hey everybody welcome back to the channel i'm patrick Teahan MSW and so in this video i'm going to be talking about six unspoken childhood trauma lies that kids experience when they grow up in toxic families i think that these lies are still a big part of our subconscious and how they play a part in how we feel how we react and ways that we're currently stuck in in places and rather than overly explain what i mean from childhood trauma lies is that you'll see as i go through this list what i mean through each one as we go through you can simply think about these lies as beliefs that can run childhood trauma survivors and when we really take a closer look at them we really see that they're not really true or if we even value them So let's dive in um they are not listed in importance they're all equally important i guess but number one is a lie from childhood trauma that could be running your life and it's that love is fear-based or love is supposed to hurt and what this means is it's the lie that people who love us are supposed to make us afraid or that fear is part of love I think this is a big one i think this affects so many aspects of someone's life from childhood trauma and the lie is like a little program that says love at the end of the day someone you love or someone that loves you makes you afraid or keeps you
off balance and from childhood it's one of the main reasons it's hard to trust it's hard to find people that you can open up to it's one of the reasons why you might shy away from even family or maybe you don't go home for the holidays or you keep people at a distance and the reason is because the people that were supposed to love you made you afraid and the sad thing about it is that kids need to be loved and they need love and they need to be in a safe environment and they need to have the adults in their life be safe and that didn't happen for a lot of us and so we grew up in fear-based environments and then called that love and then when we went into the world and other relationships that type of energy is what we were attracted to and when we might have run into people who were safe and trustworthy and good we might have found them boring we might have not been attracted to them and what happens over time is that love is fear-based this lie is that somebody that you love you're supposed to be afraid of or always walking on eggshells and so the question is is that really the love you want and is it even true meaning is love supposed to make you scared this is one of the first like big lies that develops
when you're a kid and you have one or two really troubled parents and we can add to this that part of being a kid in a toxic family is that these parents do actually love their children but they are not in a place where they can properly express it to where a kid can internalize it properly and the lie for a lot of people is that love is essentially dangerous and it's a survival instinct kids even develop shame a lot of shame and self-blame and the thinking goes like well the reason my parent is scary or the reason my parent is mean to me is because of me i must be the problem here and children really do take it on and that pattern is something that follows somebody and it's this deep it's this deep lie running the show the second lie is that other people are in charge of your emotions and by emotions we mean self-esteem identity and sense of self and what this means is that we look to the outside world to define us to tell us whether we're good or bad or to tell us how we should feel about ourselves and this one i think is something that develops in childhood trauma because our caretakers were responsible for shaping who we are and when they were off or abusive or toxic a kid can't develop a solid sense of
self and so what that does in adulthood is that we can be people pleasers we can have a hard time saying no to people or to things we can feel like we need the approval of everybody else in order to feel good about ourselves and i think the biggest part of this lie is that your identity your sense of self and your self-worth is dependent on what other people think of you and it's not like this one is easy to fix it's not it's a real thing where a lot of adults and especially people that have childhood trauma kind of bounce around depending on what other people think of them and this one is a really important one to work on in recovery because it's about you at the end of the day it's about developing a relationship with yourself so that you can feel confident and grounded without needing to check in with others to see how you should feel and this relates to a lot of things like relationships and careers and how you spend your time and what you value and i think underneath this lie is a really deep loneliness because if you're always looking to other people for your sense of self you're not really with yourself you're constantly out there trying to get something from
the world that you should be able to give to yourself and it goes back to childhood because your parents were supposed to give you that foundation they were supposed to mirror you properly and help you develop your own sense of identity and when they didn't or when they were too caught up in their own dysfunction you had to look elsewhere and that pattern just continues the third lie is that conflict is dangerous and what this really means is that disagreements or differences of opinion feel life-threatening or feel like the end of a relationship and i think a lot of people who grow up in toxic families grow up in homes where conflict was really scary where conflict led to violence or screaming or the silent treatment or somebody leaving and so what happens is that as adults we associate any disagreement with danger and so what we tend to do is avoid conflict at all costs or we go to the other extreme where we blow up at the smallest thing because we're so afraid of conflict that we either suppress everything or explode and the lie here is that conflict is dangerous it's not conflict is normal it's healthy it's a part of every relationship and it's actually how relationships grow it's how
you get closer to people is by working through disagreements and differences and being able to stay present with somebody when you disagree and the problem for trauma survivors is that their nervous system tells them that conflict is dangerous because it was in childhood and so the work is really about teaching your nervous system that conflict in the present with safe people is different from the conflict that you experienced as a kid and i think this one shows up everywhere in work relationships in friendships in romantic partnerships and it's a really common one that keeps people stuck because they either avoid real connection by avoiding any disagreement or they sabotage relationships by being too reactive when any conflict comes up and this one takes time to work on but it's really about building tolerance for discomfort and learning to stay present in difficult conversations and understanding that just because something feels dangerous doesn't mean it actually is the fourth lie from childhood trauma is that you are too much and what this means is that your emotions your needs your personality your very existence is a burden on other people and this comes from growing up in an environment where there was
not enough room for you where your feelings were dismissed or minimized or punished where you learned that expressing yourself led to negative consequences and so what happens is that you start to shrink yourself down you start to believe that who you are authentically is too much for people and this shows up in so many ways it shows up as not being able to take up space in conversations or in rooms it shows up as apologizing for everything it shows up as not being able to ask for help or tell people what you need because you believe at a core level that your needs are too much and this lie is devastating because it cuts off your connection to yourself and to other people and it keeps you small and when you start to look at it you realize that you weren't too much your parents were not enough they couldn't handle you not because there was anything wrong with you but because they didn't have the capacity and the lie runs so deep that even when safe people show up who can handle all of you you still hold back because you're so afraid of being too much and this one is connected to shame which is a huge part of childhood trauma and the work on this one is really about
learning that you are allowed to take up space that your feelings matter that your needs are legitimate and that the right people can handle all of you they want all of you they're not going to leave because you express an emotion or have a need and this is really about unlearning something that was put on you as a kid the fifth lie is that the way your family was is just the way families are and this is a really sneaky one because it normalizes dysfunction it normalizes abuse and neglect and chaos and what happens is that a lot of people grow up thinking that what they experienced was normal that every family has screaming matches or that every parent drinks too much or that every kid is afraid to go home after school and this lie keeps people stuck because if you think your family was normal then there's nothing to work on there's nothing to examine and the truth is that what a lot of us experienced was not normal it was not okay and it had lasting effects on who we became and i think this one is one of the harder ones to break through because it challenges the narrative that you grew up with it challenges the loyalty that a lot of trauma survivors feel toward their
families and it can feel really threatening to acknowledge that what happened to you was not okay but it's also one of the most liberating things you can do in recovery because once you can name what happened and once you can see that it wasn't normal you start to free yourself from the patterns that came out of it and this one comes up a lot in therapy and in groups where people share their stories and they hear other people's reactions and they start to realize oh wait that wasn't normal that was actually really harmful and that shift in perspective can be really powerful and the work on this one is really about education and exposure to what healthy families look like and what healthy relationships feel like and giving yourself permission to grieve the fact that your family was not what it should have been the sixth and final lie from childhood trauma is that you don't deserve good things and this is connected to the shame that we talked about earlier but it goes even deeper than that because this lie tells you that not only are you too much but you are fundamentally undeserving of happiness of love of success of peace and this one runs
really deep because it affects everything it affects whether you let yourself enjoy things or whether you sabotage them when they're going well it affects whether you can receive love or compliments or kindness without feeling uncomfortable or suspicious it affects your relationship with money with success with pleasure with rest and this lie comes from being treated as if you didn't matter as if your needs were unimportant as if you were an inconvenience and when a child is treated that way they internalize it they don't think something's wrong with my parent they think something's wrong with me i must not deserve better and so as adults this shows up as settling for less than you deserve it shows up as staying in bad relationships or bad jobs it shows up as not taking care of yourself because deep down you don't believe you're worth it and the work on this one is really about building up evidence to the contrary it's about starting to do things that are good for you and noticing how it feels it's about surrounding yourself with people who treat you well and letting that sink in it's about challenging the old narrative every time it
comes up and saying actually i do deserve this and i think all six of these lies are connected and they feed into each other and they create this web of beliefs that keeps trauma survivors stuck and the good news is that they can all be worked on and they can all be shifted and the starting point is awareness and i think that's what this video is about is just shining a light on these things so that you can start to see where they show up in your life and start to question them and the work is not easy and it takes time but it's possible and it starts with being willing to look at these lies and say that's not mine that was put on me and i don't have to carry it anymore and if you're doing that work right now just know that it matters and it's brave and you're on the right path and a lot of what i'm talking about with these lies is that they are really about examining your values and what you think to be true about yourself and when you start to look at it through that lens you realize that a lot of what you believe about yourself and about love and about relationships was shaped by people who were not in a healthy
place themselves and that gives you the permission to question those beliefs and to start building new ones that actually serve you and one of the things my mentor mentor curtin often talks about would you say that to a kid would you say these broken-hearted things to a kid not to break their heart but almost thinking about like are they are you really right are you really right that like love isn't safe that's what i mean about those things
