You might never have described your childhood as traumatic or difficult. Until you became a parent.
Parenting has a way of bringing old wounds to the surface. It exposes you to new experiences that can send you spiraling emotionally, turning everyday moments with your child into trauma triggers. Reminders of painful experiences become unavoidable and begin to impact your daily life and come into your parenting. Caring for your own child may change the way you look back at things that happened to you. Longstanding issues with your own parents can become even more problematic. And if you’re parenting after a difficult or traumatic childhood, you’re probably not experiencing parenthood the way your peers do, which can lead to feeling isolated, insecure and not good enough as mom.
You want to protect your child from the pain you experienced. But the effects of childhood trauma make it hard to trust yourself and others. Parenting advice and “scripts” for how to handle difficult issues like tantrums or sleep training don’t work for you because they don’t take into consideration how your nervous system has been shaped by trauma and chronic stress.
A difficult childhood can make parenthood feel heavy and complicated. Common ways this can show up in your daily life include:
difficulty handling your emotions
fear of repeating the cycle of trauma or becoming like your parents in some way
perfectionism and unrealistic expectations of yourself driven by fear of failing your child
feeling chronically anxious or depressed
feelings of shame and guilt that are misplaced and outsized
difficulty trusting others with your child
Believing that you’re not a good mom, or that you don’t even have the right to be a parent
“The first emotions that the parent deals with are the attachment emotions themselves — the baby’s desire for connection, his need to be taken care of, his need to be responded to when hungry, when in pain, when wanting love or attention. Many parents, because their own dependency needs were rebuffed as children, still live in unresolved pain over them.”
Robert Karen, Ph.D., author of Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love
What is childhood trauma?
There’s a common misconception that trauma is always a big, onetime event.
It’s easier to recognize childhood trauma caused by physical abuse and sexual abuse. But sometimes it’s harder to harder to point to. It may be years of walking on eggshells. Being criticized. Feeling unseen. Having to grow up too fast. Learning that your needs always come after everyone else’s. Experiences that were repeated over the years and shaped how you relate to yourself and others.
Common factors that can lead to childhood trauma and Complex PTSD include:
Abuse-sexual, physical, emotional
Neglect-emotional, physical
Living with a mentally ill family member
Being raised by parents who were emotionally unavailable, distant, rejecting or self-involved
Growing up in a household where there was chaos and unpredictability
Caregiving (emotionally or physically) for your own parents and siblings while still a child yourself, being parentified
Exposure to violence, threats or rage
Being the child of an alcoholic/addict
Bullying
Divorce
Being emotionally invalidated, believing that your emotions, needs were too much
You’re not broken.
The belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with you is one of the most persistent and deeply felt effects of childhood trauma.
And it isn’t true. It’s a symptom of the trauma or distress you’ve been living with.
For women navigating fertility challenges, pregnancy, postpartum and early parenthood, this belief can have a devastating impact on how you feel as you cope with the demands of your daily life and with all of the unexpected things that can happen.
Your early experiences influenced how you learned to see yourself and relate to others, leading to emotional patterns and coping strategies that follow you into parenthood. Those same coping strategies that got you through childhood may need to be adjusted, relearned, or updated when they’re no longer serving you-or when they may even be adding to your stress.
“But this happened so long ago. It shouldn't be bothering me now.”
Moms who find themselves once again dealing with the past often make comments like “I'm a grownup. This shouldn't still be bothering me”. However, study after study has shown that adverse events in our younger years can be linked to problems in adulthood. Research like the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACEs) has helped to understand how childhood trauma impacts parenting and how parenting is experienced; how prolonged, chronic stress or abuse shapes the nervous system, bringing flight/fight/freeze responses into motherhood.
Trauma therapy helps you understand the connection between your past experiences and your current reactions so that you can:
Calm overwhelm in the moment
Understand your triggers with greater compassion
Recognize stress before it reaches a breaking point
Feel more connected to your body and emotions
Respond instead of react
Move through anxiety, panic or shutdown with greater confidence
Many moms tell me they spend years feeling like they’re constantly bracing for the next bad thing to happen.
Like a part of them knows they’re safe, but they don’t feel it in their bodies.
Trauma healing helps those two things start working together again.
Overcoming Childhood Trauma and Breaking the Cycle
Healing childhood trauma isn’t about becoming the perfect mom, being someone who never loses her patience, or “loving every moment”. Healing helps you create more choices about how you meet the emotional challenges of being a parent, developing more trust and faith in yourself, and having more moments when you can actually enjoy your child and the family life you’re working so hard to build.
Childhood trauma can make having a baby and becoming a mom more challenging at times, but it’s possible to build a new legacy for your own family.
Let’s Work Together
My name is Holly Evans, I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, certified in both perinatal mental health and EMDR. I love helping women and new moms who are coping with childhood trauma, birth trauma, grief and loss during pregnancy, and postpartum anxiety and depression. I have an online therapy practice in Pasadena, California.
If you’re going through stressful time and are ready to get some support, I’d love to talk to you about how I can help.
