Image by Oxana Lyashenko
When we think about childhood trauma, we often think of the worst things. And as a therapist who specialises in trauma healing, I work with many people who have experienced truly awful childhoods. Hearing their stories can be heartbreaking – and if you went through something like this, my heart goes out to you, as it may well have caused internal wounds that you are still struggling to heal.
But experts in the trauma field increasingly understand that smaller, less obviously hurtful experiences can also be traumatic for children. Dr Francine Shapiro, founder of EMDR, calls these ‘little t’ traumas, which she argues be just as problematic as ‘big T’ traumas like being in a car crash, or on a battlefield. What does this mean in reality? Here are some common little t traumas:
Being bullied, at home or in school
Witnessing domestic violence in your family
Being invalidated, unsupported or belittled by your parents
Experiencing racism, or any other kind of prejudice
Being neurodivergent in a school designed for neurotypical kids
Having a sibling who is clearly loved and cherished more than you
One of your parents abusing substances on a regular basis
Losing a parent, or another beloved family member, suddenly and traumatically
Being forced to move home, or school, often throughout your childhood
Your developing brain
One of the reasons experiences like these are so impactful on children is that, when you are small, your brain and the rest of your nervous system is still developing. For example, in small children the right hemisphere of the brain is dominant, with the left hemisphere developing later in childhood. And the right hemisphere is (broadly, although as with everything in the brain it’s more complex than this!) focused on emotion, with the left hemisphere specialising in language, detail and rational thinking. This is one reason small children are so emotional, because they lack the brain structure needed to self-soothe, or understand their experience in a rational way. Little kids just feel, deeply and overwhelmingly, whatever they are experiencing.
If you are a parent, or have kids in your life for any other reason, you will know exactly what I mean. Children feel their emotions – anger, hurt and sadness, or joy and excitement – in a beautifully rich and profound way. Also in a deeply somatic way – watch a toddler having a tantrum, face screwed up, kicking their legs and pounding their little fists to see what this looks like. Feeling intense and and frustration is a whole-body experience for them. They also struggle to make sense of what’s happening, to give it context or make meaning of it, because their developing brain just doesn’t have the neural architecture to do this yet.
Changing the story of your life
This is why trauma-informed therapy can help you make sense of what happened to you, using your high-powered, fully developed adult brain to tell a new story about your traumatic childhood experiences. For example, if you were bullied at school, your adult brain can understand that this was not a sign of weakness or some other character flaw on your part – it was all about the bullies, unhappy kids trying to gain some sense of power and control by taunting their more sensitive classmate. If your parents favoured a sibling over you, your mature brain can see that this is just bad parenting – it’s Parenting 101 to love all your kids equally, to make them feel cherished and valued, so had nothing to do with your likeability or lovability as a child.
And this is one reason I write these posts – sharing key ideas with you from the worlds of psychology and psychotherapy, to help you make sense of painful life experiences and tell a new, more hopeful and self-compassionate story about your life. This is step one of the healing process, alongside learning coping skills to help regulate your nervous system, process traumatic memories and build healing, compassionate relationships with the hurt parts of you. There are many trauma-informed therapies that can help with this process, including sensorimotor psychotherapy, trauma-informed stabilisation treatment, EMDR, schema therapy and internal family systems.
I hope that helps – and please do find a good trauma-informed therapist if you are struggling with the impact of childhood trauma. You may also enjoy this practice I created for Insight Timer – The Story of You: How to Build Self-Compassion. Click on the button below to listen to it now.
Love,
Dan ❤️