The Role of Humility in Healing Childhood Trauma
- Ewan Nicholson
- Mar 1
- 4 min read
Today, I want to explore the role of humility in healing childhood trauma and why it’s surprisingly helpful, important, and a virtue worth developing and nurturing in this process.
Humility is a complicated word. We often carry very fixed ideas about what it means. On social media you’ll see things like a cocky YouTuber getting humbled by an MMA fighter. Humility gets framed as arrogance being crushed. Someone gets put back in their place.
There’s also the link between humility and humiliation. If you’ve experienced a lot of shame or humiliation, the idea of being humble can feel tied to that pain. It can feel like bowing down, being small, being diminished.
But that’s not the humility I’m talking about.
I want to reframe it. Not as meekness. Not as being knocked down because you were arrogant. But as a willingness to step into a space where you genuinely come to grips with the fact that you don’t know all the things you think you know.
In the context of childhood trauma, that often means questioning very fixed and rigid beliefs about who you are.
I’m anxious.
I’m broken.
I can’t change.
It’s hopeless.
These beliefs aren’t arrogant, but they are rigid. They feel definitive. It’s as if we have the receipts. We have the evidence from our life to prove that we’re incapable of change, that we can’t get rid of the anxiety, that this is just how we are.
Humility, in this context, is not about superiority or pride. It’s almost the flipped version. We’ve decided in a very definitive way that this is the truth about us. I am this way. I am incapable of change.
Humility steps in and says, maybe I don’t know.
It questions. It opens space. It creates a kind of spacious awareness that perhaps we don’t actually know the full picture.
And it’s not about flipping the story into something positive. It’s not moving from I’m broken to I’m amazing. Or from I’m a loser to I’m a winner.
It’s moving into the space of I don’t know.
These fixed ideas that I’ve held tightly for years, maybe there’s room to question them. Maybe there’s room to inquire about what’s really going on.
What is actually happening inside me right now?
How am I really feeling?
What’s truly going on, without jumping to a predetermined conclusion?
Because many of us, myself included, come to strong conclusions in our healing journey. I’m this way because of that. I can’t change because I’m lazy or selfish or there’s something wrong with me. If I could just fix that one thing, then my life would change.
And we can spend decades going around in that same circle.
Humility says, maybe there’s something I’m missing.
Maybe there’s something about how I understand myself that I’m not seeing.
And again, it doesn’t rush to another positive conclusion. It simply opens the door. It accepts that there may be ignorance, illusion, or something unseen. It bows slightly before that possibility.
There can be fear in that openness. We like solidity. We like saying, I know this. I know that. It gives us identity. It gives us a reference point.
When we move into not knowing, it can feel disorienting. Where’s the anchor? Where’s the ground?
So yes, it can feel uncomfortable. But we’re gently leaning into it. Softening into a space where it’s okay not to know.
There’s a well-known Christian mystical text from the Middle Ages called The Cloud of Unknowing. It suggests that in order to know God, we must enter into unknowing. Beneath that, it also speaks of a cloud of forgetting.
My interpretation, when I bring that into healing childhood trauma rather than theology, is this: the cloud of forgetting means setting aside our preconceived ideas about what we think is true. Then we step into the cloud of unknowing and say, I don’t know.
And we trust that from that openness, understanding and insight can arise. Not from a fixed set of conclusions, but from spaciousness.
This can be liberating. Many of the rigid ideas we hold about ourselves are negative and limiting. They make us feel stuck. They feel like foregone conclusions.
We often develop very fixed strategies to deal with them too. This is my anxiety. This is what I do with it. This is the formula.
Humility invites us to relax that. To begin again. To look with fresh eyes.
Maybe I don’t know.
Let’s see what arises from that.
If you can feel into that space, even a little, it might help reopen parts of your healing journey that feel stuck.
It’s just something to sit with. Something to consider.
About Me
I’m Ewan Nicholson, a Brisbane-based trauma-informed therapist specialising in childhood trauma, attachment wounds, addiction recovery, and patterns like anxiety, shame, and people-pleasing.
My work is grounded in somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, Gestalt-informed practice, and inner child work. I support adults in Brisbane and online across Australia who want deeper, embodied change, not just insight.
If you’re looking for a Brisbane therapist specialising in childhood trauma and somatic therapy, I offer a free 30-minute consultation to see if we’re a good fit.
Safety starts with trust. Hope grows with time.
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