Roadblocks to Acknowledging Childhood Trauma
Last week, I dove into a question I receive often: is there a link between childhood trauma and PCOS? If you missed it, you can check it out here. Or, I can give you the short answer. Yes.
While we need more research, what we know as of now about how PCOS originates is through a combination of genetics and lifestyle/environment factors. Lifestyle/environment factors include chronic stress produced by adverse childhood experiences, and they can produce a toxic stress response ultimately contributing to the manifestation of PCOS. That post also dives into tips for processing and acknowledging trauma, so be sure to head to that link at minimum for those tips. At the end of that post, I promised I would discuss common blockers I found on my own journey to acknowledge and process these kinds of events. I’ll be honest, this is something I have put off writing about for a long, long time.
A Caveat Before Diving In
I will assert that the goal here is not to blame anyone who wronged us for our lives today. I don’t know about you, but I do not want to be defined by or remembered for things that happened to me that were completely out of my control. I want to be defined by who I intentionally became after I acknowledged the impact of those events. Acknowledging, and validating what happened during childhood, is often necessary to create an identity that is authentic to who we truly want to be, rather than an identity that is constructed in response to our circumstances. That’s the crux of how I started to heal from those experiences. I woke up to the fact that I was unconsciously constructing an identity that was in response to my childhood environment, rather than one that was genuine to who I am and what I want to contribute to society while I’m on earth. Suddenly I realized that the control I thought I had over my life was an illusion. It was practically an identity crisis, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.
Common Roadblocks to Validating What You Went Through
It’s difficult to acknowledge adverse childhood experiences for many, many reasons. While I do not intend to divulge everything, I’m going to share a bit about my own journey to illuminate some common roadblocks, including:
Guilt and shame
Comparison to others
Coping mechanisms like obsessive behaviors, substance abuse, perfectionism, etc.
Addiction to anxiety or chaos
Surface emotions like anger that cover up pain, sadness
Common Roadblock 1:
Guilt and Shame
Do guilt and shame prevent you from acknowledging trauma?
I felt a ton of guilt and shame acknowledging chronic trauma (trauma that stems from prolonged exposure to harmful situations and people). My parents did the best they could with the resources they had at their disposal and cultural norms. They did not intentionally recreate patterns from their childhood in the house my sisters and I grew up in - it was a vicious cycle doomed to repeat itself. We knew they loved us. We had a comfortable house to live in and plenty of food. We went through a solid public school system and were encouraged to do as well as we possibly could academically. They told us it would take us wherever we wanted to go. My parents gave to us generously, with a complete mindset of abundance. My mom would, quite literally, rip off her arm and give it to me if I needed one. My dad had three daughters who brought out his soft side. There weren’t fancy cars, brand name designers, or extravagant family trips. The two of them gave their financial resources to not only raise and invest in us, but also to help family members for years at a time, donate to charities and donate to complete strangers. All of this made it hard to acknowledge what was unhealthy, and what was toxic.
Common Roadblock 2:
Comparison to Others
Do you have trouble validating what you went through because you’re comparing your experience to that of others?
As I grew up, I started to subconsciously feel like what was normal in my household had a lasting negative effect. Whenever that sensation arose, I quickly suppressed it. I felt shame for even thinking I had trauma from childhood. What’s interesting is that Dr. Paul Conti defines shame as “trauma’s number one henchman”. He says, “It’s often more difficult to understand the truth than it is to blame ourselves”. I spiraled into self-criticism and comparison.
I had family members who were completely abandoned by their parents. They suffered severe emotional and physical neglect, and their parents would leave them home alone as babies to go out and party, do drugs and drink alcohol. The siblings began to abuse each other.
I listened to stories from both of my parents about their alcoholic fathers. Stories about how my mom’s sister would try to break into her room and kill her while high on acid. My mom once had to climb out the second story window wearing only her nightgown in the middle of a blizzard to escape. I listened to stories about how my maternal grandfather would beat my grandmother. She’d cry out for my mom’s help when my mom was just a child. I listened to stories about how multiple men tried to kidnap my mother as a teenager, but she beat the shit out of them and got away (side note: you go, mama). Stories about how my grandmother criticized everything about my mom - her appearance, her weight, her ability to do anything at all. Stories about how my paternal grandmother would send my dad to work with my grandfather when he was 11 years old hoping it would stop my grandfather from drinking. But it didn’t. And my dad would have to drive his drunk father home as a child.
I felt total and complete guilt. How could I be so ungrateful for my experience? I criticized myself as ungrateful, reminding myself it could have been so much worse. I shut down the idea that the toxic stress response had been activated for me.
Pause: The moment in my life I couldn’t suppress the impact anymore
Has there been a point in your life that brought you to your knees, where you realized you couldn’t ignore what went unresolved for so long?
I went through a huge breakup almost a year ago. Everything I had known for 8 years disappeared seemingly overnight. Wedding plans in the trash. Promises broken on both sides. Hearts broken. Families united, then divided. I was at the lowest point of my life. Getting out of bed felt impossible. My parents came to stay with me in my apartment. My mom sat in my room with me, curtains drawn, lights off, in the middle of the day. I had been in the same clothes for 3 days. She sat on my bed and forced me to eat. Somehow I was supposed to finish grad school in this condition.
I didn’t have a choice. I had to get to work and it was time to stop suppressing my pain from childhood, pain that had been recycled in the wake of this massive breakup. I was brought to my knees and forced to confront what survival patterns adapted from childhood had propelled me into adulthood.
Note: today is not yesterday..
During childhood, my household was extremely unpredictable. I can say this now, because my dad is a testament to the fact that people can change at any age. At 57 he started his healing journey, and he’s a different man today than the one whose house I grew up in. And it’s because of that we have the relationship we do today. But if I had one word to describe him during my childhood…terrifying.
My dad’s rage ruled our household. He controlled by instilling fear and by intimidating. It was not uncommon for the house to feel chaotic. I vividly remember running in between my mom and dad during a heated argument when I was about 4 years old. They were screaming at each other and I was violently sobbing, begging them to stop. My dad was so enraged he smashed my baby doll’s high chair.
I can still see my dad’s typical infuriated expression in my mind’s eye today. He would furrow his brow and crinkle worry lines prominently between them. The red in his face would deepen, and he would expose the gap between his two front teeth as he gritted down and clenched his jaw. He’d hiss out the first words through the gap, and sometimes saliva would escape. He would clench his fists, and we’d be off.
This pattern was normal. My parents had explosive fights, and I have no idea how the neighbors never called the cops on us. As they got older, my sisters would have explosive outbursts with my parents, then with each other. My mom suffered from extreme depression my entire life and she was emotionally unavailable. She was dealing with all of her own unresolved childhood trauma, health issues, new trauma, and a husband who couldn’t control his anger. She operated right at the edge at all times, and in the same way my dad couldn’t control his rage, she could not control her emotions.
Common Roadblock #3:
Coping Mechanisms
Do you notice coping mechanisms that you might be trying to use to protect yourself from dealing with the pain?
As a child in a chaotic household, I grew obsessive over academics and getting perfect grades. It was my ticket out. It was my validation that I was worthy. I carried this pattern of behavior through college. I habitually sacrificed socializing, extracurriculars, and most things that brought me joy so I could remain in a tier of academic excellence. But why? Wasn’t the goal of my perfectionism to get me out of my parents’ house? I was out. I was 300 miles away. But I kept chasing perfection.
When I left college, I took a high pressure job that once again served as a distraction. The pattern of behaviors centered around perfectionism, high performance, and intense fear of failure, followed and imprisoned me. When I was stressed or needed to decompress, I self medicated with food and/or alcohol. Little did I know, these behaviors only continued to feed the toxic stress response.
Common Roadblock #4:
Addiction to Feelings, like Anxiety or Chaos
Is an addiction to what was familiar in childhood preventing you from realizing that maybe what you feel is common, but not normal?
What I didn’t realize was that my nervous system and brain were becoming addicted to stress. Our brains have evolved in such a way where we build our strongest neural pathways during childhood. What was once learned becomes instinct. In the same way we speak with ease after we’ve mastered our first language, we emotionally respond to situations in an almost automatic way. Our brain determines that up until this point, all of our behavioral patterns have allowed us to survive. We are wired for homeostasis, so these neural pathways are tried and true to keep us alive. That’s why it can be so difficult to “teach an old dog new tricks”.
Stress and unpredictability felt like home. Chaos felt like home. If I didn’t have an active source of stress, out of necessity I had to create one. I lived my entire life feeling like I was a hair away from an anxiety attack. I hated it, but it was what was comfortable and familiar. Diving into my work and academics protected me from the danger of vulnerability in relationships, the very thing that had the potential to facilitate my healing journey. Impersonality felt safe.
Common Roadblock #5:
Surface Emotions As a Source of Self Protection
Are you trapped in surface level emotions that are preventing you from getting to the root of your feelings? Or, are your emotions so shut down that you are numb?
Growing up in a home rife with outbursts, I deduced there was no more space for heightened emotions. So I started to bury everything. I never told my parents or my sisters anything about my life. They knew nothing about me and I may as well have been a stranger living in that house. When the outbursts began, I froze. I couldn’t speak and my body felt paralyzed. The 4 year old who once interceded now receded out of fear. When my dads’ infidelity started to come to light, and his mistress stalked my family and me, I pulled away further. My parents separated when I was 16, a month after my grandfather died and 3 months before my cousin died from an overdose.
Numbness turned into anger. Raw, unfiltered anger. I could barely hold a conversation with my mom for longer than 60 seconds without feeling filled with rage. And I had a deep hatred for men. Any story I heard about a man subjugating a woman, I internalized it. I felt it viscerally. Another strike against them in my book. Why was I so inexplicably angry? It felt justified. It felt like righteous anger. By hating men, I was refusing to let the patriarchy and status quo perpetuate. I would never let one of them close enough to me to do what my dad did to my mom. I would never be dependent on one of them. I would never, ever, allow one of them to make a fool of me or humiliate me, like my dad did to my mom. Never would a man subjugate me, have power over me because I lacked finances, or leave me broken. I was fiercely independent, and even with the man I was with for eight years, I kept him at arm’s length. I was so desperate not to have done to me what my father did to my mother, that I instead did to the man I was supposed to marry what my father did to my mother.
Beneath My Anger
When it came to men, my anger covered fear. Fear of betrayal. Fear of disappointment. Fear of infidelity. Fear of imprisonment and never being able to escape a terrible situation. Fear that my heart would be broken the way my dad broke my mom’s heart, and broke mine and my sisters’ hearts. Fear of letting someone so close they had the power to bring my world crashing down and humiliate me.
When it came to my anger with my mother, my anger covered despair, pain, hurt and sadness. I felt I had to grieve my mother’s absence during my childhood and adolescence, even though she was physically there. She always cared for us, and was expressive with her love, but I could not receive it. As children we internalize everything, and I interpreted my mom’s emotional distress, anger, and coping mechanisms as proof that I was unlovable. I thought I should have been perfect enough for her to want to get better. I was sad she was not there in the way I needed her to be. I was hurt she didn’t protect us or remove us from an environment of chaos, anger, abuse and unpredictability. And it was a lot easier for me to feel anger than it was to feel pain.
…Let’s take a breath
You might not need one, but I need one. Phew.
This journey is intense. Take it one day at a time. Here’s a list of other roadblocks to acknowledging adverse childhood experiences I’ve found along my own healing journey:
Guilt and shame
Comparison to others
Coping mechanisms like obsessive behaviors, substance abuse, perfectionism, etc.
Addiction to anxiety or chaos
Surface emotions like anger that cover up pain, sadness
Fear of opening the floodgates
Fear of a loss of identity - who am I without defining myself by what happened in my past?
Fear of humiliation
Suppressed memories
You might be unknowingly carrying trauma from generations before you
You’ve tried to talk about it but have been invalidated
Remember, as you do this work, have a support system in place, whatever that looks like for you. It may be friends, family, medical providers, community, art, music, or a combination of all of those things. I’m rooting for you!