We’ve all had a first true love in life – a person or a thing that we became obsessed with and found ourselves thinking about every spare minute of every day. For me, it was psychology. And, like many obsessive love affairs, my love of psychology was born out of pain, desperation, and the belief that I’d finally found the antidote to my misery.
After two years of suffering from a severe chronic illness that had devastated my life to the point where I seriously questioned whether I wanted to continue living it, I stumbled across a book called Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman, and soon after that, Louise Hay’s classic You Can Heal Your Life.
I say stumbled, but in truth, my grandmother had left these books in a strategic place, hoping I might pick them up. She was wise enough to realize that given my stubborn nature if she told me to read them there was little chance I would. But pain plus hope is a powerful combination, and for me, it equaled change.
These two books gave me hope that there might be a different way to live, and they also opened my eyes to a whole new universe of what my life might mean and the choices I had to potentially change it. In the ensuing months I read more intensely and widely, quickly exhausting the self-help books my grandmother owned. Eventually, I had to make a rather embarrassing trip to the local library to borrow more (as an 18-year-old male asking for books on self-love, I got some strange looks.)
A year later, my health had recovered sufficiently for me to go to university, and there was only one thing I wanted to study: psychology. A few weeks into my course, however, I discovered that the mainstream psychology approach wasn’t going to meet my desire to find more innovative and experimental ways of working. And so, hungry for more, in my spare time I continued to read self-help books, along with attending additional workshops and courses whenever possible.
Walking this path alone for the first few years was lonely and difficult, and I was deeply grateful for the friendships and connections that began to emerge. Simply having people to talk to and share new discoveries and reflections with was like nectar for my soul.
One particular friend at the time, Katie, was on her own chronic illness healing journey; she’d walked away from a successful career in media to retrain and pursue her dream of becoming a psychologist. Together, we tried to make sense of our current physical and emotional challenges, and during one of our many conversations we talked about the impact of our past.
Had our childhood played a role in our current health difficulties? Put another way, what had been the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences – potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood?
In the mid-1980s a groundbreaking study1 was carried out by Kaiser Permanente, a US-based insurance company that provides its services for a fixed fee and is therefore highly motivated to maintain and protect the health of its members to reduce its long-term liability. One of the key programs offered by Kaiser Permanente at the time was an obesity treatment program, and the company had observed that although most participants successfully lost weight while following this, the dropout rate was 50 percent.
The head of the company’s preventative medicine department, Vincent Felitti, became intensely curious about the reasons for this and decided to interview a selection of the participants who had quit the program. What he discovered would shape the world of trauma research for decades to come.
Of the 286 people Felitti spoke to, the vast majority had been sexually abused as children. This led him to wonder whether their weight gain might in fact be a coping mechanism for the depression, anxiety, and fear they reported experiencing. He teamed up with Robert Anda from the US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and together they studied the childhood trauma experiences of more than 17,000 volunteers.
Along the way, Felitti and Anda coined the term Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, which they defined as ‘potentially traumatic events that can have negative, lasting effects on health and well-being.’ They determined that ACEs fall into three categories – abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction; here’s an overview of what these are:
The study discovered that ACEs are common – 28 percent of the study participants reported physical abuse and 21 percent sexual abuse – and they also occur together: Almost 40 percent of those interviewed reported two or more ACEs, and 12.5 percent reported four or more.
In the decades since this important study, a substantial body of follow-up research has served to further confirm these findings.2–5 What’s perhaps most shocking is that those who have six or more ACEs have on average a 20-year reduction in their life span.
As my friend Katie and I reflected on our childhoods, for me, the events of my trauma were fairly obvious – my early years’ experiences formed an almost perfect list of ACEs. My parents had divorced; I’d been abandoned by my father; my sister had suffered from serious mental illness and was violent; alcohol was used as a coping strategy in the family; and at times we’d experienced considerable financial hardship.
Katie, on the other hand, had experienced a seemingly more positive childhood. Her parents were still married, and she had a good relationship with her sister and her wider family. Her parents both worked hard and contributed financially to the household, which meant that although money wasn’t abundant, there was enough. Katie had been popular at school, had good friends, and later developed a successful career. That was until, like me, she was forced onto a complex and challenging healing journey.
With a childhood which on the surface was a happy one, how could Katie claim to have been emotionally wounded? Indeed, she said it felt self-indulgent and disrespectful to people with ‘real’ trauma to even consider that her ‘happy childhood’ had affected her negatively. And yet, she had many of the same struggles that I did. Beyond living with a chronic illness, she also suffered with anxiety and low mood at times, and for several years had felt that her life lacked purpose and meaning. Like so many of us, Katie believed that she was broken and, on some level, that it was her fault.
Digging a little beneath the surface, the origins of Katie’s pain began to reveal themselves. Although her parents loved her, they were themselves not emotionally open. And as an emotional and sensitive child, Katie hadn’t known what to do with her feelings. She was taught they were a sign of weakness that had to be overcome; indeed, she’d regularly say things like, ‘Ignore me, I’m just being overly emotional.’
The more we explored together, the more we realized that in fact Katie’s childhood had impacted her as intensely as mine had – it was just that those impacts were more subtle and hidden. In a sense, the fact that she hadn’t explicitly experienced ACEs in the way I had, made them even more difficult to identify and work with.
Many years later I came to label experiences such as divorce, being abandoned, living with family members with mental illness and so on as overt trauma – i.e., they’re obviously traumatic experiences. The more subtle and insidious experiences, such as those that Katie had experienced, I’d refer to as covert trauma – they’re not necessarily less harmful in their impact, but they’re often harder to see.6 Although there are many different forms of covert trauma, here are a few examples:
Obviously, this is far from an exhaustive list, and we’ll dig more into covert trauma as we continue our journey.
I think it’s also helpful to make a distinction between events that happened once and those that became almost routine in our childhood. Although a single event can be a major source of trauma, when something becomes a repetitive experience, it has the additional cost of becoming normalized.
For example, as a child, seeing our parents have a heated argument once can be upsetting, but if our core emotional needs are being met appropriately, it might be a helpful insight into the realities of managing conflict and differences of opinion. But if witnessing our parents argue becomes the norm, the impact is very different. Our nervous system will learn to activate to help us brace ourselves for the shocks, and we’ll normalize to this new homeostatic balance.
As you’re reading this, you might be starting to think of the various events of your childhood that you believe have impacted you. If so, that’s great, as you’re one step ahead already. However, it’s also entirely possible that you’re feeling lost because you have a patchy recollection of your childhood at best.
If this is the case, you’re most definitely not alone. Indeed, multiple research studies have demonstrated the impact of early trauma on our memories of childhood.7–11 As we’ll get into in Chapter 6, one of the ways we manage the impacts of our trauma is by learning to avoid and distract ourselves from our emotions. At the stronger end of this response, we can have difficulty forming accurate memories at the time of the event.
Furthermore, there’s also evidence of a link between trauma and a tendency to overgeneralize autobiographical memories rather than remember individual events.12–17 For example, on being asked specifically to describe one occasion when we felt joy, we might say that we used to enjoy going to the fair, rather than talk about one occasion when we went to the fair.
In his important book Trauma and Memory18 Dr. Peter Levine explores how the body can store traumatic memories as feelings and sensations rather than thoughts and ideas, and how we can use this understanding to process trauma in a different way, through what he calls Somatic (relating to the body) Experiencing.
What then often happens, during a safe and holding therapeutic process, is that those memories start to resurface.19 This is a sign that the therapy is working, because our system now feels safe enough to offer the memories up for healing. That said, there’s an ongoing debate in psychological circles about repressed and recovered memories and the accuracy of memories of historical traumatic events.20–22 Therefore, I think it’s important that we hold such memories carefully.
However, although the details of traumatic events in particular can be unreliable, the more central the information, the more likely it is that there are important elements of truth.23,24 Therefore, if we do start to uncover memories of events for which we have no reference point in terms of whether or not they’re true, we can work with the trauma and stored emotion, with a light holding of the details of all the facts.25 At least until we can hopefully find some kind of external confirmation of them.26
In my work, I take the view that it’s less about whether something is true, or objectively correct, but whether it feels real, and therefore there’s some corresponding emotional trauma to be metabolized and processed, regardless. Indeed, my experience, both personally and professionally, is also that trauma can go into our body in one way and the memories that arise can be different from reality.
Another consideration when trying to understand the life events that have shaped us is the cultural norms in the environment within which they happened. For example, let’s say you grew up in a culture in which intellect was valued over emotional sensitivity, and expressing emotional needs was frowned upon. Perhaps this wasn’t only the case in your home, but also in the church you attended, in your classroom at school, and at the heart of the way your society selected and celebrated the cultural icons it did. As a result, you came to believe that thoughts matter more than feelings.
However, just because this belief was normalized and shared by everyone around you, it doesn’t reduce the impact of the event. In fact, it often worsens it because there was no support for the challenge that may well have instinctively been rising inside you to say you had a core emotional need that wasn’t being met.
For people who are neurodivergent, such as those with autism or sensory, information, or attention issues such as ADHD or dyslexia, the experience of being misunderstood is all too common. The same is true for those whose sexual orientation hasn’t been embraced, or whose gender identification has been rejected or judged by those around them. When our true identity and lived experience are the trigger for our core emotional needs of boundaries, safety, and love being withdrawn or violated, it can be deeply traumatic.
As the father of two neurodiverse children and the husband of a neurodiverse wife, I feel deeply passionate about the importance of recognizing and validating the differences between us. Not as things to ‘learn to accept and live with,’ but as qualities to celebrate for the gifts they can be. Indeed, the number of great artists, thinkers, and entrepreneurs in our history who were not neurotypical is staggering. And, unfortunately, many who grow up today in ways that don’t fit the mold of the society around them have experienced significant traumas as a result.
There’s also fascinating evidence emerging around how trauma is passed between generations.27–32 Experiences that have happened to our ancestors live in our DNA, and are also passed on through the behaviors and norms of our environment, families, and communities.33,34 My friend Thomas Hübl has written particularly elegantly about this in his book Healing Collective Trauma.35
Part of the difficulty of unraveling the impact of the events of our childhood and beyond, and the way they’ve shaped the meanings we’ve created in response to them, is getting a clear sense not of what we’ve normalized but what’s ‘healthy.’ And to do this effectively we often have to take a step away from the blame game, as it can simply perpetuate the cycle of our own suffering.
We’ll explore this further in Part II, but for now it’s important to understand that we can recognize the key caregivers in our childhood as having failed to meet our core emotional needs, or indeed as being the unintentional instigators of events that wounded us, while still loving them and knowing that in their heart, they loved us.
This isn’t about making certain behaviors, or the lack of, acceptable or right. Or about removing our right to stand up for causes that we’re passionate about. Indeed, skillful activism to drive change in the world is what’s behind so many of our leaps forward. And one of the great emotional stretches that emotional healing as an adult involves is the ability to simultaneously feel the rage and hatred in the little child in us for not getting what it needed, while the adult in us recognizes the love that may also have been there.
Put another way, we can acknowledge that it’s not our fault, but it’s also not our parents’ fault. They may have acted in ways which wounded us, but it’s unlikely this was intentional. Indeed, their inability to skilfully meet our emotional needs was likely the product of their own parents’ inability to do so for them, and so on. The potential gift of our healing is to help break the cycle of trauma.
At this point you’d be forgiven for thinking that only events that happen in childhood are important, as that’s where our attention’s been focused. The reason I’ve done so is that childhood events are particularly impactful for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s during the first seven years of our life that our personality is shaped and formed. Secondly, as a child we’re utterly dependent on those around us to meet our emotional needs, but as an adult we do at least have the self-reflective capacity to meet our own emotions.
However, trauma can happen at any point in our lives, even if the way we respond to it has likely been set up in childhood and will stay that way until we actively work to change it. The bottom line is that if we carry an unprocessed emotional injury from an event, or series of events, that’s happened to us, then there’s trauma.
The event could be overt or covert, a single event, or a series of events; our memory of it may be accurate or not; it may have happened in a culture that normalized it or not; and it could happen at any age. Ultimately, what matters is the impact of the event on us, and whether that impact left a wound that hasn’t yet healed.
So, we’ve arrived at your first exercise. It would be easy at this point to keep reading and say to yourself, I’ll do that later, but the danger is that you won’t. For this book to be more than just an intellectual process, completing the exercises is critical. Put simply, knowledge is nice, but action creates change.
Do your best to answer the following questions. Consider this a short checklist of possible traumatic events; it’s far from comprehensive, and if something comes to mind that isn’t listed here, please add it. You’ll find an easy-to-complete worksheet for this exercise, and all the others in this book, in your free online companion course at www.alexhoward.com/trauma.
I’m curious about what you discovered from doing this exercise. You might be feeling clarity and relief through having started to make some sense of your life events. Equally, you might be feeling overwhelmed and shocked at the number of traumas that register for you.
Here’s the important thing, though: Whatever you’re feeling is OK. If you’re judging or rejecting yourself for what you’re feeling right now, it’s that very response which is perpetuating your trauma cycle. Being gentle with yourself along the healing journey is in itself a sign of healing. Remember, it’s not your fault.
Now that we’ve begun to explore some of the key traumatic events of your life, it’s time to turn our attention to how you responded to them. We’re going to dive into the three core emotional needs that are critical for developing emotional resilience.