The effects of a difficult childhood often resonate as a low, persistent hum in the background of our adult lives. It can show up as a heightened startle response, a pattern of challenging relationships, or a deep-seated belief that we are somehow flawed. Childhood trauma stays with us: it is biological, lifelong, and carries profound personal consequences.
Research shows that over 16% of US adults experienced compounded abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction as children (4). These traumas rewire brain development and the body’s stress response systems, creating a stark link between a difficult past and future adult health (1).
The good news is that healing is possible. This article will guide you through how childhood trauma affects your brain and body, helping you make sense of your own reactions and illuminate the proven pathways that can help you heal. Your past may have shaped you, but it does not have to define your future.
Understanding Childhood Trauma?
Childhood trauma, often measured in Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), encompasses a range of stressful or traumatic situations that children may encounter before reaching adulthood. These ACEs include, but are not limited to (3):
- Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse
- Neglect
- Living in a controlling home environment
- Substance use by caregivers
- Parental incarceration
- Divorce
- Bullying
How common are ACEs?
Childhood trauma is unfortunately quite common. Statistics show that nearly two-thirds of American adults report at least one ACE, and 1 in 6 have faced four or more types (4).
Impact of Childhood Trauma
The impact of childhood trauma can be serious. ACEs can lead to toxic stress, which disrupts brain development, immune system function, and stress-response systems. This stress can impair attention, decision-making, and learning, potentially shaping a child’s life path (3). Long-term health risks of childhood trauma can include (4):
- Mental Health Issues: Depression, anxiety, and PTSD
- Physical Health Conditions: Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes
- Behavioral Challenges: Substance misuse and risky sexual behaviors
- Social and Economic Difficulties: Lower educational attainment and unstable employment
The impact of ACEs is so significant that preventing them could reduce depression cases by an estimated 44%, and suicide attempts among youth by up to 89% (4).
Defining Your Family of Origin
To find healing from childhood trauma, you must first understand your family of origin. Even if you aren’t conscious of it, the environment in which you were raised shaped your views on relationships, communication, and self-identity, leaving a lasting impression on your adult life. Interpersonal challenges such as trust issues, fear of abandonment, or conflict in relationships can often be traced back to these early life experiences within your family (2).
Exploring the story of your family of origin can help you develop a deeper understanding of how your upbringing has influenced your life. This process involves bringing unconscious patterns into awareness, helping you identify the source of your current struggles (2). By examining both the positive and the painful aspects of your childhood, you can begin to break free from cycles of dysfunction and avoid repeating them in your adult life.
The Science of Stored Trauma
If you’re on a journey to understand childhood trauma, you’ve likely come across Bessel van der Kolk’s impactful book, The Body Keeps the Score. This book has become a significant cultural reference, remaining on bestseller lists for years and changing the conversation about trauma, mental health, and healing. A central idea of the book is that traumatic experiences are not only stored in the mind but are biologically embedded in the body’s very wiring (5).
Van der Kolk, a researcher and clinician, explains that trauma, especially when experienced in childhood, can reshape the brain and disrupt the nervous system. This trauma can leave survivors feeling stuck in a constant state of fight, flight, or freeze, even after the immediate danger has passed. Van der Kolk holds that because trauma affects the body, the healing process must also involve the body (5).
The Body Keeps the Score advocates for somatic therapies, which focus on helping individuals reconnect with their physical selves. By recalibrating the body, these therapies can help overcome the deep-seated effects of trauma, leading to a more empowered approach to healing (5).
How Does Trauma Affect the Brain?
Trauma has a profound and specific impact on three key areas of the brain, altering their function and leading to many common symptoms seen in survivors (6):
-
The Amygdala: This region acts as the brain’s alarm system. Trauma causes it to become hyper-sensitive and overactive, leading it to scan for danger constantly. This results in hypervigilance, heightened anxiety, and easily triggered fear responses.
-
The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC): Known as the brain’s “reasoning center,” the PFC is responsible for logical thinking, decision-making, and emotional regulation. During stressful situations or when confronted with trauma triggers, this area can effectively “go offline.” This disconnection makes it extremely difficult to think clearly, make rational decisions, or calm oneself down when feeling triggered.
-
The Hippocampus: This area is vital for processing and storing memories. Trauma disrupts its function, which helps explain the complex nature of traumatic memories. While everyday memories may become fuzzy or hard to access, traumatic memories often feel intensely vivid, immediate, and intrusive, as if the past event is happening in the present moment.
The brain science of trauma explains why simply “thinking positively” often doesn’t work to overcome trauma’s painful effects. Trauma can keep the body stuck in a survival loop, making it challenging to move forward.
Letting the Body Guide Your Recovery
Bessel van der Kolk’s work illuminates the precise biology behind the phrase “the body keeps the score.” Trauma locks the brain into survival patterns, sounding constant alarms, hindering rational thought, and creating emotional flashbacks. Fortunately, you can recover through a holistic approach that directly addresses this embodied stress and returns you to a sense of safety, control, and connection.
How Childhood Trauma Manifests in Adulthood
Childhood trauma can leave deep and lasting scars that affect emotional, psychological, relational, and physical wellbeing throughout a lifetime. For survivors still feeling the affects of their childhood trauma, grappling with the following challenges is common (1):
1. Emotional & Psychological Struggles Related to Trauma
-
Anxiety and Depression: A pervasive sense of worry, sadness, or hopelessness is common among adults with childhood trauma. Your body may remain in a state of constant anticipation, making it difficult to relax or feel safe.
-
Intense Emotional Reactions: You may find yourself quick to anger, tearful, or emotionally numb. This difficulty regulating emotions may stem from an overwhelmed nervous system that never learned how to return to a calm baseline after being triggered.
-
Negative Self-Perception: Trauma can deeply damage a child’s developing sense of self, leading to feelings of shame, guilt, and the belief that you are “broken,” unworthy, or unlovable.
2. Relational Difficulties Related to Trauma
-
Fear of Abandonment vs. Engulfment: You might have an intense fear of loved ones leaving you, leading to anxious attachment and behaviors in relationships. On the other hand, you may fear being controlled or suffocated, causing you to push people away and struggle with intimacy. This push-pull dynamic is a classic symptom of unresolved trauma.
-
Difficulty with Trust and Boundaries: Having trust violated as a child makes it incredibly difficult to trust others and set healthy boundaries as an adult.
-
Repeating Patterns: Unconsciously, you may be drawn to partners who are emotionally unavailable, critical, or volatile, recreating painful dynamics from your childhood in an attempt to “fix” the past.
3. Physical & Behavioral Symptoms Related to Trauma
-
Unexplained Chronic Health Issues: Long-term trauma can increase stress hormones and inflammation, raising the risk of various physical ailments like chronic pain, headaches, fibromyalgia, and gastrointestinal problems.
-
A Body on High Alert: You may be easily startled, feel constantly “on edge,” or notice chronic tension in your shoulders, jaw, or gut. These symptoms indicate the body’s fight-or-flight response is stuck in the “on” position.
-
Self-Sabotaging Coping Mechanisms: To numb the overwhelming emotional pain or to feel a sense of control, many survivors turn to behaviors like substance misuse, disordered eating, or other addictions. These are not signs of weakness, but desperate attempts to cope with a dysregulated nervous system.
While the effects of childhood trauma can be complex and painful, you can heal. With time, support, and the right tools, you can nurture resilience and cultivate healthier, more fulfilling relationships with yourself and others.
Healing Childhood Trauma: From Awareness to Action
Taking action to address childhood trauma takes real courage. With commitment, professional guidance, and a well-rounded treatment plan, you can start to unpack your past experiences and move toward a healthier life, transitioning from just getting by to truly thriving. Fortunately, psychology and neuroscience provide restorative pathways that can help you reconnect with yourself.
Acknowledgment and Self-Compassion
Before any deep therapeutic work can begin, the most critical, and often most difficult, step is to face your pain with acknowledgment and self-compassion. Healing starts with acknowledging the impact of your past without judgment. This process can sometimes stir up feelings of shame, but the key to mitigating it is self-compassion.
To develop self-compassion, work on replacing your critical inner voice with one that is kind and understanding. Try incorporating activities such as positive affirmations and journaling into your routine. While these practices alone may not be sufficient, they can help boost your self-esteem and counter negative thoughts. By making these small positive changes, you can take control of your personal story.
Reconnecting with Your Inner Child
The concept of the “inner child” is a useful way to understand how our emotions, memories, and beliefs from childhood continue to shape who we are as adults. This part of us holds onto unmet needs, unexpressed feelings, and the coping mechanisms we developed to survive painful early experiences.
Doing inner child work involves reconnecting with your younger self from your adult perspective. This process includes revisiting your past to provide the love, safety, validation, and nurturing that your child self may not have received at the time. Together, you and your inner child can integrate the fragmented pieces of your experiences, helping you to feel more complete and less controlled by reactions rooted in the past.
Processing Trauma with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
For many people, simply talking about trauma doesn’t fully address its emotional impact. When traditional talk therapy isn’t enough, other options like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) can make a difference. Specifically designed to treat trauma and PTSD, EMDR is a proven therapeutic approach that works by helping the brain reprocess “stuck” memories, reducing the overwhelming emotions attached to them. While EMDR does not erase these memories, it allows the brain to store them as a past event that no longer feels threatening in the present.
In a typical EMDR session, an EMDR-trained therapist guides you to briefly recall a troubling memory while engaging your brain with bilateral stimulation. This stimulation often involves following the therapist’s finger with your eyes as it moves from side to side, but it can also include alternating taps, vibrations, or sounds. This process mimics the natural healing function of Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. The goal is to help you transition from simply recognizing that you are safe to truly feeling safe, effectively rewiring your brain’s threat response system.
Somatic Approaches
In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk explains that trauma resides in the body, making somatic (body-centered) recovery approaches essential for teaching a dysregulated nervous system how to find calm and safety.
Three somatic practices you can start today include:
-
Yoga: Engaging in physical postures combined with focused breathing can enhance interoceptive awareness, or the ability to recognize sensations in the body. Yoga is a safe and empowering way to release muscular tension and regulate the nervous system.
-
Mindfulness and Meditation: These techniques train you to stay present and observe your thoughts and bodily sensations without judgment. By creating a pause between triggers and reactions, mindfulness builds emotional regulation and reduces stress.
-
Breathwork: Consciously controlling your breath can directly influence your autonomic nervous system. Techniques such as deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing immediately send signals of safety to the brain, helping to calm a racing heart and ease anxiety.
These practices work because they directly counter the physiological effects of trauma. They empower you to take charge of your internal state, which is necessary for feeling safe and empowered in the world. As always, consult with your health provider before starting a new practice.
Embracing Your Healing Journey
Healing is a process full of ups and downs, and it’s completely normal to have tough days along the way. By being gentle with yourself and using proven therapeutic techniques, you can make meaningful changes in how your brain and nervous system respond to past experiences. This combined approach can be tailored to your specific needs, which will further help you work through trauma and live free from the pain of your past.
Reclaim Your Story: Begin Your Healing Journey with Frontier Psychiatry
Healing is the process of transforming the survival strategies that once protected you into sources of strength for your present life. While the impact of childhood trauma can echo through your biology, emotions, and relationships, it does not have to be your final story.
Through compassionate and specialized support, you can learn to quiet your body’s alarm system, rewrite limiting beliefs, and finally feel secure within yourself. You don’t have to forget where you came from to build a new future where you are in control of your life and happiness.
If you are ready to address the roots of your struggle with childhood trauma, the therapists at Frontier Psychiatry are here to help. Our team is skilled in trauma-informed therapies designed to help you process your past and reclaim your wellbeing. Take the next step on your healing path by contacting us today at (406) 200-8471 or scheduling an appointment through our provider matching tool.
References
-
Cleveland Clinic. (2021, October 28). Childhood trauma’s lasting effects on mental and physical health. Health Essentials. Retrieved November 26, 2023, from https://health.clevelandclinic.org/childhood-traumas-lasting-effects-on-mental-and-physical-health
-
Santos-Longhurst, A. (2023, August 31). What is family-of-origin work? Verywell Mind. Retrieved November 26, 2023, from https://www.verywellmind.com/understanding-family-of-origin-work-in-therapy-7559490
-
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023, April 6). About adverse childhood experiences. Retrieved November 26, 2023, from https://www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html
-
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023, April 6). Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs): Vital signs. Retrieved November 26, 2023, from https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/aces/index.html
-
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking. Resources page: https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score
-
Bremner, J. D. (2006). Traumatic stress: Effects on the brain. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 8(4), 445–461. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2006.8.4/jbremner
