Childhood trauma is extremely prevalent, with 67% of children reporting a traumatic experience before the age of 16. If you experienced a major life traumatic event-or a series of traumatic events- in your childhood, you are not alone.
Unsurprisingly, those who have experienced adverse childhood experiences are at a higher risk for:
- Mental health conditions like anxiety and post traumatic stress
- Revictimization in the future
- Becoming a perpetrator of violence or abuse themselves
This is why getting access to the right mental health services to treat and heal the impacts is absolutely critical.
However, it can be challenging to navigate the mental health landscape, especially when looking for a specialized service. You might wonder- what kind of therapy do I need? What should I look for in a therapist?
Our mission is to remove as many roadblocks as possible for getting into the door of a therapist to help with childhood trauma. So today, we are sharing all you need to know about how childhood trauma may be showing up in your life and how you can find the support you need.
Childhood Trauma Therapist for Adults
What is Childhood Trauma?
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention defines Adverse childhood experiences (i.e. ACEs) as potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood (0-17 years). These are events that are scary, dangerous, violent, and potentially life threatening.
Experiences of childhood trauma include:
- Experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect
- Witnessing violence in the home or community
- Having a family member attempt or die by suicide
Children can also suffer long term traumatic impacts of living in an environment which was detrimental to their safety, stability, attachment bonding, and development.
Per the CDC, this could include children report experiencing events like:
- Substance use problems
- Mental health problems
- Instability due to parental separation or household members being in jail or prison
What are the Impacts of Childhood Trauma?
Childhood trauma has an array of impacts on functioning once that child becomes an adult.
impact on secure attachment
Oftentimes, children who experience a traumatic event have a part of their self or personality that gets developmentally “stuck” at the age they were when the trauma occurs. Missing developmental milestones has longer term impacts on their healthy functioning.
Early traumatic experiences can also impact a child’s ability to create healthy, secure attachment bonds. Healthy attachments in childhood set the foundation for functional relationships in adulthood by teaching children how to connect with others in order to feel safe in the world and in their environment.
Trauma responses
Traumatic experiences can leave people with post traumatic stress, haunting them with unwanted images and intrusive memories of the event. These memories often live in the body, leaving the nervous system in a dysregulated state as it hyperactively scans the environment for safety.
This constant state of hyper-vigilance can also leave the person feeling defeated, stressed, and unable to trust others or their environment.
Left untreated, these experiences can result in post traumatic stress disorder ptsd, chronic stress, anxiety depression, intrusive traumatic memories, and anxiety disorders including panic disorder.
Undoubtedly, living with these stressful emotions has an impact on overall quality of life.
Healing Childhood Trauma
Mental health professionals specializing in childhood trauma help clients reprocess the experience and understand how it impacts their functioning and relationships as an adult.
There are many different types of therapy and methods of healing from trauma, and what works for one person may differ from what works for another. Here are some promising trauma focused modalities to work through trauma healing.
Attachment-based Trauma Healing
Attachment informed treatment leverages concepts from attachment theory in working toward therapeutic goals.
Attachment based family therapists help clients organize their mental understanding of the event, their emotional response, and the bodily sensations they experience. Most attachment therapies focus on creating new experiences in a session that lay the groundwork for rewiring the nervous system- or teaching the nervous system that the client is in a new reality, not in the traumatic incident.
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a type of therapy that was created to help people reduce the stress associated with traumatic memories.
During EMDR, a therapist will guide a client to attend to the traumatic material (in their mind, they are not required to say it out loud), while also focusing on an external stimulus (most commonly the lateral eye movements).
The purpose of EMDR is to access the trauma memory network so that the information can be reprocessed with new associations between the trauma memory and more adaptive information. Those new pathways are though to to alleviate emotional distress and allow for new insights. In addition, clients become more aware of thought and feelings and interrupt negative thought patterns with positive and hopeful ones.
In addition to reprocessing, EMDR builds client coping strategies and coping skills by guiding in grounding exercises to feel comfortable and settled in their bodies.
The EMDR model has benefits over cognitive behavioral therapy cbt including the way clients do not need to verbalize the trauma to the therapist, and results tend to come more quickly. For more on EMDR for childhood trauma, read this post.
Somatic therapy
From a physiological perspective, traumatic experiences are those which activate the fight/flight/freeze/fawn sympathetic nervous system response. When a traumatic experience happens, the nervous system gets overwhelmed and becomes stuck.
The nervous system communicates through the body, so to become unstuck, somatic practices help clients process through the body (soma means “of the body”). These practices show the body that the person is safe in the here and now, not in the traumatic experience that happened years ago and required the trauma response.
In somatic therapy, clients become aware not only of their thoughts, but of emotions and physiological sensations throughout the body. Some techniques you can expect include breath work, body awareness, and pendulation, and resourcing.
Internal Family Systems
The Internal Family Systems model of therapy is an integrative approach to treatment that applies family systems theory to individual psychotherapy.
The model assumes that people have many parts of their self in addition to a core Self which is the wise, intuitive part. In experiences of trauma, some of the parts of us carry adverse memories, negative beliefs, emotions, sensations, and energies from that experience.
IFS helps people to identify the parts that hold trauma, connect with the body, and access and heal their protective and wounded inner parts. IFS focuses on the body’s innate knowledge and wisdom in its healing process.
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy
Emotionally focused individual therapy (EFIT) is a modern model of psychotherapy that focuses on healing moments of neglect from childhood. A therapist will help you to identify the relational wounds that most impact your present day life.
From there, the therapist will guide you in “imagined exposures”, where clients have the chance to explore what they needed in times of distress. They get to create repair attempts in their mind and create a sense of healing their inner child with their adult Self.
Like other common types of emotion therapies and narrative therapies, EFT can help survivors overcome trauma symptoms and reclaim a sense of autonomy in their own stories. And unlike psychodynamic therapies, this approach provides structured interventions.
How to Find a Childhood Trauma Therapist
The best way to find a therapist and therapy for childhood trauma is to look for a provider who specializes in one of the above modalities in the area where you live.
It’s always helpful to meet with a childhood trauma therapist first before scheduling an intake session. Many providers offer a free introductory call. On this call, here are some questions you can ask them:
Therapy can be an intimidating, daunting path if you’ve never done it before. The reality is also that change happens slowly. You may wonder, given all of this, is therapy worth it? Should I seek professional help?
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