Trauma \trau-muh\ noun anything that causes emotional or physical pain and leaves its mark on a person as life moves forward.
Traumatic events can have a significant impact on our lives. Many people have experienced serious hurt that isn’t obvious to others. I’m not talking about small things like getting the wrong ice cream flavor or someone eating your last cookie.
When I say trauma, I mean the kind of emotional or physical pain that you can’t always see, but it can really affect how our brains and minds work. Even though we’re usually pretty tough, many of us feel the effects of trauma more than we realize, and it can stick with us for a long time.
This blog explores how childhood experiences shape us into the adults we become.
Why Does Childhood Trauma Matter?
Recent research shows that childhood trauma can have a big impact on our mental health as adults. It’s not always true that overcoming challenges makes us stronger. These early traumatic events can increase the chances of having profound adult illnesses like heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, and depression.
Childhood trauma affects how we connect with others, how well our romantic relationships turn out, and how well we care for and raise our own kids.
My Experience With Childhood Trauma
After getting married, I started looking into how traumatic events in my childhood might be connected to issues in adulthood. I discovered that some of the problems I was facing were/are a result of the child traumatic stress. At 13 my 30-year-old cousin raped me.
I’ve spent a decade plus struggling to manage what I now know is post-traumatic stress:
-Anxiety
-Bouts of depression
-Emotional outbursts
-Body image issues
-A laundry list of other mental health challenges
Regardless of the traumatic events I’ve been through, I am determined to live the fullest life possible.
Related Reading: How To Not Let Your Trauma Affect Your Kids
What Causes Childhood Trauma?
The CDC’s study on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) looked at ten types of traumatic events and found a strong connection between these challenges in childhood and the start of physical and mental health problems and disorders in adulthood. They are the following:
-Child physical abuse
-Child sexual abuse
-Child emotional abuse
-Emotional neglect
-Physical neglect
-Mentally ill, depressed, or suicidal person in the home
-Drug-addicted or alcoholic family member
-Witnessing domestic violence against the mother
-Loss of a parent to death or abandonment by parental divorce
-Incarceration of any family member for a crime
Recent research informs us that different kinds of child trauma, like the following all, can have lasting effects:
–seeing a sibling being mistreated
-experiencing violence in the community
-growing up in poverty
-facing bullying from a classmate or teacher
How Does Childhood Trauma Affect You As An Adult?
Traumatic events cause child traumatic stress, which reshapes a child’s brain, affecting how genes that manage stress hormones work. Child traumatic stress creates a lifelong heightened stress response, making the child more prone to adult challenges.
Mental health professionals say that the child-traumatic stress we experience after trauma, our body and brain might become exposed to harmful inflammatory chemicals for a long time, making us prone to mental health disorders.
Related Reading: Take A Childhood Trauma Test To Understand How It Impacts You
The Analogy of Trauma
A couple of years back, the Covid-19 pandemic affected everyone, and recently, I’ve begun to see trauma as a kind of virus. Child trauma leaves many people either dead or dealing with post traumatic stress disorder. Similar to Covid-19, you can’t see trauma directly; you just witness its impact—quiet but harmful. It hurts one person, then moves on to another, spreading and often circling back again.
Regrettably, there aren’t trials for a trauma vaccine, and testing for child trauma is lacking. Unless we use all available tools and confront the trauma threat, our happiness, well-being, and even our survival will be at risk.
Covid has altered how we see the world and connect with our community. For a year plus, we wore masks around others, stayed at least six feet apart, worried if others could be carrying the virus, and kept our conversations brief.
The effects of child trauma are quite similar: due to anxiety and depression caused by trauma, child trauma survivors put on metaphorical masks when dealing with others. We keep emotional distance, sometimes avoiding those others who seem to be dealing with anxiety or depression, and our conversations with them stay short and surface-level.
The “wise” reaction to the viral pandemic was to stay more closed off until a vaccine was widely available. A wise response to the child trauma pandemic, though, is for us to become more open so that we become the vaccine ourselves.
Our Reaction To Covid Vs. Trauma
Our country’s reaction to the Covid virus has been filled with denial, arguments, and a surprising refusal to confront uncomfortable realities. Our government didn’t plan ahead, even when given warnings. Because we avoided facing inconvenient truths, we missed many chances to prevent unnecessary tragedies.
By any reasonable measure, as a nation, we didn’t do what was best for our country and its people. This deeply troubles me, but it also strengthens my resolve to spread the word about the trauma virus. Trauma is a pandemic causing immense suffering worldwide. While trauma may not ever be in the headlines like Covid, its invisibility makes it all the more dangerous, just like the Covid virus.
We might notice some of its signs, but because a traumatic event changes our brains—our thoughts, memories, and how we understand things—it’s even harder to fully grasp the extent of its harm.
Related Reading: How Trauma Changes Our Brains
Many of us see trauma as something that comes from a significant, one-time event, but that’s just the surface of the trauma issue. Scientists who study trauma say there’s much more to it than the visible things.
Scientists inform us that a traumatic event is potent enough to impact future children—who haven’t even been thought of or born yet. A traumatic event can shape the way genetic traits are transmitted, implying that the effects of childhood trauma are being etched into our future genetic code right now. So, traumatic experiences behave like a pandemic but goes far beyond an individual’s lifespan. It’s a virus affecting the survival legacy of our species.
How Does Childhood Traumas Affect Us?
We often overlook a crucial aspect of the trauma story—changes to our brain’s biology and psychology. The reason we miss these effects is that the traumatic stress that childhood trauma brings hinders us from recognizing these changes and understanding how they affect our lives.
The traumatic stress that trauma bring erodes our dreams while influencing our choices without us realizing it. In this sense, trauma is like a hidden adversary that takes residence within us.
This adversary creates internal conflicts about our identity, our potential, and what we deserve. It distorts our perception of life’s balance, tipping it towards the negative side and robbing us of our inherent right to safety and happiness—all while we remain unaware that it’s taking place.
Just one traumatic event will shift our emotions and memories, affecting our decisions and life paths.
What Are The Different Types Of Trauma?
Acute trauma
Acute trauma results from a traumatic event that most people would recognize as severe:
-A vicious attack
-An injury in combat
-Witnessing violent death
-A bad car accident
-A life-threatening medical crisis
In each of these situations, something happens that drastically changes the way we experience life. Acute trauma often brings post-traumatic stress disorder in the form of fear, pain, horror, and intense vulnerability while shattering the illusion that we can predict or control life to prevent disaster.
People can understandably feel distressed during and immediately after such an event, but sometimes they appear strangely calm as if a mental switch has been turned off or the brain has gone offline to avoid being overwhelmed.
Whether or not a person seeks mental health services later, they are usually aware that something significant has occurred, and their life is noticeably different than before.
Complex Trauma
Complex trauma involves children facing multiple invasive and interpersonal traumatic events, often severe, like abuse or neglect. These events, occurring early in life, cause severe child-traumatic stress. This disrupts the child’s development and self-identity formation, especially when the traumatic event involves a caregiver, impacting childhood trauma survivors’ ability to form secure attachments.
Complex childhood trauma often involves a caregiver’s betrayal, like child abuse (sexual, physical, or emotional) by a caregiver or trusted family friend. It can lead to long-term interpersonal consequences and affect future relationships, manifesting in challenges with emotion regulation, feelings of shame, guilt, and even dissociation. Recognize the key elements of complex traumatic experiences: caregiver, sense of betrayal, and what happened during childhood.
Vicarious Trauma
We can feel others’ emotions and support their healing with our love and compassion. However, when we take on their suffering as our own, it can also hurt us. Certain traumatic experiences are so impactful that the line between what happened to me and what happened to others can get blurry when I reflect on them.
Vicarious trauma typically impacts first responders and those in helping professions but also can drastically affect children. Being there for others can ease their pain and loneliness, but it can also expose children to fears, leaving imprints that resemble the effects of firsthand childhood trauma.
Chronic Trauma
Instead of one big event, chronic childhood trauma comes from prolonged exposure to harmful situations and people:
-living under siege in wartime
-experiencing ongoing sexual abuse as a child
-enduring prejudice and racism, etc.
It’s not rare for someone going through ongoing trauma not to be aware of it or to recognize they’ve been in traumatic situations until much later. Sometimes, we consciously know things our brains push down, keeping them beneath the surface of our awareness because we can’t handle living with that knowledge.
Imagine childhood trauma as a ball filled with air that we continuously try to push underwater. It’s a constant effort to keep it down, and sometimes it forcefully surfaces, causing pain. Chronic trauma can lead to persistent self-doubt, hopelessness, insecurity, fear, negativity about the world, and shame. Both acute and chronic trauma contribute to shame, but chronic trauma gives shame more places to hide.
The Most Common Type Of Childhood Trauma- Abuse
Childhood sexual and physical abuse, including unwanted touching, severe spankings, and life-threatening beatings, happens quite often in North America.
Research on past reports of child abuse in the United States indicates that around 25 to 35 percent of women and 10 to 20 percent of men when asked, say they were sexually abused as children. Additionally, about 10 to 20 percent of both men and women report experiencing a traumatic event that fit the definitions of physical abuse (Briere & Elliott, 2003; Finkelhor, Hotaling, Lewis, & Smith, 1990).
Various studies indicate that 35 to 70 percent of women receiving mental health services report a history of childhood sexual abuse when asked. It’s also challenging to measure how many children experience psychological abuse or neglect, even though these forms of mistreatment are widespread (Briere, Godbout, & Runtz, 2012; Hart et al., 2011).
Any form of child trauma not only causes child traumatic stress but also increase the chances of being sexually or physically assaulted later in life, known as revictimization (Classen, Palesh, & Aggarwal, 2005; Duckworth & Follette, 2011).
Because it happens early in life when a child’s brain is susceptible (Pechtel & Pizzagalli, 2011; Pratchett & Yehuda, 2011) and when lasting beliefs about oneself, others, the world, and the future are developing (Messman-Moore & Coates, 2007), child abuse and neglect are likely to be among the most significant risk factors for later psychological difficulties compared to other traumatic events.
The History Of How We Deal With Trauma
In the early days of psychiatry and psychology, we believed childhood trauma was mainly about intrusive memories of bad experiences. Our initial approach was based on the simplistic idea that we could bring people back to normal by “dealing with” or “processing” specific traumatic events.
Over time, we understood that trauma, especially when it happens early in life within caregiving relationships, alters the development of the mind and brain. It influences perceptions, physical sensations and physiological reactions.
As a result, we understood that healing from prolonged trauma involves a profound reorganization in various aspects of functioning. People seldom seek out a mental health professional specifically for childhood trauma. Instead, they bravely talk to a stranger about their shameful and terrifying feelings because they feel desperate.
What most individuals will find however is that nothing seems to be working: they struggle with sleep, their appetite is affected, and they experience intense emotions even with minor challenges—the essential functions of their bodies seem to have broken down.
How Does Childhood Trauma Affect You As An Adult?
Many individuals who have experienced childhood trauma often grapple with low self-esteem; they may frequently upset those around them, find it challenging to feel at ease or close to others, sense a general disconnection, or feel emotionally numb.
When entering therapy, few people consciously link their current distress to past trauma. All they recognize is a sense of heartbreak and a knot in their guts.
In recent years, we’ve learned a lot about the physical reasons behind those feelings of alienation and the struggle with self-control. We now understand that the body holds onto these experiences, and trauma isn’t just a tale about something that occurred in the past.
The effects of long-ago experiences linger in the present, affecting the body, mind, and brain. The whole body gets stuck in the past and struggles to adapt to living in the present.
French psychologist Pierre Janet (1859–1947), a pioneer in child traumatic stress research, named his 1889 work “l’Automatisme Psychologique” or “psychological automatism.” He noticed that traumatized individuals instinctively repeat and relive sensations, emotions, and behaviors from the past.
He went on to label trauma as an illness where one can’t fully feel alive in the present. He also pointed out that traumatic experiences hinder the ability to mentally “process the event,” meaning to move it into the past. Overwhelming experiences can leave people speechless and unable to tell the story of what happened.
And that’s not all: trauma leads to additional changes that make it hard to learn from new experiences and take in fresh information. This only strengthens the hold of the past on the present.
Related Reading: Start The Healing Process From Childhood Trauma
What Increases The Likelihood, Intensity, or Complexity Of Trauma?
Trauma and the post-traumatic stress symptoms someone goes through depend on at least three areas:
1. Factors related to the person affected.
2. Nature of the stressful situation.
3. Reactions of those around the person.
Factors Related To The Person Affected
These are things about the person that existed before the trauma but are still linked to the likelihood of ongoing post-traumatic stress problems. Some of these factors (like gender, race, and poverty) increase the risk of child traumatic stress mainly because they are connected to social issues. Others might come from past trauma or mistreatment (such as previous mental health issues and challenging ways of coping).
The main factors increasing the risk for individuals having mental health challenges after a traumatic event include:
-Being female
-Age, with younger individuals at higher risk
-Race, with African Americans and Hispanics at higher risk than whites
-Poverty and low socioeconomic status
-Previous or coexisting mental health issues
-Less effective coping styles
-Family dysfunction or a family history of mental health issues
-Previous exposure to trauma
-A hyperreactive or dysfunctional nervous system
-Genetic predisposition, including epigenetic effects
-Greater distress at the time of or immediately after the trauma
The last factor, distress during or after the trauma (often called peritraumatic distress), is a big indicator of severe adult traumatic stress (PTSD). Peritraumatic distress happens when child trauma occurs, and shortly after that, the child receives anger, shame, or guilt.
Those who feel extremely distressed after a trauma seem to be more at risk for post-traumatic stress difficulties. This could be because they already have trouble handling stress and regulating emotions, experienced trauma before, or tend to see life events as beyond their control or potential threats.
