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Key points
- It's impossible to deny the relationship between traumatic childhood experiences and adult-life behavior.
- Emotionally disordered adults are often people who’ve been wounded, usually early and repeatedly.
In her book It’s Not You, It’s What Happened to You, my friend and colleague Dr. Christine Courtois writes, “Trauma is any event or experience (including witnessing) that is physically and/or psychologically overwhelming to the exposed individual.” She observes that trauma is highly subjective; incidents that might be highly distressing to one person may be humdrum for another. A fender-bender, for example, might be much more traumatic for a new mother with her baby in the car than for a professional race car driver.
According to Dr. Courtois, there are four primary types of trauma:
- Impersonal Trauma: Acts of God, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
- Interpersonal Trauma: Intentional acts by other people, such as abuse, neglect, inappropriate enmeshment, assault, robbery.
- Identity Trauma: Acts based on the victim’s inherent characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation.
- Community Trauma: Acts based on the victim’s membership in a particular community, such as a family, tribe, religion.
Nearly all mental health and addiction professionals are taught to explore the relationship between clients’ early-life experiences and later-life problems. Whether or not you believe in an unconscious or a subconscious mind, it is impossible to deny the relationship between traumatic childhood experiences and adult-life thinking and behavior.
Many people have experienced early-life interpersonal trauma that was chronic, meaning it was repeated and layered over time. Such experience is sometimes referred to as complex trauma. Complex trauma is especially problematic when it occurs within the family—an interpersonal trauma subtype known as attachment trauma.
Sadly, many people fail to see the connection between their childhood trauma and their adult-life thoughts and actions. Due to such lack of understanding and association, they sometimes think of themselves and their adult-life symptoms as crazy. They simply don’t understand that their upbringing was lacking and left them without a positive sense of self or needed life skills, and their emotionally escapist behaviors are an adaptive response to what they experienced. In other words, they don’t understand that their problematic adult-life choices are a coping mechanism, typically started early in life, that is now being (maladaptively) used to deal with emotional discomfort.
Emotionally disordered adults are often people who’ve been wounded, usually early and repeatedly, in ways that leave them feeling unworthy of love, affection, connection, and happiness. Eventually, they end up with a distorted, shame-based sense of self, where every negative or problematic experience serves as a reminder that they are defective and unlovable. When that’s the message bouncing around in a person’s head, it’s understandable that they might struggle with depression, anxiety, and problematic behaviors like self-soothing with food, drugs, alcohol, or an intensely pleasurable behavior (sex, porn, gambling, spending, gaming, and more).
Without a doubt, childhood sexual abuse—whether single-incident or chronic—leaves its victims with feelings of both confusion and shame. Exacerbating matters is the fact that childhood sexual abuse is often coupled with other forms of early-life trauma, such as emotional, psychological, or physical neglect and abuse. Their experience creates layers of trauma and, in turn, various forms of shame, although sexual shame is nearly always the most powerful.
Sexually traumatized children often begin to self-medicate their emotional discomfort relatively early in life—usually during adolescence, but sometimes even before. After all, body image issues, shame about being looked at and/or touched inappropriately, and feeling “icky” about too much trust and affection can all begin very early in childhood.
This means of self-soothing typically involve alcohol or drugs. That said, sexually traumatized children also learn they can self-soothe with sexual behaviors (including sexual fantasy, pornography, and masturbation). Often, they may eroticize and reenact (taking control over) some aspect of their sexual trauma.
Unfortunately, even though such self-soothing behaviors are distracting in the moment, they tend to exacerbate preexisting shame and emotional discomfort, thus creating an even greater need for escape and dissociation. As a result, many childhood sexual trauma survivors find themselves mired in an adult cycle of self-hatred and sexual shame, ameliorated by sexual fantasy and activity, followed by still more self-hatred and sexual shame. Adult-life sexual misbehavior is nearly always unresolved childhood trauma, and it is driven especially by trauma that is sexual in nature.
The good news here is that adults with emotional and behavioral issues are often forced to examine the pain points of their childhood as they work toward behavior change. Admittedly, their adult-life romantic relationships (if they have any) are almost certainly suffering after their problematic behaviors come to light, but with that the healing process, both internally and relationally, can begin.
