Healing from childhood trauma is hard, but it starts with understanding it.
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When you experience childhood trauma, your life and your soul are altered forever.
Those who suffer loss, abuse or neglect early-on in life can often suffer from serious psychological and emotional disorders for decades to come, changing who they are and destroying their ability to foster caring and nurturing relationships even decades after the traumatic event.
Childhood trauma holds us back and bricks up our potential in truly unimaginable ways. When our hearts are damaged at such critical developmental stages, it makes it easy to put up walls and harder to find the healing that we need.
Healing the harms and injuries of our childhood is one the hardest things we can do, but it’s necessary for us to create the life we want. If you want to get over the past, you have to start by facing it — bravely and one step at a time.
Coming to an understanding.
If you want to resolve your childhood trauma, you first need to understand it. Trauma can generate some momentous emotions, and unless we learn how to process these emotions, we will continue to repeat the same damaging patters that keep us stuck and hurting.
Refusing to face the traumas of our childhood causes them to fester like a sore; staying in our bodies as unconscious energy that wrecks everything from our employment prospects to our romantic relationships.
Healing trauma starts with understanding it and the vast array of emotions that can come alone with it. When you’ve started to understand your trauma and how it affects you, you can start implementing change — but not before then.
What is childhood trauma?
Childhood trauma is caused by any situation in which a child perceives that they are in an extremely frightening, dangerous or overwhelming position.
Traumatic events cause children to feel helpless and scared in a way that is far beyond their mental and emotional processing. These situations can occur in one-off events like natural disasters and injuries — or they could occur from regular instances of physical, sexual and verbal abuse.
All these events can bring on symptoms of emotional and psychological trauma, and all of these events can haunt children well into their adult lives.
The types of childhood trauma.
Childhood trauma can look different for everyone, but there are some core events that seem to have the most lasting effect on those of us who are unfortunate enough to experience them.
Physical abuse —This occurs when someone (anyone) who has authority over you uses it to injure you physically. This can includes cuts, bruises, scratches, burns, broken bones and even the loss of consciousness.
Physical neglect — When our caregivers fail to give us the physical resources we need to survive (like food, clothing or a place to live) this is physical neglect.
Emotional abuse — We don’t typically think of emotional manipulation as abuse, but it is. When someone intentionally causes an injury to our dignity or emotional integrity, they are abusing you.
Emotional abuse most often occurs in the form of threats, shaming, scapegoating and even confinement or driving you to hurt yourself.
Sexual abuse — This is one of the most damaging forms of abuse and sadly one of the most common when it comes to childhood trauma.
It is estimated by The National Center for Victims of Crime that 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys will be the victim of childhood sexual abuse in their lifetime, but these numbers are generally assumed to be higher due to the low rate of reporting.
Loss of a caregiver — Losing a parent or caregiver is another devastating event in any child’s life. Even when you are hardly old enough to remember it, the effects are far-reaching.
Losing a parent is hard to understand and makes us vulnerable in ways we do not always realize.
Emotional neglect — Emotional neglect is a big one, but also one of the hardest to realize and accept as adults. If your caregiver fails to give you the nurturing and connection you need to thrive, this is emotional neglect.
Natural disasters — Living through a natural disaster is traumatic for everyone, but these events are especially traumatic with young, developing children. Fires, floods and hurricanes cause trauma in a different and unexpected ways.
Trauma doesn’t discriminate, it can happen to anyone at any time, but it’s especially damaging when it occurs during our childhood.
Try these 10 habits to come back from the brink and take your life back from the traumas of your childhood.
- Distance yourself from toxic people.
If you’ve identified trauma in your life and have started the healing process, it’s imperative that you distance yourself from the toxic people in your life that could hinder this process.
Survivors of trauma need to get away from anyone who creates more of the stress and disharmony they are already trying to escape.
- Learn self-regulation and stress-reduction techniques.
Stress has a funny way of forcing us back into the coping mechanisms and the negative behaviors we develop as damaged children.
By learning simple techniques likes mindful breathing, relaxation and meditation we can actually develop the distress tolerance skills we need to undo our traumatic pasts and learn how to stay calm with things push us to the brink.
- Seek out support.
Sometimes, it just isn’t possible to heal from the trauma of your past alone. It’s common for trauma survivors to become isolated, but this isolation is actually counter-productive to your healing.
If you really want to find your way back to harmony, start by seeking out support and get the strength you need to put the pieces back together.
- Get more sleep — There’s not much that a good night or two of decent sleep won’t cure. Adult and children survivors of trauma often have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep.
Managing your sleep routine is crucial for healing the hurts of your past, however.
- Tighten up your diet.
There are some really striking relations between our neurobiological states and the ways we deal with and process stress.
When we’re stressed or dealing with painful traumas, it actually generates an inflammatory response in our bodies not unlike the ones that occur when we suffer a sports injury.
- Allow yourself to get close to people.
Trauma forces us into survival mode, a suspended state of animation that monopolizes and uses up all our energy. When you’re in survival mode it’s hard — if not impossible — to get close to people.
Experiencing trauma before the age of 10 makes you prone to isolating yourself and cutting of the relationships that give you the love you so desperately need.
Nothing melts shame faster than allowing the full weight of your heart to be seen by another person.
- Realize you’re safe now.
Distanced from the traumatic events and people of our pasts, we have to remind our inner child that they are no longer in danger.
Unresolved trauma leaves us in a constant state of “fight or flight”. This state can lead to longterm physical issues and is one of the contributing factors of PTSD.
Childhood trauma has such a dramatic impact on our continued physical health and the longer we refuse to address it, the worse those effects become.
- Find a trauma specialist.
Facing and resolving the pain of the past is not something that we can always do alone and it’s not something that can be managed simply with the help of a few good friends.
Sometimes, it’s necessary to find a specialist when dealing with childhood trauma; but it’s important to make sure you’re finding the right person to help you resolve past issues.
Trauma symptoms vary from case to case and as such need to be assess by qualified and experienced trauma professionals.
Finding a therapist who has experience treating trauma like yours can take time, but cognitive-behavioral therapists and EMDR professionals are a good place to start.
- Find an experienced medical specialist.
Considering the wide array of physical symptoms that come alongside childhood trauma, it’s crucial that you also find a medical doctor that can help you with your physical healing as well as your mental and emotional healing.
While a therapist might be able to send your thoughts in the right direction, a medical professional will help you get your body going in the right direction which can make the healing that much easier.
A functional medical provider will be able to evaluate your health as a whole and will work like an investigator to piece together the puzzle and identify the missing pieces that trigger your emotional and physical imbalances.
- Get honest about how you’re surviving.
Stop and take an honest look at your life as it stands right now in this moment.
Allow yourself to recognize all the ways you have attempted to keep yourself safe and be brutally honest in recognizing all the coping mechanisms you’ve built up over the years.
Notice what mechanisms you used to get through your childhood and analyze their value in your life today.
Do they still fit you and the goals that you have for your life? If they no longer serve you, then chances are they’re taking away from the person that you could become.
By E.B Johnson.