5 Ways Childhood Trauma Can Impact You as an Adult.
5 ways childhood trauma Can impact you as an adult.
Emotional connection & regulation
Setting Boundaries
Success with Romantic Relationships
Chronic Physical Illness
Being able to Rest
1. Emotional connection and regulation
Oftentimes people who have had a trauma in their childhood have trouble connecting to their emotions and regulating big feelings. I have heard countless stories of people not being able to cry as adults, finding themselves in a rage out of nowhere, or in a constant state of anxiety or depression. Emotions are not bad, even the big ones, but sometimes we come from homes where emotions were not openly discussed and were not managed well.
As an adult a person might struggle with being able to not only know what they are feeling but also they might struggle with being able to cope with those feelings. Sometimes people will cope with their feelings by using substances or by overworking themselves. Adult children who have trauma will often struggle with knowing what to do with uncomfortable feelings such as anger, fear, and sadness. In my online therapy practice this is what I spend a majority of the time on with my client. We will spend a good portion of therapy sessions on identifying what feelings we are having and what are the ways in which we are coping that are no longer serving us.
2. Boundaries is something that people of childhood trauma often struggle with.
Boundaries are having quite the spotlight over the last few years. This is something I often speak about to my clients in therapy. I cannot count how many times I have recommended Nedra Glover Tawwab’s book “Set Boundaries, Find Peace.” Boundaries are so important for being able to maintain a healthy relationship not only with others but with ourselves. It is no surprise that a person who had boundaries violated in childhood will grow to have trouble setting healthy boundaries as an adult.
For example, if a person was often spanked as a child, they might grow up to have issues with conflict as an adult. Spanking is a boundary violation on a person's body. They might struggle with knowing how to navigate relationships when things get difficult, either solving issues with violence or struggle with asserting themselves and chronically pleasing people. This is super common and I see it all the time in my private practice. People who were spanked as children struggle with not pleasing people and struggle with asserting what they need and want from others. It is fear based and people will often develop anxiety disorders.
This one is often tough for those who are first gens like myself. Spanking is common in the Latinx culture and people will often say “I was spanked and I turned out fine.” I am here to say there is no way you turned totally fine, it most likely did affect you, but our culture does not want to admit that our parents, who did the best they could, harmed us. And this is something I truly believe as therapist, people do the best that they can with the skills that they have in that movement. It does not make it okay and it does not mean it is acceptable. I came from a home where I was spanked. I would say I was not spanked to the point where it was physical abuse, but I was spanked. I myself struggled with anxiety throughout my teen and young adult years. It wasn’t until I started doing my own boundary work that I realized just how much my anxiety was correlated with the fact that I was spanked as a child.
3. Romantic relationships are often difficult for those who have had childhood trauma.
Continuing from my last point on how childhood trauma impacts you as an adult who might struggle with boundaries, this can also mean that you struggle with romantic relationships (friendships and work relationships too!) If you came from a home where what you said didn’t matter or you were punished for speaking up, then this can affect how you navigate difficult moments in your romantic relationship. I often work with couples in my online therapy practice and we will spend some time exploring what their childhood life was like, what did punishment look like, and how did their family solve issues. Oftentimes we come from families who model a healthy way of expressing opposing thoughts and who show a secure attachment despite not agreeing on something. This can easily translate into an adult romantic relationship where there is lots of stress, drama, and lots of anger and hurt feelings.
Childhood trauma has a way of setting the background story for the rest of our lives, but it can be re-drafted with therapy. Being able to do childhood trauma work in couples therapy can help people find long lasting relief from stressors, because oftentimes we don’t know how far back some of these wounds go for not only ourselves but for our partners. This is why in my couples work I use Emotion Focused Therapy to help people truly connect and heal. Couples therapy can be extremely healing for people because they are choosing to own that what they were doing is not helping and that they want different. That they want a relationship that is constant work and that there is ease.
4. Chronic physical illness.
More and more research has shown that chronic illness has correlation to higher ACEs or Adverse Childhood Experiences. The ACEs study was done to explore if negative experiences in childhood correlated with impacts later in life. They found that it was correlated with more substance use, higher chances of incarcerations, poor relationships, and a long list of other negative life experiences. Interestingly enough there is a link between high ACE scores and higher chances of chronic physical illness.
An eye opening book that I often recommended to my client is “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, because this book makes it clear that there is a high correlation between childhood trauma and adult illness. Science shows that illnesses such as fibromyalgia, obesity, and autoimmune diseases have some connection to high adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. For more information on these connections check out this link.
5. Being able to rest.
Last but not least one of the things that I have noticed in my therapy practice is just how hard it is for people who have traumatic childhoods to rest. It is almost as if they have been go go go and cannot rest. They do a good job of justifying it too. When we go through a trauma our bodies go through a primal response of fight, flight, or freeze. It does things as a survival mood to stay alive. So as a child who goes through a trauma or huge stressor, especially multiple, our bodies have a hard time feeling safe.
Flash forward to when this child becomes an adult and things are safe, the adult might have a hard time with rest because it is a forienge state of being. So then it only makes sense that a person will fill there lives up with some stress, whether it is working excessively, getting involved in fixer upper relationships, or the never ending quest for self improvement. I am all for a good self help book, but sometimes I will ask my client, when was the last time you just read for fun?
Childhood trauma does not stay in childhood.
Childhood trauma is something that impacts our inner child and it deserves to receive the attention and support it needs to be able to heal. Often I think about how many people are running around out there with inner wounds, because hurt people hurt people. When we heal our inner child wounds, we are better, healthier adults who in turn are kinder and more loving to others. I hope you know that you aren’t alone in this work. Many people take the courageous leap each day to begin working on healing their inner child wounds, and maybe just maybe you might be next.