Despite the fact that “trauma” has been in the zeitgeist lately (you hear the word more than ever before), very few people actually understand trauma.
People usually think of trauma as an event that happened and while traumatic events can leave us traumatized, it is also possible that they don’t. There are so many factors that contribute to trauma. The age at which you experienced it, whether there was a presence of someone who could empathetically help you process it, and how often it happened – all contribute to whether we experience a traumatic event as traumatic or not.
The fact that trauma has become part of the conversation has led to the general understanding that traumatic events have a likelihood of causing emotional trauma. However, there are certain types of trauma, that even those of us who experienced it, don’t really recognize as trauma because it’s normalized!
Childhood trauma usually goes unrecognized. The majority of us don't receive the care we need to heal and process life events that are significant to us, such as the death of a parent, divorce, or alcohol or drug abuse in our family, even when we experience egregious abuses like physical and sexual abuse. In time, we discount them as something that is in the past without realizing that the past is never behind us unless it is healed!
Without emotional healing, that past continues to live in our body and our psyche and directs our values, beliefs, and actions. Even when our life isn’t what we would want it to be, most of us never connect that it is due to past trauma. We work around it and rationalize what doesn’t work as bad luck, or that it is the fault of others or the belief that this is how life is meant to be. We find some explanation or someone provides one (a narrative really) that supports why our life is not fulfilling, happy, successful, prosperous, intimate and connected, etc. and we buy into it because we aren’t connected enough with ourselves to know that this isn’t true.
Emotional neglect in childhood is another type of childhood trauma that is almost always ignored. As previously stated, overtly traumatic family circumstances, parentification (where children assume parental responsibilities due to illness or other family issues), intergenerational trauma, rigid socialization, cultural norms, and emotionally immature or unavailable parents can all contribute to this neglect. This shows up as our parents not being sensitive to our emotional needs
As children, we learn about ourselves from our parents. When they don’t meet our emotional needs, we never learn to attune to our own needs. At the same time, it is very painful to have misattuned parents who don’t see us, value us (to truly value someone, you have to see them), or validate our emotional needs. We are hardwired to survive and we do so by disconnecting from ourselves! We are cut off from the emotional pain by being cut off from our body (every emotion has a resonance in our body) so that we feel numb to it.
There is a hefty price to pay for this disconnection with ourselves in mind, body, and spirit. It impacts our sense of self and manifests as low self-esteem, lack of self-love, beliefs of unworthiness, and inability to create healthy boundaries – all of which make relationships and intimacy challenging for us while also robbing us of joy.
The biggest issue with emotional neglect experienced as a child is that we don’t know that we were neglected. Since there wasn’t any overt abuse, we grow up believing that we had a “normal” or relatively normal childhood!
AND THIS IS HOW WE NORMALIZE TRAUMA!
Not having our emotional needs met, not being seen, not being loved, valued, or cherished as the gift that we are, is normalized by us, our parents, our social institutions, and societal structures which are geared towards external markers. If we succeed at school, choose a career that is considered “successful” and succeed at it, we are viewed as doing well – even when much of that might have been our way of compensating for what we really needed!
AND THIS IS ALSO HOW WE MAKE OUR LIFE WORK!
We might create success on the outside (how we look, what we have, what we do) so that we never have to examine that which we never got and deeply crave – love!
We often recreate the reality from our childhood for the rest of our lives because that is what we know, and we don’t know that what we know isn’t how it was meant to be!
While it can be very distressing to discover this in our adulthood (and most of us resist it), we can’t change the patterns of our life without acknowledging that they need to change.
- To attract the love and intimacy we desire, we must learn what love really is and we must learn to love ourselves so that we can recognize love when we cross paths with it.
- To become financially prosperous, we must learn how scarcity is showing up in our life – what are we hanging onto because we are too scared to lose it even when it isn’t what we really want?
- To believe in ourselves and feel free to express ourselves freely, we must learn who we are – not conceptually but through the experience of being you.
- To live a purposeful life, meaningful life, and to create effective change in the world, we must be open to changing ourselves.
- To raise healthy children who live their potential with power and authenticity, we must break the cycle of trauma by acknowledging the truth of our experience and learning to heal our wounds.
WHEN WE HEAL, WE BECOME HEALERS OURSELVES!
We stop normalizing trauma, and we show up differently for ourselves and others!
