How childhood trauma manifests in our adult lives
Trigger Warning: Self-harm and domestic violence.
When I was young, I was never taught how to regulate my own emotions. In fact, because of the hostile environment I had grown up in, as a young child I had unknowingly stepped into this “fixer” role in order to restore peace and harmony at home so that I could feel a sense of safety. Too much unnecessary information about my parents’ marriage was dumped onto me - my mum would often cry hysterically and unload her emotions about the state of her marriage on me while fetching me from school. Not only would I soak up these emotions and become distressed as a Highly Sensitive Person (definition can be found here), but I realized that instead of having an attachment figure regulate my emotions, it became my role to try to regulate the emotions of my parents - a term called “parentification”, where there is a child-parent role reversal, and a child is made to act as a parent to their own parent. I remember vividly how I had to be the one to mediate arguments between my parents and to stop these arguments from escalating into violence, all of which usually took place in the wee hours of the night. I still had school the next day, and this definitely affected my sleep and how I functioned in school. If I wasn’t pulled into arguments, I would still be woken up in the middle of the night by the shouting of vulgarities (I think the whole neighborhood could hear it) or cupboards being slammed or glasses being thrown and smashed on the ground.
I was constantly walking on eggshells around the house, which never felt safe to me. I felt like I had to make myself as small as possible, as taking up space in my own home felt threatening to my young body. During the day, there was no fighting. My parents put it on pause and refused to speak to each other. My dad would be furious and would lash out at my sister and me for no reason, while my mum would be hysterical and inconsolable while I had to be there to listen to her. With all this happening, how could I possibly bring up my own problems at the time? I felt like the issues my parents were facing were far more important than my own dumb, insignificant ones, and so I subconsciously trivialized my own needs and rarely told my parents when I was sad or scared. Thank God for my elder sister, because I felt less alone in all of this. When I think of the times when I was sad and scared when I was young, the main person who I remember was always there for me was her. At least when she was around, I knew we could lean on each other for support, and there were so many times we hid in our bathroom talking in hushed tones about what was going on and what we should do. My sister became my main attachment figure, even though she herself was just a child, and she did her best to make sure I was okay. But somehow our ways of emotional processing are completely different, and now when we discuss our childhood, I realized she had an ability to completely shut off or compartmentalize and focus on what she needed to do for herself and for her career. And when she got married and left the house almost 10 years ago, that’s when I felt the most abandoned and the loneliest, because it was as if everything suddenly fell on my shoulders. When my parents would have terrible fights - and they worsened after my sister left - my mum would swear me to secrecy so that I don’t “add to my sister’s problems”.
During my teenage years, I started cutting myself. Not in obvious places. I didn’t want to invite unwanted questions or have to explain myself. But till today I still have these scars to remind me of the pain I went through as a child. Self-harm was a form of temporary release to help me numb the intense emotional pain I was feeling. I could not find any way to organize these emotional experiences, so everything felt so overwhelming, and I did not have a single clue about what was happening within me. Now looking back, I probably had undiagnosed depression at the time, and it only grew worse as time passed and it went untreated.
When unaddressed, our childhood wounds and trauma will manifest in our adult lives. Ever since I moved out of my parental home and embarked on inner child reparenting therapy, a special type of therapy that focuses on helping the inner child in us feel the love, safety and protection that they lacked during childhood, I’ve made so many revelations about my patterns of behavior and how they have been formed since childhood, and perhaps some of these might resonate with you.
#1 Separation anxiety and fear of abandonment
I have developed very strong separation anxiety and fear of abandonment because the word “divorce” was thrown around a lot during childhood, and I never knew when it would actually materialize, or when either my dad or my mum would leave the house and never come back home. This also worsened when my sister got married and left. Sharing the same bedroom when we were younger meant the world to me because it made me feel like I was not alone and that it was the two of us against the world. As an adult, this separation anxiety and fear of abandonment now come up very clearly in my dating life. When the person I’m dating takes a while to reply to my text, this wound gets activated. And I need to catch myself when I’m projecting this onto the other person (who might probably just be busy at work or didn’t check his phone for a while). The other way this comes up is in my unconscious attraction patterns in relationships. I recently did a stock take of all the people I’ve dated thus far and found that the main commonality was that they were all emotionally unavailable or had issues committing. The notion that “everybody leaves at the end of the day” is so deeply ingrained in me that in order to protect myself, I unconsciously seek people who I know are not a good fit for me and will soon leave me. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because I find people who aren’t ready to commit and will abandon me. And when that eventually happens, I feel a twisted form of vindication; that I was right all along. The fear of abandonment then becomes further reinforced, and I make sure I date people who I know will not stick around, because if I dated the “right” kind of people, then the abandonment pain would be even greater if the relationship does not work out. Because of this fear of abandonment, I’ve also become terribly afraid of emotional intimacy of any kind, and suffer from chronic loneliness. It takes me a very long time to let people in and trust them enough to be vulnerable with them. Through my therapy journey, however, I’ve now become a lot more aware of how I’m projecting this fear of abandonment and separation anxiety onto my romantic partners and try to have an open conversation about how their behaviours have unknowingly activated this within me, and that most of the time it is not their fault when I become triggered by the things they do.
#2 Harsh inner critic
I’ve also developed an extremely harsh inner critic. Because of my childhood, I’ve always either felt like I was not enough, e.g. that my parents’ sham of a marriage was my fault or that I was not a good enough student, or that I was too much, e.g. too sensitive or emotional. Especially because I was wired to think that my achievements would make my parents feel good about themselves and that to me was most important. So this harsh inner critic started growing stronger and stronger with time, especially when I felt like maybe I wasn’t performing as well as I thought I should be, in school (even though I was a straight As student) or at work. My harsh inner critic will always find fault with what I’m doing right now, and also play out all the most disastrous scenarios that could happen in the future and cause me to catastrophize. My harsh inner critic is extremely illogical and irrational and there is no point “arguing” with it because I will never win. The best way to deal with my harsh inner critic is to acknowledge that it is there and the negative thoughts it is creating, and to slowly try to let go. Much easier said than done, but it definitely gets better with practice. I’ve been trying to practise loving self-compassion when this happens, so that my soothing system is activated and I no longer feel like I’m under threat.
#3 People pleasing
As a recovering people pleaser, I cannot emphasize enough how much this has impacted my adult life. I’m constantly afraid of disappointing people, or not being liked, and this stems from my childhood - pleasing my parents was a way I could “earn” emotional safety so they would not take out their anger on me. I have been extremely non-confrontational for a large part of my life, stayed in toxic relationships for way too long, and would always let people invade my boundaries or walk all over me. This has resulted in a lot of tension within me - when things don’t sit right with me, I dare not voice out my unhappiness, and I end up invalidating my own feelings. But over time I’ve realized that no matter what I do, it is impossible to please everybody. Another revelation is that it is important that I stay true to my own values, and stand up for what is right. My boundaries are important to me, and I need to protect them. I’ve also become more aware and accepting of my own personal limitations, and it’s now easier to say “no” to certain things that would drain me in order to protect my energy.
#4 Feeling ashamed and hiding my pain
This is also linked to some of the things I’ve touched on earlier. Somehow I’ve carved out a part of my “identity” as the life of the party, the funny and bubbly one. I don’t know how this happened, but this is where I find myself. And I feel a great amount of shame and guilt when I’m feeling low and cannot be this person for the people around me. So I hide my pain. When I’m in social settings, it’s almost like I’m putting on a performance and I pretend to be completely fine. But inside, I am breaking down. This can make me feel extremely lonely when surrounded by my loved ones, and trapped in social settings where I’m forced to put on a front. The moment I reach home, that’s when I can shed all my masks and feel all my feelings.
These are just some of the ways in which my childhood trauma manifests in my adult life. When I first started my therapy journey and made all of these revelations, I became very angry with my parents for how they have affected me. But now I’ve come to realize that every single one of us is a product of our own trauma, our parents included. Especially back in their time, they were not privileged to have access to therapy, and they have their own deep-seated trauma as well. They have also learnt their parenting style from their own parents who similarly had their own trauma. And what we need to do right now is to break this intergenerational cycle of trauma so that we can be better parents or attachment figures to our children and other loved ones.
This was a very personal story and took a lot out of me to share. But I felt it was necessary because there are so many things that happen unconsciously because of our childhood trauma that affects us in our adult lives. And there is so much strength in vulnerability because sharing our suffering gives a voice to others who are struggling in silence and makes others feel less alone. We might all be at different parts of our healing journey, but one thing’s for sure - if we put in the work, there will always be beauty that comes out of our pain, and our lives can start to make so much more sense.
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