Beyond Childhood Trauma 

What counts as 'trauma'

Trauma can sound very dramatic, but it is not just single, life-threatening incidents that leave a mark. Often 'trauma' adds-up over time when we are stuck in an environment that feels unsafe or unresponsive. 

Especially when it comes to difficult childhood experiences, we may downplay or minimize. After all whatever was going on for us as children ended up becoming the norm, it was all we knew within our household, or our community and we just got on with it. 


We may say stuff like 'it was not that bad' or 'other people had it much harder'. Indeed, childhood trauma can range from the experience of extreme violence, abuse and neglect to less tangible experiences of not belonging, being unwanted, or being chronically misunderstood. Comparing our pain to that of another is often intended to help us gain perspective, but ultimately it does not help us heal.


We may have very little memory of what happened or want to leave it in the past and move on!

Unfortunately, failing to recognise how past trauma has affected how we view and respond to ourselves and the world, can be a huge hindrance to living skillfully and satisfyingly in the present. We cannot change the past but we can, with the right support, change its living legacy.

   

knowing about trauma can help us heal...

While we cannot change what happened, as adults we can develop the self-compassion necessary to gradually change the way the past is limiting our present. We may have forgotten or blocked stuff out, but our bodies and brains remember and react according to what was learnt a long time ago. Bringing awareness to this can feel very empowering and have a deep impact in rewiring our responses.


 As a trauma-informed counselling and psychotherapy service, Crea Counselling  is addressing this page particularly to people who are living with the long-term consequences of adverse childhood experiences.  It is a work in progress, feel free to contact Crea Counselling with feedback, questions & suggestions. 

'It was not that bad...'

Trauma may be best understood as our system's response to single or repeated adverse events that overwhelm our ability to cope. Events in the face of which we feel completely powerless.

As children, our ability to cope is more limited. Our life depends on the adults around us and when their behaviour is uncaring, hurtful or erratic, our sense of safety is severely undermined and our developing psyche is put under extreme pressure. 

While child physical and sexual abuse are a lot more common than we'd like to think, other causes of complex trauma include emotional abuse, separation and loss, neglect, family violence, as well as living  in extreme poverty or with a parent with addiction and/or mental health problems.

Living with trauma's legacy

Childhood trauma survivors have had to learn resilience very early on,  but they may also be left struggling day to day with their health, wellbeing, emotions, relationships, and sense of self and identity. Complex trauma affects not only those who experienced it first hand, if it remains un-addressed, it can have a ripple effect on their partners and children too. 


Effects of childhood trauma include depression, anxiety, difficulties in managing anger, health problems, disconnection, isolation, confusion, being  'spaced out’, and fear of intimacy and new experiences.  Survivors are often on 'high alert’. They are finely tuned to danger, rejection and betrayal. Even minor stress can trigger seemingly 'out of proportion’ responses, because the traumatised brain is wired to shut down 'rational thinking' and react very quickly in the face of perceived threats. Survivors often struggle with shame and self-blame. But childhood trauma and its effects are NOT your fault, even though you may feel otherwise (often because that's what you were told as a child).

Therapy can be triggering..but it can also help!

It is possible to heal from childhood trauma. Studies on neuroplasticity show that the structure and function of the brain can change throughout life and we have every reason to be optimistic about recovery from trauma.


Unfortunately, complex trauma  is frequently unrecognised and unaddressed. Many of those affected have been inadvertently re-traumatised by those who are supposed to help but lack the knowledge and training to do so. 


Crea Counselling adopts a trauma informed approach to counselling and psychotherapy, which is strengths-based and founded on trust, safety, collaboration and respect for diversity. As a trauma informed counselling service, Crea counselling is sensitive to how difficult it may be for complex trauma survivors to trust others, and how healing it is when that trust can be built over time within a safe counselling relationship.

A thing of two it is helpful to know about trauma....

Here some useful information on trauma and how it affects us. Click on the links to read the articles

An easy Guidebook to Childhood Trauma and the Brain for therapists and survivors from the UK trauma Council


Download here


Common Complex Trauma Symptoms...

Normal responses to abnormal circumstances...


While PTSD symptoms are widely accepted consequences of single traumatic events like accidents or violent assaults, the symptoms of complex trauma can be more puzzling. We may not understand why we feel what we feel because we may have 'forgotten' what happened and be left with symptoms instead of memories'! It is not always possible, nor is it necessary, to arrive at a coherent narrative of the past. What we need to know about it in order to heal, is accessible through our feelings, reactions and behaviours in the present. Counselling and psychotherapy can help us make sense of them as adaptive responses to our early environment. We can learn to recognise triggers and find gentle ways to come back to the present when a feeling/body memory hijacks our emotions and nervous systems.


Symptoms linked to complex trauma may include: depression, irritability, decreased interest, numbing, insomnia, physiological hyperarousal, psychomotor agitation, nightmares, flashbacks, shame, feelings or worthlessness,self-doubt and self-blame, anxiety, perfectionism, OCD phobias and panic disorder, substance abuse, eating disorders, suicidality, self-harm, dissociative symptoms and disorders.

To forget and to repress would be a good solution if there were no more to it than that. But repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms.


- Alice Miller -

Remembering Complex Trauma

From 'Why can't I remember?' to 'How do I remember?'


Drawing on advances in the field of neuroscience, trauma-informed psychotherapy is based on the understanding that complex trauma is more often 'remembered' through emotions (emotional memory) and in the body (procedural memory) than as a sequence of events (episodic memory). This has great implications on how counsellors approach complex trauma: psychotherapy no longer focuses on recalling and talking about traumatic incidents (episodic memory). Contemporary trauma-informed psychotherapy tends to be gentler and aims at helping clients develop a) awareness of how trauma has impacted their bodies, attitudes and behaviours (procedural memory) and b) resources to recognise and respond to emotional memories triggered in the present. 


https://www.nicabm.com/trauma-how-trauma-can-impact-4-types-of-memory-infographic/

What we don't need in the midst of struggle

is shame for being HUMAN


- Brené Brown -

The Window of Tolerance and Complex Trauma

During times of extreme stress or trauma, our nervous system may become over-activated (hyper-arousal) or shut down (hypo-arousal).


Hyper-arousal, otherwise known as the fight/flight response, is often characterized by hypervigilance, anxiety and/or panic, and racing thoughts or bubbling anger. Hypo-arousal, or a freeze response, may cause feelings of emotional numbness, emptiness, paralysis and depression.

In either of these states, we become unable to process stimuli effectively. The prefrontal cortex region of the brain 'shuts down' affecting the ability to think rationally and often leading to us react in either chaotic or overly rigid ways. Trauma and complex PTSD tend to narrow our window of tolerance  But this is not a permanent state of affairs.


Counselling therapy can help us identify and understand what happens when we are outside our window of tolerance. With your counsellor you can explore new strategies to either soothe or mobilise and get back to a more centred place in yourself, where you can experience more safety and control.

To let go does not mean to get rid of. To let go means to let be. When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own.


- Jack Kornfield -

Befriending our Nervous System

Polyvagal Theory helps us understand how trauma primes our autonomic nervous system to interpret and react to cues based on past traumatic experiences that don’t always fit with the present-day situation.


The autonomic nervous system is made of 2 main branches, sympathetic and parasympathetic, and responds to signals and sensations via 3 pathways: 


1. the sympathetic branch, in the middle part of the spinal cord, is the pathway that prepares us for action. It responds to cues of danger with fight-or-flight.


In the parasympathetic branch, the 2 remaining pathways are found in the vagus nerve:


2. dorsal vagal pathway  responds to cues of extreme danger by taking us out of awareness and into a protective state of collapse, feeling frozen, numb, or 'not here' (dissociation)


3. The ventral vagal pathway  responds to cues of safety and supports feelings of connection, soothing, excitement and play. 


Our trauma stories live in sympatetic and dorsal, so when we hit those states our trauma stories come alive and grab us, interfering with our capacity to connect, be soothed and live in the present. 


Trauma informed counselling and psychotherapy can be useful in becoming aware of our triggers, developing our ability to self-regulate and co-regulate and activating our ventral vegal system where we feel more resourceful and connected.


Click on the link here for a brief podcast with Deb Dana explaining what the vagus nerve is and how may it help us understand our recations. For a PDF of Deb Dana's beginners' guide to Polyvagal theory click here 

What we change inwardly will change outer reality.


- Plutarch -

Why didn't I fight back ?

Trauma survivors often struggle to understand why they reacted the way they did to a relational violation of some sort.  Especially if we went into the freeze or collapse response, we may blame ourselves for not 'fighting back', and tend to see that as some character flaw or weakness in us. 


It can be really helpful to ease feelings of shame and self-blame, if we know that our reaction is based on a split-second, unconscious decision made by our nervous system to try and keep us safe.


Here is an infographic by  trauma expert Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD explaining how the nervous system responds to trauma.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced


- James Baldwin -


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