How to heal from childhood trauma
Hi, I’m Sarah and I’m a UKCP registered Psychotherapist with a Masters level training in Psychotherapy. I’ve spent the last 15 years helping people unsure of their trauma status, recover from childhood trauma.
Your experiences matter
Doubting yourself when you start dealing with childhood trauma is normal. I haven’t met anyone whose experiences didn’t count. Feeling unsure about whether you have childhood trauma reflects the lack of support you had growing up, not that you’re exaggerating. You don’t need anyone to stamp a form saying your experiences were real. You get to decide that for yourself. It’s normal to find this hard initially.
Childhood trauma healing starts with acknowledging the pain you went through, even if no one else did.
Is your current life safe?
Healing is easier if your life is stable. If your life feels unstable, or you’re worried about hurting yourself, have suicidal thoughts, addictions, eating disorders, psychiatric diagnoses, or chronic pain, aim to get help for this first. You might be able to find support through your GP, a charity, or a support group.
The aim is to get one thing more stable. This is of course easier said than done, but you may have some wiggle room with some areas, and there are people who will help you get started.
The trauma roundabout
Most people get stuck on what I call the “trauma roundabout.” You try to get off the roundabout by starting somewhere, but the shame kicks in. You make a mistake or get something wrong, and immediately you’re back blaming yourself. You go round and round, either consuming information without knowing what to do, or trying something and beating yourself up when it doesn’t work perfectly.
If you want to get better you’ll probably need to forgive yourself a thousand times a day. I know it sucks, but it’s easier to start there than give yourself 5 chances and then rip yourself to shreds when you screw up too many times. It’s perfectly normal to make a lot of mistakes when you’re trying something different.
The main thing is to start somewhere.
Stop self criticism
Most people are way harsher on themselves than they’d ever be on anyone else. The basic recipe is notice it, and correct. Don’t beat yourself up for doing it because you’re going to make a thousand mistakes a day.
Notice negative self talk and reframe it:
Catch the thought. For example: “I’m a loser who can’t do anything right.”
Reframe it to something neutral: “I find it hard to stay organised.”
Keep going. Mistakes will happen. The point is to correct yourself, not avoid it completely.
Yes, it’s hard and yes, it can be done. I’ve taught hundreds of people to stop doing criticising themselves. The key is noticing patterns and correcting them, the rest is mostly just practice.
Evaluate your contact with family
You don’t have to change anything right now. But you do need to evaluate honestly how you feel around them and what your concerns about them are. If you’re not sure if your concerns are legitimate, that’s perfectly normal. You can try noticing whether you feel better or worse around them. Feeling consistently worse is a sign that something is wrong, even if you don’t know exactly what.
If you’re reliant on them for help or support, focus on changing this first (if you can). You want to minimise time spent around people who are hurting you. At the very least, you need to take breaks between contact to recover and regroup.
Understand family patterns
Most dysfunctional families run on rules you weren’t meant to notice. If your family felt rigged, that’s because it was. You weren’t imagining it. Healthy families don’t rig games for someone to lose. They don’t gloat when someone struggles. They actually try to help each other, which might sound obvious, but if you grew up in a dysfunctional family, it wasn’t.
You are probably the victim, but you might also be the rescuer and even the persecutor. The point is that you can’t stop playing the game unless other people cooperate in stopping. Dysfunctional families won’t do this. They don’t know how to be if there isn’t any chaos.
A useful tool is Karpman’s drama triangle: victim, rescuer, persecutor. Understanding the patterns means you are better prepared to spot when the game is being rigged (again).
Reconnect to your feelings
If you’ve been brought up in a dysfunctional family, you have a feelings problem. You’re highly likely to be disconnected from your feelings because it was too awful to see how bad it was as a kid. You might still find your emotions overwhelming as an adult.
Reconnecting to your feelings means you need to make contact with your body because that’s where the feelings are. You learned to stop paying attention to the physical signs you had a feeling, so you need to learn to recognise these again. This is probably one of the trickiest bits because many people can’t recognise the feelings.
There are different ways to learn this. I do this in therapy by helping people spot where the feelings should be and how they are shutting them down. This takes practice. Don’t give up. Your feelings are important and you need them to tell you what you want and don’t want or like and don’t like.
Connecting to your body in any way can be useful here: breathwork, yoga, exercise, dance, etc.
Expressing old feelings
When you reconnect to your body it will be like finally tuning into a radio (are any of you still old enough to understand this metaphor?!) With a radio, if you made the mistake of turning up the volume when looking for a station, when you found one the music would often come blaring out. So this part can be hard. It can look messy. People might think you’re getting worse.
You’re feeling everything that you pretended not to feel, that you pretended was ok. The aim is for the feeling to move through you and come out. Feelings aren’t dangerous (but this doesn’t mean you get a free pass to use them against people or hurt them with them). This is likely an area you’ll need extra help with.
Many people find feelings difficult, and they might panic a bit if you’re sad or angry and try to tell you it was a long time ago or you should get over it. Sadness and anger are normal and common for people who have been mistreated. Support groups or therapy can help here because people doing these have more practice at accepting feelings without getting you to stop having them.
Managing flashbacks
Many people imagine their problems begin and end with their family. But they don’t. Family unkind to you? It might affect your confidence at work. You might overreact when you think it’s happening again. These can be flashbacks, which look a lot like overreactions to other people. They’re your brain reliving what happened to you.
You will need to learn and understand your specific triggers because these are moments from your past where you were hurt. Step 5 can help you get rid of some of the old feelings. You’ll also need to learn to better track before the problem, so you’ll need to be able to do step 4 for this too.
I spend a lot of time with people in therapy unpicking flashbacks and understanding what happened. This is hard to do on your own because the pattern recognition required to see these takes a long time to perfect. I have taught clients to do it, but it’s not a quick job in the same way being competent at chess or tennis won’t happen overnight.
Want help with the process?
I’ve helped people who still feel stuck after therapy reconnect to their feelings, trust themselves, and manage or prevent flashbacks. I only take on clients I’m confident I can help.