Peace with your own inabilities, which I wrote about last time, requires looking at yourself honestly. But there is a form of honesty that can transform, without you noticing, into something far more complicated: the story you build around your wounds. And precisely this story, once solidified, can become one of the most subtle and most persistent obstacles to your evolution and to your relationships.
Not because the wounds are not real. They are. But there is an important difference between being wounded and identifying with the wound.
How do we end up constructing our identity around past wounds? The process is almost inevitable and has its own logic.
When we experience something painful, especially in childhood or in early relationships, the brain seeks to make sense of the experience. Sense helps survival. If I understand why it happened, I can prevent it next time. And so we construct narratives: I was abandoned because I was not good enough, I was hurt because I trusted, I do not deserve unconditional love because it was never offered to me.
These narratives once protected us. They organised a chaotic and painful experience into a structure that could be understood. The problem is that the structure remained, even when the context that produced it disappeared long ago.
How do you recognise that you have identified with your wound? A few signs.
The wound is the first explanation you give for your current behaviours. I do this because I grew up without love. I am this way because I was betrayed. I react as I do because I experienced trauma X. These explanations may be partially true, but when they become automatic and all-encompassing, they no longer explain. They justify and block.
Another sign is that you feel uncomfortable when someone sees you beyond the wound. When someone shows you that you are more than what you lived through, that you have strengths you do not recognise, that your story does not completely define you, something in you resists. The wound has become an identity and identities do not want to be questioned.
A third sign is that relationships constantly confirm the story. If you believe people will abandon you, you will read abandonment in gestures that have nothing to do with it. If you believe you are not good enough, you will interpret every neutral reaction as a criticism. The narrative about the wound functions as a filter and produces exactly what it anticipates.
Why is it so difficult to relinquish identification with the wound? Because the wound offers something valuable: a coherent explanation, a stable identity, sometimes sympathy and validation from others, and an excuse for what does not work. It is easier to say I am this way because of the past than to acknowledge that you have choices in the present that you are not making.
I am not saying the past does not matter. It matters enormously. But there is a difference between understanding how the past formed you and using it as a reason not to evolve.
What does it mean to free yourself from identification with the wound? It does not mean denying that the wound exists or that it mattered. It means seeing it as something that happened to you, not as something you are. Including it in your story without letting it be the final and definitive chapter.
It means becoming curious about who you are beyond the wound. What values do you have that do not come from pain? What strengths do you have that did not form in reaction to something? Who are you when you do not define yourself through what you have suffered?
In relationships, this liberation produces concrete changes. You no longer project onto your current partner the experiences with partners from the past. You no longer interpret every conflict or distance through the filter of early abandonment or rejection. You no longer need the other to repair what others broke, because you no longer carry the wound as an unpaid debt.
And in intimate life, liberation from the wound's identity produces a freedom to be present that those living in the story cannot access. You are not in a relationship with your past. You are with the real person in front of you.
What is the wound from your past around which you have built part of your identity? And if you allowed it to be simply something that happened, not something you are, how would the story you tell about yourself look different?
