How Childhood Trauma Affects Adulthood
By Eleanor McGlinchey, PhD., Laura Meli, PhD., and Peggy Loo, PhD
Understanding how childhood trauma can affect adulthood
Feeling the effects of childhood trauma in adulthood is very common, especially if you haven’t received support and care to address the ways you were hurt. It’s not a personal shortcoming that you didn’t “leave the past in the past” or “let time heal all wounds”. We know that children’s brains and bodies are actively growing and learning in response to their everyday experiences. While everyone has good days and bad days, if these early (or first) experiences include childhood traumas, it disrupts the ability to grow, feel, and connect safely with others - often during key developmental periods (e.g., going to school, making friends, puberty, identity development, etc). Instead, a lot of energy and focus is diverted to coping or surviving whatever has happened, often to the distraction and detriment of a child’s wellbeing.
Self-compassion and trauma
If you’re reading this, it’s important to try and have a starting point of compassion and understanding towards yourself. The effects of trauma are never about something that’s “wrong” with you or “broken” (even if it can sometimes feel that way). Traumatic experiences are the exact opposite of what we need to flourish - so feeling residual effects say something about the trauma itself, not about who you intrinsically are.
Recognizing the impact of childhood trauma
While it can feel overwhelming or discouraging to recognize that a childhood trauma is impacting your adult life in some way, making that connection may help you make sense of an area of your life you’ve struggled with and couldn’t understand why. Realizing the effects of trauma may be the result of an understandable strategy you adopted to survive something awful can be the first step towards self-kindness, new perspective, or learning something different that works better for you today.
The effects of childhood trauma in adulthood can range significantly, and it’s often dependent on a number of factors. Effects can be specific or may feel as though they have a ripple effect in multiple areas of your life, such as relationships, work, mental health, and or how you feel about yourself as a person. The takeaway is that trauma therapy can be an opportunity to address and heal from an unresolved childhood trauma with professional guidance and support.
What is childhood trauma?
You may have some assumptions about what types of experiences are considered childhood traumas. While this list is not exhaustive, childhood trauma can include:
Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse by an adult or another peer
Physical or emotional neglect by an adult responsible for your wellbeing
Bullying in school or online
Poverty or experience of instability with food or housing
Unsafe environments, as in the case of war, community violence, police brutality, or natural disasters
Sudden or significant losses (bereavement, divorce, a difficult move)
accident, injury, or illness/hospitalization
Exposure to injury, harm, or death, as in the case of witnessing violence or abuse between parents, a parent suffering with a mental illness or addiction, or family member death by suicide
What these examples have in common is a serious absence of physical or emotional safety, exposure to threat of harm or death, a violation of trust in key relationships, and significant upheaval that impacts a child’s wellbeing and development.
What are the effects of childhood trauma on adults?
It may feel easy for you to make connections between a childhood trauma and its effect in your life as an adult. There may be familiar patterns you’ve been aware of for awhile or connections you’ve discovered in therapy. There may also be effects you haven’t considered that would be incredibly helpful to clarify and understand. Traumas in childhood can affect many areas of your life, from mental health, relationships, sleep, sense of self, and your body. Here are a few we see often as therapists in our practice.
Difficulty in friendships
In response to trauma, children might become detached from peers while others might cling to their friends. In both instances, it’s a relatable self-protective instinct to shield themselves from additional harm, either by keeping others at arms length or joining them. Childhood is an important period for learning how to engage with others, so when trauma disrupts, it makes it harder for social development to mature. As an adult, this might feel like your friendships never make it past the acquaintances phase or that you constantly feel like an outsider looking in. It could also feel like you never quite know the right balance of being vulnerable with new friends and then always questioning whether you overshared.
Difficulty in relationships and dating
The very first relationships we have in childhood (usually with caregivers or parents) teach us about safety and trust. As adults, we often unconsciously mirror these early life connections and dynamics in relationships outside of our immediate family or home environment – and this can be true with romantic partners. Romantic relationships are a unique context where we can choose to build trust or experience closeness. For adults who have experienced childhood trauma, relationships can be challenging and feel extra tricky. Traumatic experiences and unstable environments for children can mean that when they’re adults in romantic relationships, they find it difficult to understand their emotional needs, communicate effectively around vulnerable topics, and form trusting bonds that are sustained past common conflicts or life stressors.
Sleep problems
Sleep is a period of relative vulnerability since you can’t protect yourself when you’re unconscious. In a recent survey of children in foster care (a population experiencing significant trauma), as many as 85% of children experienced some form of sleep disruption. It can become a vicious cycle as the adaptive response to stay extra alert for additional threats can lead to a habit of hypervigilance at night, making it very hard for a child to obtain the necessary rest needed to recover from trauma. This can also lead to long term difficulties with settling at night such that the restlessness becomes habitual at bedtime and overnight.
As an adult you may spend hours in bed but feel as though you didn’t actually sleep or feel exhausted during the day but notice that your brain “turns on” as soon as you get into bed at night.
Being a caregiver or an extra-responsible adult
Experiencing trauma often makes children take on adult-level responsibilities at an early age. They also learn that it’s important to pay attention to the moods and reactions of those around them (often as a way to stay safe). This high level of awareness of others’ feelings and needs often turns into a caregiver role or being responsible in a manner beyond your years.
For example, a child who fills in the gap for an absent parent or spouse in the family, diffuses tension or distress in others, or becomes a regular confidant of others’ concerns (often at great cost to themselves). Children who learned to take care of others regularly are more likely to have imbalanced dynamics in relationships as adults, burn out from over-accommodating, have difficulty asking or receiving help, and sometimes internalize being a caregiver as their identity or primary worth to others.
Struggle with sense of self or instincts
Children exposed to trauma often experience a deeply felt sense of powerlessness and shame - which makes the development of self-confidence or trust in personal instincts challenging as they grow up. As an adult this might mean that you struggle to accept positive feedback or praise, or you may focus on being high achieving or perfectionistic as a way to offset an enduring inner sense of inadequacy, unlovability, or being “bad”. You may struggle to make decisions, chronically feel like an imposter despite evidence to the contrary, possess a strong self critic, or hide parts of yourself you don’t like from others.
Avoidance of emotions
Feelings like being scared, anxious, sad, hurt, confused, or unsure, to name a few, is hard for everyone - but particularly so if you had to experience these emotions in an extreme or chaotic way as is in the case of trauma. If children are around adults that are emotionally out of control or dismissive, all the more reason to see big or “negative” emotions as threatening, crazy, or unimportant. As an adult, you may actively avoid your emotions, distract yourself when upset, judge yourself about emotional reactions you can’t control, or tend to focus on what to do over how you feel.
Unfortunately, avoiding emotions backfires because then there’s few opportunities to learn that emotions can be felt, understood, and shared in healthy ways. Unaddressed emotions build, become overwhelming, necessitating more avoidance - and it becomes a vicious cycle that only reinforces that emotions are bad. Avoidance of emotions increases the likelihood of struggling with anxiety, depression, insomnia, or physical health concerns.
Disconnection from your body
Our bodies have a built-in system meant to help us in stressful moments -the well known fight or flight response. However, trauma overwhelms the body beyond ordinary stress - and in situations where you aren’t able to fight or physically leave an unsafe situation (typical for children who are less powerful and more dependent), disconnecting from your body becomes a way to survive by bypassing what hurts. This isn’t a literal disconnection, but consciously and unconsciously you may ignore physical cues, check out or feel numb, or focus on anything other than what’s happening in your body.
As an adult, being fully present in your body and its cues can feel foreign, even dangerous if doing so has been associated with unpleasant sensations or feeling out of control. You may have difficulty noticing muscle tension or deprioritize taking care of your physical health. It may be counterintuitive or challenging to try self-care activities that focus on nurturing your body.
Higher risk or chronic illness or health issues
When traumatic stress sticks around and our bodies stay in a state of activation without relief, trauma can have long-term, negative health consequences. While not everyone who experiences childhood trauma will go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or health issues, there is a clear and undeniable connection between childhood trauma exposure and physical health outcomes. Exposure to trauma during childhood is highly disruptive to development and can impact the way our brain, nervous system, and even immune system respond to stress throughout life. Through these physiological pathways, unresolved trauma can lead to chronic pain, chronic illnesses like heart disease and cancers, autoimmune conditions, and even premature aging.
What factors influence how childhood trauma impacts you
Everyone responds to their childhood experiences in unique ways. When it comes to childhood trauma, some of these factors may have complicated things for you, or had a protective effect and helped you cope.
Age or developmental stage
Children often do not have the mental, emotional, or verbal ability to process traumatic experiences or protect themselves from physical harm. The younger a child is, often the more dependent and vulnerable they are overall. Children intrinsically have little power and less access to resources to help them cope with feeling unsafe, overwhelmed, or helpless.
Single traumatic experience versus multiple (or ongoing) traumatic experiences
If you’ve had multiple traumatic experiences, the effects can accumulate and affect your mental and physical health, sometimes to the point that “survival mode” becomes your baseline. This is often the case when abuse occurs by parents or caregivers and a child has little reprieve from the person who is supposed to look out for them. Repeated experiences can also lead to internalized narratives of shame, self-doubt, or physical health concerns as described above.
Social support
Having one person in your life respond in a supportive and validating way to your experience makes a big difference. Unfortunately, being ignored, questioned, shamed, or dismissed by an adult in response to a traumatic experience is particularly harmful as children instinctively look to adults for protection, explanation, and help.
Access to resources
Your environment and life context matter a lot. Access to adequate healthcare, financial stability, the opportunity to join extracurricular activities or develop positive experiences with other role models or peers in a community can significantly buffer some of the effects of childhood trauma.
Cultural and identity
The impact of trauma is always funneled through the prism of one’s identities and cultural context. If you’re expected to be strong and stoic, save face or not air dirty laundry, be exceptional to disprove stereotypes, or avoid certain taboo topics - you may feel even more misunderstood, ashamed, isolated in your experience.
Types of Therapy That Can Help Heal Childhood Trauma in Adults
The very good news is that there are many types of therapy that can help you address unresolved childhood trauma. Some therapies that help with healing childhood trauma are:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
Psychodynamic Therapy
Mind-body based therapies
In therapy, you may learn more effective coping strategies for emotions or how to build a stronger relationship with yourself and others. Some therapy approaches focus on reevaluating old thought processes, others will address areas like early family relationships, practicing mindfulness, or understanding your nervous system. Some focus on present-day experiences and learning to respond to difficult situations in healthy ways, while others guide you through processing in the present what you couldn’t in the past.
Reach out to a trauma therapist in NYC
If you’ve been wondering if a past event in childhood is significantly affecting your life today, you’re not alone and we can help. We encourage you to reach out for professional help for clarity and support. Even if you’ve been in therapy for childhood trauma, sometimes new stressors or major life transitions can bring up old memories or questions where you’d benefit from professional perspective. Our team of therapists is trained to address trauma and here to connect. Book a free consultation call with us today.
About the Authors: Drs McGlinchey, Meli, and Loo are therapists at Manhattan Therapy Collective in New York. They have each received advanced training in a range of trauma-informed approaches to therapy, and worked with many adults to process and heal from traumatic childhood events.