If you experienced trauma as a child, whether you are aware of it or not, these deeply rooted troubles can show up in your adult life, often impacting you in unsuspecting ways.
Maybe you’ve recently been feeling unexplainable anxiety or depression that you felt you had left in the past. Perhaps you sense yourself withdrawing and building up walls. If you feel your mental health slipping, there is a chance unresolved childhood trauma is rising to the surface.
While you may be feeling overwhelmed by long-forgotten feelings, there are many steps you can take to heal. The first step of healing is acknowledging the problem, so in this article, I offer a guide to answer the question: is childhood trauma impacting you as an adult?
What is Unresolved Trauma?
As a child, we operate primarily on a subconscious level. Studies have shown that in children, the two lowest frequency brainwaves, theta and delta, predominate. These are the brainwaves adults experience during sleep, hypnosis, and deep meditation.
This brain state not only accounts for children’s vivid imagination, but also allows children to subconsciously absorb massive amounts of information for survival. Trauma from this stage of life can therefore burrow so deep beneath the surface of consciousness that you may not even be aware of it.
In fact, the brain will often ‘forget’ these painful experiences as a coping mechanism. But what the brain forgets, the body certainly remembers. The energetic imprint of these traumas can quite literally settle in your bones.
What the brain forgets, the body will remember.
Although traditional talk therapy can help alleviate the symptoms of unresolved trauma, it rarely reaches the root, meaning you may re-experience the emotional upheaval of this trauma whenever in the face of extreme stress.
What Can Cause Childhood Trauma?
Trauma in childhood may be glaringly obvious. What I refer to as ‘macro-traumas’ may include experiencing or witnessing physical or sexual abuse. However, there are many other kinds of trauma and ‘micro-traumas’ that you may have dismissed throughout your life as ‘normal.’
You may have experienced one or more of the following situations that may be affecting your current mental health:
Neglect
Loss of a parent through death or divorce
Serious childhood illness or a family member with a serious illness
A learning disability
Bullying from other children
Too many siblings
Parents who were detached, emotionally unavailable, or overly anxious
Parents with childhood trauma
Neglect Childhood neglect exists on a spectrum, so it’s important to not brush off your experience as ‘normal,’ even if you don’t feel that it was a worst-case-scenario. Whatever the cause, your emotional or physical needs may have been unseen, ignored, or resented.
If you had numerous siblings, you may have felt there was never enough to go around. Maybe you experienced feeling lost and pushed aside, or maybe you were the oldest and your parents treated you more like a caregiver than a child. Perhaps you felt that you had to push your own needs aside and consistently give in order to receive love.
Illness
No one wants to suffer from serious illness, but it is especially unfair when it occurs at such an early stage of life. If you experienced significant illness as a child, you likely spent a lot of time isolated at home or in a hospital.
Severe illness is often accompanied by traumatizing procedures, separation from your loved ones, and constant fear. When you make it through the worst of it, you still may feel the heavy weight of persistent anxiety.
You may have felt lonely or worried about being different. When you were finally able to return to normal life, you probably experienced a lack of social confidence.
Learning Challenges
If you struggled with conditions such as dyslexia, ADHD, or other challenges as a child, you may have been unfairly compared to other children and naturally began comparing yourself. This can take a toll on your self-image.
After constantly working to the point of burn-out to ‘be better,’ you became frustrated or hopeless. Now you may feel the need to be a perfectionist, yet still never feel good enough.
Bullying
Your struggles with school or socializing may have made you a target for bullying, which was brushed off as ‘kids being kids.’ You were told to be tough and resilient while your attackers never saw retribution. After all, ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ Sound familiar?
This attitude towards bullying instills the impression that people can get away with hurting others. It also lays a foundation for poor boundary setting. Throughout your life, you may have let people walk all over you. Maybe you even became the bully yourself because of the pain you experienced and the lack of consequences you witnessed.
Learn More > Helping Your Child Heal from Trauma
The Effect of Trauma on Adulthood
There are many events and circumstances from childhood that can have a negative impact on your adult life. No matter how hard you’ve tried to move on from challenges in your earlier years, childhood trauma can follow you like a shadow throughout your life. You may not know it’s there, but symptoms appear when you’re stressed such as:
Depression
Panic disorder
Eating disorders
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
Relationship challenges
Low self-esteem
Fear of judgement
People-pleasing
Frustration
Social anxiety
The Path to Healing
Without the right kind of therapy, you may never truly overcome unresolved childhood trauma. However, fortunately, healing is possible with the right help and under the right conditions. In my practice at Jolisa Clare Holistic, we target the root of your trauma with Emotional Polarity Technique™.
I will help you regulate your nervous system by cooling down the sympathetic nervous system, also known as ‘fight or flight’ and stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, or ‘rest and digest.’ Together, we will remove trauma that is burdening your energetic field and return your body and mind to a state of balance.
When healing ourselves from childhood trauma, we must approach the body and spirit as we would approach a child- with love, compassion, sensitivity, and forgiveness.
Let Go of the Past with Jolisa Clare
You don’t have to live with the constant roller coaster of symptoms that can appear when you have unresolved trauma. In my practice, you and I will work to make sure the lost child within you feels safe and seen.
While healing from this kind of pain doesn’t happen overnight, we can bring your inner-most demons to the surface and let them know we understand them and see them. Only through this kind of subconscious peeling back of layers can we truly let go of the past that is holding us back.
If you are ready to take the step to starting your healing journey, I am here for you. Call me, Jolisa Clare, today for your free consultation call.
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