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Child Development
5 Signs That Your Childhood May Have Negatively Impacted You
Ways to see yourself more plainly and seek out support.
Posted March 9, 2022 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
In my practice, I’m often asked, “How do I know if my childhood negatively impacted me?”
I get asked this question a lot because there’s no definitive checklist for what makes a childhood dysfunctional or negatively impactful. We can come with resources like Kaiser’s invaluable ACE study, but what if you don’t see yourself in the extremity of those questions asked? Do your negative childhood experiences count as “negative” if they don’t look as “extreme” as the examples given in that study?
In today’s post, I want to provide you with five anecdotal ways that you may have been negatively affected by your childhood to help you see your past more plainly and answer this very important question.
5 Signs Your Childhood May Have Negatively Impacted You
1. Your moods and emotions feel like a veritable Weeble Wobble. Do you remember that toy from the 1970s, the Weeble Wobble? You push it to one side, it falls but bounces back (thanks to the weight in its bottom). You push it to the other side and it does the same, always at the mercy of some external force that dictates its movements.
I think that, very often, for folks who come from adverse early beginnings or relational trauma backgrounds, our inner lives often feel like an Weeble Wobble: When you’re perceived well and treated well, your esteem soars. When you’re treated or perceived poorly, your confidence plummets. You’re in a great mood and then your husband comes home in a foul mood, so yours plummets, too. You were feeling good about yourself but received a slightly terse email from your boss. You feel anxious and wonder what you did, your evening ruined as you ruminate.
For those of us from adverse early beginnings, it’s not uncommon to have challenges with emotional regulation, with emotional equanimity.
2. You have challenges making, keeping, and sustaining good relationships. And/or, you may have plenty of relationships in your life, but they don’t feel healthy. They don’t treat you well and honor your dignity and personhood. You think that the good decent partners always seem taken. You experience major ruptures with girlfriends time after time. You always seem to end up with toxic, narcissistic bosses who remind you of your father.
It’s not uncommon for those who grow up in dysfunctional, chaotic, neglectful, or outright abusive homes to face challenges seeking out and keeping healthy, functional relationships.
3. You move through the world masking your lack of esteem, always feeling like you’re “faking it” and you’re about to be found out. What I’m talking about is different. It’s feeling like everyone else got handed the guidebook to life except you. It’s feeling like if people really knew you and your past, they’d run away. It’s feeling like you’re never really up for what life requires and you wear a mask of confidence but inside you feel like you’re holding it all together with proverbial paper clips and tape, constantly belittling yourself and your abilities, feeling like you’re not up for it, feeling like it’s all going to crumble and fall apart at any moment.
Low self-esteem, impaired self-perception, and feeling like you’re moving through the world faking everything and simply not up for what life requires can be another hallmark that you were negatively impacted by your past.
4. You feel the need to escape. Often. Repeatedly. Life feels like too much and, to take care of yourself, you developed ways of coping. Of escaping. You escape the boredom, stress, overwhelm, strain, and emotional pain of your daily life through repetitive actions or substances, sometimes compulsively.
Whatever the escape looks like, you do it. You find yourself counting the hours until you can just escape, zone out, relax, disappear.
5. You don’t know what “normal” is. Let me be clear: Normal is a bit of a four-letter word in therapy. There really is no “normal” insomuch as there’s no single black-and-white way of things being okay or not okay.
But there is a kind of “normal” in terms of what’s healthy and functional versus unhealthy and dysfunctional that folks who come from relational trauma backgrounds often fail to understand.
Often in relational trauma recovery work, we unpack all the maladaptive beliefs internalized from childhood and take a closer look at what “normal” actually is. We rewire expectations and help clients develop more functional, adaptive beliefs, about themselves, others, and the world.
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This anecdotal list is not exhaustive, but even if you didn’t see yourself in these descriptors in the same way that you don’t see yourself in the questions posed by the Kaiser ACE’s study, it’s important to remember that if even some part of you – even a small part of you – is asking the question, “Did my childhood negatively affect me?” then you probably already know the answer.
Trust yourself and your perception of your experience. No one else is the expert on you. Not me, not the pop psychologist on TV, not your parents. Trust your judgment .
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