The Beliefs Chronic Trauma Leaves Behind
How chronic and complex trauma shapes negative core beliefs
Imagine you encounter a bear in the woods. Your first instinct is to run. You soon realize the bear is faster than you, so running won't solve the problem. You turn to fight, but the bear is stronger. That won't work either. So you freeze and play dead. Maybe the bear won't notice you. But the bear knows better.
Fight, flight, freeze… fawn.
These are the options we have when confronted with a crisis. Once you realize — consciously or not — that none of those automated responses will keep you safe, you learn to manage the bear instead. You feed it and tend to it. If the bear is content, you will survive. Your identity becomes keeping the bear happy so that it does not threaten you. This is the fawn response.
The bear, of course, is an analogy — a figure from your life. Your bear may have been an authority figure from childhood: a bully, a teacher, or a religious leader. It could represent an abusive parent or an unsafe partner later in life. Whatever form it took, chronic and complex trauma has a way of leaving marks that outlast the threat itself.
Over time, survival leaves a deeper mark.
Beneath our conscious experience, the mind is quietly building a model of the world — a set of beliefs about who we are, where we fit, and how safe it is to be ourselves. Psychologists call this a schema. Strong emotional experiences, especially repeated ones, are encoded deeply in this model. They become working assumptions that operate as a background program the nervous system runs automatically to keep us prepared and protected.
When the threat is chronic, those assumptions turn inward. The mind tries to make sense of ongoing danger by locating the problem in the self. If only I were enough, things would be different. If I weren't so bad, others wouldn't be angry with me. These thoughts feel less like conclusions and more like facts — quiet, constant, and rarely examined. Over time, they harden into subtle core beliefs about the self like “I am not enough,” “I am worthless,” or “I don't deserve good things.”
The tricky thing about chronic trauma is that it does not stay in the past. Experiences that carry intense fear, loneliness, or shame get encoded in a way that keeps them active long after the threat is gone. Once you have survived a bear, the nervous system begins to perceive every threat as a bear. A colleague offers feedback on a project, for example, and suddenly the old belief is running the room: I'm not good enough. I never should have thought I could handle this. This is the lasting impact of chronic trauma. It often shows up as depression, persistent anxiety, and a deeply negative sense of self — the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with you, even when your life on paper looks fine.
The brain is built to heal.
This is not a platitude. The brain’s ability to restructure schemas and transform behaviors is built into our neural networks. The same system that encoded those beliefs can update them, not by talking yourself out of them, but by giving the nervous system new experiences that contradict them at the level where they were formed.
At Threshold Counseling in Tucson, we begin by identifying the organizing belief — the core story you carry about yourself that shows up across different situations and memories. That story has a history. It made sense at the time, and it can be examined, gently, with curiosity rather than judgment.
Using approaches including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Narrative Therapy, and Gestalt, we work to unzip the schema — to access the memories and emotions that gave the belief its power, and to introduce something new. In EMDR, this process is called memory reconsolidation: the nervous system updates its model of the past in light of new information, and the old belief begins to lose its grip. The work is not about erasing what happened. It is about freeing the present from it. Clients often describe the shift as a kind of lightness — not that the memories disappear, but that they stop running the room.
If this resonates, I would welcome a conversation about whether this kind of work might be a fit for you.
References
Ecker, B., Ticic, R., & Hulley, L. (2024). Unlocking the emotional brain: Memory reconsolidation and the psychotherapy of transformational change (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003231431
Kiessling, R. (2010). Isolated neural networks and belief-focused neural network processing. In EMDR Consulting (2024). Integrating EMDR into your clinical practice: EMDR training course [Training manual]. EMDR Consulting. https://emdrconsulting.com
