Childhood Trauma Explored

My thoughts lately have been focused on what is meant by childhood trauma and the consequences for us as adults.

When my daughter was about 4 years old, she's now a fine grown adult with children of her own, she would bombard me with gifts of drawings that she would complete in minutes and then present the results to me as gifts. At that time I was not capable of the sensitivity to her that she required and rather then covet her creative output, I acted out of ignorance, impatience and frustration and shut down her open heartedness. In reflection, I might have papered my walls with her art work as I loved her dearly and thought highly of her aesthetic sensibilities. Neither my daughter nor I have forgotten that incident and even though she's become a gifted professional and artist, the wound I caused her remains to this day, more then thirty years later.

I offer this incident as a minor example of what we human beings put up with and bear as children, innocent and vulnerable in all relationships, especially between parents and their minor children. The wounds we experienced as children take on many forms; from the relatively minor, yet stinging ones like the one inflicted on my daughter, to the many forms of neglect, to the more serious examples of physical and sexual abuse. Human experience is full of brutal examples we have undergone in our own childhood and then perhaps in the same form or slightly altered, inflict on our children.

I'm not suggesting that is this is rare or unusual, except at its most extreme. Indeed, I suggest that each of us who inhabit a body feel the brunt of some form of childhood wounding which often shows up in relationships, communication or isolation. Thank goodness we human beings are resilient and have an enormous capacity to endure and get beyond sometimes devastating realities. If that weren't the case, we would have been extinct long ago.

This resiliency can take on many forms with every adaptation offering the individual an opportunity to survive. What clinicians, such as myself, often encounter are beliefs, feelings, sometimes restrained and other times flagrant, numbness and habituation that people who have adapted to childhood trauma often get stuck in and seek professional counsel to resolve. The clinical way through the labyrinth of thoughts, feelings, stuck places is to slowly and gently explore what the experience has meant to the individual. This takes time and is often very painful as it involves revisiting the moments of wounding until they are integrated into our system.

I offer these few thoughts as a beginning exploration of what each of us faces in opening to what the deeper truths and realities we harbor below our surface entail. I would encourage anyone reading this blog to respond and convey whatever arises for you to me.

Thank you ;
Namaste:
mordechai