Emotional Wounds Thesaurus: Being Held Captive

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. It is not our intent to create emotional turmoil. Please know that we research each wounding topic carefully to treat it 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.

Examples:

• Being kidnapped and held for ransom
• Being kidnapped and held captive for an extended period of time
• Being kidnapped and sold into slavery…

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

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

• I’ll never get away.
• If I had done X (paid more attention, not talked to the person, left work 5 minutes later, etc.), this wouldn’t have happened.
• I’ll never be safe…

Positive Attributes That May Result: alert, cautious, discreet, nurturing, obedient, observant, persistent, private, protective

Negative Traits That May Result: apathetic, childish, cynical, devious, evasive, flaky, forgetful, hostile, humorless, inattentive, indecisive, inhibited, irrational, morbid, needy…

Resulting Fears:

• Fear of never being able to escape
• Fear of not being able to adjust to the real world after escaping
• Fear for the safety of one’s loved ones…

Possible Habits That May Emerge: 

• Becoming extremely subservient; losing one’s will
• Wanting to please one’s captor
• Clinging to one’s captor
• Withdrawing into oneself
• Decreased reactions to stimuli…

TIP: If you need help understanding the impact of these factors, please read our introductory post on the Emotional Wound Thesaurus. For our current list of Emotional Wound Entries, go here. 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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