Unresolved Childhood Trauma Quotes

Childhood trauma can range from having faces extreme violence and neglect to having confronted feelings of not belonging, being unwanted, or being chronically misunderstood. You may have grown up in an environment where your curiosity and enthusiasm were constantly devalued. Perhaps you were brought up in a family where your parents had unresolved traumas of their own, which impaired their ability to attend to your emotional needs. Or, you may have faced vicious sexual or physical attacks. In all such situations, you learn to compensate by developing defenses around your most vulnerabe parts.

Unresolved trauma can take a significant toll on your physical health. Unresolved childhood trauma is particularly insidious, with effects that are both gradual and cumulative.

Your pain may never be adequately acknowledged by those who injured you. Profound feelings of grief might strike you as you work through unresolved feelings of resentment or disappointment.

One form of insecurity of attachment, called "disorganized/disoriented", has been associated with marked impairments in the emotional, social, and cognitive domains, and a predisposition toward a clinical condition known as dissociation in which the capacity to function in an organized, coherent manner is at times impaired. Studies have also found that youths with a history of disorganized attachments are at great risk of expressing hostility with their peers and have the potential for interpersonal violence as they mature (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobwitz, 1999; Carlson, 1998). This disorganized form of attachment has been proposed to be associated with the caregiver's frightened, frightening, or disoriented behavior with the child. Such experiences create a state of alarm in the child. The parents of these children often have an autobiographical narrative finding, as revealed in the Adult Attachment Interview, of unresolved trauma or grief that appears as a disorientation in their narrative account of their childhoods. Such linguistic disorientation occurs during the discussion of loss or threat from childhood experiences. Lack of resolution appears to be associated with parental behaviors that are incompatible with an organized adaptation on the part of the child. Lack of resolution of trauma or grief in a parent can lead to parental behaviors that create "paradoxical", unsolvable, and problematic situations for the child. The attachment figure is intended to be the source of protection, soothing, connections, and joy. Instead, the experience of the child who develops a disorganized attachment is such that the caregiver is actually the source of terror and fear, of "fright without solution", and so the child cannot turn to the attachment figure to be soothed (Main & Hesse, 1990). There is not organized adaptation and the child's response to this unsolvable problem is disorganization (see Hesse et al., this volume).

The only person he’d ever told was Henry, and they’d both been drunk. “Not like it’s something that comes up in conversation. ‘Hey, wanna talk about my unresolved childhood trauma?’ It’s a lousy icebreaker.

In NARM we do not view shame, self-rejection, and self-hatred as emotions but as psychobiological processes, or strategies, of disconnecting from one’s authentic Self. We do not work directly with these strategies but instead explore what unresolved emotions may be underneath them.

Future chapters will explain other factors that influence the working hypothesis, such as the client’s psychobiological capacity, the role of shame as an adaptive survival strategy, unresolved needs and emotions, and the therapist’s capacity for self-inquiry. Remember, the working hypothesis is cultivated through curiosity and openness to the client’s internal world—and not through interpretations, which can be distorted by the therapist’s unconscious biases and countertransference reactions. Therapists hold the working hypothesis in a way that does not simplify the client’s experience but encourages the therapist and client to be present with increasing complexity, nuance, and depth.

Evolution is driven by the physical survival of the species and thus, much of the brain’s functioning is centered on automatic fight-or-flight mechanisms as opposed to conscious and compassionate decision making. Because of this, the conscious and unconscious management of fear and anxiety is a core component of our personalities, attachment relationships, and identities. The considerable degree of postnatal brain development and the critical developmental periods of early childhood experiences in the sculpting of the brain add to our vulnerability to the unresolved trauma of those who raise us.

When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.

The Drama of the Gifted Child, psychologist Alice Miller maintained nearly forty years ago that all instances of mental illness had their developmental origin in unresolved, subconscious childhood trauma, which could be physical or psychological in nature.

This scenario of Janet represents how our unresolved suppressed memories impact our life experiences. Additionally, these suppressed memories are authentic aspects of ourselves.

The child’s attachment system wants to move towards their attachment figure, while the protective defensive mechanism of flight / flight / freeze / appease wants to move away from the attachment figure, and the two systems are coactivated. The predominant factor leading to this style in childhood is having parents who are suffering from their own unresolved trauma or losses. When a parent has a history of unresolved trauma, they are more easily overwhelmed by life’s demands and emotionally flooded by their child’s emotional states. Unable to regulate their own emotions, parents with their own history of unhealed trauma, neglect or abuse might then act out, lash out or completely tune out in ways that are scary to the child. Whether that parent is being terrifyingly overresponsive or frighteningly underresponsive, the child learns that they’re not safe with the very person who’s supposed to protect them. Research has shown that approximately 20 to 40 percent of the general population has some degree of a disorganized attachment style, and approximately 80 percent of children who have experienced abuse develop a disorganized attachment style to one or both of their parents.

dissociation, “the escape when there is no escape.”An infant typically seeks his parents when alarmed, so when a parent actually causes alarm the infant is in an unsolvable situation in which it can neither approach or avoid. Neurobiologically this represents a simultaneous and uncoupled hyperactivation of the sympathic and the parasympathic circuits. This is subjectively experienced as a sudden transition into emotional chaos. Sieff asked what might cause a mother to behave in such a harmful way with her baby. Schore answered that this is not a conscious voluntary but an unconscious involuntary response, and that typically women who cannot mother their child in an attuned way are suffering from the consequences of their own unresolved early emotional trauma. The experience of a female infant with her mother influences how she will mother her own infants. Thus if early childhood trauma remains unconscious and unresolved it will inevitably be passed down the generations. Additionally, Sieff asked what role the father plays in a child’s emotional development. Schore explained that children form a second attachment relationship to the father especially during the second year. The quality of the attachment to the father is independent of that to his mother. At eighteen months there are two separate attachment dynamics in operation. It also appears that the father is critically involved in the development of a toddler’s regulation of aggression. This is true of both sexes, but particularly of boys who are born with a greater aggressive endowment than girls. Afterwards, a long discussion followed where Schore highlighted the damaging effects of long bouts of unregulated shame for the toddler, the differences between shame and guilt, and the enduring consequences of early chronic shame. Schore emphasized that when the caregiver is unable to help the child to regulate either a specific emotion or intense emotions in general, or – worse – that she exacerbates the dysregulation, the child will start to go into a state of hypoaroused dissociation as soon as a threat of

I realized that I had unresolved traumas from my childhood that continued to affect me every single day.

Treating covert depression is like peeling back the layers of an onion. Underneath the covertly depressed man's addictive defenses lies the pain of a faulty relationship to himself. And at the core of this self-disorder lies the unresolved pain of childhood trauma.

The wounded inner child is filled with unresolved energy resulting from the sadness of childhood trauma. One of the reasons we have sadness is to complete painful events of the past, so that our energy can be available for the present.