Childhood trauma and integrated wholeness

One of the most common causes of depression, anxiety and a number of other health issues is, I have found in my private practice, unresolved childhood trauma.

When we hear the word ‘trauma’ our minds jump to all sorts of terrible ideas of assault, violence and neglect. We don’t like to think of ourselves as victims or perpetrators of such behaviour, as we on some level know the impact being exposed to cruelty like this can have on a person. 

Unfortunately, survivors of childhood trauma rarely see themselves as innocent victims of ‘crime’. They often come for therapy with very low self-esteem, blaming themselves for everything that goes wrong in their life, and sometimes appear incapable of accepting that their struggles might have been caused by something they could do nothing to prevent. 

As human beings, we like to feel a sense of agency or control over what happens to us. Especially as children it can feel quite terrifying to realise the people who we are reliant upon for food and shelter have the ability to cause us pain for no apparent reason. Of course, we will blame ourselves for their behaviour. To realise we are at the mercy of psychologically unwell and possibly quite damaged individuals is too distressing for our developing brains to handle. 

What this does however is slowly chip away at our sense of self, wholeness and feelings of being a ‘good’ person. We begin to see ourselves as bad because we are treated badly, not realising that we really have no control over our environment and that how others behave towards us is no more than a reflection of themselves. 

What can make this even harder to overcome later in life is that parents often seek to offset their sense of guilt and ‘wrongness’ by projecting it onto the child. They blame the child for their cruelty, inventing ‘bad behaviour’ when in many cases there was none, or certainly not enough for the harsh or punitive behaviour to make sense. 

However, as we need things to ‘make sense’ in order to feel safe, as children we invent reasons, and this is more often than not in the form of self-blame. We assume we are always the cause of the behaviour, which sets us up for maltreatment in the future (we do not realise we are being treated unfairly), or depression and anxiety, as we are left with unresolved conflicts and unexpressed emotions which we internalise. 

How therapy can help 

Through exploring our past, what happened to us and our interpretations of events, we may become able to see things more clearly for how they were. We can begin to let go of our feelings of being wrong or to blame, and come to terms with and accept our challenging early life experiences.

By recognising our parents’ flaws, we become better able to see our own - mainly that we have fallen into the trap of identifying with their projections onto us and blaming ourselves for things we could do nothing to help. 

With this understanding and recognition comes self-compassion and self-love. We become able to see our innocence again, and we let go of the heavy burdens of the past. We do not need to carry them around and let them impact our lives anymore.

There is no one to ‘blame’ for childhood trauma, yet there is a responsibility to be taken. It is impossible to force another person to recognise and take accountability for their own behaviour, but we can and must do the work for ourselves. It is possible to set ourselves free from the inter-generational trauma cycle, and we can do this through our own self-awareness, regardless of whether others choose to do the work for themselves.

There is too much at stake for us not to do this. Once we recognise and accept the truth, we become stronger, more resilient, self-compassionate individuals. We become kinder to ourselves and others as we see how we are all victims of a story to greater or lesser degrees. We recognise that we had no choice, we were innocent children. We can forgive ourselves for our faulty coping mechanisms and become able to operate and function as the healthy, compassionate individuals we always were and have been. This is the path to true healing and integrated wholeness.