It can be surprising, and even shocking, when repressed childhood trauma shows up when you are an adult. Unfortunately, the past does not always stay in the past.
When you have childhood trauma, you can get used to normalizing unhealthy behavior. Therefore, you may not even realize your family was dysfunctional.
As an adult, you start to manifest the signs of repressed childhood trauma. This can bring up shame and self-blame. Working through the trauma makes healing possible.
It’s understandable and normal to worry that repressed childhood trauma might ruin your happiness, relationships or professional life. You thought what happened to you was over, but now you’re discovering its lingering effects.
Trauma can leak into your adult life. You may have blocked it out most of the time, but now you’re realizing that its effects are coming up, uninvited. Working through repressed childhood trauma in therapy can really help.
The Effects of Past Trauma
When you are traumatized as child, it lives, unresolved, deep inside you. Even if you don’t consciously remember what happened, it effects your relationship struggles and your self-esteem.
Symptoms of repressed childhood trauma might go underground for a while. But then, when something stressful or emotional happens in your life, the old childhood feelings can start to come to the surface. Especially if something happens in the present that reminds you of your past trauma.
Past trauma will continue to come up until you can work it through and understand how it lives on in your adult life. Your current experiences and relationships need to be understood through the lens of your childhood family life.
You might find yourself in relationships that remind you of traumas from your past. Or, maybe you just can’t understand why you keep repeating unhealthy relationships patterns. After you leave the relationship, you might wonder ‘what just happened?’ Or ‘why was I with that person?’
Until you can work through the roots of your past, the relationship patterns repeat over and over. The memories remain unresolved and continue to come up in your present life.
Repressed Childhood Trauma
When you experience trauma in childhood, it is common not to remember what happened. These are known as repressed memories. You might only forget a small period of time, but some people can’t remember years and even their entire childhood.
Disconnection from yourself is the brain’s way of escaping pain. This can disconnect you from the world and from loved ones. Unfortunately it can also disconnect you from yourself.
It can cause you to feel detached and numb. You might even have an out of body experience, such as seeing yourself from above. This can make you wonder what is actually real, and what isn’t. You might even zone out or feel like you are in a dream.
This is called disassociation and can be caused by family of origin trauma. Your home is suppose to be the place that makes you feel the most safe. If you felt unsafe as a child, during your developmental years, it has a profound impact on your personality development, self-esteem, and future relationships.
Repressed childhood trauma can come up in your present in many different ways. These symptoms can get worse during stressful times.
Symptoms of Repressed Childhood Trauma
You might realize that you have strong reactions to things. This can arise when you feel unsafe or you interact with someone who reminds you of something unsafe from your childhood. You might have uncontrollable outbursts and even a tantrum. This extreme reaction can make it difficult to cope with change and interfere with daily life or relationships.
Childhood trauma creates a lot of anxiety and depression for people. Your heart rate can increase, and you might feel nausea. Panic attacks and fear can arise. You can lose interest in things you normally really care about, and feel helpless and hopeless in your life.
You might find that you have intense mood swings and overwhelming emotions. It can be hard to figure out why you are feeling so irritable, stressed or angered.
Other symptoms might include things feeling really uncomfortable with certain smells, places, noises or sights. Fear of being judged, pleasing and appeasing behavior, difficulty setting appropriate boundaries and lack of self-esteem and self-worth can also create problems in your life.
Physical Symptoms and Emotional Regulation
Childhood trauma can wear down your body, making you more susceptible to auto-immune disease, chronic pain and illness. Trauma can make you distrustful and fear abandonment. This can lead to depression, anxiety and self-blame. You might not trust at all, or trust too quickly, before you even know someone.
When you experience a traumatic memory, it might feel like you are reliving it. This can trigger fight or flight reactions and panic. Strong emotions like anger, shame, disgust and grief can cause you to over-react. Emotional regulation can become a challenge.
Childhood trauma can cause you to choose dysfunctional partners, bosses and friends. This can keep you from reaching your goals. You might find that you neglect your own needs, allow others to abuse you or even abuse others. When you’ve been mistreated, you might not be comfortable expressing how you feel. This can lead to intimacy and other relationship issues, such as avoidance or clinginess.
At first, you might not be aware that the behaviors you were exposed to growing up are having an effect on your adult life. If a parent or sibling had alcohol or drug problems, couldn’t control their anger, or were critical and blaming, your mind’s way of protecting you from how painful this was is to deny it’s impact.
As you become more aware of the impact your history has had on you, a lot of feelings such as anger and helplessness can arise. You can find yourself trying to convince other family members of what happened. This can really backfire, since they might not be ready to come out of denial.
Types of Therapy For Repressed Childhood Trauma
Having a therapist who understands the impact of what you’ve been through can provide a safe space for you to build trust. You can go at your own pace and express any of the emotions and feelings that come up, without fear of judgement or being rushed.
The traumatized child inside you needs empathy and kindness in order to work through the trauma of adverse childhood experiences. You can work things through in therapy so they don’t have to come up, unbidden, in your adult life.
I also use EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, to help you heal from past trauma. EMDR is proven to assist you in desensitizing and reprocessing memories, body sensations and emotions.
We can also use neurofeedback to create new neural pathways in the brain that promote a calm, resting state. This method of therapy is a way to deal with trauma without having to focus on it. When you experience trauma, your resting state can feel like it’s just gone. Neurofeedback builds self-regulation and regulation and resiliency. Read more about neurofeedback here.
If you’d like to explore treatment for repressed childhood trauma, please contact me at 310-314-6933 or mindy@mftherapy. I can do online therapy or in my Torrance or Santa Monica offices.
