What Trauma Teaches Us to Become

On fawning, fear, and the nervous systems that shape our creative lives

When I sat down with Ruth Clare for Amra’s Armchair Anecdotes, I knew the conversation would go deep. Ruth’s work has never skimmed the surface. Her award-winning memoir Enemy confronts domestic violence, intergenerational trauma, and the legacy of the Vietnam War without flinching. She writes from the intersection of lived experience and research, blending neuroscience, embodiment, and storytelling in a way that makes people feel both seen and unsettled.

What I didn’t expect was how clearly our conversation would articulate something many of us live with but struggle to name: the way trauma doesn’t just shape what we remember—it shapes who we become.

Becoming High-Functioning as a Survival Skill

Ruth began by tracing her early identity back to achievement. Science, she explained, wasn’t a calling so much as a shield. Excelling academically offered protection against being underestimated. It was proof. It was armour.

Later, acting served a similar function. On the surface, it looked like creativity. Underneath, it was adaptation.

“I realised I was acting most of the time in my life,” she said. “I was a chameleon.”

What Ruth described is something trauma researchers now recognise as the fawn response—a survival strategy alongside fight, flight, and freeze. Fawning develops when the greatest threat comes from those meant to protect you. The body learns that safety lies in appeasing others, anticipating moods, and erasing one’s own needs.

Children who grow up in violent or unpredictable homes often become exquisitely attuned to others. They can read micro-shifts in tone, posture, energy. But that attunement comes at a cost: disconnection from the self.

“You become very good at knowing what other people need from you,” Ruth said, “and very bad at knowing what you need.”

This isn’t personality. It’s conditioning.

Children as the Invisible Victims of Violence

Enemy was born from absence. Ruth didn’t set out to write a memoir; she set out to write the book she couldn’t find.

Most narratives about domestic violence centre the adult relationship. Children appear as collateral damage. Ruth’s experience was different. In her family, the children were the primary recipients of violence. The abuse was constant. The fear relentless.

This distinction matters, because childhood trauma doesn’t simply fade. Longitudinal studies show that experiencing four or more adverse childhood events can reduce life expectancy by up to twenty years. The body carries what the child could not escape.

Ruth was also interested in something largely ignored: what it means to grow up as the child of a soldier. While there is extensive research on the descendants of genocide survivors, far less attention has been paid to the children of war perpetrators—or conscripted soldiers trained for violence and returned to civilian life without de-escalation.

Recent research shows that rates of domestic violence in transitioning veteran families can reach as high as 45%. Yet this remains politically inconvenient. Acknowledging it complicates recruitment narratives. It raises uncomfortable questions about responsibility.

“We’re not just sending people to war,” Ruth said. “We’re sending them back into families.”

Trauma Lives in the Body, Not Just the Story

As our conversation moved from memoir into Ruth’s later work—Beyond Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn and Turn Fear into Courage—the focus shifted from narrative to physiology.

Trauma, Ruth explained, is not primarily a memory problem. It’s a nervous system problem.

When the body is exposed to prolonged threat, it learns vigilance. Energy is spent scanning, predicting, bracing. Over time, this becomes the default state. Even in moments of safety, the body remains on alert.

We call this anxiety. Or insomnia. Or stress.

But the body doesn’t distinguish between past danger and imagined futures. Rumination feeds the same physiological response as real threat. The nervous system responds accordingly.

This is why trauma cannot be healed through insight alone. You cannot think your way out of a body that has learned to survive by staying activated.

What makes nervous system work radical is its simplicity. Regulation begins not in analysis, but in sensation: breath, posture, grounding, presence.

“Not everyone can afford therapy,” Ruth said. “Everyone can afford to breathe.”

Motherhood and the Return of the Body

For both of us, motherhood reopened old terrain.

Ruth described the moment she realised how close unprocessed trauma can bring a person to repeating harm. When her toddler went through a hitting phase, her body flooded with adrenaline and cortisol. Despite years of therapy, she felt herself approaching a threshold she never wanted to cross.

That fear became fuel—not for shame, but for urgency. The question shifted from why does this happen? to what support do people need before they lose control?

For me, motherhood triggered the return of PTSD through postnatal depression and insomnia. Trauma doesn’t announce itself. It resurfaces through the body, through flashbacks, through relentless vigilance. Only later does meaning catch up.

This is why stories matter. Recognition shortens the path. Reading another person’s truth can unlock understanding that years of isolation could not.

Fear as Fuel, Not Failure

One of the most resonant ideas from Turn Fear into Courage is Ruth’s reframing of fear itself.

Fear, she argues, is not an enemy. It is energy—meant to mobilise action. The problem arises when fear is held, not released. When potential energy never becomes movement.

For writers and artists, fear often masquerades as perfectionism, avoidance, endless revision, or silence. We wait for confidence before acting, not realising confidence is a by-product of action.

The body learns through evidence, not reassurance.

Small actions matter because they teach the nervous system safety: I moved. I survived.

Fear does not disappear. But it loosens its grip.

Writing, Emotion, and the Myth of “Triggering”

Inevitably, we talked about trigger warnings—an issue that sits uncomfortably between care and avoidance.

Ruth made a distinction that feels crucial: feeling emotion is not the same as being traumatically triggered.

True triggers are involuntary, often sensory, and disorienting. They hijack the nervous system. Discomfort, grief, tears—these are not pathology. They are human responses.

Recent research shows that trigger warnings do not reduce distress; they increase anticipatory anxiety. What began as protection has, in many cases, become the medicalisation of emotion.

For those of us who write from trauma, this creates tension. We are asked to soften truths so others do not feel discomfort—often by people who have not lived these experiences themselves.

As Ruth put it bluntly: if you don’t want to read the book, close it. The choice already exists.

Stories do not harm by being told. Silence does.

From Traditional Publishing to Creative Autonomy

Ruth’s experience with traditional publishing echoed what many authors quietly admit: a system heavy on mystique, light on transparency.

Attention is abundant before the contract. Afterward, clarity disappears. Expectations are unspoken. Marketing is opaque. Creative control—especially over covers and positioning—is limited.

When books fail to meet inflated projections, authors are left carrying the shame of a system they were never taught to navigate.

Self-publishing, Ruth acknowledged, comes with its own challenges: learning systems, managing details, funding production. But it also offers something rare—agency.

Let readers decide. Let writers back the work they believe in.

The only non-negotiable, she stressed, is craft. Autonomy does not excuse carelessness. Editing matters. Learning matters. The work still matters.

The Work That Remains

What stayed with me after the interview wasn’t just Ruth’s knowledge, but her insistence on collective responsibility. Trauma is not an individual failure. It is shaped by families, institutions, governments, wars.

Veterans deserve support. So do their families. Children deserve recognition as primary victims of violence, not footnotes. Mental health care should not be a privilege. Emotional literacy should not be radical.

And for those of us who write from these places, the task is both simple and impossible: to tell the truth without abandoning ourselves in the process.

Fear will come. Discomfort will come. So will resistance.

But sometimes fear is not a warning sign.

Sometimes it is proof that you are finally moving.

Listen to the full episode