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The Impact of Past Trauma on Our Personality

Updated: Sep 19, 2019


Our personality is created by our emotional experiences. If we don’t let-go of emotional upsets and traumatic events or heal them then our emotional past is brought forward into our future. This is how our emotional past - literally creates our emotional future.


I have many years of working in Clinic with clients who have emotional based health concerns. I also have years of my own emotional healing. From this I have come to see that when negative, emotional events happen in our life, they can be held onto and significantly impact our future happiness and overall health.

Can you think of a situation where this may have happened in your life?

Maybe your partner left you, and since then you just haven't felt yourself?

Or, maybe you experienced emotional trauma as a child, such as sexual abuse, that resulted in you thinking all men are dangerous and out to get you?

Or maybe you got fired from a job and your confidence has never quite been the same since?

The reality is that all of us experience emotional setbacks and/or trauma in our life. Some of us are able to feel the pain, let it go, heal and then move on and some of us aren't. This article is particularly pertinent for the latter.


For people who aren't able to heal from a strong emotional event their life path often gets diverted. Instead of being able to do and be the person they want to be their emotional world rules their life.

When a negative event happens in life it creates an emotional response, this is completely natural and normal. After each event, there is a refractory period that occurs. Depending on how long this takes and how long you are affected by it, it is called different things.

Mood – lasts for hours or days – an emotional reaction that takes over then drops away.

Temperament – lasts for weeks or months – still being affected by the original event.

Personality - Lasts for years, becomes a personality trait – unaware that we’re still being affected by the original event.

When it comes to emotions there is no timeline. Emotions that are created years ago and are not released will continue to resurface over and over again. They will feel as strong as they did when they were first created, as if the event happened yesterday. However, when we notice we are upset in the present moment our brain looks for current reasons for being upset (not past causes). Therefore, we often are often unaware that we have unresolved emotions from the past that are creating or amplifying our emotional reactions in our present.

As time passes an unconscious emotional habit is created. One that we are completely unaware of and it will seem like it IS us. This is a past unresolved emotional state can become a part of our personality.

The TRUTH is WE ARE NOT OUR PAST but we are definitely affected by our past. And if there’s something that’s not working for us emotionally then we can heal this, simply by letting the past emotions be felt, validated and freed from our body and mind.

I personally have used this technique on myself and many clients with great success. In an emotional healing appointment, I facilitate and teach these techniques and use them alongside of nutritional, dietary therapies and herbal medicine to assist my clients back to their own natural, emotional health balance.

If you would like some assistance finding your own emotional health balance, I’d encourage you to book a 30-minute Balance Appointment with me where I will connect in with you and your health concerns and explain and outline a holistic approach to improving your health.

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