Overcoming a Painful Past: 4 Tips for Healing Childhood Trauma
“Oh look, how cute!”
You’ve been roped into looking at the family picture albums again. You leaf through snapshots of relatives you met once when you were three. You flip past pictures of your parents with various fad hairstyles that you know were hip at the time, but now seem impossibly dated.
And then, it happens; you come to a photo from a time in your childhood you know you don’t want to remember. You don’t want to ruin anyone else’s fun, so you close the book quickly and pass it on.
You don’t know why you’re suddenly so uncomfortable and sad. You aren’t even sure you remember why that time in your life is so hard to look back on, and you don’t want to make a fuss, so you’re stuck, unhappy and confused. What’s going on?
How to Recognize Childhood Trauma
This kind of discomfort around remembering certain times in your childhood can be a sign of childhood trauma. But your childhood was a long time ago, why is this coming up for you now? Whatever you’ve been through, those experiences imprinted themselves into your psyche, stored as memory fragments and bodily sensations and smells. Whether it was that photo album or something your partner did, those traumatic memories are making their way to the surface, demanding to be dealt with once and for all.
You don’t have to suffer alone; there’s help available once you recognize that something isn’t quite right about how you feel. First thing’s first though, let’s take a look at how trauma shows up for children, and then in adults who experienced childhood trauma.
Trauma in Children’s Lives
Trauma is typically defined as a person’s emotional response to a serious event in their life. Traumatic experiences can impact your brain long-term, making it difficult to differentiate between the past and the present when your trauma is triggered, and causing your brain to try hard to protect you from threats through hyper-vigilance.
Trauma can impact childrens’ lives in several ways, but it can be hard to tell the extent of the impact for any particular event or ongoing trauma. Children aren’t as able to communicate how they feel or what they’re thinking, and childhood trauma can even impact memory formation, so remembering exact events isn’t always possible. Healing traumatic wounds from childhood once you’ve reached adulthood can be tricky.
The most common traumatic events a child may experience include:
Neglect from caregivers
Death of a loved one
Verbal abuse
Physical or sexual abuse
An accident or a debilitating medical condition
Bullying or peer trauma
How Childhood Trauma Shows Up In Adults
When childhood trauma is not addressed, a child will cope as best they can. They’ll grow into an adult who does the same, until they realize their signs and symptoms are something that can be helped with support and therapy.
But you might find yourself asking, how can I heal from childhood trauma I don’t even remember?
How to Recognize Trauma in Your Life
Trauma can show up in your life in a variety of ways, including physical symptoms, emotional symptoms, and behavioral symptoms. The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment lists the following, and many more, as manifestations of trauma:
Exhaustion, difficulty sleeping, and/or sleeping excessively
Mysterious aches and pains
Panic attacks or anxiety issues
Feeling overly emotional, or being closed off from your emotions
Being angry, irritable, impatient
Feeling like the future is meaningless, or like you can’t impact it at all
Avoiding people, places, or activities
Hyper-vigilance, or always spending energy waiting for something to happen
Losing interest in things you used to take joy in doing
Isolating yourself
Keeping as busy as you can, all the time (to avoid thinking about how you’re feeling)
Flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts
All of these, and more can be signs that you’re being impacted by childhood trauma. Healing trauma from childhood, including healing childhood sexual trauma, starts by recognizing the ways your trauma shows through in your body, your emotions, and your behaviors.
Overcoming a Painful Past: What Now?
You’ve come to the conclusion that you’ve experienced childhood trauma, and you know you want to start healing from trauma from your childhood as well. What now?
There are several steps you can take toward healing, but first, we want to take a moment to recognize you. You’ve put in hard work to get to where you are right now, work that has required introspection into difficult feelings and memories. Deciding you’re ready to continue that work, with support, community, and guidance, is a very big deal. Please know that you have strengths beyond what you may have realized.
Steps You Can Take Toward Healing Childhood Trauma
Step One: Acknowledge and Educate Yourself
Now may be the time to acknowledge that you experienced childhood trauma. Even if you can’t remember all the details, you know that your emotional discomfort and your physical manifestations of your trauma tell you the truth. It can be hard to consider this reality, but it will take you far in terms of better understanding what has happened to you, and where to go from here.
This is also an opportunity to educate yourself on childhood trauma. You can find resources online about childhood trauma, or seek out a trauma informed therapist to work with you to better understand what you’ve experienced and how it has impacted you.
There is an increasing body of knowledge about trauma and the effects of adverse childhood experiences, and with that comes an increasing knowledge of how to help people who are dealing with these difficulties.
Step Two: Be Gentle With Yourself on Your Path to Healing
Be gentle with yourself in this process. You know all too well that you’ve been through a lot. You deserve grace as you figure out how to handle this new understanding of yourself and your life. You may find yourself experiencing grief, shame, guilt, anger, numbness, fear, any number of emotions, as you process your trauma and work toward untangling it.
These feelings are all normal. Try not to push them away. You’ll have to work through them, and it will take time and patience. Consider yourself as someone who is on a journey. You’re on a long journey through your past experiences, and how they’ve impacted who you are and how you operate today. You aren’t defined by your traumas, but you are affected by them. Healing childhood trauma or childhood sexual trauma is no small feat, but you’re taking the reins in your life by working through how you’ve been affected, and choosing how to respond to that.
Step Three: Find Your Support System
It can be tempting, when healing trauma from childhood, to isolate yourself. You might feel the need to be private about your experiences, or experience shame or guilt about what you’re going through. As you work through those feelings on your journey, know that support from people around you can be a boost to your healing process.
You can build your support system by:
Seeking out support groups for childhood trauma: these people will know what you’ve gone through, and you can connect as you each work through your own journey of healing.
Find friends to spend time with: friends can be key to a life well lived. Time with people you enjoy can help regulate your nervous system, and make you feel a sense of belonging that all of us need.
Tap into your neighborhood: becoming involved in the place you live, from volunteering to getting to know your neighbors, to attending or organizing community activities, can give you a pride of place and a sense of home that becomes your own. This kind of connection can be invaluable in healing.
Finding support through therapy: a trauma-informed therapist can help with healing trauma from childhood. EMDR therapy in particular is uniquely suited for overcoming a painful past, which is why I’ve included it as its own step below.
Step Four: Seek EMDR Therapy
EMDR is a therapy process that was developed specifically to address trauma. It can be highly useful for healing childhood trauma, including healing childhood sexual trauma.
During EMDR therapy, you’ll be guided by your therapist to use bilateral stimulation through eye movement or tapping. You’ll do this while you and your therapist delve into a specific traumatic memory you’ve selected to tackle. The structure of EMDR makes sure that you remain in the present while negotiating a triggering memory, and your therapist will help guide you through whatever comes up. This bilateral movement in the present helps your brain reconfigure how it approaches the traumatic memory, reducing the emotional impact for you when you recall it in the future.
EMDR is very structured, with support at the beginning and the end of each therapy session to ensure your emotions are settled and you feel safe in your body. The structure is key to success, and a trained EMDR therapist can take you through processing a painful past in a way that is responsible and effective. EMDR is a gentle, but powerful process, offering you real change in how your memories and trauma affect you.
An EMDR process often requires several dedicated therapy sessions. You’ll work through the following steps:
Select the memories you’d like to work through and set goals for your EMDR process.
Develop soothing techniques with your therapist, to use as resources when working through memories.
As you consider your traumatic memories, you’ll work with bilateral stimulation to desensitize yourself to them.
After this stimulation, you’ll process with your therapist what you’ve discovered and find what feelings might remain for you in association to the memory.
You’ll then be asked to shift the story around the memory for yourself, while scanning your body as well. In this reprocessing, you’ll explore what positive thoughts can you bring in, and what could happen differently in the future.
Finally, you’ll wrap up with resuming thinking within the present and into the future. You’ll be able to let go of your pain here.
EMDR can give you a sense of control over how you respond to your traumatic memories. It allows you to develop emotional distance from painful memories, giving you relief from some of the deep impacts of trauma. With time, you’ll be able to measure the effects of EMDR through noticing things like better sleep, reduced distress, better memory, healthier thought processes, deeper interpersonal relationships, and more.
Haven Family Therapy Can Support You With EMDR
If it sounds like EMDR therapy would be a path forward for you in healing your childhood trauma, Haven Family Therapy offers a safe, supportive space, with a trained therapist offering healing EMDR therapy. Consider contacting Haven Family Therapy today to find out how EMDR might work for you on your healing journey of overcoming your painful past.
Contact me today to discuss your goals for family therapy.
