Emotional Wound Thesaurus: Making a Very Public Mistake

When you’re writing a character, it’s important to know why she is the way she is. Knowing her backstory is important to achieving this end, and one of the most impactful pieces of a character’s backstory is her emotional wound. This negative experience from the past is so intense that a character will go to great lengths to avoid experiencing that kind of pain and negative emotion again. As a result, certain behaviors, beliefs, and character traits will emerge.

Characters, like real people, are unique, and will respond to wounding events differently. The vast array of possible emotional wounds combined with each character’s personality gives you many options in terms of how your character will turn out. With the right amount of exploration, you should be able to come up with a character whose past appropriately affects her present, resulting in a realistic character that will ring true with readers. Understanding what wounds a protagonist bears will also help you plot out her arc, creating a compelling journey of change that will satisfy readers.

NOTE: We realize that sometimes a wound we profile may have personal meaning, stirring up the past for some of our readers. Please know that it is never our intent to create emotional turmoil. We also recognize that an event that is traumatizing for one person may have only a passing impact on someone else. Emotional wounds affect people differently, so we have tried to include many possible outcomes, to give writers many options to choose from. Above all, please know that we desire to treat these wounds and those who have lived through them with the utmost respect. 

We hope the sample list of ideas below will help you see how emotional trauma will influence your character’s behavior and mindset. For the full entry of this and over 100 other emotional wounds, check into our bestselling resource, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression.

Making a Very Public Mistake

Examples: Public mistakes are nothing new and have been happening as long as we all can remember. Luckily, they’re soon forgotten—at least, they used to be. In today’s technologically-advanced world, public mistakes are often recorded for posterity—on YouTube, Facebook, and even on websites set up with the express purpose of never letting anyone forget. This kind of reminder makes it even more difficult to move on after an embarrassing gaffe, such as one of the following:

• Backing a cause or organization that turns out to be fraudulent
• Getting caught having an affair
• Getting caught in a public lie…

Basic Needs Often Compromised By This Wound: love and belonging, esteem and recognition, self-actualization

False Beliefs That May Be Embraced As a Result of This Wound:

• This is all people will ever remember about me.
• No one is ever going to let me forget what I did.
• I can’t be trusted not to screw up…

Positive Attributes That May Result: ambitious, cautious, discreet, humble, merciful, private, proactive, responsible, tolerant 

Negative Traits That May Result: defensive, evasive, inhibited, insecure, irresponsible, perfectionist, pessimistic, rebellious, resentful, self-destructive, timid…

Resulting Fears: 

• Fear of failure
• Fear of speaking/performing in public
• Fear of letting others down…

Possible Habits That May Emerge: 

• Shying away from ambitious or challenging opportunities
• Becoming very private and withdrawn
• Becoming overly cautious or even obsessive-compulsive in an effort to avoid the same kind of mistake (obsessively checking one’s work for errors, over-planning, etc.)
• Doubting one’s abilities
• Not doing anything without a partner; relying too much on others and not enough on oneself…

TIP: If you need help understanding the impact of these factors, please read our introductory post on the Emotional Wound Thesaurus. And for a boatload of practical information on how to incorporate wounds into your story, see our collection of posts on this topic.

For other Descriptive Thesaurus Collections, go here.

Which emotional wounds are haunting your characters?

Emotional wounds are incredibly formative, changing how a character views the world, causing trust issues, damaging their self-worth, dictating how they will interact with other people, and making it harder for them to achieve their goals. As such, understanding your character’s wound is vitally important to your overall story.

To learn more, we recommend The Emotional Wound Thesaurus. This writing guide explores emotional trauma and what it will look like for your character and their journey in the story. It highlights 120+ possible wounding events and helps you brainstorm how each might play out in your story so you can write your character’s behaviors, attitudes, fears, and insecurities with authenticity.

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