Therapy culture has invaded a large part of our lives, viewpoints, and vernacular. Many in public and private spheres are quick to break down behaviors and personalities on a psychological level, with the intent of a diagnosis to identify the cause and predict the future behavior of others through a named disorder. In ourselves, we like to have something to blame when things aren’t going well, something out of our control, or better, something done to us. The most gratifying is low-level trauma, especially childhood trauma.
This is a long one, so I dropped a TLDR at the end — Scroll to the end if you would like and leave a comment with your thoughts!
As one has to do in every potentially offensive topic, I am not denying or belittling real childhood trauma. Real abuse, neglect, abandonment, and loss do happen, and the effects are profound. All the same, professional therapy can be an invaluable way to process and overcome traumatic instances. It should go without saying, but anyone’s opinion should not supersede professional diagnosis and treatment.
The Definitions and Data
It is not the prevalence or the degree of childhood trauma that I wish to discuss, but leading with the data is important. Maybe some of this information will seem clear-cut, but personally, I find the definition, studies, and statistics to be broad and vague. More curious are the primary sources when you try to research most of this. Most of what you hear is from the CDC, National Health Institute, DHR, and pediatricians. I find this interesting, not because of the credibility of the people doing the work, but the mission of the organizations, the samples, and the proposed treatment. Nonetheless, here is a brief overview of some of the scope of Childhood Trauma and ACEs:
According to the CDC, nearly two-thirds of the population is exposed to at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). “Overall, 63.9% of U.S. adults reported at least one ACE; 17.3% reported four or more ACEs.”
According to the National Center for PTSD. “Studies show that about 15% to 43% of girls and 14% to 43% of boys go through at least one trauma. Of those children and teens who have had a trauma, 3% to 15% of girls and 1% to 6% of boys develop PTSD. Rates of PTSD are higher for certain types of trauma survivors.” They cite how often certain types of traumas occur: 65% neglect, 18% physical abuse, 10% sexual abuse, and 7% psychological (mental) abuse.
The American Psychological Institute states similar statistics and outlines definitions of traumatic events and ACEs: “A traumatic event is one that threatens injury, death, or the physical integrity of self or others and also causes horror, terror, or helplessness at the time it occurs. Traumatic events include sexual abuse, physical abuse, domestic violence, community and school violence, medical trauma, motor vehicle accidents, acts of terrorism, war experiences, natural and human-made disasters, suicides, and other traumatic losses.”
Identifying with Childhood Trauma
Our childhood shapes us into who we become as adults. The experiences we have play critical roles in developing our personalities, views, interests, and habits. It can shape our very relationship to love. Our negative experiences do the same. They shape our fears, our reactions, our protection mechanisms, and even how we escape.
Something unique about childhood experiences is the lack of autonomy we have in them. Especially as younger children, life happens to us with little input or room for recourse. We don’t have the authority, knowledge, or responsibility to alter the course of what is happening. We can’t place ourselves into good situations or remove ourselves from bad ones. We are along for the ride, no matter where it goes.
This sort of helplessness has an odd effect. It is a pass for everything we do as a result. As children, not only are we out of control of the situation, but we are often out of control when it comes to our emotions and reactions to them. These Adverse Childhood Experiences produce behaviors such as distractedness, anger, loss of interest in normal activities, sadness, and lack of sleep that can exacerbate those things. As we get older or with proper help, we may be able to identify the cause and associate the behaviors in an effort to course correct to more “normal” behavior.
The issue lies there — At what age is one old enough to sort this out? What does proper help and processing look like? What the heck is “normal” anyway?
Without some sort of anchor, example, or goal, we can’t even begin to integrate our experiences into productive development. If we can’t integrate, then an easy alternative is to utilize these negative experiences as an excuse not to progress, and not to develop, or worse, hurt others.
None of the defined Adverse Experiences are new to humans. Traumatic events, poor parenting, and cruel peers have always been there. The difference, I think, people had more of an idea of what normal looked like. When you see “normal,” and you realize that the way you were treated does not align with that, you can see your negative experience as an anomaly. You know that is not how things should go. Conversely, if you see everyone else encounter the same hardships, you can integrate those as “normal,” and you can adapt strategies to cope with them alongside peers. In both those situations, you are able to view and carry your bad experiences differently and, in many ways, let go of them.
We have distorted what normal looks like, though. There are no playbooks left. We don’t have communities to help us define what we should be doing and how to process and progress through adversity. We have a system that allows us to keep youthful mindsets indefinitely. We are told to only look out for ourselves and that our happiness is the highest goal. What stands in the way of that? Unintegrated adverse experiences that we have yet to deal with.
When we remain in states where we continue to allow life to happen to us, we continue to attribute our behavior to the reaction of the things that happen to us. We continue to skirt responsibility and give up the ability to own and learn from our outcomes, good and bad. This trauma is not only a continuing source of pain, but it impedes development, success, and happiness. It keeps us from connecting with others and perpetuates a pain and reaction cycle that drives us further into alienation and away from a “normal,” healthy life that we want more than anything.
Healthy Integration of Traumatic Events
There is a pinch of “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” that comes along with childhood. Just like when we swan dive from the couch, we discover gravity in the same way Newton did. When we bite someone, they do not react kindly. All of childhood is a series of testing boundaries and incurring natural and sometimes unnatural consequences. As we are doing this, we are learning the rules of the world, of our unique reality, and how to operate within them.
Bad things will certainly happen. We will get hurt, we will hurt others, we will experience loss, we will experience joy. Sometimes we will learn the proper way to handle situations through observation, and sometimes we will learn the wrong way to handle situations and deal with consequences. Sometimes life will be unfair, and we will have to grapple with the reality of inequality. All these things will happen to everyone to some degree. The important part is learning.
Humans learn in only a few ways, either by dictation or experience. Learning by dictation is simply being told how something works. You do as you are told by someone who knows more about that subject than you. When you are little, it is easy, but as you get older and acquire some knowledge yourself, you naturally will start to question someone’s authority if it challenges your existing knowledge. However, questioning authority in the face of it presents its own challenges. That is where experience comes into play.
Challenging authority requires, not necessarily knowledge of the topic, but knowledge of the tactics. When to nod, when to speak, when to ask questions, and how are all important things we learn at a young age. Get these wrong, and you will likely face some negative consequences.
That experience of reprimand helps build a steady path to civility. How to work, grow, and interact in a group. How to identify authority and how to wield it. The consequences become common knowledge, allowing you to predict outcomes of behavior. It is what teaches us to have polite conversation, make friends and allies, exchange information effectively, ask things of others, and ultimately become a member of the tribe. This is the normalcy that is needed to feel included and properly develop. As we start to unlock ways to behave that allow insight to others, we can see what is normal, and we can start to compare our experience to it, determining what is common and what is not. We find what makes us and our situation unique.
Finding what is common and normal is key to integrating our negative experiences, even if that normal is relegated to your community. Your family, your scene, your religion, or locality all provide a level of normalcy that allows people to come together with common beliefs and experiences. As you interact, you will likely find that your situation is not too dissimilar from others’. There is a sense of shared struggle, support, and friendship that removes the feelings of alienation, isolation, and shame that often come with the pains of growing up.
Finding that requires personal interaction, and I believe that life online makes this almost impossible. Scrolling content, reading stories, and even participating in online communities do not allow for the depth of connection and the vulnerability needed to identify with others. Online stories often lean towards extremes and feature the worst sides of humanity, focusing on horror and shock for engagement. If someone was beaten nearly to death, a spanking seems trivial. If someone was raped, then a non-physical inappropriate interaction seems less of an issue. It creates a space where you cannot talk and process these traumatic events because there are worse problems, and when you can’t get that space, you embellish the events to express the gravity your young mind feels. When you embellish, you amplify not just the event, but the damage. What you could have moved past as a learning moment is now a traumatic event that may have never happened.
Our friends and communities prevent this spiral by giving us space, listening, supporting, and relating in less extreme instances, helping us heal and move while forging deeper bonds with humans and learning trust, another critical element of development. Good friends reel back exaggeration and can offer a healthy degree of reducing the weight of events. They offer an outside perspective before we have a chance to solidify malintent. These same friends offer one other special place in processing: sharing the experience.
Having a friend to get in trouble with is beautiful. Someone is there with you, learning alongside you. Messing up and facing consequences together; covering for you, retelling stories, and keeping secrets. This can’t be replicated outside of them being physically next to you. This, I believe, is how we mitigated crippling childhood trauma in the past — friendship.
The final and most important piece to integrating our traumatic experience in a healthy way is the acceptance of responsibility. No, not blaming yourself for what happened to you when you were a child, but identifying when you are no longer a child and can actually express agency. Moving past the phase of life happening to you and realizing that you have some control over your outcomes through your actions. It comes in the form of knowing when not to jump out of that tree, because you know what will happen, or how to identify when an adult is short-tempered, and maybe stay quiet and distanced. It comes when you can be reprimanded and acknowledge that you knew better.
Identifying with trauma halts this development. Constantly seeing adverse situations as injustices and not learning opportunities only ensures that certain consequences will happen again, only as you get older, the consequences become more severe and self-induced. Eventually, you find the only person to blame is yourself.
The healthiest way to integrate negative experiences is to see them as things you could not control at the time, but accept that you can now. Making the shift from child to adult is simply taking on responsibility; responsibility for yourself, your actions, and your outcomes. That shift means taking all the lessons from your childhood, what you learned through dictation and experience, and applying it all in your behavior.
Processing Past the Transition
Humans have a natural way of becoming stronger through adversity. Muscles grow by tearing and repairing. Scars are formed by creating fibrous tissue to heal beyond the normal properties of our skin. We learn from mistakes in hopes of not making them again.
If I were to sum this up: The healthiest way to move past common childhood trauma is to realize that you are no longer a child.
More, without your experiences, you would not be you. Your unique strengths would not have developed, and your personality would still be that of a child. Adverse Childhood Events are as unique as your fingerprints and interact with your chemistry in a one-of-a-kind fashion to create a person like no other, with insight and experience that most certainly can apply to many other situations in adult life… if you choose to.
Pain becomes art, abandonment becomes self-reliance, neglect becomes adaptability, and abuse becomes resiliance. Survival demonstrates determination.
What it takes to pull off this kind of alchemy from common traumas is simple, but not easy: Acceptance and Forgiveness.
Accepting our reality can be hard. It isn’t always rosy to accept that sometimes we were just dealt a bad hand when it came to our upbringing. The situations in which we came into this world and the needs that we had are not something that we had control over. We didn’t ask for any of it, but we got it anyway.
It can be painful to look at others and think of how easy it seems like they had it with seemingly more loving families, more resources, and simply better starting places. It is hard to imagine these people having issues of their own equal to or worse than yours. Remember, no one escapes childhood without trauma, and comparing trauma is a losing game.
Looking at a hard childhood in a positive light can also be difficult, but it is so helpful. The skills developed through those hard times are not ones that can be easily learned later in life. If you can identify the special skills you adopted to survive in what may have been less than ideal circumstances, you may actually be a little grateful for them.
Resenting all aspects of your childhood and not being willing to see how it shaped your development positively maintains a narrative of victimhood and being lesser-than. It perpetuates a sense of hopelessness that can’t be overcome. That resentment carries the weight of years wasted and potential squandered. That weight makes any forward progress more arduous. This is why forgiveness is the second most important part of the transformation from traumatized child to empowered adult.
Especially if you are not yet a parent, something that we never give our parents is how difficult it is. There is actually no instruction manual for raising children well, especially someone as unique as you. There is no prelicensing course, no training wheels, just straight into the trenches. Parents deal with their own level of trauma as they have to abruptly transition from being an adult, just trying to keep it together themselves, to now being responsible for a small, needy human, who it is their sole responsibility to keep alive. Maybe it was a planned effort, maybe it wasn’t, but one thing any parent can tell you is that you are never fully ready to be a parent.
We rarely think of the issues our parents had in their childhood. Our relationships with our parents change when we have kids, partly from just finally understanding. We naturally have a hard time thinking of our parents as children, pushing the boundaries with their parents, learning, and incurring their own traumas. It may seem like your parents and grandparents get along now, but there were likely times of turmoil in their own relationships.
There are always things that our parents did that we vow never to do with our kids because of the effect it had on us. Your parents did as well. Every generation tries to be a little better and royally screws up in its own unique way. Every child is different after all, and the world has changed drastically from generation to generation. The last few generations have been particularly hard with modern social technology.
You also can’t forget the times when you start to hear about therapy-speak. The concept of trauma is now heard in people’s teens. Teens: when absolutely everything is traumatic due to the influx of hormones, the battle for our independence, heightened social stress, and intro to existential dread. If you take on the concept of childhood trauma during the most physically and mentally stressful stage in development, when you hate your parents the most (this is biological), it can easily become a part of your very identity. Your parents’ enforcement of rules feels nothing short of abusively tyrannical. With trauma on the tip of your tongue and all the social media posts to back it up, if you fall too deep into it, you may never recover.
Being able to stop and look at your parents through a hormonally sober lens and look at the struggles they faced, you may have a different outlook on how your childhood actually was. You may realize that when you were born, they were young and not fully developed themselves. Your short-tempered, absent parent was really just exhausted from burning the candle at every end to give you all they could. Your parent who spanked (in a controlled way) was actually just trying to get your attention because nothing else worked to correct your behavior. Maybe keeping you more sheltered was for social issues in your area that made it more dangerous than they could explain to a child. Every story has more than one side and an origin story.
We all make mistakes. As parents, these are profoundly more impactful. Many times, hindsight isn’t kind, but there are reasons. Seeing our parents as humans and not benevolent caretakers, responsible for achieving the best possible outcomes despite the odds, is critical for development. Having that conversation can help. A simple, “tell me how it was,” lands differently when you are an adult. You may even find that a common trauma response comes from them: forgetfulness or repainting the story in a better light. Parent trauma works like that, the most hellish parts drift into obscurity, leaving only the good parts. Most mothers that I know don’t remember much of childbirth. If they did, most may never have a second child. That is part of growing, though, and how trauma is overcome. It isn’t about the bad times; it is about the good things you can take away.
Identify the love and how it manifests. Not how you wish people loved you, but how they actually do. When you see the love, forgive and let go. Everyone tried and could have done better when it came to your upbringing. Give some credit and move forward.
The TLDR — Your Childhood Trauma is Not That Special.
At least two-thirds of people can report some childhood trauma. That doesn’t make it an anomaly; it makes it normal. In fact, if someone reports that they don’t have any, that makes them the outlier, and that probably has its own negative side effects.
These traumatic events are so impactful because there were key lessons to learn and not forget found in them. They are critical points of development for us and pivotal in forming our personality. These events are as unique as we are in how they interact with our brains. So, while they can absolutely be viewed as negative experiences, common traumas can also be seen as the very things that shaped us into the people that we are — in a positive way.
Turning trauma into development is a key part of growing up, and when it gets hard is when we lose people to share it with. Negative situations have a way of turning into stronger bonds with those close to us. Having the ability to track where we came from, where we are, and where we are going in the developmental journey requires others to help us process and define a norm that allows us to belong. Belonging is as important to our development as nutrition and play.
We have to realize at some point that we are no longer children. Life happens to children, and they have little control, but becoming an adult means seizing responsibility and a degree of autonomy. Maybe this is lacking some today, but regardless, the most well-adapted realize that their actions absolutely have an impact on their outcomes.
Realizing adulthood encompasses the reality that our parents were not always who they are today. They, too, were once young, uniformed, and overextended: more like you than you may care to admit. They made mistakes with the best of intentions, and those mistakes were likely embellished by your young, sensitive mind. Seeing them for the love they gave and not their faults is critical to moving forward.
While it was said, it needs to be reiterated: I am talking about common traumas. These are common parts of growing up that get branded as traumatic events. Extreme cases of abuse and neglect do exist, as well as truly bad people. In those instances, help is likely required and should be sought and given. However, if we utilize the statistic that 17% of people have experienced multiple forms of ACEs, it should not be touted as the majority. We should not spend time comparing and quantifying the degrees of our hardships; rather, we should be putting in the efforts to overcome them and leave them in the past, supporting each other where needed to grow up together.
At some point, we have to grow up. That means accepting that you have arrived at adulthood. Just like you cannot choose the situation you are born in, you may not be able to choose where you start your adult life, but you can choose what direction you take it. You are no longer a child, you are an adult, and the type of adult you always hoped you would be. You are the kind of adult who doesn’t have to let life happen to you; you can do whatever you want. You can learn, grow, try, fail, explore, and shape your own corner of the world. You are responsible for making that happen, but you are also responsible for your own consequences.
Fight as you may, you know what is right and wrong. There is no single parent to issue punishments; it is now the entire world. You spent your childhood training and learning the rules of your reality; now you have to apply your knowledge and play the game. There are no excuses or tantrums that can get you out of this. No one is required to look after you, because no one is responsible for you anymore. The recollections of past traumas don’t serve you here. They only hold you back.
With Love,
Reid Pierpoint