“Time does not heal all wounds. One does not ‘just get over’ something—not even fifty years later. Instead, time conceals. And human beings convert traumatic emotional experiences in childhood into organic disease later in life.” Vincent J. Felitti, MD
In the mid-1980s, Dr. Vincent J Felitti and Robert Anda, MD, conducted a study through the CDC and the Health Appraisal Division of Kaiser Permanente’s Department. The study asked twenty-six thousand patients if they would be interested in helping them understand how childhood traumatic events might affect adult mental health; seventeen thousand agreed.
The survey called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) probed patients’ childhood and adolescence. The first five covered personal aspects like emotional and physical stressors, while the next five questions concerned other family members—the specifics of one’s household situation while growing up.
Following the interviews, each participant received an ACE Score based on the number of questions they answered yes to based on adverse or traumatic events experienced during their youth. All ten questions addressed various aspects of child welfare. These questions formed the basis of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.
Felitti and Anda surveyed participants, predominantly educated and middle-class, defied expectations, with 64% affirming one or more categories of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Astonishingly, 87% of those with one “yes” had additional ACEs, revealing a strong correlation.
A significant 40% faced two or more traumatic events, and 12.5% had an ACE Score of 4 or more, meaning they faced at least four traumatic events. Only a third scored zero on ACEs. The study uncovered a powerful correlation between childhood traumatic events and adult illness, offering a fresh perspective on human health and the causes of unspoken suffering.
What does this all mean?
The majority of the adults that you meet have some form of complex PTSD from their childhood, regardless of whether they know it or not. This blog will help you understand how childhood trauma affects us as adults.
What Is Childhood PTSD?
Childhood PTSD refers to children with traumatic events who have experienced one or more traumas, leading to persistent reactions affecting their daily lives. These reactions include emotional upset, depressive symptoms, anxiety, behavioral changes, self-regulation difficulties, challenges in relating to others, regression, attention and academic issues, nightmares, sleep and eating problems, and physical symptoms. Older children might turn to drugs or alcohol, engage in risky behavior, or participate in unhealthy sexual activity.
Related Reading: Understand Where Childhood PTSD Comes From & The Trauma That Causes It
What Does Childhood PTSD Do To Us?
Child abuse disrupts the path of normal development during childhood, leading to a wide range of psychological and physical conditions. As a result, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) can arise in life.
In the past 30 years, many studies have looked at how interpersonal trauma disrupts caregiving and affects psychological development. The findings reveal long-term impacts on emotion regulation, attention, thinking, perception, mental health and relationships in adulthood.
Research has shown that child abuse can lead to a significantly higher risk of suffering secondary traumas in adult life. When a traumatic event is experienced at a critical period of growth, it can have tremendous influence over personal and psychological development and, most notably, on the individual’s sense of who they are.
Trust is broken or skewed, and dependency issues — whether in the form of addictions or continuing the patterns of abuse and neglect— become reinforcing patterns that affect the lives of victims well beyond childhood.
How Bad Does The Trauma Need To Be For Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?
The challenges a child encounters don’t need to be a severe traumatic event to cause lasting changes that contribute to adult post traumatic stress disorder. Felitti’s research revealed that all ten types of adversity they studied had nearly equal damaging effects on mental health. After analyzing over seventeen thousand responses, Felitti and Anda found that no traumatic event significantly outweighed another.
This held true despite certain types of childhood trauma, like sexual abuse, being considered more shameful by society and others, like physical abuse, being more openly violent.
Surprisingly, repeated humiliation by a parent had a slightly more negative effect and was slightly connected to a higher chance of adult mental health challenges like depression. Just living with a parent who belittles or humiliates you or who struggles with alcoholism or depression can create a lasting impact, affecting your brain and immune system throughout life.
Anda suggests that the ACE Survey reveals only “the tip of the iceberg.” In recent years, scientists have sought ways to identify childhood stressors not covered in the ACE Study. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have recently inquired about “family-focused” issues, such as major disagreements or tension between parents and the absence of affection or communication among family members.
Brain imaging of the kids (who experienced one traumatic event) found that even exposure to very common but relatively chronic forms of family dysfunction, such as lack of familial affection or parental discord, led to changes in the developing brain, decreasing the brain’s size and volume.
Related Reading: Take The Childhood Trauma Quiz And Learn Where You Stand
What are the symptoms of childhood PTSD in adults?
1. Hypervigilance
We all have a threat sensor that usually lies below the surface of awareness and constantly surveys the sights, sounds, and sensations of our internal and external environment. You can be engaged in a relaxing activity like reading a book or watching a movie, but if that threat sensor sees an unexpected shadow or hears something suspicious in the next room, it will let you know immediately.
Its purpose is to protect us but not really bother the conscious part of our minds unless the threat calls for vigilance. When people are child trauma survivors, however, their threat sensor becomes hyperactive and hypervigilant, convincing them that things are dangerous and wrong right now constantly.
It’s like the threat sensor recognizes that it was unable to prevent the initial childhood trauma, and now it’s trying to make up for it by being active and loud all the time. But like the boy who cried wolf, when the threat sensor is always sounding the alarm, the brain eventually becomes fatigued and unable to differentiate false from real danger.
Hypervigilance also results in ongoing tension, less enjoyment and ease, an increase in risk-taking, and physical issues such as high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and cancer.
2. Anxiety
Childhood trauma can raise baseline levels of anxiety as well. Although anxiety is a buzzword, we are explicitly referring to the internal feeling of tension and discomfort that can diminish our ability to counter distress by using healthy coping skills.
Anxiety can also negatively affect our coping skills by diminishing our perseverance, our ability to maintain self-confidence in the face of challenges, and our ability to orient toward self-soothing when we get upset or frazzled.
The higher our baseline anxiety, the less we’re able to access these coping skills. It’s not too different from being out of shape and suffering from stiff joints and muscular tension—if we need to jump out of danger’s way, we’re not going to do so very skillfully.
Additionally, child traumatic stress increases in our baseline anxiety also lower distress tolerance, which refers to the amount of distress a person can put up with and still use good coping skills and make healthy decisions. Distress can come from vivid memories of the traumatic event that play over and over again in our mind or from trauma-induced worries that we’ll fail in our endeavors and feel embarrassed.
External examples of distress can include partners whose behavior reminds us of past abusers, experiencing bullying or prejudice, or being subjected to sexual harassment at work. Regardless of the form our distress takes, we’re better able to face it through a strategy of healthy thoughts, compassion, and smart decisions.
Childhood trauma changes the whole internal playing field. Just as an athlete can’t perform as well under adverse conditions (a muddy playing field or high winds, for example), we’re not at our best when traumatic stress undermines our ability to function by throwing too much at us and messing with the control panels of our nervous systems. The difference here is that an athlete will return to optimal performance when conditions return to normal, whereas a traumatic event increases the likelihood of negative changes to body and mind.
3. Low Mood
Mood and anxiety are strongly related. Child traumatic stress, traumatic events, and hypervigilance all turn up the dial for anxiety while simultaneously turning down the dial for mood.
When we suffer from childhood trauma, we become more prone to avoidance and isolation, which leads to decreased enjoyment of previously pleasurable activities. It isn’t hard to roll the tape forward and see where this is going.
How often have you heard a person describe themselves in unimaginable words before the traumatic event? One previously social person now describes themselves as someone who “lays low because people just don’t like them.”
No matter the case, when the person describes themselves, neither you nor they can tell if the words are false or if they became true at some point after the trauma occurred. This is just one more way trauma fools us about ourselves, using anxiety and a low mood to camouflage its actions.
4. Sleep Issues
Childhood trauma attacks our sleep from every angle—it increases how long it takes to fall asleep and how many times we wake up during the night, and it decreases the length and quality of our sleep. This is obviously bad for our happiness and health—fatigue is correlated with an increase in injuries and accidents—and it often means more anxiety and dread while we’re trying to get the sleep we so desperately need.
This can lead to more foggy decision-making, avoidance, and the self-fulfilling prophesies of loneliness and disappointment. Our mental and physical health can decline, each compounding the negative effects of the other.
Poor sleep is also associated with rumination—those unproductive, negative, repetitive thoughts: It’ll never work out, for example, or I’m a terrible person. The more we repeat these things to ourselves, the more likely we are to believe them and act from those erroneous beliefs, especially when we consider that rumination happens both consciously and unconsciously.
A person can find themselves wide awake in the middle of the night, thinking the same negative thoughts repeatedly, becoming more distressed about being awake and miserable, and not even realizing that the rumination has been going on just under the surface of sleep for hours. Needless to say, this destroys the restorative function of sleep.
5. Behavioral Changes
Behavior changes quickly add up, multiply, and eventually lead us to unrecognized places with no obvious escape. In other words, child trauma makes us change without our understanding of the extent, risk, or damage.
People often comment about how different they are after experiencing child trauma, and they have trouble uncovering the good parts about the people they once were.
How we act in the world affects how we think and feel about ourselves, and thoughts and feelings change our behavior in turn. From a mental health standpoint child trauma is like using a map that’s just slightly “off.” Following a map like that might get us to our destination in a roundabout way, but more often than not, it gets us confused and lost.
Related Reading: Learn How Trauma Changes The Brain
Summary of The Symptoms
Individuals with complex ptsd may encounter all these symptoms or a mix of them. In each situation, there are actual changes in the person that lead to unhappiness, heightened suffering and risk, and reduced ease and resilience.
It’s important to note that these are only a few harmful changes that affect the core of our existence, both individually and collectively.
Why Does Childhood PTSD Matter So Much?
Scientists are labeling the link between early childhood trauma, child traumatic stress, brain structure, and adult well-being as the new psychobiological “theory of everything.”
Every few decades, a groundbreaking psychosocial “theory of everything” emerges, providing a new understanding of why we are the way we are and how we became that way.
In the early twentieth century, Freudian psychoanalytic theory introduced the concept of the unconscious and the ego. Jungian theory explored introversion and extroversion, influencing personality indicators like Briggs and Myers. More recently, neuroscientists highlighted the critical “zero to three” age range for brain development, leading to initiatives like Head Start and preschool.
Our comprehension of adverse childhood experiences is changing how we view ourselves, understand our origins, love and nurture our children, and strive to reach our full potential.
Research on child trauma reveals that both physical and emotional suffering is linked to the intricate workings of the human immune system. The immune system acts as the body’s main control center, and what occurs in the brain during childhood establishes lifelong programming for this essential system, influencing the body, brain, and mind.
Complex PTSD matters because your emotional biography is your physical biology; together, they create the script for how you will live your life. To simplify, your childhood dictates the way your life will play out. If you or a loved one needs help navigating their childhood trauma there are a myriad of mental health services out there that are willing and able to help!
