I was abused, how does my experience affect my emotional health?

Adults who experienced physical or sexual abuse in childhood have experienced trauma. In other cases, ones who have had parents/caregivers whose behavior was frightening, chaotic and/or overwhelming, or who lacked a secure caregiver, this too has resulted in childhood trauma. These children experience internal fragmentation and disconnection from themselves and others which means that their unprocessed traumas leave their memories, emotions, and body sensations in an unintegrated and chaotic state. In therapy, many sufferers have made expressions such as, “I feel like a part of me is not present”, “I constantly feel insecure about myself, my decisions, and my feelings”, “I go numb and shut down and isolate for a few days before I come out of my bed”, “Trusting people is such a frightening thing for me”.

This condition is also found in those whose parent’s behavior was frightening or disorienting to the child, such as in families with drug and alcohol abuse. Perhaps the parent raged, but didn’t hit the children. For these children, their source of comfort and protection(ex. parents) was also their source of terror. This impossible situation is too much for children to integrate so they fragment or compartmentalize their feelings and sensations. Because the child depends on their parents for survival, realizing that the same daddy/mommy can be both loving and fun and abusive and terrifying overwhelms the child with anxiety. It is too much to process, therefore they disassociate; allowing them to function in early childhood. As a result, he experiences difficulty with emotional regulation, creating a feeling of safety and reaching out for resources for help, because of trust issues. He may also experience an internal “tug-of-war” between needing distance from his parents yet feeling guilty in doing so.

In psychotherapy, we focus on adding new neural pathways for developing safe resources, regulating them by staying grounded, spacious, and compassionately attuned to them, but also aligned with their wholeness and their capacity to heal the trauma.