Trauma Responses That Look Like Personality Traits Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned to call our survival patterns our personality. We say things like, “I’m just a people pleaser,” or “I’m just really independent,” or “I just hate conflict,” or “I’m bad at expressing myself,” as if those things showed up one day because we were born that way. And maybe some of it is temperament. Maybe some of it is wiring. Maybe some of it really is part of who we are. But sometimes, what we call...