06 Jun Psycho-Emotional Childhood Trauma, Its Impact On Our Daily Life & How To Heal

Often, when we talk about severe trauma and the aftermath we’re thinking of serious accidents, a natural disaster, violence (physical abuse and rape) or the sudden death of a loved one.

We forget about the daily impact long-term emotional abuse has on all areas of life.

A Canadian study involving 1,000 women aged 15 and up showed that 35% of them had experienced emotional abuse growing up.

Common responses to trauma are:

• Sleeping problems,
• Poor performance at work,
• withdrawal from family and friends,
• addictions and more

The impact of trauma can be subtle, insidious, or outright destructive.
It can be a rollercoaster of emotions like:

• anger,
• grief,
• despair
• helplessness
• shame,
• guilt
• numbness,
• loneliness

When these emotions don’t improve over time, they often lead to the devastating feeling of total lack of control over life.

Did you know that from birth until the age of six, a child’s brain works very differently than an adult brain. Throughout these first few years of life, the child’s mind is like a sponge, soaking up huge amounts of information from their environment. They are absorbing everything around them, effortlessly, continuously, and indiscriminately, based on Maria Montessori in her book “the absorbent mind.”

IF WE COMPARE OUR ABILITY AS ADULTS TO THAT OF THE CHILD, IT WOULD REQUIRE US SIXTY YEARS OF HARD WORK TO ACHIEVE WHAT A CHILD HAS ACHIEVED IN THESE FIRST YEARS

Have you ever wondered…?

If these first few years of a child’s life will build the architecture of their brain and the connection that will allow them to develop important life-long skills like problem-solving, communication, self-control and relationship building, what happens when this child is raised by abusive parents.

Let’s have a look at the definition of emotional and psychological abuse in children: It is any nonphysical behavior that aims to diminish the child’s sense of self-worth or identity.

Parents who abuse their children emotionally and psychologically are manipulative and controlling. They often are passive-aggressive, emotionally withdrawn, neglective, threatening, over-protective, overcritical (never praise) and/or have extremely high expectations.

First of all, we have to notice that we are not alone.

No matter who we are, all of us were wounded in some way or another when we were children. Some of us were abused physically and some of us were abused emotionally.

Maybe you were neglected. Maybe your parents inadvertently and unknowingly hurt you by minimizing the sadness or fear you tried to express. Whatever it is, it often hurts so much that you are disconnecting from your soul.

I remember my mom telling me that she didn’t want to have a child. Then she got pregnant, and she wished for a son. But there I was, unfortunately a girl. She used to mention that her pregnancy was horrible, and I would have squeezed her nerves as an embryo which caused her endless pain. I tried to behave like a boy until I was 11. I got my menstruation very early and my mom yelled at me “Now you are a whore! Every man can impregnate you!”. She also decided -and this is called “deliberately isolating”- when or if at all I can have a friend to play with and as soon as the friend didn’t suit her, she didn’t allow the kid to visit us anymore. Being not very sportive made me a weakling in her eyes. And whenever I wanted to try something new, she said “You can’t do this! You are too weak. You will hurt yourself.”

My dad was great in comparing me with my cousins and the kids of his acquaintances, saying things like “I wish Susanne was my daughter; she’s so much smarter!” Perhaps he thought that it would makes me more competitive, but the effects were just the opposite.

And in addition to the emotional abuse, I was still spanked and slapped with an open hand, no matter if I spoke the truth or not.

The American Psychological Association reports that: “Children who are emotionally abused and neglected face similar and sometimes worse mental health problems as children who are physically or sexually abused, yet psychological abuse is rarely addressed in prevention programs or in treating victims.”

Signs of Emotional & Psychological Abuse are…

• Adult anxiety (uncertain environment cause extreme stress)
• Co-dependency (limited independence and self-regulation)
• Introversion (lack of social experience and scaredness of social interactions)
• Inability to develop healthy and loving relationships (distorted sense of love)

An example would be:

“From a counselling perspective, the way emotional abuse would show up between couples was when one partner would seek comfort from the other, but not be able to trust it, so instead of the comfort being soothing when they got it, it would actually increase the person’s anxiety, and they would then push the partner away… and then seek comfort again.”

Says Elly Taylore. That’s called Attention-seeking behavior as a result of emotional deprivation (not feeling loved, wanted, secure and worthy).

I was shy and introverted until my late 20ies, co-dependent and emotionally abused in my second marriage and actually still feel very uncomfortable when I’m forced to work in a team.

But I often wonder, if I would be able to be as compassionate, empathetic and caring as I am now in my counseling and coaching business if I had a different childhood.

Would I be able to relate to the emotional pain of a teenager in the way I do now? Would I be able to feel what women go through when they’re emotionally blackmailed and abused by their partners? Would I be able to understand trauma in all its facets?

Healing for me became possible when I understood that I am who I am now as a result of childhood trauma. The healing process made it possible for me to love myself and be proud of who I became. I’m at the point that I am grateful for the traumatic experience because it taught me so many important life lessons.

And I was able to forgive my parents, understanding that they didn’t have a great childhood during the years of World War II. And again, their parents were influenced by World War I. Forgiving my mother became easy when during my psychology studies I became aware that she suffered from severe war trauma, trying to darken the windows all through my childhood, like she used to do it during air raids.

Now, I am thankful for the photographical and technical skills I have inherited, the intense love for nature, music and art.

Something happened to all of us. And we created false beliefs around those incidents by interpreting them through the mind of our childhood self.

In reality, what happened may have had little or nothing to do with our interpretation of those events, yet we’ve been living our lives as if those false beliefs were true. They may be things like “I don’t belong” or “I am alone” or “I’m not worthy” or “I am not lovable” or “I’m bad” or “I’m never enough” or “I’m too much” or “I’m not wanted” or “I’m not safe.”

In order to heal from childhood trauma, it is important to acknowledge the pain that we felt as a child. When we engage in a loving attitude toward this young part of us, we are evoking the same positive emotions that get generated in loving relationships between caring adults and young children.

Even if we didn’t have a loving parent or caregiver, we can now create a reparative experience which can help us to find a sense of resolution within ourself.

Self-compassion as applied to trauma recovery allows us to transform our pain. The word compassion literally means to “feel moved by” or “feel with” another person’s experience. Usually, compassion arises in response to another person’s suffering and evokes a desire to understand their pain and be of service by offering help or kindness. This same intention of warmth and caring can be offered to ourselves in the form of self-compassion. Here, we set an intention to respond to our own suffering with warmth and gentleness.

Trauma recovery involves developing positive coping resources and focusing your attention on your strengths. Healing also asks you to attend to difficult memories from your past and your emotional pain. Self-compassion helps to support both of these intentions. 

There may be times that you have difficulty feeling compassion toward a younger part of yourself. Instead, you might notice that you feel resentful or angry toward this part of you. This often occurs because we internalize our experiences of the family members that we grew up with. For example, if you had a critical parent, this could become the voice of your own inner critic. Or, if you felt abandoned as a child, you might continue to neglect your own self-care needs now. You might feel that this young part of you is unlovable, or you might blame the young part of yourself for causing or allowing abuse.

In part, this occurs because it is common for children to believe that the abuse or neglect is their fault. They blame themselves because it can be too frightening or inconceivable for a child to confront that they have a threatening parent or caregiver. A child is completely dependent upon caregivers. Their very survival requires that they make a dangerous environment tolerable, even if this is accomplished by fantasy alone or through peritraumatic dissociation (defined as a complex array of reactions at the time of the trauma that include depersonalization, derealization, dissociative amnesia, out-of-body experiences, emotional numbness, and altered time perception). 

Most of the time it’s not possible to heal trauma without reaching out for professional help.

I remember trying therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Psychoanalysis for almost a year and it didn’t get me anywhere. I felt as depressive and anxious as before. I was so desperate that I turned towards healing techniques I’ve never heard of in my life before. I was scared that these unconventional methods could do me more harm than help me, because they were talking about energy pathways (meridians) and re-wiring/re-pattering on a subconscious level. It sounded quite spooky.

However, these spooky techniques turned my world around and one session already made a bigger difference in my life than months of conventional counseling.  I gained self-confidence fast, my resilience level was on the rise, and I was able to grow from a shy shadow into a social sun, making lasting friendships and finding exciting jobs.

My conclusion from comparing my therapy experiences was:

With the help of energy psychology, we can access and change the programs in the subconscious mind, and overwrite the protection mechanism of it. You know, there’s quite a debate going on between the conscious mind that says, “I want to move forward” and the subconscious mind that answers “If you move forward, I can’t keep you safe. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t!”. So, we have to drop into our heart field, connect to our soul or ask our superconscious for healing.

During my years of education, I discovered early on that I have intuitive abilities that help me tune into my clients’ energy fields and find the root cause of trauma and pain very quickly. Even after receiving my diploma, I never stopped researching and acquiring more information, and 2005 I started to put together my own coaching techniques, like HeARTful Transformation Therapy.

HeARTful Transformation Process helps to…

• Quickly release stress and anxiety
• Transform your painful past into Peace and Non-attachment
• Meet your goals in lightning speed
• Upgrade your system to accelerate you towards anything you want in life
• Balance your entire system – mental, emotional, energetic, spiritual to get more of what you DO want
• Get unstuck – attract the partner, job, career, life you want.
• Discover and release emotional blockages in seconds

If you’d like to learn more, please visit www.balanching.org and if you’d like to get to know me a little more, subscribe to my inspirational and motivational self-help videos on YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/balanchingYouTube: www.youtube.com/c/balanching