Trauma born gifts - Hypervigilance
Back in middle school, my school used to conduct ‘memory’ competitions. Teachers would line up ~50 items in a row. The kids would walk by each item within a fixed time, walk back to our desks and write down the names of those items in a row. I would almost always win these competitions, getting more than 45 names correctly.
Now that I am on a journey of healing my trauma, this memory has been popping up every time I hear the word hypervigilance (in addition to other memories). I decided to sit with it, to understand it more.
Most children walk past those 50 items with casual attention. I almost certainly walked past them with a nervous system that had been trained to encode environment rapidly and completely. Not as a skill I developed — as a survival adaptation that was already running. What looked like talent from the outside felt like pressure from the inside. I cannot recall a single moment of calm during those competitions. There was no joy in the winning, not really — only relief, and the quiet, nameless anxiety of not wanting to fall short. I did not have language for any of this at the time. I did not learn to recognize what anxiety felt like in my own body until I began therapy, years into adulthood. Before that, the pressure simply felt like me.
For children growing up in environments where safety was unpredictable, this scanning becomes the baseline. Hypervigilant children don't just notice things. They catalog them. Exits, objects, moods, micro-expressions, the way a room is arranged differently than yesterday. This happens automatically, below conscious intention, because the body learned early that missing a detail could mean missing a threat. Paying close attention was necessary for survival.
In that memory competition, the same mechanism that I developed to keep myself safe — scan everything, retain everything — gave me a measurable advantage in a completely neutral context. My classmates were using ordinary attention (I assume). I were using a threat-detection system. This is also highlighted in how I operate in an airport, I have noticed that I am extremely competent in finding the gates, figuring out the layouts, continuously on edge and being ‘safe’ from missing a flight.
When the Gift Has a Shadow
There is a framework in psychology called Post-Traumatic Growth, developed by researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, which describes the genuine positive change that can emerge through the process of surviving and integrating trauma. It is careful to note that this does not mean trauma is beneficial — only that human beings are capable of developing real strengths in the aftermath of real hardship. Those strengths are not in spite of what happened. They grew from it.
I think about this often when I consider the ways my hypervigilance has shaped me. The perceptiveness that lets me read a room, attune to the people in it, notice what is unspoken — these are not separate from my history. They are the other face of the same adaptation. The nervous system that encoded fifty objects on a table is the same one that makes me, in certain moments, an extraordinarily present and attuned person.
But it is worth being honest about what that costs. Hypervigilance is metabolically and emotionally expensive. The body in a constant state of scanning is a body under continuous low-grade stress. The strengths are real. So is the exhaustion underneath them.
Many gifts that emerge from hypervigilant childhoods are like this — real, genuine, often remarkable capacities that are also evidence of what the body had to do to survive. My perceptiveness, my ability to read rooms and people, my attunement — these aren't separate from my trauma history. They grew from it.
That doesn't make them less mine. But it does mean they carry a cost that my classmates didn't pay.
What Naming Makes Possible
I am not writing this as someone who has moved beyond hypervigilance. I am writing this as someone who has begun to recognise it — in old memories, in present-day patterns, in the body's insistence on staying alert even in safe rooms.
That recognition does not undo the adaptation. But it changes the relationship to it. The child who walked past those fifty objects was not broken or unusually gifted. She was doing exactly what her nervous system had learned to do: pay attention to everything, because everything might matter.
Understanding that is not the same as healing. But I have found, on this journey, that it is always where healing begins.
If you are curious to learn more about the research behind hypervigilance and Post-Traumatic Growth, the following are worth exploring:
American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5-TR — the clinical definition of hypervigilance within PTSD/CPTSD
Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory. Journal of Traumatic Stress — the foundational framework for Post-Traumatic Growth
"Growth After Trauma" — American Psychological Association, Monitor on Psychology, November 2016 (accessible overview of PTG research)
CUNY Academic Works — Neural Hypervigilance in Trauma-Exposed Women (dissertation, neurobiological research on amygdala function and hypervigilance)