Symptoms Of Childhood Trauma In Adulthood Quotes

Imagine the daughter of a narcissistic father as an example. She grows up chronically violated and abused at home, perhaps bullied by her peers as well. Her burgeoning low self-esteem, disruptions in identity and problems with emotional regulation causes her to live a life filled with terror. This is a terror that is stored in the body and literally shapes her brain. It is also what makes her brain extra vulnerable and susceptible to the effects of trauma in adulthood.                              Being verbally, emotionally and sometimes even physically beaten down, the child of a narcissistic parent learns that there is no safe place for her in the world. The symptoms of trauma emerge: disassociation to survive and escape her day-to-day existence, addictions that cause her to self-sabotage, maybe even self-harm to cope with the pain of being unloved, neglected and mistreated. Her pervasive sense of worthlessness and toxic shame, as well as subconscious programming, then cause her to become more easily attached to emotional predators in adulthood. In her repeated search for a rescuer, she instead finds those who chronically diminish her just like her earliest abusers. Of course, her resilience, adept skill set in adapting to chaotic environments and ability to “bounce back” was also birthed in early childhood. This is also seen as an “asset” to toxic partners because it means she will be more likely to stay within the abuse cycle in order to attempt to make things “work.” She then suffers not just from early childhood trauma, but from multiple re-victimizations in adulthood until, with the right support, she addresses her core wounds and begins to break the cycle step by step. Before she can break the cycle, she must first give herself the space and time to recover. A break from establishing new relationships is often essential during this time; No Contact (or Low Contact from her abusers in more complicated situations such as co-parenting) is also vital to the healing journey, to prevent compounding any existing traumas.

What about unexplained physical symptoms, like pain? Surely that must proceed from trauma? Researchers have conducted rigorous studies to determine whether abused children experience more pain as adults. In one investigation, researchers identified child survivors of documented abuse or neglect and followed up with them decades later. The same was done with a similarly situated control group, where no abuse was documented.[47] The researchers found that, when interviewed as adults, both groups showed essentially identical levels of pain symptoms, indicating that there was no relationship between childhood abuse and medically unexplained pain in adulthood. Even more interestingly, when asked retrospectively whether or not they had been abused, the participants with adult pain were much more likely to report childhood abuse than those without pain. In other words: childhood trauma doesn’t result in higher incidence of unexplained pain. But adults in pain are more likely to report childhood trauma. If researchers had relied solely on retrospective reports, they would have erroneously concluded that childhood trauma (and perhaps the resulting “body memories”) led to increased levels of idiopathic pain in adulthood.