Hi, Victoriah. Good for you, for digging deep to figure out the “why” behind your character’s behavior. Keep in mind that our thesaurus entries aren’t comprehensive because each character is going to react uniquely to a wounding event, and there’s no way we could include every possible response. So just because the results there don’t fit your character, it doesn’t mean the wound isn’t possible for him. There are so many different factors that work together to determine a character’s response: personality, influential people, support system, etc. So don’t throw out those possibilities until you’re sure they don’t work for him.

One thing I would suggest is to try and work backward from who he is today to why he is that way. It sounds like you know his behaviors and habits; figure out why he embraces those things. Are they a defense mechanism? Is he mirroring the behaviors of an influential role model from his early days? Does he exhibit them to try and meet a certain unmet need? If you can figure out why he has those habits, you’ll have a better understanding of which wound they may be tied to.

In your case, where you seem to know who your character is currently and you’re trying to figure out why he is that way, it makes sense to work backward, from the present to the past. Our Reverse Backstory Tool can be super helpful with this because you can start pretty much anywhere and work you way forward or backward. Take a look at that and see if it helps. If you have a copy of The Negative Trait Thesaurus, there’s a filled-in example, so you can see how it’s supposed to work.

I’m having some difficulty here, I’ve been searching the emotional wound thesaurus for a traumatizing experience for my character who is a con-man with an obvious antisocial personality. I haven’t quite discovered one strong enough to influence his dark side.

After relentless searches in psychology, I keep coming back to being raised by neglectful parents, being raised by an addict, or being raised by a narcissist, however, their possible responses and results, don’t really speak to any behaviors that would ordinarily develop his darker side of his personality.

Whatever help you can give me is greatly appreciated.

any neglect is neglect. there’s no “little” or “large”.

I’m so glad it was timely. 🙂

I came to the comments to post the same thing!

He’s apparently incredibly well-adjusted ;).

😉