The Impact of Childhood Experiences on Adult Wellness
When you think of your childhood, you might have happy memories come to mind: Running around the backyard with the neighbor kids, swinging high to see if your feet can touch the clouds, and eating Bomb Pops on a hot summer day. Or you might be among the many people who didn’t experience that kind of innocence, whose happy memories are crowded out by darker ones.
Although you might not give it much thought now, your childhood directly influences your adulthood— biologically and psychologically. While there are a number of ways to improve your mental health depending on your unique circumstances and needs, most often, your Inner Child needs explored and nurtured.
How Complex Trauma in Childhood Affects Adulthood
Trauma isn’t a word we typically associate with childhood, is it? When we hear ‘trauma,’ we think more along the lines of Grey’s Anatomy, car accidents, and war.
Complex trauma, on the other hand, is a more subtle kind that occurs in childhood. It is difficult to put a finger on, especially because it is less characterized by what happened and more so by what didn’t. This is what makes Inner Child work in therapy so much more intensive (but not impossible)— There’s a lot to explore, and we don’t always know where it’s hiding!
For example, if you consistently looked to your parent to fulfill your needs— as young kids do in order to survive— and were only met with silence, you likely learned that you were going to have to fulfill your own needs. In adulthood, that might lead to detachment and extreme independence, making relationships difficult for you to emotionally engage in.
Or perhaps you have a vivid memory of watching a parent leave out the window to never return.While your other parent might have done the best job they could filling two sets of shoes in the other parent’s absence, that memory could have embedded itself deep in your psyche, causing a fear of abandonment in relationships.
In short, the way we were nurtured (or not nurtured) as children directly affects our interpersonal engagement and feelings about ourselves. We call this the development of attachment styles in psychology, and an understanding of these is a helpful first step to healing your history.
Read: How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Relationships
3 Ways to Notice Complex Trauma
So, if complex trauma is so hard to locate, how do we know if we need to seek the help of a mental health professional?
Well, the first indication is a relatively simple one: You are unhappy, and you don’t feel like you are living your best life. You are plagued by anxiety or depression, you struggle engaging in a meaningful relationships, or you have low self-worth. In short: You know there is more for you than this.
There are a host of other ways to notice that the Inner Child needs a little (or a lot of) love, though:
- You experience chronic (perhaps inexplicable) illness that is a manifestation of trauma nestled deep into the body.
- You have an unhealthy relationship with your own sexuality. Complex trauma makes it difficult for a child to learn about their own bodies and sexuality in a healthy, confident way and in a safe, caring environment.
- Your perceptions of time are distorted. You might have difficulty remembering the past, or planning for the future might cause extreme anxiety. While we all have remnants of our past and fear of our future in some sense, people who experienced complex trauma have literal gaps in their past and future.
No matter what your story, I am here to help you. Please reach out anytime, and together, we will repair the damage done back then in pursuit of a better now.
