Trauma reenactment at the cultural level
For a long time I told myself I stayed in manufacturing because the money was good and because I was good at the work and because I had people depending on me. All of those things were true. None of them were the real reason. The real reason took me years to see clearly, and I could only see it once I had been gone long enough to feel the difference between that environment and the one I have now. The plant was familiar to my nervous system in a way that other environments were not. It matched what my childhood had already trained me for. The constant pressure, the unpredictable demands, the requirement to suppress my own feelings in order to keep functioning, the leadership style that praised the steady ones and punished the ones who showed emotion, all of it was a place I already knew how to live inside. My body recognized that place from the inside, and my body wanted to stay where it was recognized, even when the recognition was costing me my health and my life.
I did not choose manufacturing because I had carefully evaluated the available options and decided that twelve-hour shifts and impossible schedules and zero work-life balance were what I wanted. I chose manufacturing because manufacturing felt like home to my nervous system. The home it felt like was the home I had grown up in, and the home I had grown up in had taught my body what kind of environments to seek out and what kind to avoid. The avoidance was supposed to keep me away from harm. What actually happened, the way it happens for so many of us, is that the familiarity we felt in our bodies overrode the rational assessment of harm. My body did not know that what felt familiar was also what was hurting me. My body only knew that the familiar was safer than the unknown, because the familiar was at least predictable, and the unknown was the territory where anything could happen.
This is something I see almost every day in my therapy office now. A woman leaves an abusive marriage and within a year she is in another one, and she cannot understand why. A man finally walks away from a high-control religious system and joins a high-control political movement that operates on identical principles, and he cannot see the resemblance. A young adult escapes a chaotic family of origin only to end up working for a chaotic boss in a chaotic workplace. A person leaves one addiction and picks up another within weeks. The systems look completely different from the outside. From the inside, the bodies of the people in them are doing the exact same thing they were doing in the original wounding. The shape of the harm has changed. The familiarity of the harm has not.
We do not talk about this honestly in our culture, partly because the framing we have for it is moralistic instead of clinical. We say things like “she has terrible taste in men” or “he never learns” or “they are just attracted to drama” or “some people love being miserable.” That language treats the pattern as a character flaw, something the person should be able to correct by trying harder or having more self-awareness or making better choices. All of those framings are wrong. The pattern they are trying to describe is what happens when a nervous system that was trained in chaos as a child finds chaos in adulthood and reads it as home. The reading is automatic, prerational, somatic. It has almost nothing to do with the person’s intelligence, intentions, or values. It has almost everything to do with what their body learned to recognize before they had any way to consent to the learning.
The reenactment is not random. It follows specific contours. A person whose childhood involved being yelled at by an unpredictable parent will often end up working for unpredictable bosses or partnering with unpredictable spouses. A person whose childhood involved being responsible for emotionally fragile adults will often end up in jobs where their primary task is managing emotionally fragile people. A person whose childhood involved walking on eggshells will often find themselves in adult environments that require constant vigilance and adjustment. The therapists Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt called this pattern, when it shows up in romantic partnership, the Imago. They argued that we unconsciously choose partners who match a composite image of the caregivers from our childhood, not because we want to be hurt again, but because the body is reaching for an opportunity to finally complete what was never completed in the original wounding. I believe the same dynamic operates outside of romance. We choose workplaces, churches, political tribes, friendships, and entire careers based on the same unconscious matching. The match is rarely conscious. The body just notices, somewhere underneath language, that the new environment has the same energetic signature as the original one, and the body moves toward it the way a hand moves toward a familiar tool.
What makes this so painful to recognize is that the reenactment also feels like competence. The skills the person developed to survive their childhood are exactly the skills that make them successful in the reenacted environment. The hypervigilance that kept them safe from a volatile parent makes them excellent at reading the room in a volatile workplace. The emotional suppression that allowed them to coexist with an unpredictable caregiver makes them a model employee in a workplace that punishes emotion. The over-functioning that compensated for a parent’s under-functioning makes them indispensable in any system organized around chronic crisis. They are thriving by the metrics those environments use, and the system rewards them for their wounds, which makes the wounds harder to see.
This is the cultural piece that the typical individual-trauma framework misses. What Hendrix and Hunt described at the level of intimate partnership shows up at the level of institutions and industries as well. The systems themselves are organized around finding and retaining the people whose nervous systems were trained for them. Manufacturing plants need workers who can absorb mistreatment without complaint, so they hire and promote workers who learned to absorb mistreatment in childhood. Certain religious systems need members who will defer to authority without questioning, so they attract and retain members who learned to defer to authority in childhood. Certain political movements need followers who will tolerate inconsistency and broken promises, so they draw in followers who grew up tolerating inconsistency and broken promises from caregivers. Certain industries need employees who will work themselves to exhaustion for praise, so they create career paths that reward exactly that pattern. The systems and the wounded bodies inside them are in a kind of mutual selection. The systems persist because the wounded bodies fit them. The wounded bodies stay because the systems feel like home.
When we ask why certain harmful systems persist across generations, the answer is partly that the systems themselves keep selecting for the kinds of people who will keep them running. The wounded children of the system grow up to staff the system. They cannot easily leave because every system that would feel less harmful would also feel less familiar, and the unfamiliarity itself registers as unsafe. So they stay, and they reproduce the dynamics inside the system, and they raise their own children inside the dynamics, and the next generation of wounded children grows up trained for the same system. The system does not need to consciously perpetuate itself. It only needs to keep producing the kinds of bodies that will keep choosing it.
I am describing my own past here, even when I am also describing the broader pattern. I stayed in manufacturing for twenty-five years not because the work was particularly meaningful to me, but because the environment was familiar in ways my body could not articulate. When I finally left in 2022, what surprised me most was how disoriented I felt without the stress, not the absence of it. My nervous system had been calibrated to a particular kind of constant pressure for so long that the absence of pressure felt wrong. I had to learn, slowly, that the wrongness was the unfamiliarity of an environment that was no longer actively harming me, and the unfamiliarity was its own kind of grief.
The work of recognizing this in yourself is delicate. It cannot be done by accusation, by deciding you are stupid for staying somewhere harmful, by berating yourself for the choices you have made. The recognition has to start from compassion, because the body that made these choices was doing what bodies do. It was looking for what it knew. The work is to notice the pull, name it for what it is, and slowly start practicing a different kind of recognition. Not the recognition of familiar harm, but a recognition of the actual conditions in front of you. Not the recognition of patterns you have known your whole life, but a recognition of what is true right now in this specific environment with these specific people. The new recognition is slow and uncomfortable and rarely produces the same kind of certainty the old recognition provided. It produces something better and more honest, which is contact with reality as it actually is rather than as your nervous system has been trained to expect it to be.
I remember a specific morning, not long after we opened the doors at Illume, when I sat in my office before my first appointment of the day and noticed that I had nothing to brace against. The room was quiet. The schedule was reasonable. There was no manager around the corner about to tell me what was wrong. My body didn’t know what to do with the calm. I felt a small wave of restlessness rise up, the kind of low-level anxiety that used to drive me into action on the plant floor, and I caught myself looking for something to fix. There was nothing to fix. I sat with the restlessness instead. It took years for that restlessness to soften, and even now it returns sometimes, the body reaching for the familiar pressure it was trained to seek. The difference now is that I recognize it when it arrives.
If you are reading this and you suspect that you have been choosing your environments based on familiarity rather than on what is good for you, that curiosity is the beginning of something. The body that has been choosing for you cannot be argued out of its choices. It can only be slowly retrained, through repeated experiences of safety that the body does not yet recognize as safety. Those experiences are available, even if you have not yet learned to recognize them when they appear. The recognition will come. The retraining will take longer than you expect. The day will come when you walk into a room that feels strange and unfamiliar and you will realize with a small shock that what feels strange is actually peace, and that you have been mistaking chaos for home your entire life.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Obedience as a Form of Belonging
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
