Signs of childhood trauma

Childhood Trauma

There is much greater awareness now around trauma, and how it affects childhood development. Very stressful experiences can occur at home or outside the home, including things like bullying, criticism, emotional neglect, violence, sexual abuse.

If it happens outside the home, and there are loving, supportive care-givers to help, trauma can be resolved quite quickly.

But if the trauma is at home, it may occur for years with nobody there to help the child feel safe and process their emotions. Highly dysfunctional families are very stressful places to survive as a helpless child. And how do we grow up properly when we are not getting the love and support we need for healthy development?

A child can be effected by trauma in various ways. Common signs of unresolved trauma are:

Low self-esteem, shame, unworthiness
Aggression, behavioural disorders
Social isolation, withdrawal
Trust, relationship issues
People-pleasing
Emotional dysregulation
Anxiety, depression, CPTSD
Substance, addiction issues
Personality disorders

Suggestion:

At the heart of psychotherapy is reparenting the wounded child. We remove the hurt, neglect, attacks and abuse, and replace them with love, kindness and care, all coming from our own adult self to the little self inside.

Be still a moment and drop your awareness within. Welcome forth your inner child. Gently connect with them as closely as they are comfortable.

Let your inner child know that childhood is over, you made it, you survived, you are safe now.

Hold them, open your heart to them, look them in the eye and tell them that you are here now to love and protect them, to give them everything they missed out on, that you will never leave them.

Notice how your child responds.

Repeat every day for a month. It will change your life.

From therapist Pete Walker:

“Trauma occurs when attack or abandonment triggers a fight/flight response so intensely that the person cannot turn it off once the threat is over. He becomes stuck in an adrenalised state. His sympathetic nervous system is locked “on” and he cannot toggle into the relaxation function of the parasympathetic nervous system.

If the trauma is not too continuous over too long a time, a short course of therapy may be all that is needed to resolve the trauma, provided of course the danger in the environment can effectively be remediated.

When the trauma however is repetitive and ongoing and no help is available, the child may become so frozen in trauma that the symptoms of PTSD begin to set in”.

Source: Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving