The Difference Between Sharing From a Scar and an Open Wound

When to Share Your Trauma Story: Scar, Not Wound

I ask most of my podcast guests the same early question: what is the earliest memory that still shapes who you are? Efia Leatham does not hesitate. She goes straight to a staircase, socks on hardwood, seven years old, already narrating out loud that she is going to entertain the world. It sounds like a sweet memory, right up until she adds, almost in the same breath, that real trauma sits underneath it too, the kind nobody around her ever notices.

That is the sentence I keep coming back to since we recorded the episode. Not the trauma itself; she does not go into detail, and I am not going to speculate on her behalf, but the fact that it hides so well for so long that even the people closest to her miss it completely.

When “That’s Just How I Am” Is Actually a Wound Talking

A lot of what gets filed under personality is actually a trauma response wearing a costume. I say this to clients constantly. The overexplainer. The person who apologizes before anyone has accused them of anything. These are not quirks. They are old survival strategies still running the program long after the original threat is gone.

Efia and I land on the same idea from two different directions in our conversation. She talks about watching people get defensive the moment someone gently names a pattern in them, and I talk about the same thing from my side of the coaching table. Awareness asks for accountability, and accountability is uncomfortable, so most people would rather keep calling it personality than examine where it actually comes from.

 

The Wisdom That Sounds Harsh Until You Know the Whole Story

The part of our conversation that stays with me most involves Efia’s daughter, who died sixteen days after she was born in 1995. Efia remembers her grandmother’s words as cold at the time: “I don’t know what you’re crying about. That’s not your child. God loves her more than you could ever love her.”

Understanding the rest of the story takes years. Her grandmother had buried a son who died at twelve or thirteen, and had grown up alongside a twin sister who never made it past birth. The hard words were not dismissal so much as the only language her grandmother had for a grief she had never been allowed to name out loud, handed sideways to a granddaughter instead of spoken to herself.

I think about this every time someone tells me a piece of advice landed wrong. Sometimes it genuinely is bad advice. Sometimes it is real wisdom, delivered by someone who never had the chance to properly grieve their own version of it.

 

Sharing From a Scar, Not From an Open Wound

Efia and I share the same perspective in how we operate. She talks about sharing from her scars rather than her open wounds, and the difference is not subtle once you see it. A scar means the healing has actually happened. You can look directly at what occurred, tell the story with some steadiness, and hand someone else something useful. An open wound is still bleeding, and when you try to teach from that place, the pain tends to transfer onto the very person you meant to help.

A scar means the healing has actually happened. An open wound is still bleeding.

You do not need to wait until an experience stops meaning anything to you before you are allowed to talk about it. Just be honest with yourself about which stage you are actually in, rather than performing healing you have not done yet because an audience is watching or a deadline is coming.

 

Even the Healer Needs Someone to Call

Here is the part of the conversation I did not expect. Efia, a minister, coach, and author who spends her working life helping other people get unstuck, admits she has been quietly self-sabotaging and cannot fully name why. She says people assume that because of who she is, she should already know how to handle it herself, that a coach should not need coaching and a minister should just pray harder.

I push back on that in real time, because I believe the opposite. Every good coach has a coach. Every therapist has a therapist. Knowing the material does not make you exempt from needing another person to hold up a mirror you cannot hold up for yourself. Expertise is not immunity.

Knowing the material does not make you exempt from needing another person to hold up a mirror you cannot hold up for yourself.

 

What This Actually Looks Like on an Ordinary Week

If you take one thing from this conversation, let it be permission to separate the work you are doing on yourself from the work you are ready to teach. You do not owe anyone a polished lesson while you are still in the middle of the mess. Pull back from social media if that is what capacity requires. Say the true, unfinished thing to one trusted person instead of a polished version to everyone else.

And when someone offers you advice that lands wrong, get curious before you get defensive. Ask what grief or loss might be sitting underneath it, the way Efia’s grandmother carried decades of hers into one hard sentence. You might still disagree with the advice. You will probably understand it differently.

Ask what grief or loss might be sitting underneath it.

Efia’s story is also a reminder that the body keeps track of everything the mouth refuses to say, long after the mind decides to move on.

If this conversation resonated, listen to the full episode #258 with Efia Leatham on the H.E.A.L. Her podcast, or subscribe to the newsletter for more reflections like this one.