Sunday Deep Read: Heal Your Trauma, Strengthen Your Team
Turn trauma into resilience for a sharper resistance.
You don’t say it out loud, but you’ve probably thought it: If I actually work through my trauma, I’ll get soft.
Maybe you mock those people who “have to go to therapy” or you shrug off the things that happened to you as a child because “it’s in the past.” Deep down, though, where no one else goes but you, you know that it is right there. It still rears its ugly head in your gut AND your decisions, if you’re being honest. If you take the time to work through it, however, you think you’ll lose skills that you use now.
That fear is common, because survival mode feels sharp and ‘turned on.’ You know how to scan a room faster than anyone else, anticipate threats, and keep your guard up. You can maybe read people, and catch patterns. Those skills kept you alive, so why risk dulling them? Sure, what you went through was awful, but it made you who you are now. Facing the place where you got those skills seems like a dangerous endeavor.
Here’s the doctrinal truth: survival skills are real and they’re useful, but they’re not strength. They’re compulsions; they’re behaviors and traits that you don’t have full control over, and that makes them leverageable.
An adversary who knows your primal drives can use them to control you: validation, fear, the need for approval.
Staying unhealed makes you exploitable. In fact, you can end up exploiting yourself through self-sabotage.
John Boyd’s OODA loop makes the point: orientation, not raw action, is what drives survival and victory. Orientation is how you interpret reality, and trauma distorts that. Hypervigilance feels like speed, but it’s distortion in your process.
Survival Mode is a Borrowed Edge
Trauma survivors pick up survival mechanisms along the way that look like strengths:
Hypervigilance: spotting cues and patterns before others.
Manipulation: controlling the environment to stay safe.
Validation-seeking: reading people and bending to their will.
Game-playing: being able to become what you need to be in the moment to get done what you need to get done.
These can look like intelligence or strategy, but they’re compulsions in your unhealed hands. By default, that means you are not intentionally choosing a decision; you’re reacting to old threats in a new environment. If you’ve ever made a decision even while knowing it was the wrong one but you couldn’t bear to not choose it, then you know what I’m talking about.
As Claire Wolfe and I pointed out in Basics of Resistance, primal drives left unexamined are leverage points. If your need for approval or your reflex to control is running the show, anyone who understands people even a little can exploit you…which means someone who is trained to do it can own you.
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score puts it more bluntly: traumatic memory doesn’t stay in the past. It’s stored as sensation and body response, meaning the trauma replays itself long after the event. Robert Sapolsky’s Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers adds that chronic stress responses keep firing even when the threat is gone. In other words, the edge you think you have is really your nervous system stuck in overdrive.
That means you don’t control it, and whatever you aren’t actively controlling through intentionality will eventually be controlled by someone else.
Myth: “It’s in the past, so it doesn’t affect me”
Tough people love to claim their trauma doesn’t matter anymore because it’s “in the past.” On the surface, it sounds logical. The events are over, you’ve moved on. In fact, these assertions are often seen as evidence of resilience. But this is a form of denial.
Boyd made it clear: orientation is not just about the present. It’s the synthesis of your culture, your past experiences, even your biological wiring. Trauma doesn’t vanish just because time has passed; it remains embedded in your orientation until you deliberately strip it out or reframe it in a healthy way.
Van der Kolk also wrote that trauma embeds itself in the body and resurfaces in how you perceive and respond. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery adds that “banishing atrocities from consciousness” only works temporarily; unintegrated memories always return. I tell my counseling clients all the time that it’s like leaving a cup of fountain soda on your desk. Eventually the paper cup breaks down and the liquid seeps out on to your desk. We might spend a lot of time wiping up the mess, when what we need to do is handle the leaking cup itself.
Operationally, the costs are obvious. The man who pretends his childhood abuse “doesn’t matter anymore” still explodes when his competence is questioned. The leader who still hears his dad’s voice telling him he’ll never amount to anything pushes him to get more people, more followers, more events in an effort to prove to himself and others that he is worthy.
Their orientation is still distorted by the past, even if they refuse to admit it. In resistance work, that means their “strength” is actually a glaring vulnerability.
Healing Strips the Hooks Out
Disciplined self-work, whether you do it with a counselor or on your own, won’t actually erase your survival skills. It will, however, unhook it from the heavy trailer of compulsion.
You still notice when someone is lying. You still read the dynamics of a room, but you don’t feel compelled to control them out of fear.
This is what Boyd meant by clear orientation: seeing reality without distortion. Healing is orientation correction, and it is absolutely necessary if you want to function at top form.
Cognitive therapy pioneer Aaron Beck showed that reframing distorted thinking patterns reduces compulsive responses. Trauma recovery research consistently finds that healing reduces reactivity, leaving the skill intact but making it a conscious choice. Compulsivity is a form of slavery; you’re controlled by the survival mechanisms instead of learning to leverage the skills with discipline.
To start healing, try journaling triggers like ‘What makes me feel out of control?’ Practice grounding: Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4. Repeat 2-3 times. Or name five things you see, four you touch, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste.
Be honest with yourself about the ways that your pain still lives in you, and how it affects your decisions. Ask yourself, “Why did I choose this course of action?” or “What was I looking for in this situation? What do I find myself doing to feel safe?”
Even if you can’t verbalize what happened to you, find a way to verbalize how it made you feel. If you felt small, abandoned, worthless, scared, say that. If you have someone in your life who is safe, say it to them. Say it out loud.
There are free CBT worksheets online that you can use to reframe reactive thoughts. If therapy feels ‘weak,’ start privately to build control on your terms. Healing is ongoing, but each step strengthens your control.
Integration Creates The True Edge
Once the compulsions are gone, what remains is the actual edge:
Threat recognition: fast, accurate reads on danger.
Manipulation detection: spotting covert control before it shifts the course of the group.
Group dynamic radar: pattern recognition sharpened by experience, now under deliberate control.
This is orientation you can wield, and that makes it an actual strength.
Play to those strengths, not your ego. Trauma-fueled compulsions are ego-driven. Healed perception is strength-driven.
Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow shows how intuitive “fast thinking” can be deadly accurate when it’s based on valid experience instead of distorted signals. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence demonstrates how disciplined awareness makes people more effective in both individual and group environments.
In short, healing your trauma is the only path to clear orientation, better decisions, and long-term effectiveness.
Bridging trauma research with resistance strategies might seem strange, but it offers a new lens on psychological resilience for activists. By integrating insights from Boyd’s OODA loop and trauma experts like van der Kolk, we enhance operational strength for both individuals and teams.
The Operational Advantage: Hardened, Not Weakened
Healing doesn’t make you fragile. It makes you harder to manipulate, harder to destabilize, and more consistent under stress.
You don’t bleed security through compulsive behaviors.
You don’t hand enemies leverage through your unacknowledged drives.
You adapt faster because your orientation is clear.
Boyd stressed that rapid, adaptive shifts depend on clean orientation. Healing clears the loop and allows you to make decisions with clarity and intentionality.
Southwick and Charney’s Resilience (2012) highlights post-traumatic growth: the process of integrating trauma creates stronger adaptability and higher functional strength. What once felt like weakness becomes actual resilience.
What Individual Healing Changes For the Group
If your group is made up of members who have chosen to face their demons and heal, the effects on your group cannot be overstated. Here is a sampling of the ripple effect:
Improved Team Cohesion: Healing individual trauma reduces compulsive behaviors (e.g., validation-seeking, control reflexes) that cause interpersonal conflict. For example, a healed member is less likely to dominate group decisions out of fear, fostering trust and collaboration.
Enhanced Group Decision-Making: Clearer individual orientation (per Boyd’s OODA loop) improves collective decision-making. A team of healed members can observe and orient more accurately, avoiding reactive decisions driven by distorted perceptions.
Reduced Security Risks: Unhealed trauma creates group vulnerabilities, such as members being manipulated by adversaries exploiting their compulsions. Healing reduces these risks, enhancing OPSEC.
Stronger Resilience Under Stress: The research on post-traumatic growth shows that healed individuals contribute to group resilience, maintaining morale and adaptability during high-pressure missions (e.g., anti-trafficking operations).
Modeling Psychological Strength: Leaders who heal their own trauma will model resilience, encouraging others to prioritize self-work, which creates a culture of psychological strength within the group.
The best part is that you and your group won’t lose your skills; you just lose the part where you’re a slave to them. Instead, you control them now.
Bottom Line
Refusing to heal isn’t actually toughness. It’s leaving the past in the hands of your enemies to exploit you all they like. Healing sharpens your perception, and puts the handle of the blade back in your hand.
You’ll keep the edge, but now it’s under your command. And THAT is operational strength.