Children struggle to interpret complex events, contexts, and emotions, leaving them vulnerable to wounds that can affect them throughout their lives. However, healing from childhood trauma is possible through honesty, acceptance, and growth. Working with a professional through trauma-informed care can enhance the recovery process.
Childhood trauma Is difficult to overcome.
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What Is Childhood Trauma?
Childhood trauma can develop after experiencing a stressful, abusive, or life-changing event(s). These experiences encompass what has or has not happened to children, like parents failing to meet their needs. Trauma can manifest immediately, decades later, and even as intergenerational trauma.
No single list can capture how children respond to their environments and life events growing up. Childhood trauma can include single events or chronic exposure to harmful environmental factors.
Examples of childhood trauma may include:
- The chronic absence of basic needs, including affection, food, shelter, and education
- Experiencing systemic and institutional racism
- Displacement via moving, removal from a childhood home, persistent homelessness, natural disasters, or acts of terrorism
- Experiencing emotional, physical, or sexual abuse
- Chronic and extreme stress in the childhood home
- Witnessing domestic violence, volatile separation or divorce of caregivers, or untreated mental health conditions in family members
- Parental incarceration
- Loss of a beloved family member or friend in childhood
The Effects of Childhood Trauma
The effects of childhood trauma can be obvious or subtle. Repressed childhood trauma in adults can affect the ability to self-advocate at work, perform professionally, maintain healthy relationships, manage strong emotions, and have healthy self-esteem. The effects are similar for children, often with more pronounced behavioral or mood changes.
Effects of childhood trauma may include:
- Academic underachievement
- Under-responding or over-responding to emotional events
- Changes in behavior or communication
- A heightened sense of hypervigilance, anxiousness, clinginess, chronic worry, or explosive anger
- Dysregulation related to depression, lethargy, inability to focus, isolation, or quietness
- Chronic illness and sickness, including irritable bowel syndrome or chronic fatigue
How to Heal From Childhood Trauma: 3 Essential Stages
Healing from childhood is not scripted or predetermined. Everyone experiences childhood trauma differently depending on whether childhood offenders are still in their lives, family structures, or current situations. However, healing childhood trauma often focuses on accepting and growing from experiences.
Here are three stages you might experience when healing from childhood trauma:
1. Getting Real
A common starting point when healing from childhood trauma is recognizing how childhood experiences may impact your current life. Childhood trauma can affect your physical health and ability to maintain healthy relationships and manage emotions. Trauma can also be the primary source or trigger for mental health conditions like anxiety and depression.
Childhood trauma can also significantly affect how you value yourself, self-advocate, and trust others. The first step in recovering from childhood trauma is being honest about how certain events, specific people, or unmet needs influence functioning in various professional and personal areas of your life.
2. Acceptance
Healing from childhood trauma means accepting that certain people, including primary caregivers, may have intentionally or unintentionally failed to provide for your needs or protect you from all harmful situations.
Accepting this reality is particularly difficult, as you might experience guilt for putting down your caregivers or the situation in which you grew up. However, you can accept both the good and bad experiences. You can be honest about the happy parts of your childhood alongside the wounding aspects, events, or individuals.
We are all products of our environment. Healing from childhood trauma includes accepting that people and experiences can be positive and negative, and both can receive equal credit for how they affect well-being.
3. Growth Focus
Self-growth takes work, and overcoming childhood trauma is no different. This step involves rolling your sleeves and gathering your resources, including personal support, professional services, and additional financial or health insurance information. You must be willing to ask for help, remain open to learning new skills, own your shortcomings, and endure temporary discomfort.
Remember the phrase, “The only way to not organize your life around something is by attending to it.” The hardest part is that facing adverse childhood events can be temporarily disruptive. Learning how to heal from childhood trauma can affect our current relationships, challenge how we view past events, and cause us to rethink our lives.
“Unfortunately, there is no magic number when it comes to the length of time it takes for an individual to heal from childhood trauma. Some people, especially young children who tend to show greater resilience, bounce back quickly from adversity. For others, healing is a lifelong journey. Taken together, it is important to view healing as a process rather than as an outcome or final product. Recovery and healing can take time, but it is certainly possible.”
Healing from your childhood trauma can result in the following positive life changes:
- Healed relationships or new life-giving relationships
- New or renewed choices that result in a significantly better life or future
- Improved self-esteem and understanding of the value you bring to your workplace or personal life
- New or renewed life goals and interests
Therapy for Healing From Childhood Trauma
Many forms of professional help can help you overcome childhood trauma. Trauma has become a buzzword in our society, with many claiming to have tools for trauma-focused work, from coaching services to self-help programs. However, working with qualified licensed or board-certified individuals specializing in trauma-informed care is best.
Below are therapy options for healing from childhood trauma:
Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is one of the most recommended treatments for trauma recovery, and providers may offer both in-person and online EDMR sessions. EMDR helps individuals overcome childhood trauma by determining and desensitizing specific targets like memories, negative beliefs, intense feelings, or negative body sensations. These targets offer access to more accurate information about situations, events, and people we may have lacked as children.
Once we connect to more accurate information about our childhood trauma, we can heal by no longer holding negative self-beliefs, reacting to triggers, or experiencing intrusive images from past trauma. EMDR can also treat symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD that may occur after childhood trauma.
Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT)
TF-CBT is a childhood trauma recovery intervention focusing on the primary caregiver and child (aged 3-18) to maximize existing supports, target negative and self-defeating belief systems, and learn healthy coping skills. When healing childhood trauma, TF-CBT can help families gain knowledge through education and parenting skills.
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
CPT for PTSD is an evidence-based intervention for recovering from childhood trauma. CPT is a short-term therapy where individuals focus on identifying distorted thoughts and beliefs related to the trauma and how those experiences impact current feelings and behaviors. The participant learns to challenge and modify unhelpful beliefs to improve their lives. CPT can benefit those who like an action-oriented focus on psychoeducation alongside practical tools for addressing unhelpful thinking.
Play Therapy
Play therapy describes the therapeutic use of play to capitalize on childhood learning processes. This method involves toys, puppets, games, and storytelling to help children nonverbally describe or process their experiences.
Play therapy can help children recover from childhood trauma, learn new coping skills, and redirect inappropriate behaviors. Play therapy is an incredible healing mechanism that meets developmental needs while allowing their minds to heal from often very adult situations.
Art Therapy
Art therapy helps individuals heal from childhood trauma by using artistic mediums as self-expression when words fail. Art therapy can put images, textures, or colors into our experiences and expand into the expressive arts. With a trained and qualified therapist, the participant does not need to be an artist to experience significant benefits.
Exposure Therapies
Exposure therapies are proven to be effective in treating childhood trauma. The focus of exposure work is to help participants confront their fears, resulting in desensitization and a reduced need to avoid them.
Prolonged exposure (PE) teaches the participant that trauma-related memories and triggers are no longer dangerous and that the event has passed. PE can help those dealing with childhood trauma in adulthood through imaginal exposure and in vivo exposure between sessions.
Narrative exposure therapy (NET) focuses on developing a life narrative that adds context to our traumatic experiences. This context includes incorporating parallel positive elements to help the mind move beyond the trauma to see life outside the event.
Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT)
Parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT) is for primary caregivers and their children and focuses on improving child development and parental skills. This approach can help individuals let go of childhood trauma, often reducing child behavioral problems, trauma symptoms, PTSD dissociation, and caregiver distress.2
PCIT is a structured intervention conducted through a one-way mirror. The caregiver utilizes an earpiece as the therapist guides them in interacting with the child, allowing for simultaneous learning, healing, and growth.
Finding a Therapist to Help Heal Childhood Trauma
Finding the right therapist can be intimidating at first. You can visit an online therapy directory if you are interested in therapeutic interventions for healing childhood trauma. Dealing with childhood trauma is possible with the right support and guidance.
“It is significant to remember that there is no “one-size-fits-all” formula that works for childhood trauma. Therefore, clinicians and practitioners should offer carefully tailored interventions to support and empower clients on their journey to healing from childhood trauma.” – Dr. Yoon
Help For Recovering From Childhood Trauma
Talk Therapy
A licensed therapist can help you recover and heal from childhood trauma. Betterhelp offers online therapy starting at $65 per week. Free Assessment
Virtual Psychiatry Covered By Insurance
If trauma is affecting your life, talk with a professional. Talkiatry offers personalized care with medication and additional support. They take insurance, too. Take our assessment
In My Experience
Additional Resources
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Online Therapy
BetterHelp – Get support and guidance from a licensed therapist. BetterHelp has over 25,000 therapists who provide convenient and affordable online therapy. Take A Free Online Assessment and get matched with the right therapist for you. Free Assessment
Online PTSD treatment
Talkiatry offers personalized care from psychiatrists who listen and take insurance. Get matched with a specialist in just 15 minutes. Take our assessment.
Treatment For Trauma & OCD
Half of people diagnosed with OCD have experienced a traumatic life event. The chronic exposure to stressful situations, such as ongoing bullying, or an abusive relationship can lead to the development of OCD symptoms. NOCD therapists specialize in treating both trauma and OCD and are in-network with many insurance plans. Visit NOCD
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Experiencing trauma can result in distressing and debilitating symptoms, but remind yourself that there is hope for healing. If you or a loved one is suffering from the aftereffects of trauma, consider seeking therapy. Trauma therapy can help you reclaim your life and a positive sense of self.