Living with Childhood Trauma

You cannot heal if you pretend you are not hurt! 🤗

For me, one of the most surprising things surrounding the area of childhood trauma is that a lot of people are unaware that they experienced it, to begin with. It’s only when people are asked specific questions regarding their childhood or, are invited to think about why they behaved in a certain way as an adult that the individual begins to consider the possibility that they may have some childhood trauma.

When you are a child, your family home environment is “normal” to you even if it involved trauma. This is because it is all that you know. As you get older you are able to better identify events you experienced as a child as traumatic. However, there can still be traumatic events that occurred that you either don’t recognise as traumatic as it was just “normal” for you or, you don’t believe them to have been “that bad”. Below are some examples of things that can cause childhood trauma. However, you must know childhood trauma is incredibly diverse, and these are just some brief examples to give you an idea, this list is not exhaustive...

🔶 Someone in your family passed away or was seriously injured. 🔶 You were seriously sick or were seriously injured. 🔶 You witnessed a crime or an accident 🔶 You were a victim of a crime. 🔶 You lost a close friend. 🔶 Your parents experienced a negative change in their financial situation. 🔶 One of your parents lost their job. 🔶 Your parents separated. 🔶 Someone in your family had issues with alcohol or drugs. 🔶 Someone in your family was arrested. 🔶 Someone in your family experienced a mental health illness. 🔶 Your parents argued a lot. 🔶 You changed school. 🔶 You moved family homes. 🔶 You got a new step-mom/dad. 🔶 A parent or adult in the household swore at you, insulted you, or put you down. 🔶 You ever felt afraid you could be hurt in any form. 🔶 You were hurt in any form by someone else. 🔶 You witnessed one parent experience domestic abuse. 🔶 One of your parents is a narcissist. 🔶 You had to take on the parent role. (Some of these examples are extracted from “The Adverse Life Events Scale” (Felitti et al (1998) and the PhenX Toolkit (2010))

👆Many people who have experienced childhood trauma are not surprised when they feel upset, horrified, anxious or angry, etc., about what they experienced. But, something that can take a lot of people by surprise is the feeling of shame. Shame is a very common feeling amongst people who have experienced childhood trauma. Feeling shame can stem from feeling like you were to blame for the traumatic event or, that you should have protected yourself.

✍️ Activity 1: Feelings of Shame. Shame is a very difficult emotion to work with as it can be so deep-rooted and to challenge the feeling of shame is to challenge your belief system. If you are experiencing feelings of shame or blame, then have a go at this activity… (Please stop at any point if you begin to feel distressed) 👉 If another child came up to you and told you they had experienced the same traumatic event that you had experienced, how would you respond to them? 👉 For example, your dad lost his job when you were ten. You tell yourself this is your fault because he needed to be home to look after you. Also, you are being silly thinking this was traumatic for you, after all, it wasn’t you who lost a job. But, when you are not directly involved it can be easier for you to be objective. If a child came and told you this, you may say something like “It’s not your fault your dad lost his job. Your dad is the adult and he is responsible for looking after you, you are not responsible for your dad's employment status. You should not be having adult worries, that’s too much for a ten-year-old. It must be difficult for you to adjust to living with less money and it’s ok to feel sad you can’t go on school trips. It must be difficult listening to your dad being worried about money too. It’s not nice for you to have to experience your dad being more stressed than usual”. 👉 Write down all the things you’d say to the child who told you about the traumatic event. 👉 Now, tell yourself these things. This can be difficult. It might be the first time you’ve shown your inner child this level of compassion and that can be a really emotional experience.

👆Childhood trauma can be increasingly difficult to recover from as it occurred at such a key stage in our development. This led to us developing trauma responses at a young age to protect ourselves. These were what we needed at the time, so never feel negative about having these, they were your mind/body's way of keeping you safe. The problem with these trauma responses is that you are not the same child in that environment. The trauma responses that kept you safe as a child might be hindering you as an adult. For example, as a child, you were punished if you didn’t do as your parents asked. Your trauma response to this was to always do what was asked of you, to protect yourself from being punished. As an adult, this has led to you people-pleasing and putting others' needs above your own in romantic relationships.

👉 Living with Childhood Trauma Example.

John witnessed his parents argue a lot when he was a child and they eventually divorced. After the divorce, John’s parents were much happier, and as a result, so was he. John’s relationship with his parents improved significantly and his parents had a great co-parent dynamic. The divorce of his parents was never something John felt had impacted him. However, in his adult romantic relationships, John was adopting a trauma response from childhood that he had developed as a consequence of his parent's divorce. This led to John self-sabotaging his romantic relationships. Whenever he would disagree with his partner, he wouldn’t communicate or look to resolve this issue. As he felt that he was being abandoned by his partner so he left before this could happen.

Mary also had the same experience when she was a child. However, Mary began to identify that she was replicating the same patterns in each of her relationships. Acknowledging this was uncomfortable for Mary and caused her to experience a lot of difficult feelings. Mary realised it made her feel safe when she left the relationship because she felt in control. But, Mary wanted a happy and healthy relationship where differences could be discussed and resolved. So, Mary began to sit with the discomfort with her present partner and begin to open up. Even though it was scary for her to start with, over time it began to feel easier.

✍️ Activity 2: Healing your inner child. 👉 As a child, you need certain things to thrive. You may not have received some or any of these. But you are an adult now and you are now in a position to provide yourself with these. It might feel strange for you to think you deserve these things, but you do. Everyone does. It could feel strange to you because you didn’t experience it as a child. Over the next week think about these questions. 👉 How do you give yourself kindness? 👉 How do you give yourself stability? 👉 How do you give yourself respect? 👉 How do you reassure yourself? 👉 How do you give yourself love? 👉 If you are noticing you can improve in any of these areas, then start thinking about what you can do to improve. Then how you can action this in your everyday life? So, it becomes part of your routine. Because this is what you deserve, you deserve this!

🤗 You are the adult you needed as a child. You are not alone. Happio can help you on your journey, look out for the Living with Trauma group that is coming soon! 🤗