By Anna McKenzie
Childhood trauma can have a lasting effect on your health and development. A childhood trauma workshop can help you heal the wounds of your past, develop new coping skills, build your self-esteem, and restore your physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
The Effects of Childhood Trauma
What constitutes childhood trauma? Trauma may occur when you perceive that your life, livelihood, or sense of self is being severely threatened. Beyond injuries, accidents, illnesses, and natural disasters, some examples of childhood trauma include experiencing or witnessing violence, being abused or neglected by a caregiver, parental drug use, dysfunction in the home, losing a caregiver, being bullied, living in poverty, being socially isolated, or experiencing a betrayal of trust by an authority. The experience, severity, and effects of trauma vary based on the individual, as well as the circumstances surrounding the event or repeated events.
The effects of childhood trauma can be long-lasting and increase in complexity over time. As children, we’re dependent, more vulnerable, and often unable to escape from people or situations that may cause us harm. We develop coping skills to deal with what we’ve experienced, but the skills that kept us safe in childhood don’t work for us in adulthood. We become stuck in the past, focused on survival, and less able to mature as healthy people.
How Does Childhood Trauma Affect Emotional Resiliency?
Having childhood trauma doesn’t determine your future. In fact, you can resolve the pain of the past and become a stronger and more resilient person as a result. Further still, resiliency can be passed down to your children. So even if you’ve been dealing with many issues related to childhood trauma, there’s no reason to despair: Healing and growth are still possible for you.
In our Beyond Theory podcast, Meadows Senior Fellow Dr. Claudia Black explains, “Whatever our levels of trauma have been, even experienced trauma doesn’t dictate that you’re going to live a life of misery [or] a life of major dysfunction. There’s various degrees of resiliency and vulnerability … [It’s] not [a] given that you’re going to have a messed-up life, even if you’ve come from a history with a lot of trauma.” Dr. Black further explains that emotional resiliency is highly impacted by the age in which we traumatic stress first entered our lives and how much additional trauma ensued.
Indicators of Childhood Trauma
The first step in dealing with childhood trauma is recognizing its effects. According to Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services’ TIP 57 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), here are some issues you may be dealing with if you experienced trauma in childhood:
Initial Reactions:
- Exhaustion
- Confusion
- Sadness
- Anxiety
- Agitation
- Numbness
- Disassociation
- Physical arousal
- Blunted affect
Delayed Responses to Childhood Trauma:
- Persistent fatigue
- Sleep disorders
- Nightmares
- Fear of recurrence
- Anxiety focused on flashbacks
- Depression
- Avoidance of emotions, sensations, and activities associated with the trauma
Severe reactions to childhood trauma may include chronic distress, severe dissociation symptoms, and intense intrusive recollections that continue despite safe circumstances.
How Does Childhood Trauma Impact Development?
Childhood trauma has many other effects on your emotional maturity as a person. You can have difficulty regulating your emotions, which can create attachment and intimacy issues, as well as the propensity to abuse substances.
“If I’m living with any kind of trauma … if it’s chronic, [I] become what we call emotionally dysregulated, and [I] become stuck in a trauma response,” says Dr. Black. “Almost typically, when I grow up and I leave the home at 17 years of age, I take with me 17 years of dysregulation; it doesn’t just disappear.”
Dr. Black continues that people who have experienced childhood trauma often possess survival skills that allow them to appear fine to those around them. “But the problems are going to begin to show usually about mid-20s. That’s when they start trying to have some intimate relationships. So they don’t know how to have intimacy,” she says. Challenges can also surface during this time when entering the workforce full-time is common for young adults. “The problems show themselves in some slight ways, but the problems often aren’t even a crisis until they’re in their 30s, 40s, or even 50s,” Dr. Black explains.
Childhood Trauma Treatment: Addressing the Past
Because childhood trauma can have a variety of effects and influence your life far into adulthood, treatment can provide relief, breakthroughs, and a much healthier trajectory for personal development.
According to the Journal of American College Health, childhood trauma can increase your risk of behavioral issues in adolescence and adulthood, including alcohol abuse, high-risk sexual behavior, disordered eating, and self-harm.
Alcohol Research cites several studies where trauma is connected to the development of addiction. One study reveals exposure to trauma in over 3,700 female twins doubled the risk of developing alcohol dependence. In another study of men and women in addiction treatment, 62% reported that they had experienced physical or sexual abuse in childhood. A third review of studies that focused on people seeking treatment for addiction showed 50% or more of the participants also had PTSD.
Research from Child Abuse & Neglect indicated childhood trauma rates were especially high among nonheterosexual individuals. Of the 3,508 participants, all between ages 14-18, nearly 34% reported they were pansexual, about 27% reported they were bisexual, and 16% reported they were queer. In total, the participants reported multiple adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), including emotional neglect (58%), emotional abuse (56%), and living with a family member with mental illness (51%).
How can childhood trauma be addressed so that it doesn’t continue to impact your present or future? The first step is recognizing the trauma and clearly understanding your story — getting a clear picture of what happened and separating it from your identity and the present moment.
“Acknowledging past abuse can be an important step for clients in treatment because it breaks the secrecy and shame that are so often part of the abuse legacy,” reports SAMHSA’s Substance Abuse Treatment for Persons with Persons with Child Abuse and Neglect Issues.
The next step is talking to a sympathetic listener who can also help you understand that whatever you experienced is situated in the past. That person — most helpfully a licensed treatment professional — can draw distinctions between your emotions as a child and the choices available to you now as an adult. A childhood trauma workshop can provide a valuable opportunity for this experience.
As psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein wrote in The New York Times, “The willingness to face traumas — be they large, small, primitive, or fresh — is the key to healing from them.”
Personal Growth Workshops for Continued Healing
As a Meadows Behavioral Healthcare alum, you still have access to tools and resources through Onward that can help you when you need it. We are here to help you connect and stay on the path of wellness as things come your way. The personal growth and development workshops we offer at Rio Retreat Center at The Meadows are just one of the many ways you can continue learning and working on being your best self. Whether through THRIVE, Men’s Sexual Recovery, Coming Home for LGBTQ+, or a number of other workshops, we can help you overcome any unexpected challenges that might throw you for a loop in your recovery. Reach out today to learn more about our workshops, as well as everything our Alumni program has to offer.