for Personality Traits (And How Healing Changes Them)

Feb 14, 2026

5 Trauma Responses You’ve Been Calling Personality Traits (And What Healing Really Looks Like When You See Them)

Category: Emotional Wellness | Trauma Recovery | Emotional Eating

Shot of hands grabbing a young woman’s against a dark background

“I’m just a people pleaser.”

“I’m a perfectionist.”

“I’m an emotional eater—I’ve always been this way.”

“My brain never shuts off. I’m just an overthinker.”

“I can’t say no. I’m too nice.”

Sound familiar?

Most of us have said at least one of these things about ourselves. We say them casually, like they’re facts. Like they’re written into our DNA. Like they’re just… who we are.

But what if they’re not?

What if every single one of those is a trauma response—a survival strategy your body and mind developed to keep you safe—that you’ve been carrying for so long it started to feel like your identity?

That realization changed everything for me. And if you’re reading this as a woman who has spent years at war with her body, cycling through diets, eating her feelings, and wondering why she can’t just “get it together”—it might change everything for you too.

First, Let’s Redefine Trauma

When most people hear the word “trauma,” they think of the big, dramatic events. Car accidents. Abuse. Loss. And yes, those are trauma. But trauma also includes the things that are quieter and harder to name.

Childhood emotional neglect. Growing up in a home where love felt conditional. Being the “strong friend” who never got to fall apart. Being parentified—forced into the adult role before you were ready. Living in an unpredictable environment where the mood could shift without warning. Staying in a toxic relationship because leaving felt more dangerous than staying.

When we experience these things—especially as children—our nervous system adapts. It develops strategies to keep us safe. Those strategies are brilliant. They are creative. And they work.

The problem is, they don’t retire when the danger passes. They keep running in the background, long after you’ve left the situation that created them. And eventually, you stop seeing them as coping mechanisms and start seeing them as who you are.

Frustrated woman hugging man having no power to forgive cheating

5 Trauma Responses You’ve Been Calling Personality Traits

1. People-Pleasing

There’s a difference between generosity that comes from overflow and people-pleasing that comes from fear.

People-pleasing as a trauma response usually starts in childhood. You learned that the safest thing to do was monitor everyone’s emotions and make yourself indispensable. If mom was happy, you were safe. If you were “good enough,” you got the love you needed.

So your little self developed a strategy: anticipate needs, say yes, keep the peace. And that strategy followed you into adulthood. Now you’re the woman who says yes when she means no, apologizes for having needs, and cancels her own plans to help someone else—then wonders why she’s exhausted and resentful.

The food connection: When you’re constantly pouring into everyone else and neglecting yourself, food becomes the one thing that’s yours. The one comfort that doesn’t require you to perform.

“People-pleasing is not your personality. It’s a survival strategy.”

2. Hypervigilance

Also known as: “I’m just an overthinker.”

This is the one that has you replaying conversations at 2 AM. Analyzing tone in text messages. Scanning every room for tension the moment you walk in.

Hypervigilance is your nervous system stuck in threat-detection mode. At some point, you had to be hyper-aware of your environment to stay safe. Maybe it was a volatile parent or an unpredictable partner. Your brain learned: if I can predict it, I can protect myself. So it never stops scanning.

That constant state of alertness is exhausting. It disrupts your sleep, drains your energy, and floods your body with cortisol. And when your body is running on fumes and stress hormones, it reaches for quick fuel—sugar, carbs, comfort food. Not because you lack willpower, but because your nervous system is screaming for relief.

“Real intuition feels calm. Hypervigilance feels urgent. If your ‘gut feeling’ always comes with anxiety, that’s not your intuition. That’s your trauma.”

3. Emotional Eating

This one is personal. And it’s the heart of what we talk about at Glow & Flow Holistics.

Emotional eating is not a lack of discipline. It is not weakness. It is your body’s attempt to regulate a nervous system that was overwhelmed.

When we experience trauma—especially before we have language for processing emotions—our bodies find ways to self-soothe. Food works. It lights up reward centers in the brain. It provides warmth, comfort, and a temporary sense of safety. When nothing else in your world felt safe, food was there.

Then diet culture came along and told you that the way you coped was disgusting. That your body—the body that carried you through all of that—was the problem.

“Your body is not the problem. Your body was the solution. It did what it needed to do to get you through.”

You cannot restrict your way out of a trauma response. You have to heal the wound underneath it. That’s why diets don’t work. That’s why willpower fails. And that’s why we take a different approach here.

4. Overworking

The world rewards this one, which is what makes it so sneaky.

You get promotions. You get praised. People call you “dedicated” and “reliable.” But underneath that badge of honor, there’s often a person who learned that their worth was tied to what they produced.

Maybe you were the child who had to earn love through performance. Good grades, good behavior, being the responsible one. Maybe rest wasn’t safe because idle hands got criticized. Or maybe you learned that staying busy enough meant you didn’t have to feel.

The food connection: When your body finally forces you to stop—through burnout, illness, or depletion—all the feelings you were outrunning surface at once. And many of us reach for food because we never learned to sit with ourselves without producing something.

5. Difficulty Saying No

This is related to people-pleasing, but it’s its own thing. People-pleasing is about anticipating needs. Difficulty saying no is about what happens in your body when you try to set a boundary.

The tightness in your chest. The guilt in your stomach. The racing thoughts: “They’re going to be mad. They’re going to leave. They’re going to think I’m selfish.”

That’s not a personality flaw. That’s your nervous system telling you that boundaries were dangerous at some point in your life. Maybe you said no and got punished. Maybe you expressed a need and got dismissed.

Here’s the connection most people miss: when you cannot say no to other people, you also cannot say no to the inner critic. You can’t say no to the diet. You can’t say no to the punishing workout. You can’t say no to the voice that tells you you’re not enough. The boundary muscle is the boundary muscle. If it’s weak with others, it’s weak with yourself too.

“Healing your relationship with food means healing your relationship with the word no. They are the same work.”

Dizzy Woman With Balance Loss. Vertigo Disorder

So You See It Now. What Happens Next?

Here’s what nobody tells you about awareness: seeing the pattern doesn’t make it disappear. Naming the wound doesn’t instantly heal it.

And if you’re reading this thinking, “Okay, I see all five of those in my life… now what?”—you’re in the exact right place. Because the next step is understanding what healing actually looks like. Not the Instagram version. The real one.

What Healing Is Not

Healing is not linear. You will have a breakthrough on Tuesday and a breakdown on Thursday. You will go weeks without emotionally eating and then find yourself at the refrigerator at 11 PM after a hard day. That is not failure. That is the process.

Healing is not the absence of struggle. You don’t heal and then never feel triggered again. Healing means the space between the trigger and your response gets wider. You catch yourself sooner. You choose differently more often—not perfectly, not always, but more often.

Healing is not a performance. You don’t need to document it, post about it, or prove to anyone that you’re doing it right. If your healing looks like crying in the shower, that counts. If it looks like going to bed at 8 PM because you’re emotionally exhausted, that counts.

Healing is not about becoming a different person. You are not trying to kill the version of you that coped through food or people-pleasing or overworking. You are trying to understand her, love her, and gently show her that she has other options now.

“Your healing does not need to be pretty to be real. It just needs to be yours.”

The Grief Nobody Talks About

When you realize your people-pleasing is a trauma response and not your personality, there’s a moment of relief. But right behind that relief? There’s grief.

Grief for the decades spent saying yes when you meant no. Grief for the relationships where you abandoned yourself. Grief for the years spent at war with your body because nobody told you that emotional eating was a survival strategy, not a character flaw.

You might grieve the time you can’t get back. The relationships that won’t survive your boundaries. The simplicity of not knowing—because before you saw the patterns, you could just call yourself a perfectionist and keep going.

That grief is not a sign that something is going wrong. It is a sign that something is going right. You are mourning a life built on survival. And that mourning is what makes space for a life built on intention.

If you are in that grief right now, I see you. I have been you—standing in my kitchen at midnight, eating something I wasn’t hungry for, trying to swallow down a sadness I couldn’t name. That was grief. I just didn’t know it yet.

Five Signs You’re Actually Healing

If you’re wondering whether any of this is working, here’s what to look for:

1. You catch yourself mid-pattern. You’re about to say yes on autopilot and you notice. Even if you still say yes, the noticing is the healing. That pause—even half a second—is your awareness muscle getting stronger.

2. You feel worse before you feel better. When you remove the coping mechanisms that were numbing you, the feelings surface. The pain didn’t appear because you started healing. It appeared because you stopped hiding from it.

3. Your relationships start to shift. Some people will adjust to the new you. Some won’t. A relationship that requires you to abandon yourself to maintain it is not a relationship—it’s an arrangement.

4. You start having new conversations with food. You pause before eating and ask, “What am I actually feeling?” You eat the thing and observe without spiraling into shame. Food starts to lose its power as your only comfort—not because you restricted it, but because you built other sources of comfort.

5. You develop compassion for the version of you who survived. This is the deepest sign. When you can look at the parts of yourself that coped through food and people-pleasing and say, “Thank you. You kept me alive. I’m going to take it from here”—that shift from shame to compassion is the entire foundation of lasting change.

The Messy Middle Is Where Healing Lives

Most of your healing journey will not feel like a breakthrough. Most of it will feel like a regular Tuesday.

It’s choosing to pause before you say yes. It’s noticing the urge to eat and sitting with it for sixty seconds. It’s going to bed instead of answering one more email. It’s texting a friend when you’re sad instead of opening the pantry.

These are not dramatic transformations. They are micro-choices. And they compound. One day you’ll look back and realize you’re living a completely different life—not because of one big moment of change, but because of a thousand small ones.

If that’s where you are right now—in the middle, wondering if it’s working, unsure if you’re doing it right—the fact that you’re here, reading this, asking the hard questions, is not nothing. It is everything.

Stone arch in water at sunset

Take the Next Step

If this post resonated with you, two free resources go deeper:

“Am I Healing or Performing?” Self-Assessment — This walks you through all five trauma responses with checkboxes, rating scales, and reflection questions. It helps you identify which patterns are most active in your life and includes gentle reframes for each one. It’s the companion to Part 1 of the Trauma Response Series on Glow & Flow Radio.

“My Healing Is Not Performing” 7-Day Check-In Journal — Seven days of honest reflection questions, body check-ins, and compassion prompts. Designed for five minutes a day, no performance required. It’s the companion to Part 2 of the Trauma Response Series.

Download both free at the Glow and Flow Holistics Resource Shop.

And if you haven’t listened to the podcast episodes yet, start with Part 1: “Trauma Responses You Think Are Personality Traits” on Glow & Flow Radio, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

One Last Thing

You are not a collection of flaws. You are a survivor who developed incredibly intelligent strategies to get through incredibly difficult circumstances. And now you get to decide which of those strategies still serve you—and which ones you can gently, compassionately lay down.

You do not need to be healed to be whole. You are whole right now. In the mess. In the grief. In the moment where you catch yourself people-pleasing and choose to be kind to yourself about it instead of adding it to the shame pile.

“You are not your trauma responses. You are the woman underneath them. And she is worthy of every bit of healing that’s waiting for her.”

If this post helped you see yourself differently, share it with one woman who needs to hear that she’s not broken. She’s not “too much.” She’s healing. And so are you.

Keep glowing, keep flowing, and keep healing from the inside out.