Childhood trauma isn't just something from the past. It's something that lingers and shapes the way you feel and see the world. Sometimes, you don't even realize it's still haunting you as an adult.
"Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort."
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
It’s important to note that childhood trauma in adults is something that encompasses both early childhood traumatic events and long-term effects. We incur childhood trauma when we have traumatic experiences that happen consistently over long periods of time. These events change who we are at our core, disrupting our feeling of safety in the world and relationships.
Experiencing trauma in childhood can affect us as adults; it can make us feel crazy since we see ourselves having these significant reactions and acting in ways that are unaligned with our values. It can make us feel out of control in our bodies, emotions, and minds.
If this is your situation, know that you are absolutely not alone. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 64% of adults in the United States report experiencing some form of childhood trauma before the age of 18.
Although it can feel hopeless when it's hard to remember a time when your trauma did not impact you, change is possible! Working on gaining awareness of your traumatic experiences, learning how these experiences affect you today, and therapy can help you separate what happened to you from your present self.
Self-assessment: Adverse childhood experiences
Childhood trauma in adults can be categorized into specific traumatic events called Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs.
Check how many points you experienced before age 18 to see your ACEs score. This is not a complete list, as there are many more adverse experiences in childhood that could lead to trauma in adulthood, but this is a base to give you an idea of where you stand.
Experienced violence, abuse, or neglect
Witnessed violence in the home or community
Had a family member attempt or die by suicide
Witnessed substance abuse problems in the home
Witnessed mental health problems in the home
Experienced instability due to parent separation
Experienced instability due to household members being in jail or prison
Did not have enough food to eat
Experienced homelessness or unstable housing
Experienced discrimination
Take a look at your final ACEs score. The higher your number, the higher likelihood your childhood trauma has had a direct impact on your mental, emotional, and physical health struggles in adulthood.
How childhood trauma shows up in adulthood
Childhood trauma impacts us across the board, from an increased risk for mental health disorders and chronic health conditions, an impaired ability to form secure attachments and deeply ingrained feelings of shame and low self-esteem.
“Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal
Let's take a look at some of the larger areas of our adult lives that become disrupted when we have experienced childhood trauma.
The more you reflect on the signs in these lists and see where they are showing up in your own life, the more empowered you are to recognize that you are not your trauma. Those out-of-control behaviors and thoughts are ghosts of your past still haunting you.
Awareness of these ghosts is the first step in healing, so let's recognize them.
1. Emotional impacts
Ever feel like your emotions are out of your control, and it kind of scares you?
When we experience childhood trauma, our bodies experience living in survival mode or fight or flight for years. You may even still be in that survival mode now.
Living in a highly stressed body for that long can be exhausting, as our emotions work in overdrive with the intention to keep us alive from the bear it thinks is always around.
Some signs your emotions are still working in survival mode are:
Frequent emotional dysregulation: You may experience extreme highs and lows with difficulty finding a middle ground.
Danger scanning: You are hyper-aware of any change in someone's tone, behavior, or emotions and frequently look to see if they are upset with you.
Shame spiraling: If you think you messed up or did something “weird,” you may get self-critical, feel horrible about yourself, and isolate yourself.
Anxiety as a constant companion: Peace may be a foreign concept since all you are familiar with is feeling stressed, physically tense, and a racing mind.
Difficulty motivating yourself: You may struggle to get out of bed, take a walk, or form habits that align with your goals because everything feels hopeless and draining.
2. Psychological and relational impacts
Sometimes, it can be difficult to notice our emotions when we've experienced childhood trauma, so emotional signs may be harder to relate to in those cases.
Our bodies may have learned to disconnect our awareness from what we're feeling to help us survive. Remember how horrible we felt as children could have been too overwhelming. Other than the emotional impact, childhood trauma in adults can show up in how we think, how we function in relationships, and how we cope with complicated feelings.
These impacts may manifest as:
Low self-esteem: It may be hard to believe you're interesting, good at your job, or someone of value.
Flashbacks: Images and video clips of past traumas may unexpectedly pop up in your dreams or day-to-day mind.
Trust issues: The idea of vulnerability or trusting that someone will not leave you may feel beyond difficult.
Difficulty communicating your needs and setting boundaries: It might be easier to put yourself last and others first, leading to cycles of feeling happy you're helping people and then resentful that you stepped over your boundaries.
Coping with substance or technology addictions: To not feel the difficult feelings, you may resort to drugs, alcohol, social media scrolling, or other distractions.
3. Impact on our physical health
Our minds and bodies are connected, and the invisible scar of childhood trauma in adults leaves a very real impact on our bodies.
Maybe you've been to doctors complaining about pains or issues, and they couldn't find what was causing it. This type of experience is all too common with childhood trauma survivors.
Childhood trauma affects us in a variety of physiological ways, including:
Chronic pain: You may feel frequent pain and tension in your neck, joints, back, and more due to increased internal inflammation.
Gastrointestinal issues: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), frequent digestion problems, and stomach cramps are common responses to the high-stress environment associated with childhood trauma.
Autoimmune disorders: These can include conditions where your immune system is weakened, leading to increased illness frequency, or disorders where your immune system attacks your body when it shouldn't.
Reduced cardiovascular health: There is an increased risk of heart disease, hypertension, or stroke when your heart is exposed to high stress over long periods.
Jaw clenching or teeth grinding: Your jaw muscles may involuntarily tighten, especially during sleep.
Insomnia or other sleep issues: Falling or staying asleep may be difficult, leading to frequent feelings of fatigue.
Heightened sensitivity to sensory experiences such as sounds or touch: You may overreact to things in your environment, such as loud sounds, someone touching your shoulder, or crowds.
The science behind trauma's impact
They say that trauma is in your head, and while this grossly simplifies the impact of childhood trauma in adults, there is a sliver of truth.
Scientists have found that the part of the brain used for learning and survival, the salience network, alters when exposed to a traumatic event. This exposure is life changing, as the brain rewires itself to prepare you for what it thinks are consistent life-or-death situations.
Recent studies have demonstrated how trauma can make it difficult for the brain to differentiate between safety and danger cues, especially when emotion is involved. Trauma-affected brains physiologically become wired to lean more toward overreactions and seeing things as dangerous.
Neuroplasticity: The brain's superpower to reduce trauma's impact
Does it ever feel like your reactions are quick and out of nowhere, almost like your body and brain just take control?
When we are growing up, we may hear or experience some things over and over. With childhood trauma in adults, this repetition of experiences can lead our brains to hardwire responses like getting angry and ready to fight when threatened because we actually used to get hit or attacked. That is why it can sometimes feel like our responses come out of nowhere or are hard to change — they're ingrained within.
However, our brains are not stuck. Our brains have an amazing ability to adapt and change via neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity means that when the brain faces new situations and ideas, it can flex and adapt to change its structure and function well into adulthood.
Research has shown that combining mindfulness, exploring our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and actively restructuring them can help rewire the brain's trauma responses. As we redirect attention from distractions and old ways of thinking, it is possible to intentionally reshape the brain, leading to healthier thinking and emotional patterns. In doing trauma work, my clients have been shocked at how consistently practicing simple mindfulness skills such as going on walks, breathwork, and being in the present have brought their nervous systems to a calmer place.
Self-directed neuroplasticity changes have been shown to reduce depression in participants by 76%, reduce anxiety by 60%, and boost self-esteem by 43%. Individuals become more able to handle stressors in life, regulate their emotions better, and be more mindful of their thoughts. Brain change is possible!
Story of a client's neuroplastic brain
I'll share a story of a client who inspired me with their perseverance and growth mindset and saw real, long-lasting change in how their trauma affected them.
This story demonstrates that the important thing in therapy is to keep showing up, not only when it feels hard but especially when it feels hard.
An adult client in her 20s (we'll call her Gol) came in feeling horrible. She was in a situationship she was not happy with, knew her childhood experiences were affecting her but did not know how, and wanted to feel peace. Her treatment involved:
Helping her body feel comfortable in the therapy space by focusing on building a therapy relationship
Linking how her past was affecting her present
Bringing more awareness to the sensations in her body, her emotions, and her intuition
Aligning her behavior with her values, such as setting more boundaries with authority figures, focusing on gratitude, and surrounding herself with people who built her up
After about two years, she left the situationship, found friends who accepted her for her, and started leaning more into believing her worth.
Gol's story could have gone in a different direction, but because she prioritized working on her mental health, her trauma no longer defines her, and her brain rewired!
How to begin healing childhood trauma in adults
While our childhood traumas are a part of our stories, they are not the sum.
Many approaches in trauma informed treatment work to separate people from what happened to them. The goal is to help people experience hope, sometimes even for the first time, that healing is possible.
Below are some traditional and newer ways of approaching trauma healing. I encourage you to tune into yourself to see what methods you gravitate toward.
Traditional, evidence-based trauma approaches
These approaches have strong research support and are widely used today in the treatment of childhood trauma in adults.
Prolonged Exposure (PE)
Often considered the gold standard of trauma treatment, this approach involves being exposed gradually to trauma-related situations, feelings, and memories, leading to feeling more calm with things that used to be triggering.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
CPT is an effective way to treat trauma by teaching people how to reframe their trauma-related distressing thoughts using a cognitive-behavioral approach.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS utilizes a mindful, compassionate approach to childhood trauma treatment and helps clients explore and integrate the different sub-personalities ("parts") within themselves and their survival responses created when they were growing up.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
SE is a healing approach focused on utilizing the body's self-healing systems to break out of survival responses, increasing the mind-body connection and releasing childhood trauma stuck in the body.
Eye Movement Densitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR)
While more controversial in the therapy field, EMDR has been around since the 1980s and has shown effectiveness in helping clients bring down their level of distress around traumatic memories by following a back and forth movement or sound.
Emerging and promising trauma therapies
These approaches to treating childhood trauma in adults have less research behind them, but more and more studies are being conducted as they gain popularity.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
While Deep TMS isn't FDA-approved in the US for trauma treatment yet, regular TMS has shown to have a positive impact on mood regulation and life quality. Individuals wear a helmet with a magnetic coil that non-invasively targets the part of the brain that controls emotions, mood, and thoughts.
Brainspotting (BSP)
BSP was created in 2003 for people who became overactivated by rapid eye movements in EMDR. The technique involves having clients fix their focus on a particular point of vision linked to the stuck trauma. They enter deep states of mindfulness and integrate past trauma experiences without needing to explicitly share or relive the trauma.
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET)
VRET uses virtual reality to recreate the traumatic event in a safe, controlled environment with a therapist. This treatment works to desensitize the person to the trauma and process difficult associated memories.
Psychedelics
Even with restrictions on its legal usage, psychedelics are showing promising results in research as a way to increase the effectiveness of traditional psychotherapies when both approaches are paired. Many studies focus on the impact of utilizing MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
By combining somatic and cognitive approaches, attachment theory, and mindfulness techniques in the Hakomi method, this neuroscience-informed approach focuses on increasing emotional regulation abilities through somatic-oriented talk therapy.
Final thoughts
Childhood trauma isn't just an old memory — it's the blueprint your body and mind know for how to live your life. If you're still struggling, it doesn't mean you're broken; it just means you're human.
But healing is possible. You're already on the right track by reading these articles and taking steps toward understanding your trauma. Therapy, self-reflection, and gaining more insight into how your childhood trauma is still showing up are powerful ways to take control of your life.
Healing isn't easy or straightforward, but every step you take to improve matters. Keep showing up for yourself, learning, and growing.
Even if our paths never cross, know that I — and so many other trauma healers — are cheering you on.
Tyana Tavakol, LMFT
Further reading
Further your insights on the impact and recovery from childhood trauma in adults by checking out these books:
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk - A guide to understanding the effects of trauma on the brain, mind, and body and how to incorporate mindfulness on the path to healing.
The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté, MD - Learn how psychological wounds and diseases are connected and ways to improve your health.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson - A look into how having an unavailable and emotionally immature parent as a child impacts you as an adult.
For more resources, check out Headway's collections on understanding childhood trauma and childhood trauma recovery.
