Childhood and Complex Trauma: Episode 3

Hello and welcome back to the Thriving After Complex Trauma podcast where I aim to help you to understand complex trauma, recover from it and truly thrive in your life. In these next few episodes I'm going to be delving into a really important topic, relationships. And that's because our connections with others are absolutely central to our lives, to understanding complex trauma and crucially to our recovery and healing. But here's a crucial insight up front. As you know, if you've listened to earlier episodes, when we have complex trauma we've been deeply hurt in harmful, threatening relationships. But we also heal in good quality, healthy, supportive and safe relationships. And empathetic, warm, trusting and mutually supportive connections with other humans are not just helpful for recovery, they're truly essential. Put simply, we really do need each other. So in this episode we'll explore that more and start with the critical role of our childhood. So we'll look at what children need from their relationships with their parents and other caregivers for the very best start in their lives, with a focus on their social and emotional development. I'll also look at how and why complex trauma often begins with these early relationships. So hopefully you'll find this a helpful episode. So for everyone, considering our childhood relationships and understanding more about the impact they have had on us can be incredibly helpful in knowing ourselves more as adults. And this is especially true with complex trauma. It more often than not starts in childhood in some way. And many of my clients recognize they grew up in less than ideal early environments, or indeed come to realize that through therapy. It's also important to say before we begin that even if our childhoods were incredibly difficult, there's a lot we can do as adults to understand ourselves more, to repair any damage and crucially to recover. Our childhood stories are really important to all of us, but especially if we are experiencing difficult symptoms of complex trauma as an adult. It helps us to organize our experience, understand who we are, and how we may have developed our ways of being in the world. Considering our own childhoods, what happened, and why our parents may have behaved as they did can truly help us develop a strong personal narrative and can be a powerful way to understand ourselves more deeply. But even if we did not get what we need in our early relationships, we really can repair this and learn as adults how to create secure, authentic connections with healthy, safe others, which we really do all need. We all want a need to feel connected, safe, and loved. And I see this time and time again in my practice. It doesn't mean we have to necessarily dig around in childhood to unearth very difficult memories that may be well hidden for good reason. So we don't have to stay there long or do it all at once. It can be very challenging and many people have a strong urge to avoid or deny for some time looking at their childhood or any negative impact of their upbringing. So it does need to be done carefully and possibly with the support of a therapist. But we do usually at least have to consider what life was like for us as children in order to make sense of why we may be suffering from the symptoms of complex trauma and to take steps to recover. So it's a really big step in the right direction you're taking by listening to this podcast. But do go gently with yourself. If you're a parent, you might also find yourself thinking about the impact that you've had on your children. Again, that's quite natural, but please do be kind to yourself. Let me reassure you that there is lots of evidence we just need to be good enough parents. We all make mistakes. We can also make repairs and we can do things better if we need to, but we can't change the past. And really if we can work through our own trauma, it's the greatest gift we can give our children and then their children. So let's start with the basic question. Why are relationships so profoundly important to us all? As a species, we are fundamentally social beings. Our survival has depended on living in small collaborative tribes, which means our connections with other humans deeply impact our psychological, social, emotional and physical health. And there is exceptionally strong, robust scientific research across various fields to support this. It's not just my opinion. We have a fundamental human need for connection. We are born as babies hardwired for social interaction and survival. Our attachment system is an innate biologically driven mechanism that has been developed to ensure our survival and safety by forming close emotional caring bonds with our primary caregivers, usually mum, but not necessarily. And our early interactions with our caregivers really do shape how we see ourselves and our relationships. They influence how we see connection, comfort and security throughout our lives. And this has been shown time and time again by research. The science really is very robust. So as humans, we get a sense of belonging safety and security from our relationships. And having healthy, strong, stable and supportive relationships provides us with emotional support, stress relief, a sense of purpose and fun. Good relationships really do help us to navigate lives inevitable ups and downs and face challenging situations with greater ease. We feel genuinely encouraged and supported in so many aspects of our lives. Research consistently shows that high quality social connections contribute to longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives. So they truly are vital for health and wellbeing and help us to blossom and thrive in life. We really are completely wrong if we think we can survive without other people. We need good, strong, healthy, supportive and trusting connections to flourish. Let me give you a really good example of the research. The longest Harvard study on human happiness and adult development tracked 724 men over the course of 85 years, so from adolescence into old age. And they found that good, warm relationships were the most powerful indicator of health, happiness and a longer life, much more so than wealth, fame, social class or IQ. And there is so much other evidence showing the same. High quality relationships really are essential to our health and wellbeing across many aspects of our lives. And unfortunately, the reverse is also true that abusive relationships can be deeply damaging. As I explained in earlier episodes, if we've experienced hurt, threat and harm in our closest relationships repeatedly over time, it's natural that a common symptom is to be very wary of close bonds and to avoid letting others too close because those connections felt overwhelmingly threatening in the past. We can really struggle with trusting others and have every reason not to. It takes great courage to take steps to trust people again. It's deeply admirable and also very beautiful to witness. So let's turn our attention back to childhood. I've mentioned before that the roots of complex trauma usually, they're not always found in our childhood. So let's explore now why our early relationships have such a profound and lasting impact on us all as humans. Our childhood relationships are the foundations of our psychological development. And they profoundly influence how we see ourselves, others and the world throughout our lives. We're all born into families that we didn't choose. And many of us didn't get everything we truly needed in childhood. Usually there's a reason that our parents or caregivers behave the way that they did. And that usually lies in their own childhood and their relationships. But understanding the impact of our relationships with our parents and caregivers and our families can really help us understand ourselves and our behaviors in adulthood, especially in our relationships. For example, our coping strategies when things get difficult, why they make sense, our approach to inevitable conflict and how we view our own and other people's emotions. And having this self awareness is the first step to them being able to change anything that no longer serves us. So the first years of our lives are vitally important for our development and long term health. And psychologically, we especially focus on the first three years of a child's life and up to the age of seven. So classed as infancy and early childhood. And that's because the brain and mind are developing at an astounding rate during this period, rapidly building the foundational brain structures for everything that comes later, from movement and language, to problem solving, and crucially emotional processing, social understanding, and attachment to others. The growth and change in the brain that happens during this period is primarily being shaped by our experiences. So if we don't receive what we need from a psychological, social and emotional standpoint during early childhood, it does have a significant impact on us later in our lives. And the longer this goes on for, the more detrimental the impact is. And this is true for all of us, but especially in the field of complex trauma. If a child's not able to get their basic emotional needs met, or there's any outright maltreatment, neglect or abuse, then this leads to complex trauma. There's obviously a spectrum of this. So the less they have their basic emotional needs met, the more severe the maltreatment, and the longer it goes on for, then the greater the impact. And it's more likely that a child will grow up to struggle with significant and challenging symptoms of complex trauma, well into adulthood. And that's really because infancy and early childhood sees the most rapid brain development of our entire lives. It truly does lay the groundwork for how we interact with the world. This rapid development particularly occurs in the limbic system, which as I discussed in episode two plays a crucial role in our threat and our emotional systems. And this is really heavily influenced by our early relational experiences and our interactions with our caregivers in the first few years. The experiences a child has in their caregiver relationships directly shape the neural pathways concerned with emotional regulation, social and relational skills. And these directly contribute to how resilient a child is in the future, how they can manage their stress and emotions, and how they can have healthy relationships later in life. We all know that infants learn so much and their brains are highly vulnerable, sensitive, adaptable and responsive to experiences. So it really is critical that early childhood experiences are overwhelmingly positive. And central to this are the interactions between a child and the adults in their lives. And as adults we're hardwired for this. It's why we instinctively have those little back and forth interactions with babies. Many of us are drawn to babies and young children. So we coot them, we smile at them, we have a little chat with them in that motherese or infantese, that high pitched exaggerated sing song way that we automatically use when we speak to babies and young children. And that's not just baby talk, it's us instinctively communicating and making language more engaging and accessible for the infant brain so that they will interact with us and learn. It's absolutely crucial for an infant's development in many ways. And little ones need active social engagement. They learn from immediate consistent and appropriate reactions to them. It's vital for them to feel connected to their primary caregivers and this helps them to learn essential emotional regulation and social interaction skills. There's very strong research to show that if they don't get this, they can have very strong stress reactions. And again, as I explained in episode two, prolonged activation of the stress response system can have a really damaging impact on our brains, bodies and minds. And this is especially true for infants and young children. If they don't get what they need from their caregivers, it can alter their brain structure and lead to difficulties with emotional regulation, learning and physical health much later in their life. If young children are exposed to chronic or extreme stress due to neglect, abuse or other adverse childhood experiences, this really can disrupt their brain development and there are significant long term consequences of a child's early years. So it really is a critical time and infants and young children really do need to have responsive, attuned, attentive and loving caregivers to give them the very best start in life. So in an ideal world, a child's primary caregivers behave consistently kindly and lovingly towards them. They are present and attentive and they validate and respond to their child's emotional cues and they create a home environment that's emotionally regulated the vast majority of the time. This allows a child to feel that they have a consistently safe, secure base. And again, we definitely don't need to be perfect, just good enough to create a steady, safe, secure base that allows a child to feel protected and connected. It's through countless interactions with consistent responsive, attentive caregivers who mirror, validate and respond to them that a little one is able to develop their sense of self and gradually learn who they are as a unique individual and that they are both separate from and connected to other people. A child needs supportive but not engulfing caregivers who allow them to develop as an individual over time. They need caregivers who are curious about them and their uniqueness, who want to learn what the child is thinking and feeling to discover their likes and dislikes, what motivates them, gives them joy and helps them to feel safe and supported in the world. Emotionally, children need caregivers to help them understand what they're feeling and help them realize there are a wide range of feelings that come and go. They need lots of help particularly in the early years to help them with their feelings. It's a critical part of a child's development and really does set the template for how they deal with their emotional world and their interactions with other people throughout their lives. Children need a safe haven where they can go when they're distressed and that their crying will be met in an attentive, responsive and nurturing way. By being soothed, comforted and supported when they're feeling overwhelmed, they learn that their feelings are important and they matter and that people care and will help them with big feelings. And through lots of these interactions every day as they grow, they firstly learn to co-regulate to calm their emotions and then in time they learn to self-regulate their emotions. And in doing so they also develop a secure sense of themselves and of other people. It's such an important fundamental skill and it's really quite simple to do. As adults we just need to take as many opportunities as we can to mirror, name and validate a child's emotions. So it's important that we are the safe, regulated adult who stays calm, shows interest in how they're feeling and helps to console and regulate them. We are trying to help a child over many, many interactions to recognize and manage their feelings, which with little ones are often communicated through crying. And if you think about how we rock and sue the crying baby, we coot at them and we murmur to them, we're not just calming them in the moment. We're helping their emotions to be seen and soothed. We're building a foundational sense of security in their tiny minds and bodies that their emotional signals are important, will be understood and will be met. As children grow, helping them to name their feelings is powerful as it helps to validate the child's internal emotional experience and it teaches them that all their feelings are acceptable and understandable. The process of labelling emotions helps children to develop emotional literacy and self-regulation skills. It also helps them in time to build a secure sense of themselves and the ability to manage their big feelings constructively. We call this name it to tame it and a feelings wheel is an excellent tool you can use to help you. We can all use it to expand our emotional vocabulary and I'll put one in the show notes that you can download. So let me give you an example of how it might look to help a child with their feelings. If you see a toddler hitting another child because the child has taken their toy, you might get down to their level, make eye contact and say it looks like you're feeling very angry because Bobby took your toy and then you'd go in with the behavioral correction of we don't hit people. So the first step is always validating the emotion and then setting the clear behavioral boundary and in doing so you really are helping to build a child's self-regulation skills and helping them understand in time better ways to express their distress. Hitting behavior is very common in toddlers who often express themselves through physical actions and it usually declines as long as we teach them other ways to regulate and express the emotions and it goes without saying I hope that physical violence is never an acceptable solution and we need to model that as adults too. Physical violence is really harmful and violent, aggressive adults are very scary especially to children and hitting badly erodes the trust in any relationship and of course healthy relationships need trust and relationships that are kind, caring, safe and loving truly do create a strong foundation and in childhood this helps little ones to form positive views about their value in the world to see others as safe and trustworthy and the world itself as a largely secure place to be. This is how children build their foundational templates the blueprints if you like of themselves others and the world where they can learn they are worthy of love relationships are healthy and stable and safety can be found in them. Children who grow up in safe secure environments with good enough parenting free from hurt and harm tend to carry this into all aspects of their lives especially their relationships they're more likely to form stable long-term intimate connections and use well-developed relational skills like cooperation and empathy and they tend to have low levels of interpersonal aggression they're usually able to regulate their emotions and impulses which helps them to be more successful in many areas of their lives unfortunately the opposite is also true and too many children don't get this kind of consistent safe nurturing care and they're consequently set up to struggle. Children who grow up in neglectful or abusive homes often develop models of relationships which include deeply ingrained beliefs about themselves as bad or unworthy of love and good things in some way they see others as unpredictable unsafe and untrustworthy and they see relationships as threatening dangerous and uncertain these patterns understandably can lead to profound difficulties with trust intimacy and often a fragmented sense of self some of the symptoms of complex trauma that I explored more in episode two you might recognize that I'm talking about attachment theory here and I'll definitely be covering that more in later episodes as it's profoundly important when we're looking at complex trauma but for now the key takeaway is that children need safe secure consistent nurturing and loving caregivers for the very best start in life and to set them up for long-term success so I want to talk more now about what happens if we don't get what we need and to talk about the profound impact of neglect and abuse in childhood this is obviously quite a difficult topic so do be gentle and careful with yourself and pause and stop if you need to but let's start by focusing on what happens when we grow up in families where there isn't outright obvious abuse like psychological physical or sexual harm but where caregivers are instead constantly misattuned or not emotionally present or available to their children when caregivers are emotionally unresponsive a child repeatedly feels misunderstood uncared for or undervalued if a parent isn't asking how a child feels or truly doesn't seem to care it sends a deeply damaging message that the child's feelings and eventually the child themselves do not matter or count when parents consistently miss a child's bid for attention support and connection in other words they aren't attuned to them or if they reject a child's feelings and preferences and fail to offer support for overwhelming emotions they're leaving a child feeling repeatedly emotionally abandoned this consistent emotional neglect over time can affect many aspects of a child's life understandably it impacts their relationships with their own emotions their emotions aren't given appropriate space and they don't get the help that they need to learn to regulate and manage their emotions some clinicians argue that emotional neglect is one of the most common reasons for complex trauma to develop in childhood yet it's also arguably the most under recognized this is often because people may deny or minimize its impact perhaps because it lacks overt violence and obvious abuse emotional neglect can indeed be unintentional many parents are genuinely unaware the harm that their repeated emotional absence is causing their child however the evidence is very very clear the repeated absence of emotional attunement is significantly harmful to a child's development and can have lasting implications emotional neglect often occurs in families where parents are dealing with immense stress of their own perhaps significant relationship conflict their own unaddressed psychological issues which perhaps impairs their capacity for consistent emotional connection and responsiveness similarly addictions to substances or behaviors can consume a parent's attention energy and resources making it impossible for them to attune to a child's emotional needs but also intense overwork or chronic stress can lead to a parent being physically present but emotionally distant because they're too depleted to engage with their child's inner emotional world and in the world today of course parents and caregivers can be easily and constantly preoccupied with their phones or their laptops far more than in the past and all these things mean that a caregiver is repeatedly emotionally absent for long periods of time if you're interested in this more you can look up edtronics still face experiments on youtube and that clearly illustrates the impact on a baby of a mom adopting the kind of still face with no emotional expression that really we all have when we're scrolling on our phones it's quite powerful to watch and i'll put a link to it in the show notes but the key point here is that infants and children really do need their parents and other caregivers to pay consistent attention to them and interact with them in warm caring loving ways being carefully attuned to their emotions it really is imperative for their development in so many ways not only in childhood but well into adulthood but attunement is not the same as attention some parents can pay too much attention to a child but in a harmful intrusive way and they're not attuned to their child and their emotional needs rather they're often using them to regulate their own emotional state so this isn't about a lack of emotional presence but rather a relentless over involvement where a parent's anxieties or needs override a child's developing autonomy so this can look like being very over involved and overstimulating a child which consistently violates their boundaries it can lead to enmeshments which i'll talk about in later episodes but is essentially an unhealthy relationship dynamic in families where there are very few boundaries and there's an over involvement in each other's emotional lives which creates many issues for children and it can lead to a child feeling smothered or trapped but at the same time feeling immense guilt and an ongoing and unhealthy feeling of being overly responsible for their parents emotional well-being and that doesn't allow them to fully develop as an individual with a strong sense of self because their autonomy is not being allowed to develop appropriately and of course this then leads to various difficulties with forming healthy secure relationships later in life because their template of what relationships look and feel like has been unhealthily developed in childhood and it's not uncommon unfortunately for children to experience caregiving which is a combination of intrusive and neglectful and also sometimes outrightly abusive too many of my clients come to recognize in adulthood that they've come from families where there has been psychological abuse and one or both parents have exhibited pathological narcissism i'll talk more about narcissism in later episodes because again there really is so much misinformation on the internet but it's incredibly harmful to have a pathologically narcissistic parent and even if a parent is not pathologically narcissistic there can be other forms of psychological abuse and this means a child has experienced a parent who is highly emotionally dysregulated at times sometimes very volatile and struggles to create a safe environment for them their parent may also have been overtly controlling cruel and unkind and very threatening at times so essentially there were many emotionally unsafe and harmful events that have happened in their childhood that were quite simply terrifying for them to experience as a child and understandably this kind of parenting or caregiving has a much more significant impact on a child's development as their stress responses unable to turn off as i explained more about in episode two in this kind of environment a child may experience regular and repeated harsh name calling humiliation and mockery belittling or outright rejection and often this is directed at their normal emotional experiences so for example harsh punishment for crying which is really harmful for a child especially if it's the parents scary behavior that has caused them to cry in the first place and when a parent is sometimes kind and then suddenly very frightening it creates immense confusion for a child the sheer unpredictability means that they never know what to expect an unpredictable emotionally dysregulated and volatile caregiver is truly terrifying especially if this is the person that the child must rely on to survive they can't get away from them if they're their parents and they live in the same house and for many of my adult clients who've had parents who've behaved like this it can be really painful to recognize but also sometimes a real relief when they can recognize where their own patterns of behavior are coming from and it's not because of some defect but because of the way that things were when they were a child and while this kind of abuse does often come from a parent unfortunately it can also originate from another family member like an older sibling but regardless of its source being subjected to such psychological abuse is incredibly damaging for a child and a child really does have to learn ways of coping with this because it's in the home so they can't get away from it so that's where we'll see the fight flight freeze for or dissociate responses that I talked more about in episode two and they're happening very early in a child's life so they can become deeply ingrained it's also crucial to acknowledge the potentially devastating impact of physical and sexual abuse in childhood and I'll just talk about these briefly so if you do want to skip past this section because you recognize it's potentially triggering for you then please do physical and sexual abuse represent a significant violation of a child and involve direct bodily harm pain and a terrifying betrayal of trust by those who should be protecting them the experience of having our body repeatedly hurt harmed or violated especially in childhood significantly disrupts our sense of bodily autonomy and our overall sense of safety and if this happens in childhood then it's likely to lead to an intense sense of vulnerability and the need to protect ourselves from other people who have been harmful and hurtful to us for a child the very person who should be their source of safety and comfort becomes a source of fear and pain and this repeated experience have been harmed by a caregiver often under the guise of teaching or love creates deep confusion and a distorted understanding of relationships boundaries and self-worth it teaches a child that their body is not safe that pain is an expected part of discipline or even love and can lead to heightened aggression difficulty with emotional regulation and a pervasive sense of anxiety or hypervigilance well into adulthood it can significantly deepen the complexity of trauma symptoms and contribute to increase difficulties with trust intimacy body image and a heightened and understandable need to rely on dissociation as a coping mechanism the longer and more severe any such abuse then the more enduring and challenging the symptoms can be but please know it is truly possible to heal from this and there are excellent and highly effective treatments working with a specialist psychologist or psychotherapist who understands dissociation and complex trauma can really help you to get on the path to healing quickly and I do want to reiterate that very important message and also return before I finish to a clear and hopeful message that children really do thrive when they experience consistent warmth kindness care and love they flourish with genuine interest in their uniqueness as a little human and support to explore the world as they develop and grow ideally this comes from parents but if not it can be from an alternative adult many of my clients record with immense fondness a gentle kind and loving grandparent teacher cousin or neighbor who made a tremendous difference in their childhood and helped them to feel what real caring love looked like so even if we didn't have a good enough childhood with consistently available loving parents having at least one emotionally attuned caregiver or loving person in our lives protects us somewhat from the profound impact of complex trauma that's a very very important message but so is also that considering our childhood experiences is vitally important if we're struggling with complex trauma symptoms trauma of any kind distorts and disrupts what comes after it and if we've had difficult early life experiences with the very people we relied upon for safety and protection it's very natural that this then has a particularly deep impact on our later relationships complex trauma in our earliest connections makes us very vulnerable to entering adult relationships with harmful people we're often more likely to tolerate abusive behavior because it conforms to our earlier templates about relationships it feels familiar in some way which of course confirms the view that people in the world are unsafe or dangerous this kind of pattern where we unconsciously reenact childhood trauma is very very common it's called the repetition compulsion it can be incredibly distressing and confusing but psychologically it's very understandable and with insight often with the help of a therapist we can absolutely change our patterns while we may have been hurt in relationships we can also heal in relationships good ones and for some people that healing journey has to begin with a relationship with a therapist and i've been incredibly lucky to witness countless clients begin and continue to build healthy happy relationships during therapy after a long history of complex trauma it truly is one of my favorite parts of my work if you're allowed to run a struggling with symptoms of complex trauma even if you consider it primarily stems from an abusive adult relationship it is highly likely some of the origins are in childhood for your recovery it can be incredibly important to at least consider with a good therapist if needed what you learned about yourself and how relationships work from your own early experiences so you can ask yourself what did you learn from your parents family members and other caregivers about yourself and relationships were those relationships warm and supportive consistent and caring did you have at least one person who truly took an interest in you and helped you with your emotions in your early life i hope you did but if you didn't please know that you can heal from your childhood experiences we all can and you may need some good therapeutic support to help you however it's also vital to reiterate that sometimes complex trauma can develop solely as a result of our adult relationships again this happens if we've been in an ongoing relationship where there's been repeated mistreatment control from a threatening person an absence of safety kindness support and care that we naturally need and expect many of my clients start therapy after leaving abusive controlling or violent adult relationships where they've been subjected to significant harm these kinds of unhealthy harmful relationships in adulthood understandably leave deep scars and impact our psychological and physical health long after they're over yet it is absolutely possible to heal from them and that's going to be the focus of the next episode so if you suspect that you or someone you care about has been through an abusive adult relationship and may have symptoms of complex trauma please do tune in for that meanwhile i hope it's been helpful to learn more about how complex trauma develops in childhood and also what children need from us as adults i'll put some free resources on this in the show notes and i hope they're helpful too thanks very much for listening and i'm sending you my best wishes