Unfinished Business From Childhood Trauma - 3 Examples

Patrick Teahan, MSW explores three examples of unfinished business from childhood trauma, showing how unresolved grief, anger, and relational wounds continue to drive adult behaviors and emotional reactions.

By Patrick Teahan

hey everybody welcome back to the channel i hope you're well and this video is all about unfinished business left over from our childhood trauma one of the two primary goals in the childhood trauma work that i do is finishing business with our family system of origin it's the first goal and the second goal is reclaiming intimacy down the road i'll probably do a video on the reclaiming intimacy part but this video is going to get all into the nuts and bolts of unfinished business what it looks like what it means and what's good to kind of know about it if we grew up in childhood trauma and abuse defining what our unfinished business is is is super helpful because it's another layer of added awareness that we need to shift out of stuck places or to be more in our best inner adult self and even better like stop a lot of unnecessary suffering that we put ourselves through because of our childhood trauma which that sounds pretty good so the type of trauma work About Unfinished Business that i do is called the rrp model which was developed by my mentor amanda curtin you can check out an interview that i did with her over here or somewhere up here in that model the idea of unfinished business is that the inner child is trying to resolve their childhood trauma by people and situations in the present but it never works and in fact it causes more dysfunction in our lives so exploring unfinished business and how the inner child is attempting that when we have no inner adult present how that all kind of plays out here's a really bad analogy on this one it's like trying to return socks that you bought online at your local hardware store like both places sell stuff but trying to return it at a hardware store is probably not going to work out so well and the inner child who looks through the lens of trauma at the present just keeps trying to make it work like the inner child is like dude why can't you just accept these socks bro and that's what i mean about dysfunction in the present or you'll hear me say in the video like kind of barking up the wrong tree for example many trauma survivors will give a lot of power to authority figures in their life like a boss or we might even act out with a boss coming from a different side of the same coin in that way and say you got into a pattern of people pleasing with a boss who doesn't recognize you and or you just never get that response that you're looking for from them so you work harder and you keep trying and you put all of y

our worth issues um into that sort of situation or into that person and it's sort of like dude why don't you just take these socks back and we just you know we'll just move on that's sort of what i mean about the analogy a very very simple example of unfinished business you guys is how much energy we put into getting people to notice us or getting people to see us in a certain way and sure that's like a human thing to do we all want to be seen in a good light and that kind of a thing but how much energy do you put in it and does it come from your childhood in some way you're probably aware of if you do this you're probably aware of it as i'm sort of speaking and as a side note even if we got an amazing response from the boss almost like that fantasy got confirmed and the boss was like you are just the greatest things in sliced bread we wouldn't know what to do with you it wouldn't be in we wouldn't do without you it wouldn't um be enough for the inner child like it wouldn't heal us because you know the boss is not the sock return store where it all went wrong and the boss is just the hardware store and they're just focusing on hammers and stuff i'm hoping i'm not completely watching this video talking about that analogy i hope i hope it's kind of landing in some way so our inner child or our subconscious doesn't take in how the present is different unless we have a solid inner adult teaching them meaning that sort of that the adult is the one that's just like wait a minute i'm barking up the wrong tree here it's our inner adult who would catch that and only our inner adult the inner child is just going to keep doing what it does until we they get re-parented and reloved so or loved for the first time so how would that possible people-pleasing fit into the idea of unfinished business if you grew up in unconditional love or neglect or inconsistency like in childhood one minute you're okay and the next minute you're being screamed at people-pleasing is actually a great strategy to keep attempting to be tolerable to the toxic adults or to be acceptable to them does that sound familiar to some of you guys so our inner child keeps working harder shows up more is more emotionally available to everyone in an attempt to be okay if this is part of your story this isn't part of everyone's story side note it's not always a terrible thing to have an open heart and want that from people but we have to include that openness and heart space for ourselves so what's the unf

inished business that needs to be finished well with a client like that who struggles with people pleasing i'd be helping them hit bottom of sorts with that people-pleasing behavior and i'd be helping the client lower their own tolerance for that behavior and people-pleasing like kind of you know some of the work is just getting sick of those survival strategies and getting real about how they're not working they probably know it's beneath them in some way but they just kind of can't get themselves out of it so i'd be helping them look at at how they were set up to be a people pleaser in childhood and really embrace that idea that it was a survival strategy that takes root by holding the dysfunctional or abusive parents accountable which is a loaded word so i do that from having them do something like empty chair work where we sort of imagine that the the toxic parent or the or the abusive parent is sitting in a chair with them and the client is going to be speaking their truth to them and they tell their toxic parent what it was like for them to struggle with what it's like for them to struggle with that people-pleasing behavior what it's like to walk on eggshells all the time and to be obsessed with being a good kid instead of a healthy kid in childhood what it was like to try to get that alcoholic or neglectful parent to notice them what it was like to never be good enough or to never be loved even by their own parent and there's such an expression to all that there's so much to say that comes out like i might be kind of coaching it and usually nine times out of ten the client just sort of starts to just speak their truth like we jump started something and then it all sort of comes out things that they never would have thought of things that they really want to sort of um say to them and they say it kind of organically you know and i'll talk to the parent too with the parent and the empty chair and hold them accountable as well and support the client who never had someone validate or take that parent on and over time we do other activities about truth-telling like this and also for the client to say stuff like to the empty chair i'm not losing my self-respect anymore to you to try to get people to like me or make everything amazing for them f that i don't need to make people happy to survive but that's what you did to me so accountability in this conversation is we need to have that with our parents in therapy not in person huge huge major point there a

nd give the parents back the dysfunction and the stuckness is how business gets finished doing it in person isn't good for anybody i think doing meaning doing it in person with our family it's better to do it in therapy in the therapy room with someone who knows like what they're doing after doing work like that and if the client has a strong inner adult in place that i'm trying to cultivate with them they can now teach the inner child those empowered beliefs that they brought up in that empty chair like i'm a thousand percent acceptable the way i am i can give work just 75 instead of the 200 that i give them every day that's good enough

One of the most important concepts in childhood trauma recovery is the idea of unfinished business — the emotional experiences from our early years that were never fully processed, expressed, or resolved, and that continue to operate beneath the surface of our adult lives. In this video, Patrick Teahan, MSW presents three concrete examples of how unfinished business from childhood manifests in adulthood, helping viewers recognize these patterns in their own lives.

Patrick explains that unfinished business is not just about remembering what happened — it's about the emotional residue that remains stuck in the body and nervous system because it was never safe to feel it fully at the time. Children in toxic family systems learn to suppress grief, swallow anger, and disconnect from pain as survival strategies, but those unexpressed emotions don't disappear. They get stored and replayed in adult relationships, triggers, and self-destructive patterns.

Through three detailed examples, Patrick illustrates how unfinished business shows up in everyday life — from disproportionate emotional reactions to seemingly minor situations, to repetitive relationship patterns that mirror childhood dynamics, to persistent feelings of emptiness or rage that seem to have no identifiable source. Each example demonstrates the direct line between childhood wounds and adult struggles.

The video emphasizes that completing this unfinished business is one of the primary goals of childhood trauma therapy. Patrick discusses how inner child work, grief processing, and therapeutic re-experiencing can help survivors finally express what couldn't be expressed in childhood, release what has been held for decades, and begin to live from the present rather than constantly being pulled back into the unresolved past.

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Unfinished Business From Childhood Trauma - 3 Examples

This video is part of the following playlists...

This video is featured in...

Want to go deeper?

Reparenting The Inner Child

Overcoming the Toxic Family System

Topics