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It sounds easy, right? To not care, not give a damn about your past, your hurt, the patterns you picked up for survival?

No one understands trauma, and trust me when I say this: at times, even therapists and people going through trauma or who have managed to find their way out of it also don’t.

The thing about trauma is that it is highly complex, nuanced, and so layered. It impacts every aspect of your being in ways that are incredibly hard to fathom.

Gabor Maté is right that trauma is not what happened to you but what happened inside of you as a result, and those thoughts, feelings, and behaviours can be deeply confusing, exhausting, and painful to bear and also to work upon.

Trauma changes the way your body chemistry works. It shapes your entire nervous system—the way you view yourself, people around you, relationships, work, everything, and at times some patterns can be so deeply embedded in every cell of your being that changing them, navigating them, can be incredibly tough. I know that not only because I’m a therapist but because I’ve also gone through a lot of sh*t. I know what trauma does to you.

If you’re constantly activated, in fight-flight, or immobilised because your system shuts down, it’s not your fault. It’s just how your system learnt to protect itself and get by. And sometimes, it’s even difficult to change that systemic wiring because your system won’t let you, and that can be paralysing.

But then, reclaiming your sense of agency only comes when you start understanding what has shaped you—how and why. How is it playing out now? What triggers you? How does your body react when it is triggered? What stories and memories are activated? And you have to fight for yourself to support yourself through this. You have to start understanding your mind and body’s language and gently communicate with yourself. It’s about first building capacity to connect with yourself, working within your window of tolerance, and then gradually expanding it. It’s learning how to free up the trapped energy and emotions in your body and slowly defining the life you want to create for yourself, which won’t happen in a day. It will take months or even years, and that’s okay. As they say, every drop makes an ocean. Every small step that you take toward yourself counts.

Trauma tells you that your suffering is not valid, that you are the problem, you exist to please others, you are unsafe, alone, abandoned, and your life on its own has no meaning, and none of this is true. Trauma strips you of your agency and makes you live in this false reality where you think that nothing belongs to you, you don’t belong to anyone, and you should just cling to whatever little you’re getting because trauma starves you. It keeps you hungry for safety, security, understanding, love, acceptance, and sometimes just basic humanity. I know it’s harder than hard (if this expression even makes sense). But what I also know is that there is a way out, even if it takes ages. Hope is not dead. It is around the corner and sometimes the corner takes a while to reach.

I also know that while it’s easier said than done, here are 10 things every trauma survivor needs to stop giving a f*ck about for their own well-being, and getting there is the journey. It is healing, and this is how you also heal.

Ten things every trauma survivor needs to stop giving a f*ck about:

1. Other People’s Discomfort with Your Healing:

When you start changing, setting boundaries, or speaking up, it will make others uncomfortable, especially those who benefited from your silence. Their discomfort is not your responsibility and you will have to bear that discomfort to start connecting with yourself.

2. Being “Too Much” or “Too Sensitive”:

Trauma survivors are often shamed for feeling deeply. But your sensitivity is not a flaw; it’s a nervous system that learned to survive. You don’t need to shrink to make others comfortable and you also have to not drown in shame because that’s what shame does. It makes you believe that you are the problem, you are bad, unworthy, and so on. The more you begin to look at your shame as a protective response and not an absolute truth, you will be able to ride it out. When you get to the point of healing the root of it, shame will turn into self-compassion, dignity, healthy self-ownership, courage, and self-trust.

3. Explaining Your Boundaries Again and Again:

“No” is a complete sentence. You don’t owe anyone a trauma history to justify self-respect. This is tough because most trauma suvivors struggle with boundaries immensely. After all, the only way they learnt to survive was by people-pleasing and saying yes to everything. But the key to unlocking your healing is by saying no to things, people, conversations, activities that drain you and start saying yes to things, no matter how small, that let you breathe, relax, and just be.

4. Being Liked by Everyone:

People-pleasing kept you safe once. It doesn’t get to run your life anymore. Not everyone will like the healed version of you, and that’s okay. Besides, healed or not, chasing approval, validation, and acceptance are trauma responses that you need to unlearn. You have to find safety within no matter how hard it feels, how long it takes.

5. Guilt for Choosing Yourself:

Trauma programs you to feel guilty for rest, joy, softness, and saying no. Healing means choosing yourself without apologising for it. It will be deeply triggering and uncomfortable, but like your system got trained into so many survival patterns and then collapsed, this too is a new pattern that you need to learn to stop collapsing.

6. Fixing, Saving, or Carrying Everyone Else:

Survival taught you to over-function. Healing teaches you that every adult is responsible for their own inner work, including you. The hurt and pain may have been caused by someone else or circumstances, but your hurt is for you to tend to and heal. Unfortunately, this is something no one can do for you.

7. Looking “Strong” All the Time:

You don’t need to be resilient 24/7 to be worthy. Some days, surviving quietly is strength enough, and what most trauma survivors understand as strength is actually suppression, holding it all in and never allowing themselves to fall apart. That’s not allowing yourself to be human.

8. The Timeline of Healing:

You are not behind. You are not late. You are not failing. Nervous system healing does not operate on productivity clocks, so stop focusing on what’s happening in others’ lives and direct your energies on what you need.

9. The Lie that You are Broken:

You are not broken. You adapted to an unsafe world in the best way you could. Healing is not about fixing you; it’s about coming back home to who you always were beneath the hurt.

10. Outgrowing people and relationships:

Stop holding on to people and relationships for your dear life because you will outgrow some of them or maybe all of them as you start connecting with yourself more. It may feel lonely for a while, but soon a new equilibrium will set in and you will also find people in your own community, but for that you have to be patient with yourself.

Most importantly, please stop giving f*ck about whatever it not working for you, is breaking you and tearing you apart. Reserve those f*cks for what feels safe, comforting, helps you to regulate, learn, and move forward. Heal, not because you don’t have a way out, but because you want it, deserve it badly, wholeheartedly, with your soul.

Healing will not make you loud overnight. It won’t turn you fearless in a month or free you from every trigger in a year. Healing is quieter than that. Slower. It looks like choosing yourself on days when guilt screams. It looks like feeling what you once numbed. It looks like disappointing people who were comfortable with your suffering. It looks like staying when every survival instinct tells you to run.

And one day—almost without you realizing—you wake up and notice something has shifted. You don’t abandon yourself as quickly. You don’t apologize for existing as much. You don’t tolerate what once felt normal. You begin to feel your strength not as armour, but as steadiness. As choice. As inner safety.

This is what trauma never wanted for you.
It wanted you small, silent, starving for scraps of safety.
But healing rewrites the contract.

You are no longer here to prove your worth through pain.
You are here to live. To feel. To rest. To rise.
To take up space without permission.
To stop surviving and start belonging—to yourself first.

And that is the real rebellion.
Not perfection.
Not fearlessness.
But staying.
Choosing.
Returning—again and again—to who you were always meant to be.

~