How Childhood Trauma Impacts Adult Mental Health and Relationships
Childhood trauma has far-reaching effects, shaping the course of our lives in significant ways. Depending on several factors, including genetic predisposition, temperament, position in the family, and how young we were when encountering adverse childhood events, we may be burdened with a variety of symptoms.
For women recovering from addiction and mental health disorders, it’s important to recognize childhood trauma effects when they show up within our own personalities and patterns of relating. We will want to invest some amount of personal work healing our inner child, and undergo trauma therapy, in order to restore our true selves and regain control of how we show up in the world with others.
It is not necessary to fight darkness, but rather to turn on a light, the saying goes. It is very similar with traumatization. By restoring the flow of life force within the body, psyche, and spirit, trauma blockages will eventually dissolve, allowing psychological development that was once arrested to proceed.
The first step is to recognize trauma’s presence by its signature energetics and impacts. In this post, we take a look at how trauma affects adult mental health and relationships.
The Lasting Impact of Childhood Trauma on Women’s Lives
In order to complete the most basic developmental tasks involved with growing up physically, emotionally, and mentally into a healthy, high-functioning adult, a degree of physical and psychological safety is required. Safety means both that we are nurtured and that we are protected. All humans have needs and boundaries. Children cannot thrive when developmental needs are unmet, nor when boundaries are violated.
Provided we are sufficiently nurtured and protected, we naturally grow up, learning in a self-directed fashion through exploratory play and interactions with people, animals, and nature. In addition to safety, we need a high amount of autonomy – the chance, permission, and support to grow into our own unique self, in our own unique way.
For a variety of reasons, many families are not able to provide the right mix of safety and autonomy that is required for children to have a healthy sense of self. In fact, our families may have done very poorly in one or more requirements of meeting needs, protecting boundaries, and supporting autonomy. If our families did a good job of this, that still doesn’t mean that our peers and teachers were able to.
It’s important to understand that trauma is not in the events themselves, but in the way that a human nervous system responds to certain events. Many relatively common childhood experiences are identified by trauma experts as being traumatogenic, which means that children who are exposed to such adverse events tend to develop recognizable symptoms of trauma and even patterns of personality. Examples of traumatizing childhood events include physical, sexual and emotional abuse, physical and emotional neglect, having a parent who uses substances, witnessing domestic violence in the home, and separation, death of a parent, or divorce.
What this means is that if you survived such circumstances in your childhood, chances are high that this impacted you in ways that are so ingrained into your personality and way of perceiving the world, that the effect might be invisible to you. Common signs of having been traumatized in childhood include sleep disorders, substance abuse, relationship troubles, intense emotions including fear and anger, spacing out, fatigue, illness, inability to relax, and shame.
Understanding How Early Experiences Shape Adult Patterns
The key to understanding how untreated trauma from childhood affects life as an adult lies in recognizing trauma’s presence underneath cognitive, emotional, and behavioral patterns. Many mental and behavioral health symptoms can be unmasked as ingenious adaptations to trauma. Symptoms are likely to be mechanisms for coping with stress from being exposed to too many threats in the past. An excess of fear and anger indicates unintegrated experiences of being exposed to impacts which were life-threatening and violating.
Keep in mind that events can be traumatizing to the human nervous system, brain and body, even when the people who affected us didn’t mean to hurt us. Remember also that many aspects of our culture which the majority of people consider to be normal are considered by some experts in the field to be lightly or even heavily traumatizing.
We can begin to recognize trauma by getting curious about ourselves. Specifically, we must ditch the idea that we are sick, and ask instead how a symptom is helping us. What is the purpose of our depression? How does our irritability help us? What is anxiety good for?
When we get to know our anxiety, irritability, anger, and depression, as well as our seemingly counterproductive behaviors like substance use, self-sabotage, and low self-compassion, we may come to see that in actual fact, these legacy symptoms once helped us adapt to an environment that was trauma-generating. If we have symptoms of excess fear (anxiety, insomnia, dissociation) and excess anger (depression, irritability, self-harm, etc), that almost certainly means that we have spent some time in an environment that failed to meet our developmental and nurturance needs, violated our natural boundaries, or both.
Breaking Free from Trauma Bonds and Unhealthy Relationships
It isn’t easy to heal trauma, but it is absolutely possible and certainly worth it. One area of life which can improve significantly through trauma healing is relationships with loved ones.
If you experienced physical or emotional neglect, physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or any combination of those in your early years, it is very likely that you have had trouble with founding and maintaining healthy relationships as an adult. You probably unconsciously sought out partners with whom you would experience a bond that resembles the bond you had with the same people who neglected or abused you.
This may mean that you accept a low level of nurturance, a high level of boundary violation, or both. You may have an enmeshed, codependent relationship, in which you give your partner the love that you actually always needed to receive. You may prefer partners that treat you in a way that matches your own low self-esteem – with some level of neglect, misunderstanding, or disregard.
All of this is terribly common among women, and please hear us that this isn’t your fault. Rather, fraught relationships are unavoidable until trauma is addressed. Until we have healed our trauma, we likely wouldn’t know healthy love if it walked right up to us. Rather, we will tend to fall intensely in love with people who have similar patterns of relating as the people who hurt us the most.
Nevertheless, each relationship attempt, even when it clearly mimics certain patterns of our childhood, is also a sign that deep inside, we have not given up on trying to get the genuine and appropriate love that we have always wanted and needed. And the good news is that, through trauma healing, we get one very important bonus: a chance at experiencing that love. We get this love when we activate our inner Self (https://ifs-institute.com/resources/articles/larger-self), becoming a source of the parenting, kindness, and even adoration that we always needed. We become the loving person we have always needed to have in our lives.
Learning to love ourselves, to recognize our own value, we attract a higher quality of emotional intelligence in partners, and interact differently with existing love relationships than we used to. Overall, we can expect that we gradually learn to behave with dignity and self-compassion, requiring that others treat us the same.
Reclaim Your Story with Compassionate Trauma Treatment
To live openheartedly and authentically in this world, amid the interference of loud and often self-conflicting trauma symptoms; amid emotional instability, self-attack, and demoralizing outcomes; amid escalating substance abuse, relationship problems, and career struggles; it has undoubtedly been a lot for you at times.
But hear this: trauma healing is possible. The work that it takes is worth it. The path of healing is emotionally intense, it’s true – but nothing you haven’t already been living with every day since the trauma started. There will be psychological pain at times, yes – but no more intense than the pain you already cope with. There is nothing to lose by healing trauma, and a lot to gain. In facing trauma, you risk short term triggering – having to re-experience what you already have experienced, and most likely still re-experience on repeat – for the potential reward of at last healing the wounds in a permanent way.
You might be surprised, furthermore, to find out how sweet, rewarding, deepening, and meaningful the trauma healing journey is. You might feel silly for not starting the journey earlier, and have to remind yourself that you needed all the time you did, to get to the point of facing it. You might be happy with every aspect of your history, in the end, recognizing how each wounding poison also brought its own magnificent antidote into your life. You just might.
Villa Kali Ma offers trauma-informed treatment for women struggling with substance addiction and mental health disorders. We also run a state-of-the-art trauma treatment center, offering several forms of cutting-edge treatments for helping women address their trauma.
