How Healing from Childhood Trauma Is a Gift to Your Adult Self
Sometimes being a kid isn't what it's cracked up to be. When you think of childhood, you think of having no cares or worries, fun summers, and happy days at school. Sure, there will be bullies and setbacks, but overall, life is good. However, it's not always that way. Some kids have to live in horrible circumstances, from poverty to abuse and neglect.
Even though we don't think about it, trauma in childhood can have lasting effects. But it doesn't have to be this way. Healing from our childhood hurts can heal who we are as adults.
Understanding Childhood Trauma: Definitions and Impacts
The definition of childhood trauma is experiences that overwhelm a child's ability to cope, leading to lasting emotional, psychological, and physical scars. This can be from physical, mental, verbal, or sexual abuse, household dysfunction, violence, etc.
The impacts of childhood trauma include:
-Emotional issues, including sadness, anxiety, anger, fear, and confusion.
-Not being able to form secure attachments and trust others.
-Deeply ingrained feelings of shame, guilt, and worthlessness, which lead to low self-esteem, self-destructive behaviors, and a deep sense of hopelessness.
-Untreated trauma can lead to mental health issues like depression, anxiety, PTSD, and substance abuse.
-Trauma also impacts physical health, leading to issues like cardiovascular disease, obesity, and autoimmune disorders.
-Trauma can also affect a person's school performance and employment opportunities and contribute to their overall quality of life.
Recognizing the Signs: How Childhood Hurt Manifests in Adulthood
The trauma we go through in childhood can also manifest in our adulthood. Some signs include:
Emotional dysregulation: People experiencing emotional dysregulation can have frequent mood swings, intense emotional reactions, and difficulty managing stress.
Flashbacks and intrusive memories: People may experience flashbacks or intrusive memories of past trauma, which cause stress and vivid memories of the traumatic event.
Avoidance behavior: Avoiding people, places, and situations that remind them of the traumatic event or take them back to it. This includes avoiding certain social situations, relationships, or other activities that trigger these memories.
Hypervigilance: This means a person will constantly scan and look around an environment for perceived threats or danger, causing a heightened sense of alertness and an inability to relax.
Trust issues: Because of the trauma they endured, people have trouble trusting others and forming healthy attachments. They often expect the people in their lives to betray, abandon, or abuse them.
Low self-esteem and self-worth: Trauma profoundly affects a person's self-esteem and self-worth, causing feelings of shame, guilt, and being inadequate.
Relationship problems: Adults who have experienced childhood trauma often have relationship problems, including difficulty with intimacy, trust, and communication.
Substance abuse and addiction: In order to cope with the effects of childhood trauma, some adults turn to drugs or alcohol.
Physical Issues: Trauma can cause physical issues in adulthood, like chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and other illnesses.
The Healing Journey: Acknowledging Your Past
There are many steps on the healing journey, and the first step is acknowledging your past. It's easy for those who have experienced childhood trauma to stuff it down inside, compartmentalize it, and act like it didn't happen, at least to an extent. Most of the time, these are memories we don't want to entertain as adults. But if we're going to heal, we have to put a voice to what happened. Here are the stages of healing from childhood trauma.
Understanding the Definition, Impacts, and Types of Childhood Trauma: Understanding what childhood trauma is, the different types, and the impact it has on your life.
Acknowledging and Validating Trauma: Recognizing it, validating your feelings and pain, and seeking professional help.
Coping Strategies/Healing Techniques: Therapeutic intervention, meditation and mindfulness.
The impact of physical activities: Yoga, exercise, dance, and movement can help.
Maintaining a Healthy Lifestyle: How nutrition, sleep, and self-care come into play in your healing journey.
Processing and Letting Go: Understanding grieving, methods for releasing the past, and creating a new identity past the trauma.
Building resilience and moving forward: Developing healthy relationships, embracing self-care and self-love, setting boundaries for a safe environment, and planning for the future.
Therapeutic Approaches: Methods to Heal Childhood Wounds
Therapy is a great place to start learning to heal from childhood wounds. There are several kinds of therapy you can consider, including:
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: This therapy focuses on identifying negative thought patterns and challenging those negative thought patterns and behaviors. It helps people use better coping strategies, manage their emotions, and reframe untrue beliefs from the trauma they have been through.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: This therapy differs from the above because it combines cognitive behavior techniques and trauma-focused interventions to address people's unique needs after experiencing childhood trauma.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: This form of therapy helps people process past trauma by using eye movements and bilateral stimulation. Its purpose is to desensitize the distress that people associate with their trauma and promote adaptive processing.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy combines cognitive-behavior techniques and mindfulness practices in order to help people regulate their emotions, improve their relationships, and learn healthy coping skills.
Building Resilience: Strength Gained through Healing
You can start building resilience as you gain strength from the healing process. There are seven C's of resilience, and they are:
Competence: Telling yourself, "I can do this."
Confidence: Built from processing wins and losses
Connection: During healing, engage in relationships that mirror healthy relationships, not masked as one.
Character: You do this by restoring your integrity through repairing your boundaries.
Contribution: Having purpose will help anchor your healing.
Coping: This is when you have true resilience rather than numbing the pain.
Control: when you go from freezing because you don't have a choice to having a choice because you are in control of your world.
Reframing Your Narrative: The Power of Self-Storytelling
Narrative therapy helps you reframe your past and shape your future. Therapists encourage patients to explore and reframe their personal narratives, leading to growth and positive changes. Techniques used in narrative therapy are:
Externalization occurs when the problem is separated from the person. This enables patients to see their issues externally rather than as part of their identity, resulting in a more objective perspective of the issue.
Re-authoring: This technique allows patients to actively reconstruct their stories, highlighting different viewpoints or aspects of experiences. In doing this, people challenge negative self-perceptions and societal expectations while opening themselves up to growth and transformation.
Collaborative Approach: In this approach, therapists work with patients as co-creators of their new narratives. This approach respects clients' expertise while providing a safe place for exploration.
The Role of Support Systems: Enlisting Friends and Professionals
It's extremely important to have friends, family members, and professionals to help you on your journey to healing. Friends and family can provide emotional support. Attending a group for trauma survivors can help you have a social support system from others who have gone or are going through the same thing you are. Talking with a professional will help you process things in a way that talking with friends and family can't.
Having a support system will help you have a sense of belonging
and encouragement, will keep you accountable for your actions and decisions, promote healthy behaviors, and help reduce stress.
Practicing Self-Compassion: The Importance of Kindness to Yourself
Practicing self-compassion is extremely important when healing from childhood trauma. Others had no compassion for you, so giving yourself compassion is paramount in the healing process.
What Is Self-Compassion?
Self-compassion comprises self-kindness, common humanity, and a mindful approach.
Self-kindness means that instead of judging or shaming yourself, you should shift towards a warmer and gentler approach to accepting your pain or suffering. Common humanity means being aware that all humans fail and make mistakes—you're not the only one. A mindful approach involves observing what has happened without over-identifying with the experience. It involves looking at traumatic events objectively.
How to practice self-compassion:
-Check how you talk to yourself
-Practice forgiveness
-Practice loving-kindness
-Celebrate minor accomplishments
-Express gratitude
-Practice acts of kindness for yourself
-Be mindful
-Reach out for help when you need it.
Self-Help Strategies: Tools for Personal Growth
You can use many tools for personal growth on your healing journey.
Self-reflection: Regularly reflect on the current state of your emotions and thoughts and identify areas of improvement.
Goal setting: Set clear, actionable goals for yourself.
Time management: Use your time effectively and organize tasks in order to achieve your goals.
Learning and building new habits: Learn new skills and add new habits to your daily routine.
Self-care: Consider your physical and mental well-being. Eat well, get enough sleep, and exercise every day.
Relationship Building: Build strong personal and professional relationships through communication, empathy, and setting boundaries.
Continuous Learning: Engage in lifelong learning to keep growing and improving.
Creating Healthy Relationships: The Ripple Effect of Healing
You can start engaging in positive relationships by healing yourself and learning about healthy relationships. Making new friends is a great way to help yourself heal and, with what you have learned on your own journey, help others heal from their trauma.
Embracing Forgiveness: Letting Go of the Past
Mastering forgiveness is important for our personal well-being and growth. In doing so, we let go of the past and move into a more peaceful life. Here are some points to consider.
-Acknowledge your pain.
-Practice self-compassion.
-Cultivate mindfulness
-Embrace the present
-Set boundaries
-Practice gratitude
-Ask God for help.
Embracing Your New Self: How Healing Enhances Personal Growth
Embracing your new self is an important part of enhancing your personal growth. You're not the same person you were when you were walking through the trauma. Now you're an adult who has done the work and is stepping into the light of a brand new life. You may still have setbacks now and then, but own who you are and the person you have become.
You can move on and live the purpose-filled life you were created for after healing from childhood trauma with the help of God, friends, family, and professionals.
Originally published August 20, 2025.
