The dynamics in our family of origin leave an imprint on us--for better or for worse. If there is perpetual toxicity in your family of origin, the imprint left can feel devastating. It is also common for family members to sometimes not recognize the toxicity and its impact. Knowing the signs and impact can help you understand why you might feel the way you feel and why you have some of the struggles you have. Thankfully, you do not have to stay tethered to, or wounded by, these toxic patterns. Healing, freedom, and positive growth can be yours.

Below is a brief synopsis of some common signs of toxicity in families, the impact that toxicity has, and what to do about it.

How do I know if my loved one is living with the effects of untreated, unresolved childhood trauma? This is a question I’ve heard more than once. Below are two lists. One list details some of the main effects of childhood trauma and the other outlines many of the symptoms.

Please keep in mind that not every survivor of childhood trauma will experience each of the effects or symptoms outlined below. Survivors experience various effects and symptoms, and to various degrees. The combination of effects and symptoms are as varied as each survivor’s particular history, trauma experience, and current reality.  

I. The Effects of Complex Childhood Trauma

1. Aloneness
Trauma survivors can find it difficult to bond with others, even close family members. It is not uncommon for them to feel little or no connection with people, and to feel tremendous aloneness even when in the company of others. This inability to connect is sometimes further intensified by feeling “different” from everyone else.

2. Attachment Issues
The individual has attachment patterns that are not healthy or fulfilling. Those patterns may include anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, or disorganized attachment. These are marked by dysfunctional relationships, love/hate relationships, relationships that lack deep connections, and/or limerence relationships (being obsessively in love with a person based on fantasy rather than reality.) They may even have relationships marked by a seemingly profound loyalty to their childhood abusers.

3. Crisis of Faith
As coping mechanisms work less and/or in the face of repeated triggers that are intensifying beyond tolerability, complex trauma survivors can reach a crisis of faith. Their faith in people, in causes, in the future, in God, and in self erode more and more. Sadly, even the safe and reliable people and aspects of their lives are viewed more and more as abusive, dangerous, and untrustworthy. This internal, unbearable crisis can be manifest in their sabotaging their worlds or suddenly walking away from the lives they have built.

4. Deep Routed Fear of Trust
It is understandable that many people who have endured abuse and other forms of trauma question the safety of people and situations. The severely traumatized brain of a complex trauma survivor is easily overwhelmed and often finds it very difficult to trust others, and therefore shields itself. What little trust might exist is very easily eroded.

5. Defensiveness
The survivor’s brain is constantly scanning for threats. As a result, defensiveness is frequently employed through avoidance and circular discussions, especially in their intimate relationships. It is important to remember that this is not a character issue, but a response to traumatic injury. It is part and parcel of the tremendous childhood threats that have caused the individual to experience hypervigilance and flashbacks, and to have a very low threshold for conflict and for others being displeased with him or her. This is also why many trauma survivors are people pleasers, as people pleasing is a form of defensiveness, helping to guard the individual from the displeasure of others. It is important to note a seeming contradiction, which is that many trauma survivors will not actively defend themselves from lies and accusations, and will not adequately explain themselves. Again, conflict is excruciating for many survivors, causing them to experience emotional paralysis, which in the moment serves as a defense mechanism. These types of complexities are the constant reality for many trauma survivors.

6. Dissociation
Dissociation is a coping mechanism the brain uses during repeated or perpetual abuse. It involves  a detachment from reality that can be as mild as day dreaming or as severe as dissociative identity disorder. This mental process produces a lack of connectivity between a person’s thoughts, feelings, actions, memories, and sense of self, and it interferes with how a person experiences events.

7. Emotional Dysregulation
While many adults can regulate how they experience and respond to external events and interactions, survivors of trauma find this difficult to do, especially as it relates to loved ones and authority figures.  For one thing, survivors of childhood trauma typically lacked caregivers that modeled healthy emotional regulation. For another, because of the abuse and neglect, they were robbed of the opportunity to develop the psychological and emotional health necessary to regulate. The consequence is that as adults they tend to over analyze and easily misread facial expressions, body language, tones, words, and actions. Internally, they can also experience exaggerated emotional responses to everyday dynamics, even if they are not showing it on the outside.

8. Flashbacks
This includes distressing visual images, intrusive thoughts, body memories, nightmares, and emotional flashbacks. With emotional flashbacks, the survivor responds to a current situation based on a past traumatic experience. This can cause his response to seem irrational to others in the moment. However, his response is based on very real and intense negative feelings he is experiencing, and he is often not aware that the intense emotions are flashbacks.

9. Hypervigilance About People
Hypervigilance is the scanning of one’s environment for danger. It is a normal response when danger is present or perceived. For many complex trauma survivors, danger is perceived in all human dynamics, and survivors therefore tend to remain on hyper alert. Because they can be particularly sensitive to body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions, their fight, flight, or freeze response is regularly engaged. This is a profoundly taxing state for the nervous system. The nervous system is meant to be able to rest from hypervigilance, but cannot in the case of many complex trauma survivors.

10. Profoundly Wounded Inner Child
If there were ever a person whose inner child needs to be understood, it is the survivor of complex childhood trauma. He or she has a deep reservoir of neglect and unmet needs from childhood. He has been left believing that he is bad, unimportant, and insignificant. That wounded and damaged child remains a driving force within him, searching for safety, protection, and love.

II. The Symptoms of Complex Childhood Trauma

• Addictive Behaviors

Alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, and/or shopping are used to cope with and/or avoid dealing with difficult and complex emotions.

• Black and White Thinking

Extreme black and white thinking is marked by an all or nothing approach to life and by difficulty in internally navigating the nuances of relationships, conversations, issue resolution, and a host of other life experiences.

• Denial

This is marked by the survivor’s struggle to accept in part or in entirety the reality of his childhood and the impact it has had, and still has, on him.

• Depression

Chronic depression, including profound sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal ideations are experienced.

• Eating Disorders

Anorexia, bulimia, obesity, and other eating disorders may be present. 

• Intense Anxiety

Anxiety and repeated panic attacks, even in dynamics that are not typically anxiety inducing, can be frequent occurrences.

• Intense Fears

The survivor may experience a profoundly deep fear of people, places, and dynamics.

• Self-Blame

The blaming of self for the abuse is present. They find it difficult to accurately place the blame on the correct individuals.

• Self-Harm

This is the infliction of self-harm, self-injury, and self-destruction to cope with the trauma stress.

• Perpetrator Role

Some survivors take the perpetrator role, being angry, aggressive,  and controlling in relationships. (Conversely see the “Victim Role.”)

• Victim Role

Because of profound childhood victimization, and because the trauma is not resolved, the only self the survivor knows, experiences, or recognizes is the victim self. (Conversely, see the “Perpetrator Role.”)
 
Trauma survivors, even many of the ones in therapy, deny, dissociate, and refuse to look at their trauma. This is because facing trauma is painful, tremendously taxing, and potentially very scary. It is also the only way of living, thinking, and navigating that they know. Facing the trauma means moving into a completely new way of being. And that can be terrifying. The price of not resolving that trauma is far worse than the pain of facing it and healing, but facing it is a terrifying prospect nonetheless for many survivors.
 
If your loved one is experiencing a number of the effects or symptoms listed above, you may want to consider reaching out for help. The road to recovery can be very long. It can take years and years to process through the profoundly deep and destructive implications of childhood trauma. Yet, it is a worthwhile journey that can offer tremendous healing and liberation, step by step.

Copyright © 2018 Dr. Dawn-Marie Pearson

One of the questions I have been receiving since my article on marriage and childhood trauma is: “How do I know if my spouse or fiancé has experienced childhood trauma?” As we consider whether a loved one is experiencing traumatic stress, it is key to establish what trauma is. With that in place, we are then better able to explore whether a loved one may be experiencing traumatic stress. 

What Is Trauma?

Trauma is not determined simply by an event or an environment. What makes the event traumatic is the impact it has had on the individual. Certainly, some types of events and dynamics are more typical of being experienced as traumatic, as you will see below. But not everyone who experiences the same event suffers traumatic stress. For example, two people may witness a violent crime. One may experience traumatic stress and the other may not.

So what exactly makes the event a traumatic experience? A traumatic event, in very simple terms, involves an isolated experience or an ongoing dynamic or ongoing dynamics that completely overwhelm the individual's ability to cope or to integrate the ideas and emotions involved with that experience. Here, it is crucial to understand that a person who has experienced childhood trauma does not always register it as trauma, even as an adult. So while the event may be causing tremendous traumatic stress, the adult survivor may be unaware that some of what they are experiencing is traumatic stress.

How Can I Tell If My Spouse Is Experiencing the Effects of Trauma?

One of the ways to help determine if a spouse has unresolved traumatic stress is to know the adverse childhood experiences that can cause traumatic stress. From there, you can explore if your spouse has endured any of those adverse childhood experiences.

As we delve into a list of adverse childhood experiences, it is important to note that even if someone has had any of the following experiences, it does not automatically mean they have unresolved issues from trauma. There are several factors that play a part in whether or not the event caused lasting traumatic stress, or even any traumatic stress at all. One such factor to be taken into account is the presence of a nurturing adult in the child’s life. A loving and supportive grandparent, a tuned in teacher, or a safe and positive neighbor can help to build resilience and to foster healing in a child. Another factor is the frequency of the event, not just the intensity of the event. A seemingly “mild” difficult event that happens repeatedly can cause as much traumatic stress as a one-time horrific event. Whether or not the child had access to help and to appropriate intervention is also a key factor in whether the event causes longterm traumatic stress. This means that the below list is a helpful guide, not a diagnostic chart.

Adverse Childhood Experiences that Lend Themselves to Traumatic Stress

If your loved one has suffered any of the below adverse childhood experiences, and certainly if he suffered them with any amount of repetition and frequency, it is very possible that he has experienced childhood trauma.

• Abandonment – As a child, his biological parent or significant caregiver left his life through divorce, death, incarceration, or other reasons. Loss and abandonment can also be experienced when a child lives between various households, lives away at boarding school, or feels ignored by a parent who is a workaholic or who is not engaged when in the home. Children who have been placed in the foster care system or placed for adoption can also experience this sense of abandonment.
• Accidents – As a child, he experienced a vehicular accident, a serious sports injury, a building fire, or some other major accident that threatened his life, his sense of safety, and his feeling of security.
• Bullying – As a child, he was bullied repeatedly by classmates, neighbors, teammates, or others at school, in the neighborhood, at after school activities, or in any environment he frequented.
• Crime - As a child, he was the victim of a crime or witnessed a crime.
• Domestic Abuse - As a child, he experienced or witnessed one person in the family unit or household make threats of violence, be physically violent, be sexually, emotionally, or psychologically threatening or cruel, or use economic threats to disenfranchise, control, and dominate.
• Domestic Violence – As a child, he experienced or witnessed one person in the family unit or household use physical aggression or threats of physical violence to dominate, gain power over, or control another person. Such abuse is characterized by any behaviors that imprison, injure, intimidate, horrify, terrorize, injure and wound someone.
• Emotional Abuse – As a child, his parents, caregivers, and/or other adults in the his world often insulted, swore at, shamed, or insulted him, his siblings, or each other. The child may also have feared for his physical safety at these times.
• Isolation – As a child, he experienced his family as disconnected. They did not bond with each other. He felt unloved and unimportant, and did not experience reliable or consistent support from his parents or the significant adults in his life.
• Mental Illness – As a child, he lived with someone who had a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental illness, was battling depression, or attempted suicide.
• National or Natural Disasters and Terrorism – As a child, he experienced significant or dramatic events such as war, persecution, hurricanes, forest fires, or flooding that led to displacement, uncertainty, hunger, life threatening incidents, and increased vulnerability. He experienced or heard about terrorism, and/or heard of children wounded or killed by terrorism. He was uprooted from home under violent or threatening circumstances. Any of these can be destabilizing for a child.
• Neglect –  As a child, he experienced intoxicated or absent parents who did not protect him, did not provide enough to eat, and did not supply clean or appropriate clothing. In some cases, his parents may not have been in drunken stupors or physically absent, but may have left him to raise himself. He might have shown up for school in clean clothes and may have had food in the refrigerator, but was usually responsible for figuring out his daily life. He was poorly supervised, experienced very few - if any - healthy rituals of connection with his family, navigated much of his world on his own, and tended to be at risk of exploitation or of being in harm’s way.
• Physical Abuse – As a child, he experienced physical aggression by a parent or adult, such as being grabbed, shoved, hit, pushed, pulled, or having things thrown at him. A child witnessing the physical abuse of a parent, loved one, or caregiver can also suffer tremendous traumatic stress.
• Separation from Loved Ones – As a child, he was separated from caregivers, siblings, and other significant loved ones due to situations such as migration, military deployment, divorce, incarceration, economic difficulties, or illness, or due to a court order. Children kidnapped by a stranger or someone known to them also experience this devastating type of separation.
• Sexual Abuse – As a child, he was subjected to sexual activity with an adult or with another child. Sexual activity extends beyond intercourse and includes fondling, oral sex, inappropriate and obscene conversations (whether in person or by telephone or text), exposure to pornography, prostitution, rape, and having the child expose his body or view the other person’s exposed body.
• Substance Abuse – As a child, he witnessed a parent or significant adult in his life abuse alcohol or drugs. He may also have had to live with the chaotic implications of a parent who was an alcoholic or an addict, such as unpredictability, violence, illness, incarceration, institutionalization, or having a parent who was unresponsive or unreliable. A parent being a drug dealer or allowing the house to be a place where people become intoxicated also creates peril, instability, and a profound sense of insecurity for a child.
• Surgery or Serious Illness – As a child, he was hospitalized for a serious illness or surgery. Consider if the medical intervention included invasive procedures, medical personnel that the child considered scary, separation from caregivers, unanswered questions, secrets from the child, unfamiliar machines and tubes, dark rooms, and/or painful procedures. These can all create fear and even terror for a child. A loved one having surgery or a serious illness can also cause a child to feel overwhelmed beyond his ability to cope.
• Unsafe Community – As a child, he lived in a community where violence and other threats abounded. He or family members may have been hurt by violence in the community, or he may have witnessed violence and threats. Even hearing about the violence second hand can be a traumatic experience for a child.

One of the things I have discovered over the years is that trauma is filled with nuances. Every trauma experience is unique because it has its own variables. One of the best ways to begin to understand the impact of your spouse’s life experiences is to know his story. Listen to him share. Be curious, be caring, and be kind as he shares.

This list might not reflect only your spouse’s experiences. Perhaps you found some of your life experiences chronicled there. If that’s the case, be patient, caring, and kind with yourself. Seeking help in order to process the trauma that might be there is one of the best gifts you can give yourself and your family.

In the next post I’ll explore, among other things, the behaviors that point to unresolved trauma.

For help resolving traumatic stress, you are welcome to contact us here.

Copyright © 2018 Dr. Dawn-Marie Pearson