How Does Childhood Trauma Impact An Adult?
What happens to us as children can follow us throughout our lives. Childhood trauma is a distressing event or series of events that a child during their formative years. It can be due to abuse, neglect, the loss of a loved one, or witnessing traumatic events.
Childhood trauma can have a significant impact on a person’s development and wellbeing, and it can affect their mental health and relationships well into adulthood. With treatments such as therapy and self-discovery, healing from childhood trauma is possible.
What is childhood trauma?
Trauma includes a variety of experiences, ranging from neglect, sexual, physical, or emotional abuse, grief, poverty, and witnessing violence. It can also be caused by environmental factors such as natural disasters, surviving an accident, or living in wartime. Depending on a child’s development level, family history with trauma, culture and community, and available resources, each person will react differently to traumatic events. Sometimes things we might not normally consider trauma can be disturbing and stick with a child through to adulthood.
Attachment styles and trauma
Children who experience trauma may have difficulty forming and maintaining healthy relationships later in life. They may struggle with trust and intimacy, which can lead to difficulties with romantic partners, friends, and coworkers. Because they most likely felt unsafe in their home and around caregivers, many survivors of childhood trauma have trouble with attachment to romantic partners. They’re more likely to show avoidant, fearful, ambivalent, and disorganized attachment styles than those who developed secure attachments early in life.
Trauma’s effect on physical health
Trauma can cause changes in the body’s stress response system, which can increase the risk of developing chronic illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes. Prolonged exposure to stress hormones disrupts your body’s normal processes since it’s continually in fight-or-flight mode. Trauma can also cause changes in the immune system, which can lead to a weakened immune response and an increased risk of infection. Some health issues may be due to poor self-care as a result of mental health struggles as well.
Trauma and negative coping skills
Childhood trauma can make it difficult for a person to cope with stress and adversity in healthy ways. They might turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as avoidance, dissociation, or self-harm, which can be harmful to their mental and physical health. Survivors of childhood trauma are also at a greater risk of addiction than those who aren’t. Trauma can lead to a sense of shame, guilt, and self-blame, which can contribute to substance abuse. People who have experienced childhood trauma may turn to drugs or alcohol to numb their emotional pain or to cope with stress and anxiety.
Parenting after childhood trauma
Adults who experienced trauma as children may have difficulty regulating their emotions, which can affect their ability to parent their own children. They may struggle with attachment, empathy, and understanding their child’s needs, which can lead to difficulties in the parent-child relationship. Parents who have had traumatic childhoods might be overly controlling, shelter their child, and have a hard time emotionally connecting. This contributes to a cycle of trauma and dysfunction within families.
How to start the healing journey
Even if it feels like your childhood trauma will always affect you, help is available. Talk to a therapist about how your childhood is negatively impacting your adult life. They’ll help you come to terms with what happened to you and understand how to move forward. Processing your traumatic history doesn’t mean dismissing or forgetting about it. Instead, you’ll learn to work on your negative thoughts and emotions surrounding past events and how to improve your adult life.
To find out more about how therapy can help you cope with trauma in your childhood, please reach out to us for trauma therapy.
