so growing up i wasn't fully conscious of it probably but i spent most of my energy trying to hide things that what was going on with me i hid in school what things were like at home i hid with my friends about how kind of really off my parents were and try to turn that off-ness into like novelty like yeah my mom's cool she lets me smoke smoke or cigarettes isn't that cool i tried to hide how unfinished and messy our house was i tried to come off like that was bohemian like by choice um and i tried to hide that i wasn't growing up in this alcoholic and financially messy chaotic mess of a place and growing up and neglect
so when clients get to me i really relate to their stories about how they still had to hide and they may be still hiding these big dark things from say their their therapist or their coworkers or even their partners and that hiding isn't good you know secrecy separates us from intimacy that we want and you could think about this video as a list of stuff you might have had to hide and that i've had to hide and that are actually super kind of appropriate things for growing up in childhood trauma
the biggest chunks of my personal growth and healing came from really good people and my therapist saying you know of course you hid that stuff that was the right thing to do at the time of course you pretended to be somebody that you're not of course you lied about who your parents were and of course you felt that way about those really hard things um i want you guys to feel that same kind of level of relief and to really take the pressure off and start to normalize our issues around our childhood trauma because these things are way more common than you think
my mentor who i love would say to me you can't learn new things when shame is running you and i think that that is so true you know shame and secrecy is just more than hiding what we had growing up with
the webinar is going to cover how shame manifest in our childhood trauma what present life triggers to shame looks like and it's also going to include an inner child worksheet on how to get ourselves out of shame triggers and i'll also be doing a live q a at the end in that webinar the link will take you to my website where you can register for that webinar you can also connect with me and you can also explore some e-course work that i offer there as well
so here's a list of five abnormally normal childhood trauma issues that we experience in our present lives and all of them are very emotionally confusing and they're actually hard to talk about so this could be triggering for some of you so if you know if you get triggered just pause and come back to it when you're ready we're just naming these here and i hope you can connect with embrace that i've had many clients struggle with these with these very things including myself and i'm not going to be listening these in a level of importance or severity they're all sort of just kind of dark issues and difficult issues to unpack
so number one is being estranged from extended family i often find that dysfunctional family systems are fragmented and estranged from each other what this looks like is our parents don't keep consistent family connections going with their siblings cousins even their own parents and the result of that is that you might even have say a cousin that lives in the same town as you but you barely know them and there's a whole family story to that
later in life if say you're getting married or that cousin is getting married it is now incredibly awkward and not really knowing what to do with each other and our inner child might feel immense shame about that that we're not good enough at keeping those connections going we might feel shame about not keeping up with them we might feel shame about our abusive nuclear family system as it is and those cousins aunts uncles the extended family might know that about us or know that we were raised in that which is another source of shame
and ideally i really think it's up to the job of the adults in the family system to keep family relationships going not the children so it's quite normal to not know that cousin or an uncle or an aunt fully if if growing up the parents didn't cultivate that connection that wasn't our the job of children
um if we also feel shame around our nuclear family like who our parents were or what happened to us that's also not on us not on us from a place of shame within the context of the whole extended family as adults we can we can reach out and we can try to start connections but it's also not on us if it's not reciprocal they may not how to do they being the extended family they may not know how to keep connections going too because of generational trauma in a way that it's like nobody knows what to do with each other but we may feel personal shame about that like as if it's on us which is the point to this one
there's a couple as some some additional issues as you might have been told that your grandmother was awful and that a meeting later in life with that grandmother turns out that that's really not the kind of case and it's just like we may we may have these stories about who these people were that aren't actually really the truth could be another part to it
another issue is that highly toxic parents can have axes to grind meaning let's just say that dad made a mom cut off her own parents because he hated them or he like sort of wanted to sort of separate her from her parents or vice versa that mom refused to include her in-laws in anything and they were they were evil and they were bad and you know it's it's hard to know with with all of this mess in our family it is hard to sort of know who to believe but sometimes that is sort of warranted and sometimes it's not warranted another component to the estrangement and the dysfunction in this
so what i've learned from hearing about from hearing hundreds of genograms in my in my in my private practice a genogram is your family map of dysfunction your family tree of dysfunction and what i've learned is that the generational trauma really carries through the generations of this kind of disconnection
those that disconnection can also be related as i mentioned before about huge schisms in the family like one brother doesn't talk to the brother because of some kind of business deal gone wrong and they haven't talked to each other in 20 years and then that's your uncle and then that's your dad and my point to expressing that is again i know that this is repetitive is it's not on you and it's it's you are just in the middle of it and it's not you're not responsible for that disconnection nor are you responsible to carry the shame about it
number two is very difficult this is hiding that you grew up in a religiously abusive household or a cult in the beginning of a person's recovery who grew up like that this one is really hard to share with anyone and if whether it's a close friend a support group a therapist or even a partner
in no way here am i saying that all spiritual practices whether individual or
what i do define as abusive here is growing up in a family system that defaults all parenting emotional care explaining the world explaining general life things like sex or gender or chain of events or even reality when they do that through spiritual and religious interpretations only that's what i think is abusive such as say refusing medical care to children due to believing that a higher power is all that is needed
there is an abusive betrayal of the parent child contract while shaming and blaming and gaslighting a child into thinking they aren't worthy enough of god's healing and that child can't say like that child can't reconcile that their wrist is still broken and painful in a in a delusional system like that meaning that the child is aware that it's not it still hurts it's you know what i mean it's they're aware of that disreality between what the parents are sort of saying and what's going on with it
and as a side note in the united states that kind of abuse would wrote would if they if it was found out about that would cue child and family services or if a school nurse saw that the wrist has been broken and it's been broken for two weeks that school nurse would be required to get child and family services involved it's that sort of abusive this is just one example of how religious overly religious families and cults can become abusive to children
clients who grew up in that kind of level of fundamentalism and have maybe found their way out they may greatly struggle with reclaiming getting medical care when needed or their trauma might be deeply rooted in not being believed when they're ill or they're going to have issues around being sort of sick or needing medical care and that's sort of symptoms of the trauma which are appropriate symptoms
and whether it's a religious organization or a cult they can be both there are abusive dynamics from parents like controlling children as devout members and listing all non-members in society as bad or as e as or it's like evil and it's it's highly damaging to a child's development specifically around perception that say if you're five and you're growing up in a system like that it's really hard to know that the kid that you're in daycare with is going to be like you know damned in society because they're not like you so a lot of a lot of abuse around perception with this one
in cults and in fundamentalist religious organizations there's a marked use of things like mind control authoritarianism totalistic
so when nuclear families are wrapped up in fundamentalism or cults like this i see that the childhood trauma survivors have to address the abuse in their recovery on two fronts the first is that the parents were selling out their life their choices their children and sometimes even their livelihoods to the organizations themselves that's betrayal of the children and it's highly damaging such as when a client say wasn't protected from the abusive leaders and the parents welcomed those leaders into their lives and defaulted all the parenting and decisions to those leaders
there is also a direct abuse from the parents themselves to weaponize the dogma like sort of saying well that happened because god doesn't like you or you're not pious enough or you're not sort of paying attention to the rules enough and explaining things in that way that's what i mean about weaponizing it that there's always this shameful you're bad and you're not you're not sort of a good enough member if you were a good enough member of this thing you would be doing better
so the second thing that the person will have to sort of do some recovery around work around is the the organization itself meaning that to look at how kids don't organically get to choose their friends they don't get to find their own identity they lose their true self because they were told to do like the door-to-door cold calling and the door-to-door work or they're told to achieve some unattainable level of perfectionism and they're told to be selfless and compliant and they're told to shame others who may be wandering from the from the doctrine or the dogma
there's almost like a level of paranoia to it um i've had clients who as children like i said before were refused medical care they had to make daily cold calls as teenagers to get people involved into the cult like you come home from school and you have to do your calls and the awkwardness of that and having to leave your body to just sort of pay attention to just be present it's such a mind effy kind of experience to do all that
um and you know to also to kind of gone through a level of almost like systemic paranoia around who was in and who was out and i really can't articulate all the fear-based magical thinking and mind-effing that goes on in these systems
i've had clients who were handed over to their abusers by their own parents i've had clients told that the reason that they were hurt or assaulted was because of divine punishment and that they deserve it they deserved it because of mr so-and-so they deserved it because of god
so there really are sort of two issues of business to finish in my mind for children who grew up like this and then they've somehow miraculously have gotten out of the system it's very difficult for the survivor to open up about this especially when they were conditioned to think that the outside world is just full of evil actors like psychology is evil or the band queen is evil or sex is evil or makeup is evil or disney is evil and it'll all corrupt you the fear of those things is just a powerful way to control and obtain compliance from members
you know recovery service for survivors will be about embracing that they experienced normal repression of self in a horrifically abnormal situation and to say you know of course you feel so other than you know you were conditioned to think that way and it'll take a long time for you to just simply be a person in the world um and to not so not be so afraid of you or afraid of the world
and the last thought here is there's a heartbreaking grief i really want you to really want to like sort of honor this there's really a heartbreaking grief that if if you got out of systems like that there's a lot of heartbreak around those who you were close to that didn't and they stayed in it there's such a schism there
number three is not feeling joy when good things happen you know realizing this one is actually what got me into therapy or actually someone else noticed that i was sort of not experiencing joy during good things and i would really be shut down and really ho-hum about big celebratory things that would come up in my life and i think we need those moments that other people pointed out to us it's painful but it's also stuff that we're already kind of aware of and they're just addressing what we see as well
what this one looks like is that when there is a graduation a marriage a new job getting a scholarship even having a baby it can feel to trauma survivors anti-climatic and that we don't really know what to do with it because we don't really feel much we might we might know that something's up we might have a feeling like shouldn't i feel more but we're kind of like meh you know and um we really don't like that we have that response and it can even be a little bit scary
it's highly normal for childhood trauma survivors to not experience the full spectrum of emotions including joy that's what it was like for me and i struggled in this surreal way with not feeling joy at joyous moments and i also had a really hard time with knowing how to be spontaneous i see those two things as kind of intertwined joy and spontaneity
these are hard things to admit to because like most of these things we feel like we might be somewhat dead inside which isn't true we just don't want to be seen like that we don't want to be seen that we're dead inside so we might try to cover it up as what i mean
i really worried that if if i was this profoundly broken person because i didn't feel what others felt and growing up in abuse and neglect and dysfunction we shut down our emotions and we go into our heads as children which is what is sort of the the not feeling joy is is kind of a byproduct of that this is also known as dissociation almost like a baseline not being in our body because the priority would be to be watching out for what happens next and watch out for how to get through things or the whole household is really repressed and shut down and there's really no spark to life
we'll approach our own college graduation as getting through it rather than feeling the joy and the relief about moving out and celebrating that's not possible if joy and spontaneity and grief and all those other emotions are buried so it actually makes sense
so you know it's very normal for trauma you're not a freak or you're not a monster if you're really feeling meh about big things it's just a sign that there's an emotional work to do like talking about it processing some trauma it's like um this i think good therapy and good childhood trauma is a lot about almost like jump starting a dead battery that's almost you could almost right before i started my therapy work it was just really like a like a dead battery that just needed a good kind of like clear and we can get those emotions back i want to be clear about that
so but what we do is we kind of hide those feelings and we kind of play along we also might find that adrenaline-based activities like drugs or sex or jumping on a plane or something like that can almost jump start that feeling of joy but at the end of it it always kind of leads back to shut down feelings after so those things don't really sort of solve the issue
number four is kind of a mouthful um not liking or fully valuing tenderness and empathy towards self or to the vulnerable i know that that's quite a bit of a title but it's another really normal thing and is incredibly hard to admit to for childhood trauma survivors
what i mean is experiencing some level of disgust about being tender to ourselves or others what it looks like is having disdain for our inner child or even blame that inner child for your life being a mess you don't have to fully like the concept of the inner child and some people really struggle with it but what i mean is having disdain or disgust or hatred towards yourself when you think about yourself as a child or you see pictures of yourself as a child
it also looks like having contempt and disgust when we see children being taken care of emotionally or that we imagine that they're being coddled and sure sometimes kids are cuddled but i don't even like that word but um what i'm describing in a sense is a disgust for empathic parenting or empathic relationships we might even balk at believing that it's real when we see it sort of going on in others
this can also look like having an inner dialogue that tends to be cold or really nasty towards self um like is our inner monologue about ourselves voiced through like angry clenched teeth like you better not eff this up this time um like you do everything else and that is a clue that you might have this kind of going on
what i call this very common symptom of childhood trauma is self-logging or self-hate and there's a really good reason why we do it when children are treated with contempt becomes their inner vibe that becomes their inner voice and this is especially true for clients who grew up in what i call anti-love families children will also hate themselves and start to blame themselves for their circumstance believing that if they were stronger or more focused or just better then they could rise above the things that is about their abuse that is beyond their control within their abusive family
when that doesn't work because it's impossible for a 10 year old to rise above all that stuff we start to hate ourselves so i look at it as being twofold it's how we talk to and we also take it on when we can't overcome i've even had clients painfully admit that they really dislike children or seeing children get their needs met and to that i say you know of course that's there like you were treated awful for having those needs and you're just feeling what you know but it's also with the vibe of like you know like i didn't need care and attention why do you like there's a judgment going on in the background of it valuing a child in a child's world really got wrecked the concept of like sort of what kids needs or kids being appreciated
recovery for this is going to be about really checking in with what you really value about parenting and kids and also clearing the air with yourself sometimes with the clients who have self-hate going on i have them say to their inner child stuff like i think we don't really like each other and i think we need to be real about that let's not be fake with each other um as we both really don't want this relationship but we do need to work together and it might have to start with almost like a frenemy vibe where it's unrealistic to have a person who is struggling with self-hate to totally shift gears into this really loving affirmative language it's not going to work for them so we have to start somewhere with it
self-hate is often a way to survive instead of really taking in what the family system is like or realizing at eight we have 12 years to go until we're 18 to survive this miserable system so lastly on this like with most of these to shift that idea of self-hate or disdain or disgust or contempt as look at it as sort of a symptom of what we experience in our inner inner in our family systems to also check in to really kind of awaken what do i value do i value children growing up and thriving and sort of getting their needs met of course we do but it's just not sort of our experience so we do have to be real with ourselves and start somewhere but it is very fixable
number five is also difficult this one is hiding our true feelings when an abusive parent passes away this one's very hard but not for reasons you might think when a survivor of childhood trauma loses an abusive parent they are usually stuck not knowing how to feel or not knowing how to process what it usually looks like is not feeling much and then experiencing worry or shame that they're not feeling much and there is usually a worry that they're somewhat of a monster or they for not having grief or shock or even compassion
but in reality it's totally normal to not feel much and to feel confused when we lose an abusive parent why is that well that abusive parent broke a family and parent child contract by being abusive once that takes place much of the traditional death of a parent feelings are no longer warranted but we may feel like freaks about the feelings which and that really isn't good for us
i tell clients that the sexually physically or emotionally abusive parent who has now passed on is perhaps a closing of a chapter in their trauma life i also might ask them if they feel like the relationship connection passed away many years ago or was never there and that's another sort of reality to kind of look at
i if you think about someone who loses a parent who's who's struggle with alzheimer's for the past eight or ten years is they often say that you know like once my dad kind of got sick in that way it's like i lost him then and then he became like a different sort of person it sort of in a similar way and for childhood trauma in a way that the relationship had passed away a long time ago or was never there it can often just feel like losing like a teacher from high school that you had that one year and that teacher was a nightmare like we don't rejoice in their death but we don't really feel a big connection to that person because that person was almost just someone to endure and to kind of like get away from
i'm not saying who cares that they die this is this is the passing of someone who most likely we need to do a lot of processing around in therapy in our recovery there could be you know there but there could also be an emotional freedom or feelings of safety once that parent has passed on in our subconscious especially if that parent was like a horrific predator so it's actually appropriate to not know what to feel you know death is the main surreal experience we have as humans no one knows what to do with it and i think if they do they're kind of bs'ing it's just such a it's just such a different reality when someone when you had a co-worker that was there on a tuesday no longer there on a wednesday as human beings i think it just messes with us and it's part of being human about not really knowing what to do with it
um and i had this client one time and i'll finish with this is this is one of the most powerful experiences that i've done in group therapy this client that i had was really terrified of their parent toxic very highly abusive toxic parent hadn't passed on yet but they were getting up in years and the client was worried about having to go to the services and have everybody from soup to nuts say how great their parent was because the parent was a charmer the parent could really sort of pull the wool over people's eyes
and in group we did this experiential where experiential is an exercise where you kind of call up the trauma in a good enough way but you have a different outcome so this we kind of did this almost like theater thing where we represented like a awake and a funeral for the parent who has passed and the receiving line would have been people sort of saying um your parent was so great they they did this you know every time that i would come to the house they would always have a smile on them like strangers would you know come to this thing or nurses or whatever or neighbors you know you must be devastated
and the the client was was able to practice and saying um that was not my experience of my parent i had a totally different experience i appreciate what you're saying but that was not my reality and that was just a very powerful experience for them to go through to be able to sort of tell the truth about who the parent was
so i tell you that story that this stuff is is very powerful to us about when we lose sort of an abusive parent so i hope that that was helpful i wanted to address these things that we tend to hide from and name them as normal for growing up and childhood trauma they can be very isolating they can be secrets that we really don't want others to know or that we have going on but the relief to hear them called out or to hear them talked about was huge for me and to just feel like it's just it's just all normal stuff and there's nothing wrong with you
if you identified with any of these you could do some of these journaling prompts here are two very simple journaling prompts
the first is what do i feel about myself when one of these secrets comes up and incidentally it can be it doesn't have to be one of these five secrets it could be secrets about sex it could be secrets about anything i'm just giving you five off the top of my head um is it true that i'm bad somehow in it or could it actually be normal given what my family system was like is it me or is it the system that i was born in and i will have these two journal prompts in the description of the video in case you guys sort of lose it
the second journaling prompt is what it might feel if i embrace the normalcy around this issue would i be less burdened would i feel more human rather than feeling separate can i gradually accept that my story is more about my family dysfunction rather than me being faulty you know they are incredibly hard to even bring up with a therapist much less partners or friends and underneath them is the shame
and you're welcome to join me for that webinar coming up again the link will be in the description of this video and if you identif if you identify strong with one of these let me know in the comments that uh if that i've just sort of touched on if you want these to be more flushed out if you want sort of more of a longer video on it or an e-course i would love to hear that from you
and as always you guys i hope this was helped video was helpful to you and as always may you be filled with loving kindness may you be well may you be peaceful and at ease and may you be joyous take care and i will
