Are you making these mistakes when working on your childhood trauma?
Hi, I’m Sarah and I’m a psychotherapist working online in the UK and Europe.
I help people with childhood trauma or CPTSD stop feeling empty and start feeling good about themselves again.
Today I’m going to talk about some of the ‘mistakes’ I see people making when trying to work on their childhood trauma.
You don’t need to berate yourself if this is you, because with every new piece of information, you get closer to understanding what has happened to you and how to take care of yourself better. It’s totally normal that you didn’t know this information, after all nobody taught you how to deal with your childhood trauma.
We’re going to look at some of the mistakes I see when working with clients with CPTSD, so you will know to look out for them!
Underestimating how long it’s going to take you to heal
By the time people come to therapy for childhood trauma it’s been 20, 30, 40 (or sometimes more) years of being affected by their trauma. Most of us had around 20 years of living with our family and if your family was dysfunctional you experienced some kind of abuse (emotional abuse, physical abuse or sexual abuse) or neglect (this can be physical neglect but it’s also emotional neglect or childhood emotional neglect also known as CEN. )
If you want to learn more about the types of childhood trauma, you can read more here What is childhood trauma?
When you grow up with complex trauma you are being brainwashed into believing that there is something wrong with you as a person and that is why you were treated this way. That’s not true, but after 20 years, you’ve had a lot of practice at believing this. You may have tried to stand up for yourself and been told you were crazy or you imagined it which is known as gaslighting.
With decades of practice thinking that what happened to you was your fault, you’re going to have an inner monologue that supports this idea. Your beliefs, your thoughts, your friends, your relationships are all likely to reflect this. We need to start unpicking your structure slowly so that you can make small adjustments that are realistic and manageable. You don’t want to go changing the whole system at once as it’s destabilising and overwhelming.
Your goals should be small enough that you can reach them fairly easily, don’t make your goals another thing to punish yourself for.
To find more about how long it takes to get results in therapy, you can read more here How long will I be in therapy?
Most people start to see progress between 6 months - 1 year (sometimes earlier) although there are continued benefits to ongoing therapy if you have the time, energy and money to keep going.
Being too harsh on yourself
If you’ve grown up with emotional abuse which can be name calling, insults, criticism, shouting, belittling and humiliating you have been trained to criticise yourself.
It takes time to notice when you’re in a negative thought loop. It also takes time to resist the temptation of falling back into this loop and getting out of the habit of being unkind to yourself. You might be so used to your inner critic that it feels like a part of you or it might sound like your own voice. In reality, it’s probably an amalgamation of the messages that you received growing up and only sounds like you.
One of our jobs in therapy is to sort through the useful and unhelpful messages that you received. I will be on hand to provide lots of feedback about when you’re bing unkind so that you know what to look out for going forward.
After all it’s hard to spot something that you’re unaware of. Once you have awareness of being unkind, it’s simply a case of practicing this.
You might need to dig deep to check whether your inner monologue has improved or whether the overt criticism has stopped but you’re still subtly dismissing or invalidating yourself and being judgmental. It’s normal that there are different layers of criticism to work through.
All the shame
One of the most misunderstood and underestimated emotions is shame, which is responsible for the feeling that we are not worthy of love, that we are faulty, useless or stupid and that people don’t like us. If you experienced childhood trauma you might not have much awareness of your emotions but if you do it’s not uncommon that shame doesn’t really factor in.
Despite shame often being ignored or passed over, shame underpins so much of the childhood trauma experience that it represents a key element that needs to be worked through.
This means, learning to recognise when you are feeling shame, or which situations you find particularly triggering, learning how to express shame safely to people that you can trust and learning how to tell the difference between shame from the past that is leaking into the present and shame caused by your current situation.
In CPTSD it’s common that people experience flashbacks to their past in the form of emotions (also known as an emotional flashback) so that they are suddenly and confusingly overwhelmed by a tidal wave of difficult feelings, often with no real understanding of what happened.
Pete Walker has written extensively on CPTSD flashbacks and if you haven’t already read his book I would highly recommend it. It’s called ‘From Surviving to Thriving’ and is often the book that clients describe as ‘helping them put together the pieces and understand what has happened’ to them.
It frequently represents the first step in healing and has helped so many people start to make sense of their confusing experiences and symptoms. The way that I work as a psychotherapist is in alignment with the approach taken in Pete Walker’s book and I am happy to support clients who are looking for a therapist familiar with this approach.
Other issues include ‘shame spirals’ whereby you start feeling shame about one thing and your brain starts making connections with other times you felt embarrassed or bad about yourself. It’s like a vortex sucking in all your shameful experiences and puling you down into feeling alone and hopeless.
Brené Brown who often talks about shame in her work talks about ‘vulnerability hangovers’ whereby attempting to be vulnerable leaves us feeling exposed and open to attack (real or imagined). This is an indication of shame; we share something or do something we feel a little insecure about and once the adrenaline of actually doing it wears off, our brain back tracks into anxiety and shame.
We question if we did a good enough job, if people liked us or if we have the potential to succeed. All these situations can be triggering and hard to navigate for survivors of childhood trauma. They don’t yet have the inner resources to bounce back from these knocks.
Working in the wrong order
Now in some ways there is no ‘right order’ and you are free to start anywhere that you like. If your approach is working and you are making progress then this is a sign that you are doing well and on the right path. On the other hand, it is common for clients to start working in areas that I would consider ‘advanced’ and for which you need other skills to make progress.
For example a common complaint among trauma survivors is a lack of motivation. I used to buy so many books on motivation and for a while they seemed to help but after a week I lost interest and then I’d end up feeling worse than ever.
Motivation requires several more basic skills to really overcome including learning to recognise and identify your emotions, finding safe ways to express those emotions so that they get smaller and more manageable, an ability to override and tame the inner critic so that you don’t give up at the first fall and the ability to find people that can support you and be your cheerleaders. You might not know how to do these things yet.
It is far better in my opinion, to start with recognising and identifying emotions because they apply to so many other situations and are really the building blocks of what you need to change. Done properly and in small steps, you will learn to tolerate and understand emotions which once felt insurmountable. At this point motivation will be far easier to tackle than simply jumping in and hoping for the best without a plan of attack.
Other ‘better left till later’ issues can involve finding your new identity, working on any addictive behaviours that you would like to reduce (this can depend of course on how dangerous the behaviour is to you and your health) and confidence. I would expect your confidence to increase as you feel better, but I think it’s also normal that this becoming confident is a consequence of putting yourself in ever more challenging situations.
These can feel far too daunting initially and it’s important not to go too fast and activate your inner critic when things inevitably go wrong. ‘Failure’ is very rarely an indication that you should give up but it can feel like this when you get started.
I hope this has been helpful to highlight some of the areas you can focus on as you work on your own childhood trauma.
If you’d like to arrange a free 15 minute call to find out how I can help you overcome and heal from childhood trauma and CPTSD, please click on the link Book Now