Who Shawn Might Have Been: IQ, EQ, and the Cost of Trauma

We talk about trauma mostly in terms of damage.

What it does.

What it breaks.

What it leaves behind.

What we talk about far less is what trauma interrupts.

Not just safety.

Not just childhood.

But intelligence.

Emotional fluency.

The person someone might have been if their nervous system had ever learned it was safe.

Shawn is a fictional character.

But the question he raises is very real:

Who might someone have been if trauma hadn’t redirected every ounce of their intelligence toward survival?

First, a quick grounding: What are IQ and EQ, really?

IQ (Intelligence Quotient) is meant to measure certain kinds of cognitive capacity:

·         reasoning

·         pattern recognition

·         verbal comprehension

·         working memory

·         problem-solving

It does not measure worth.

It does not measure creativity, morality, or character. It measures capacity, not outcome. IQ is generally considered stable across a person’s lifetime; what changes is how much of that capacity someone can access or demonstrate.

EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is different. It refers to:

·         emotional awareness

·         empathy

·         emotional regulation

·         reading social cues

·         understanding others’ internal states

·         managing one’s own emotional responses

Unlike IQ, EQ isn’t fixed.

That was the part I didn’t fully appreciate until I began thinking more deeply about Shawn.

How can EQ change over time?

A person doesn’t gain or lose empathy like a switch flipping on and off.

What does change is access.

EQ depends heavily on:

·         safety

·         attachment

·         nervous system regulation

·         shame

·         trust

·         whether someone is allowed to feel without consequences

In other words, EQ can be situational.

Someone may have deep emotional intelligence but be unable to access it consistently if:

·         their environment is unsafe

·         their emotions were punished or exploited

·         vulnerability led to harm

·         regulation was never modeled

So the person doesn’t become less emotionally intelligent.

They become emotionally restricted.

This is where Shawn lives.

Shawn as he is: intelligence shaped for survival

With trauma, Shawn is:

·         cognitively sharp but scattered

·         highly perceptive but guarded

·         emotionally attuned yet withdrawn

·         capable of deep empathy but reluctant to show it

·         excellent at reading danger

·         inconsistent in accessing his own emotional insight

Trauma didn’t make him intelligent. It forced his intelligence into survival roles.

Every skill—pattern recognition, emotional awareness, intuition—gets rerouted toward:

·         threat detection

·         self-protection

·         reading power dynamics

·         anticipating harm

That kind of intelligence keeps you alive. It does not leave much room for growth.

Shawn without trauma: not a different person—an uninterrupted one

This is where the question gets uncomfortable.

Remove the trauma, and you don’t get a brand-new Shawn. You get the same one—with access.

Without chronic threat:

·         his cognitive intelligence stabilizes instead of fragmenting

·         his emotional intelligence becomes consistent instead of state-dependent

·         empathy flows without self-erasure

·         regulation replaces hypervigilance

·         trust becomes possible

·         curiosity outweighs fear

His IQ doesn’t change. His EQ doesn’t suddenly appear—it becomes accessible.

It was already there.

What changes is how often he can reach it.

The quiet cost we don’t measure

This matters beyond fiction.

In the real world:

·         trauma masks intelligence

·         dysregulation looks like defiance

·         emotional shutdown looks like apathy

·         hypervigilance looks like distraction

·         survival strategies look like character flaws

We test performance, not capacity.

We measure output in unsafe systems and call it potential.

And when someone doesn’t shine under pressure, we assume there was nothing there to begin with.

What safety actually does

Safety doesn’t “fix” people.

It returns access.

When someone like Shawn experiences safety—real safety, not compliance—the intelligence that was spent on survival begins to reappear elsewhere:

·         in connection

·         in creativity

·         in learning

·         in emotional expression

Not because they changed.

Because the interruption lifted.

The real question

The question isn’t:

How smart is someone?

How empathetic are they?

The question is:

Were they ever safe enough to show it?

That’s the cost of trauma we rarely name.

Not just what it takes—but what it delays, hides, and quietly reroutes.

And sometimes, what it steals is not potential itself—but the chance for that potential to ever be seen. Click the button for Shawn's entry.

Read His Words Here