The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Psychological Trauma Read online

  WHAT IS AN EMOTIONAL WOUND?

  Growing up, do you remember something happening that you didn’t expect, something that surprised you—and not in a good way? Maybe you came home with a third-place Science Fair ribbon, and rather than wrap you up in a breath-stealing hug and fawn over the yellow slip, your mother barely gave it a glance, declaring that you should have tried harder. Now, fast-forward to junior year. You auditioned for the lead in the school musical, but the part went to someone else. How did that feel, especially when you had to deliver the news to dear old mom? What about when you missed the cut for a university program that, as she likes to remind you, your brother got into with no problem, or the time you were passed over for a promotion and had to sit through an agonizing family dinner where your sibling was lauded for his accomplishments?

  Chances are, this wounded past doesn’t match your own. But if it did, at what point would resentment set in over your mother’s love being withdrawn each time you failed to meet her unrealistic expectations? How long until you stopped talking about your goals or—even worse—refused to try at all because you believed you would only fail?

  Unfortunately, life is painful, and not all the lessons we learn are positive ones. As with you and me, the characters in our stories have suffered emotional trauma that cannot easily be dispelled or forgotten. We call this type of trauma an emotional wound: a negative experience (or set of experiences) that causes pain on a deep psychological level. It is a lasting hurt that often involves someone close: a family member, lover, mentor, friend, or other trusted individual. Wounds may be tied to a specific event, arise upon learning a difficult truth about the world, or result from a physical limitation, condition, or challenge.

  Whatever form they take, most wounding experiences happen unexpectedly, meaning, characters have little or no time to raise their emotional defenses. The resulting pain is brutal and immediate, and the fallout of this trauma has lasting repercussions that will change the character in significant (often negative) ways. As with us, characters experience many different painful events over a lifetime, including ones in their formative years. These wounds are not only the most difficult to move past, they often create a domino effect for other hurts that follow.

  Now, you might ask why we should care about what happens to our characters before page one. After all, isn’t it what they do during the story that matters? Yes, and no. People are products of their pasts, and if we want our characters to come across as authentic and believable to readers, we need to understand their backstories too. How a character was raised, the people in her life, and the events and world conditions she was exposed to months or years ago will have direct bearing on her behavior and motives within the story. Backstory wounds are especially powerful and can alter who our characters are, what they believe, and what they fear most. Understanding the pain they’ve experienced is necessary to creating fully formed and compelling characters.

  When we think of emotional trauma, we often imagine it as a specific moment that forever alters the character’s reality, but wounds can present in a variety of ways. It’s true that one may develop from a single traumatic event, such as witnessing a murder, getting caught in an avalanche, or experiencing the death of one’s child. But it can also come about from repeated episodes of trauma, like a series of humiliations at the hand of a workplace bully or a string of toxic relationships. Wounds may also result from a detrimental ongoing situation, such as living in poverty, childhood neglect caused by addicted parents, or growing up in a violent cult.

  However they form, these moments leave a mark, albeit a psychological one, just as a physical injury does. Wounds damage our characters’ self-worth, change how they view the world, cause trust issues, and dictate how they will interact with other people. All of this can make it harder for them to achieve certain goals, which is why we should dig deep into their backstories and unearth the traumas they may have been exposed to. This is especially important because within each individual wound there is a darkness that has the power to not only lock the character’s mind in the past so he can’t move forward but also embed an untruth that will sabotage his happiness and leave him feeling deeply unfulfilled.

  THE WOUND’S DARK PASSENGER: THE LIE

  Emotional trauma is terrible to experience, but in a cruel twist of fate, the trauma itself is not always the worst part . . . it’s what hides within a wound: the lie (also known as a false belief or misbelief). The lie is a conclusion reached through flawed logic. Caught in a vulnerable state, the character tries to understand or rationalize his painful experience, only to falsely conclude that fault somehow lies within.

  It might sound melodramatic, but this situation is not unique to fiction; it is a familiar reflection of how people process painful events in real life. Think about it—when something bad happens, something we don’t understand, it’s human nature for us to try to make sense of it. In doing so, we often turn our questions inward: Why didn’t I see this coming? Why didn’t I act sooner? Or perhaps in the case of disillusionment: Why did the system (or government, society, God, etc.) fail me? This usually leads to a form of self-blame or the belief that had we been more worthy, chosen differently, trusted someone else, paid more attention, or better safeguarded ourselves, a different outcome would have resulted.

  Because the lie is tied to disempowering beliefs (that the character is unworthy, incompetent, naïve, defective, or lacks value), a path of destruction is left in its wake. The lie affects his level of self-worth and how he views both the world and himself. It causes him to hold back, making it difficult for him to love fully, trust deeply, or live life without reservation.

  Imagine a character (let’s call him Paul) who discovers five years into his marriage that his wife is gay. They have a home, debt, kids—the whole matrimonial package. Perhaps she sits Paul down to reveal her secret after finally coming to terms with it herself. Or maybe he discovers that she’s been exploring her sexual identity with someone else. Either way, it’s a devastating blow when he realizes that the person he married is not who he believed her to be, and it throws Paul’s road map for the future into chaos.

  In the immediate aftermath, Paul will feel betrayed, hurt, and angry. But as the shock settles, he will also look back and search his memory for signs that he missed, details that slipped past him that would have prevented this painful rejection: If I’d been more observant at the start of our relationship, I would have saved myself this heartache. But no, I was too stupid to see it.

  Once Paul starts down this track of self-blame, his doubts and insecurities will flare, feeding the fire: If I’d been a better partner, a better lover, this probably wouldn’t have happened. She would have been happy. Then our life would be all we imagined and hoped for when we each said “I do.”

  Thanks to our objective viewpoints, you and I recognize that Paul could not have stopped this devastating situation from coming to pass. But all he sees are his shortcomings: the warning signs he missed, things he didn’t do right, his failures as a husband. In his mind, he starts to believe that this was partly his doing. Internalizing the wound then leads to a false conclusion that an inner deficiency must be to blame, making Paul question his own worth: There’s something wrong with me. I’m not good enough to build a life with.

  And then the lie emerges: Defective people just aren’t marriage material.

  Once a lie forms, it’s like a fungus releasing toxic spores. This false belief seeds itself deep into the character, damaging his self-esteem, sabotaging his confidence, and creating the fear that if he tries to get into a relationship again, he won’t measure up, and sooner or later, his partner will leave.

  While most lies center on a perceived personal failing due to self-doubt or guilt, not all of them do. In cases where a wound isn’t as deeply internalized, the person may become disillusioned in another way. Using Paul’s situation as an example, he might apply his pain to the world at large by adopting a jaded outlook on life: Everyone lies. No on
e is who they claim to be. Or even: Love doesn’t last. Sooner or later, people always find an excuse to leave.

  This type of lie becomes a critical judgment about how the world works, because, in the eyes of the character, it’s true: Paul’s wife wasn’t who she said she was. She did lie, and she did leave. His conclusions may be skewed, but these “facts” will cause Paul to hold back, limiting how deeply he connects with other people. His fear of abandonment and rejection will grow rather than diminish, since—thanks to the negative lessons his wounding experience taught him—he’ll always be expecting the other shoe to drop.

  Born of insecurity and fear, the lie is a destructive force, and until it can be reversed, it will continue to hamper happiness, fulfillment, and inner growth. Within the character arc, this lie will often clash with a protagonist’s efforts to achieve his goal because deep down he may feel unworthy of it and the happiness it will bring. Only when he is able to shatter this false belief will he truly feel that he deserves the prize he seeks.

  FEAR THAT GOES BONE DEEP

  Some writers argue that a truly fearless character shouldn’t be held back by emotional wounds. If so, this deviates from real-world experiences, because the unfortunate reality is that no one is immune to the pain of psychological trauma. What holds true for people should extend to characters as well, meaning, no matter how strong or brave a protagonist might be, wounds are the great equalizer. It might take losing a loved one to a random act of violence, becoming disfigured, or just failing to do the right thing when it really matters; in the end, the debilitating pain of a wound will awaken a fear unlike anything the character has encountered. This fear is so strong that it burrows into the character’s mind with a single purpose: do whatever it takes to ensure the painful emotional experience never happens again.

  None of us are strangers to fear. Whether it’s rational or not, we feel the niggling pressure of it in our everyday lives. If I walk down that alley, will I be mugged? If I let the kids play in the backyard alone, will they be safe? Fear is part of our survival instinct, alerting us to possible danger.

  The fear surrounding an emotional wound is a different creature, though. Rather than dissipate when the crisis has passed, it endures and grows, feeding on insecurity and self-doubt.

  Because characters are rendered utterly vulnerable when emotional trauma strikes, they become convinced that they are doomed to reexperience the agony caused by these negative emotions if they do not protect themselves. Nothing motivates quite like the psychological fear of emotional pain, and the certainty that this prophecy will come to pass becomes all-consuming. As with a colonel clearing his desk to roll out a map before battle, whatever mattered to the character before no longer does, or the importance of it lessens in the face of this new threat. Prevention becomes the prime directive.

  One of the most significant (and damaging) results of this type of fear taking the driver’s seat is the construction of emotional shielding, which the character erects as a barrier between him and the people or situations that could lead to more hurt. Hollywood story expert Michael Hauge calls this shielding “emotional armor” that the character dons to keep further painful experiences at bay.

  What makes this shielding so damaging is that it consists of character flaws, self-limiting attitudes, skewed beliefs, and dysfunctional behaviors—all of which the character eagerly adopts to block anyone who might wish to hurt him. It also helps him avoid the negative emotions that were present during his wounding experience.

  Fear is all about avoidance, and that’s why a character’s emotional shielding locks into place. Understanding the exact fears associated with a wound will help you see all the ways your character dodges uncomfortable situations and problems. A fear of intimacy might turn your character into a self-made outcast because this allows him to maintain distanced relationships or bypass them altogether. Or it might send him on a dark pursuit of power and control, creating a hardened and ruthless persona that will keep others at arm’s length.

  However, as in real life, using avoidance to solve problems will result in blowback. To the character, this shielding seems like a protective layer, but in reality it encases him in his fear. Always kept close and never forgotten, a spotlight stays trained on what he’s afraid of, and it becomes a constant sore spot, a reminder of what will happen if he drops his guard or lets people get too close. Not only that, the flaws and negative attitudes he adopts to keep people at a safe distance are the very ones that hold him back time and again in life. Because the wound is never allowed to heal, fear of what could happen again steers the character’s actions and choices each moment.

  Being motivated by fear rather than the desire for fulfillment leads to all sorts of fallout for the character—from relationship problems, to his deeper needs being neglected, to a gnawing dissatisfaction that life is not all he hoped for and dreamed of.

  WOUND FALLOUT: HOW PAINFUL EVENTS RESHAPE CHARACTERS

  Because life is a painful teacher, a character will enter the story wearing some form of emotional armor. These flaws, biases, and bad habits are very often the result of the profound difficult moments he has experienced; as authors, it’s important for us to explore those. We should especially have a clear picture of the unresolved trauma the protagonist needs to face and move past, such as Paul’s own wounding event.

  Wounds and the lies tied to them can influence the core aspects of a character, which in turn will dictate how he’ll behave in your story, so let’s take a closer look at the changes these negative experiences can produce.

  How They View Themselves

  Because the lie within a wound is the great saboteur of self-worth, it becomes the noxious root of your character’s thoughts, actions, and decisions. If a self-taught musician believes she is stupid and lacks true talent, she will fear ridicule and avoid situations that might showcase her skills. This could cause her to miss out on an opportunity to follow her passion. She may also allow others to tell her what she’s good at and should do because she has no faith in herself.

  The lie a character believes is critical to her arc because it dictates what she must learn in order to achieve a balanced, healthy view of herself and the world. When a character changes how she views herself, she gains new insight. This not only encourages self-growth but can also underscore the theme of your story.

  Personality Shifts

  All people have a personality blueprint: traits, beliefs, values, and other qualities that make them unique and interesting. This blueprint becomes the bedrock of who they are, setting them apart from everyone else. But when emotional trauma enters the picture, the psychological side of a person engages to figure out what caused the hurt. As mentioned earlier, if fear is in charge, a hypercritical lens will focus on whatever might have led to this moment of exposure and vulnerability so emotional shielding can be slapped into place. One of the first things on its hit list is personality.

  In light of a wounding event, certain positive attributes may be labeled as weaknesses, such as being too friendly, too kind, or too trusting. When emotional shielding goes up, these traits are replaced by others (flaws) that will do a better job of keeping people and the pain they can cause at a distance.

  For example, a character who fell victim to fraud may discard her helpful, friendly ways and instead embrace mistrust, miserliness, and apathy so she doesn’t get suckered again. Ironically, these negative traits become a blind spot because she doesn’t view them as flaws at all. Instead, she rationalizes that they are strengths, keeping her alert to scams and scammers alike. It is only when these flaws start to mess up her life later on that she begins to see their true nature.

  It’s important to note that not all personality changes resulting from a wound will be negative. Lessons are learned during any good or bad experience, and they can lead to the character also embracing helpful traits. Perhaps this character used to jump into situations recklessly, going with her intuition rather than thinking things through. As a result
of being the victim of fraud, now she’s more cautious and takes time to investigate before making decisions, especially financial ones.

  Positive attributes also form when the character is coping with the wound in a healthy way, so if you want to incorporate them, pay attention to where you are in the story. For instance, when your character is in a dysfunctional state due to the trauma, her flawed behaviors should come to the forefront. But if she’s starting to move past the wound through change and growth, the emergence of these positive attributes can be a strong signal to readers that her mind-set is shifting and she’s on the path to recovery.

  What They View as Important

  When a character experiences a trauma, she refocuses. Things that used to matter may lose significance because of the character’s defensive state; she assesses possible vulnerabilities and gives up goals that could lead to further hurt (which creates unmet needs, discussed in a later section). She also may cling to certain people or activities because she is terrified of losing them.

  Imagine a character who is investing all her time and money into getting her dream of a pottery business off the ground. Then, her eldest son is killed in a fall on a hiking trip, and everything changes. In her grief, she feels responsible for not having been there to protect him, and the terror that this could happen to her surviving daughter pushes her to sell her business and return to her previous career in accounting. This job is stable and allows her to be home more to keep tabs on her child, but it’s soul-crushing work, providing no joy or satisfaction. She sacrifices her own happiness to ensure she is always there to keep her daughter safe.