A Guide to Childhood Trauma

Exhausted from putting on a front of coping
Profoundly alone, because no-one knows what is really going on
Isolated, because no-one you know shares your experience
That you can’t keep doing this
That no-one understands what you are going through
That it’s so hard to keep it together when you have kids/partner/family/housemates etc.
That if you start crying you might never stop
That you are going crazy / or your greatest fear is going crazy
That your childhood wasn’t that bad, so you have no right to feel like this
Or your childhood was really bad, so you’re beyond help
That you were doing really well, for years, but all of a sudden, everything is falling apart, and you can’t understand why

Do any of those sound familiar?

What’s really happening? The way you’re feeling now is more than likely rooted in your past. Even though lots of things might be happening in life right now and causing stress and pain, the intensity of the pain is usually caused by earlier experiences.

Don’t worry, it should all make sense soon. But first, let’s return to your childhood.

There are so many ways a child can be traumatised. But the particular type of childhood trauma I will be talking about, and the trauma I specialise in, is relational trauma. It’s a particularly harmful type of trauma that can create lifelong impacts unless treated.

Childhood relational trauma

Relational trauma happens in a relationship between a child and someone significant in their life who holds power over them (typically a parent), but it can be a carer, teacher, coach, family member etc. Trauma that occurs in adult-child relationships is damaging, because there is the trauma itself, but also, 1) there is the betrayal of a person who is supposed to love and take care of you and is also harming you and 2) the abuse is rarely a once off occurrence, it usually happens again and again over years, resulting in 10s, hundreds, if not thousands of trauma experiences.

So, having defined the type of childhood trauma I’m talking about -trauma that happens within a relationship between a child and someone that has power or authority over them-I’ll list some of the types. Again, the list is far from definitive.

Types of relational trauma

Sexual abuse
Witnessing or experiencing family violence
Neglect of physical needs e.g., clothing, food, shelter, money etc.
Neglect of emotional needs
Death of a parent
Parental psychiatric or physical illness
Excessive physical discipline from parents
Sibling incest
Religious trauma
School bullying and not receiving adequate support/protection from adults
Not having a parent to go to for emotional support.
Parental drug or alcohol abuse or other addictions
Having your privacy and/or boundaries consistently violated
Parentification – when you feel responsible for your parent’s wellbeing, they confide their problems to you, or feel you must take care of them.
A mum who wasn’t ‘there’ / present with you due to post-natal depression, chronic dissociation or another issue that prevented her connecting with you.
Being highly sensitive and having parents who were unable to understand you and meet your emotional needs for validation, connection and emotional understanding.
Being autistic and being coached to be neurotypical rather than validated for who you are.
Being gender diverse and receiving persistent subtle or strong messages that you should be cisgender and/or adhere to gender norms.
Being gay and receiving subtle or strong and consistent messages that you should be straight and/or adhere to gender norms
Having your normal development restricted (e.g., a teenager being restricted from socialising with the opposite sex or going to parties).
Being consistently told that you’re wrong, making things up, or don’t feel the way you’ve said you feel.

But does my past really affect me now?

The difficulty with childhood trauma is that it doesn’t always leave behind an obvious trace. Some of the damage can be obvious, like when a highly critical parent leaves you with low self-esteem or sexual-abuse results in issues with sex. But the impact of other trauma remains hidden, both because the symptoms seem unrelated to their cause and our culture does not recognise the more subtle types of trauma as traumatic (yet they are just as impactful).

Check out this list of childhood trauma symptoms (again, it’s a very brief list and far from comprehensive, but I just want to give you a sample of symptoms that are common but not obviously connected to childhood trauma).

Symptoms often overlooked as signs of childhood trauma

Depression
Overwhelm
Substance abuse
Anxiety
Hopelessness
Deep loneliness
Panic attacks
Identity/not knowing who you are
Eating disorders
Shame
Nightmares
Self-harm
Worthlessness
Large memory gaps
Flashbacks
Mistrust in others
Dissociation
Workaholism
A critical inner voice

If you haven’t seen these symptoms as trauma symptoms you are not alone. Most of the medical and much of the psychiatric world does not see them that way either.

Trauma memories

Trauma symptoms are memories

Believe it or not, these symptoms are actually childhood memories.

Do you need a minute to take that in?

Except for eating disorders, substance abuse and self-harm (which are a way of dealing with the memories), the other symptoms are bodily memories of how you felt during the different traumas you experienced as a child.

The difficulty is, we don’t recognise these symptoms as memories, because they’re nothing like the memories we’re familiar with.

How a non-traumatic memory is formed and stored

Figure 1. Memory components
From Susan Pease-Banitt (2019) Wisdom, attachment, and love in trauma therapy.

For example, a typical non-traumatic memory has all the elements from the figure above

A Narrative or story
Sense memories (sight, sound, hearing, smell, taste, and touch)
Feeling state (emotions)
Whole memory (a combination of the elements above that can be put into words).

A non-traumatic memory might go like this – The day my partner and I brought our new puppy Rosie home, I remember her sweet puppy smell, how small she looked on my lap as we drove. I listened to her breathing, felt the softness of her fur, and experienced a mix of feelings like love and excitement, knowing my daughter would meet her for the first time soon. In this memory, each sensory element – smell, sight, sound, touch, (not taste!) was stored in one part of my brain, and the feelings in different parts of my brain. Then, my hippocampus integrated these sensory details, emotions and information in chronological order and perspective, creating a whole memory I could put into words.

How a traumatic memory is formed and stored

When your body or mind faces trauma, your nervous system shifts to survival mode. To maximise speed, all non-essential parts of your brain shut down, including the ability to pause (which would waste valuable seconds) along with conscious decision making and fully comprehending the experience. Your nervous system is focused on preparing your body to flee, fight, freeze in fear, or surrender when escape isn’t possible (children, in particular, are almost entirely dependent on freezing and submission). If you’re interested, this article will give you a lot more detail on the fight/flight/freeze collapse response, and dissociation in particular.

Normally, after the trauma, memory processing would happen. Remember your hippocampus? Its job is to integrate different sensory elements and information, put them into chronological order, make sense of them, and transfer them to the verbal memory areas of your brain while you sleep. This process allows you to later put the experience into words.

But with trauma, a heightened state of arousal and dissociation can shut down your hippocampus, which prevents proper memory integration. As a result, the brain separates the components of the traumatic memory to protect the child from becoming overwhelmed, which makes it hard to create a cohesive narrative of what happened.

After trauma, you are left with an inadequate memory of what happened and how you got through it.

Triggers are memory fragments

When you are ‘triggered’, you experience one of these memory fragments.

Most trauma survivors experience intense emotions linked to memory fragments, often without realising they are recalling past trauma.

For example –

you might find yourself feeling anxious about your partner being unfaithful despite them giving you no reason to distrust them
you might feel frightened and overwhelmed when your partner expresses their love and desire to become closer
maybe you get unexplained physical sensations of pain every time you get sexually turned on
certain smells make you want to vomit even though most people consider those smells neutral
maybe certain situations make you feel like a young child, and you just can’t shake that feeling
even repetitive nightmares, dreams and some sexual fantasies can be trauma memories

It’s hard to see these triggers as memories because they don’t play back in our minds like regular memories.

A normal memory would play back in our minds with the visual components and the story. But trauma memories are fragmented, so they playback with only one or two elements, usually the emotion, so we don’t recognise them as memories. But we feel crazy, because we have such strong emotional reactions to them.

Trauma leaves fragmented memories

Especially in early childhood, and for people who have had one or more severe traumas, instead of complete memory that can be put into words, each component of the memory stays stored in different parts of your brain (see the top three squares of Figure 1).

When you are ‘triggered’ or have symptoms, you are probably experiencing one out of three of those memory components or fragments, the other two parts of the complete memory are segmented off in your brain. It’s really hard to know you are experiencing a memory fragment, you probably just feel crazy, anxious or depressed. We need all three of the memory components for it to feel like a ‘real’ memory. Read this article if it would help you to have it all explained in another way.

A note on repressed memories

If two or three of these fragmented components link back together, people often feel like they’ve discovered a new memory, while at the same time feeling like they’ve uncovered something they’ve known all along; something akin to a déjà vu feeling. You’ll notice this is quite different to media representations that will have you believe that repressed memories are the unearthing of entirely new memories.

If you’re constantly triggered it can feel overwhelming and like there is no escape. But healing is completely possible, and therapy can help you to finally experience some relief.

Healing childhood trauma with emotion focused therapy (EFT)

EFT can help you heal from childhood relational trauma. Instead of just talking about emotions or past experiences, EFT helps you feel, process and transform your emotions in the session, which gives a deeper level of healing.

Another amazing thing about EFT (disclosure; I am very biased!) is that you don’t have to know the cause of your symptoms. It works beyond the thinking mind, allowing you to access deeper emotional experiences and memories that are often out of reach consciously. This allows your symptoms to be healed at the root of the issue.

The following steps aren’t mutually exclusive. For example, Step One doesn’t need to be completed before starting Step Two. It’s an ongoing step that is worked on throughout therapy.

Step 1 – Therapy safety

The first step in therapy is feeling safe and developing trust when you’re in session with me. Mistrust comes up in all sorts of ways when you’ve experienced relational trauma, some examples are –

Will she like me? / Why would she like me?
Will therapy help? / I don’t think therapy can help me
Will she judge me? / She’ll judge me, everyone does
Will she understand? / She won’t understand so I won’t tell her
Will she blame me? / I know she will blame me so I won’t tell her
Will she really care? / She’s probably just in it for the money

Feeling safe and able to trust allows you to feel secure enough to explore painful emotions and begin the healing process. Without this safety, it’s hard to trust that anyone can truly understand or help. For some people, this process is complete within a few minutes, whereas for others it can take years. Both are ok, for some of you, deep healing around trust IS the therapy and the trauma work.

Step 2 – Emotional safety

Emotional safety is about helping you develop tools so that you don’t get overwhelmed by your emotions and can stay present with them. For someone with childhood relational trauma, intense emotions can often feel like they’re taking over, making it hard to manage distress. Through this process, you’ll gradually build emotional safety, allowing you to experience your emotions without the fear of being consumed by them. As we gently start exploring trauma in the next phase, you’ll need these skills, as emotions and memories from the past get activated.

Step 3 – Trauma Processing

Once therapy and emotional safety is in place, we can start the deeper work of processing trauma.

In EFT, trauma processing involves accessing and working with your body and brain’s memory of the source of your issue, where the fragmented memories of trauma are stored in the brain. Using Melissa Harte’s Extended Focusing model, I help you access all components of the memory (see Figure 1)—the sensations, emotions, and narrative—so that we can integrate them into a whole memory. This process transforms your brain’s neural pathways, shifting them from a trauma state of fear, for example, to one of safety (with many variations in emotional transformation depending on the trauma). The result is freedom, because your triggers no longer trigger you.

Other EFT Tasks for healing childhood relational trauma

EFT has other techniques that are powerful with trauma. One key step in EFT is accessing needs that parents weren’t able to meet, which we often do using a technique called the empty chair. In this exercise, you imagine sitting across from the person who caused you pain, like a parent who didn’t see or hear you. This allows you to express feelings and unmet needs in a safe way, giving a voice to what was left unsaid. It might sound a bit unusual, but it’s a powerful way to connect with the emotional pain you carry and finally express what you needed but didn’t receive.

There are other pretty awesome techniques, like one transformative one for dealing with a critical voice, another one that helps you soothe that pain and emptiness that comes from emotional neglect.

Overall, what can I say, EFT is great! It helps heal childhood relational trauma by processing past trauma in a way that leads to real emotional change.

References

Banitt, S. P. (2019). Wisdom, attachment, and love in trauma therapy. Beyond evidence-based practice. Routledge, New York.
Chu, JA (2011) Rebuilding Shattered Lives: Treating Complex PTSD and Dissociative Disorders, 2nd edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons
Fisher, J. (2021). Transforming the living legacy of trauma: A workbook for survivors and therapists. PESI Publishing & Media.
Fisher, J. (n.d.). Working with the neurobiological legacy of early trauma. Janina Fisher. Retrieved from http://www.janinafisher.com
Harte, M. (2019). Processing emotional pain using emotion focused therapy: A guide to safely working with and resolving emotional injuries and trauma. Australian Academic Press.