Is it possible to move forward in life by looking backwards? Sometimes, the answer is, “Yes.”
When I was a kid, I wasn’t thinking about deep ideas or the long term. I was just living, which meant hanging out with friends, television, reading, and school. Life got more complicated, especially socially, around 5th grade, and more so in my teenage years.
As an adult, I have always felt that I had it good growing up, and I never considered the concept of trauma. My parents had a good marriage, and I had friends and was generally happy when I was young.
It wasn’t until I was in my 50’s that I figured out that I was wrong, at least to some degree.
Because I did deal with trauma growing up, just not the dramatic, tragic type that too many people have suffered through. There were incidents and periods of my early life when, in the private little world of my mind and feelings, I faced struggles and insecurities.
And without being aware of it at the time, they shaped me in ways that would last for decades.
Even now after becoming aware of those early events and being in a ministry where I think about how people can live life better, some of those situations still haunt me. Because back then, I did what all people do: I came up with ways to limit my pain. Sometimes, bad ways, which led to suppressing negative emotions and using unhealthy coping mechanisms to deal with my insecurities.
I believe the same is true with all of us—including you. Even if we aren’t consciously aware of it.
I am a firm believer in how counseling and therapy can help increase our sense of well-being, but I don’t think it is always critical for everyone. And I don’t suggest obsessing about the past or living a life of regret. But it is healthy to become aware of what shaped us into the person we have become.
Because then we can do something about it.
We are going through a Next Right STEPS blog series about “Discovering Breakthroughs in Your Life.” But here I am talking about early-life trauma; what does that have to do with finding breakthroughs? For many of us, it can mean a lot!
Because realizing we have faced some form of trauma in our early years can be an epiphany of self-awareness. And doing something about it to increase our well-being is a breakthrough.
Understanding the Characteristics of Trauma
A “trauma” is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.
Those harmful to our well-being often happen when we are young, so much so that they have names such as “Adverse Childhood Experiences” and “Early-Life Adversity.” These experiences often require adaptation on our part in order to live life to the fullest.
There are some other characteristics of trauma that are useful for us to understand:
Trauma exists as a spectrum of life experiences – Robert Scaer, M.D. is a psychologist and neurologist and served as Director of Rehabilitation Services at the Mapleton Center in Boulder, CO. He authored The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resilience which redefines traumas “as a continuum of variably negative life events occurring over the life span including events that may be accepted as normal.”
Some traumas are smaller than other traumas – Elyssa Barbash, Ph.D. is a leading authority on psychological trauma. In Psychology Today, she differentiates between Large ‘T’ and Small ‘t’ traumas. Even smaller traumas exceed our capacity to cope and cause a disruption in emotional functioning. They tend to be overlooked by the individual who experienced the difficulty. This is a form of avoidance, and sometimes the individual does not recognize just how disturbed they are by the event or situation.
Trauma can be an accumulation of smaller events – A person does not have to undergo an overtly distressing event for it to affect them. An accumulation of smaller or less pronounced events can still be traumatic. Developing post-trauma symptoms is not an indication of psychological weakness. By most standards, these individuals would likely be referred to as “strong-minded” or “tough,” and their ability to experience such hardships and rise above them would be deemed honorable.
Most people experience trauma, but some overuse the concept – In her article “Are All Childhoods Traumatic?” in Psychology Today, Dr. Laura McNally states that over half of Americans are likely to go through an event that may be classified as trauma, but most of them will not have a dramatic, negative response. In addition, if we begin to view more and more of life through the lens of trauma, we may run the risk of raising the perceived status of victimhood that we draw from those experiences.
Sometimes, experiencing trauma can lead to a breakdown. A “breakdown” is a failure to function properly or make progress, and it may be accompanied by depression or anxiety such that the person impacted finds it hard to cope. Big ‘T’ traumas are sometimes so severe that the person experiencing them struggles and suffers for years, occasionally to the point where they break down entirely.
This contrasts with a “breakthrough” which is a dramatic discovery or development that changes our life significantly for the better. The trauma-like events we face in our early years may be very harmful, but if we become aware of them and choose to adapt in a healthy manner, they can actually help us improve our life in our way that we may not have experienced otherwise. The very trials we faced while young can lead us to discover breakthroughs in our future well-being.
Learning from the Experiences of Another
Using our awareness of past trauma-like events to enhance our well-being can start relatively simply. We do it by noticing those incidents from our early years that remain vivid in our memory and recognizing any harmful emotions, bad coping habits, or negative self-talk they led do. Then, we discover breakthroughs by making the choice to take positive steps moving forward.
Even though we are each a different person with varying circumstances, there are many similarities in our life journeys, and we can learn from the experiences of others. Your life and personality are different from mine, but you can hopefully develop some insights from events that happened with me:
- My Dad attended one—only one—of my sports events. After that Little League game he said, “Steve, I didn’t know you could play baseball like that.” I not only remember what I thought then, I can still feel it: “That’s because you never come to my games!”
- Negative self-talk: “Dad doesn’t even love me enough to come to my games. I wonder if that is how God thinks about me too.”
- Breakthrough: “Dad did love me, and God loves me too, individually and unconditionally.”
- Playing kickball during recess in fifth grade, I kicked a homerun. Some of the kids were telling me how good I was at kickball, but that’s not what was going through my mind.
- Negative self-talk: “That was a lucky kick. You’re a fake, and you’re just kidding everyone.”
- Breakthrough: “I am pretty good at some things, and that’s part of my identity.”
- In sixth grade, classmates starting having boy/girl parties that included “kissing games.” At one, I found myself in a bedroom with Dawn. I was afraid to kiss her and even more scared of what the other kids would think.
- Negative self-talk: “Kissing is what cool kids do, and I’m scared, so I’m not cool like they are.”
- Breakthrough: “Being considered ‘cool’ is a relatively non-important part of life.”
- In Junior High, I went out for the basketball team, and I was the last person cut as the coach formed the final roster.
- Negative self-talk: “That was humiliating. In the future, I’m only going to try things that I know I can be great at.”
- Breakthrough: “It’s okay to try new things, even those I may not be good at to start.”
- In eighth and ninth grade, I was chosen as a class “Superlative,” but I felt it was only because I was good in school.
- Negative self-talk: “I’m okay if I stay in my lane, but I’m fooling people who see me as anything more than that.”
- Breakthrough: “I can appreciate and leverage my strengths and have an identity unique to me, and that is a good thing.”
- My Dad drank alcohol, but he often hid it from others, and Mom covered up for him.
- Negative self-talk: “Bad habits are okay if you can keep them hidden from others.”
- Breakthrough: “What really matters is our character and what God thinks about us.”
- In tenth grade, I went on a youth group trip to Europe. One night, I came across the “cool kids” sneaking beers, so I gave it a try.
- Negative self-talk: “Alcohol makes me feel how I want to feel. I don’t have to be dorky or insecure; I can feel cool and connected.”
- Breakthrough: “Alcohol and other bad habits are not a good way to address our pain and insecurity.”
- In my freshman year at Georgia Tech, my first big experience was going through fraternity rush.
- Negative self-talk: “Wow, drinking is not only fun, but it helps me fit in. I can see how this could become a lifestyle!”
- Breakthrough: “For me, alcohol is an addiction, and my well-being is much better now than when I was drinking.”
Those experiences remain vivid memories even today. I didn’t know it then, but they shaped my life without me even being aware of it. Decades later, when I finally realized the import of those incidents, that insight helped me choose to take steps to live life better.
In other words, I experienced epiphanies of awareness and breakthroughs from better choices.
Breakthroughs in Dealing with Early-life Trauma
The National Wellness Institute has a great definition for how we go about increasing our well-being: “Wellness is an active process through which people become aware of, and make choices toward, a more successful existence.”
The Next Right STEPS article titled “Align Your Heart to Achieve Your Potential” showed how we all have a deep, inherent physiological need for well-being. We saw that Abraham Maslow included “well-being” in his famous “Hierarchy of Needs.” Which is appropriate, because we all yearn for relief from feelings such as anxiety, depression, and insecurity, and we all grow weary of that pain.
According to the American Psychological Association, well-being is “a state of contentment, with low levels of distress, good physical and mental health and outlook, or good quality of life.” Well-being is being comfortable with ourselves, psychologically healthy, and happy as we judge life positively.
Paradoxically, we can increase our well-being by becoming more aware of negative emotions and past events. We can learn to recognize even harmful feelings as “indicator lights” that something in our psyche needs to be attended to, and we can grow to better understand our trauma-like past events.
In addition to dealing with our negative issues, this journey of self-awareness can lead us to other positive epiphanies as well. We can see where some of our strengths and passions come from, which can help us find more identity and purpose in our life as a result.
Here are key points to remember when dealing with early-life trauma:
- We all encountered negative incidents, issues, and insecurities when we were growing up.
- Subconsciously—beneath our awareness—many of us choose to hold onto negative emotions and ineffective coping mechanisms from those situations that may remain with us for a long time.
- Becoming aware of how those choices degrade our well-being can lead to epiphanies of self-awareness.
- Using that awareness to take positive steps to live life better leads to breakthroughs that may improve our overall well-being.
The Next Right STEPS process includes learning how we can use our mind to help us overcome negative thought patterns and self-talk in order to live life better. Applied here, the 3 steps in that process are:
- PAUSE: Increase our awareness to notice how our feelings and habits have been influenced by the trauma-like incidents in our past.
- EVALUATE: Assess what is going on and how it is affecting us, notice the indicator lights of our negative emotions, and increase our understanding of our past incidents of trauma.
- CHOOSE: Decide on a next right step to keep those feelings in perspective, choose how we want to feel and act, and work at reinforcing that more positive way of thinking.
Becoming more aware of early-life trauma is an epiphany. Doing something about it to increase our well-being is a breakthrough.
Wrap-up and Summary
Trauma exists as a spectrum, and we’re all on it somewhere.
I’ve known people with Big “T” trauma in their life, and I’ve seen the harmful consequences it can bring. For example, someone who was abused as a child, came from a broken home, or experienced psychological distress from bullying may sometimes be adversely affected for much of their lives.
But we all face trauma-like situations or phases in our life that can cause harm. For example:
- When my dad was 7 years old, he lost his father to a car accident. He never had a role model growing up for what being a “dad” was supposed to look like. As an adult, it is reasonable to assume that this affected his relationship with not only me and my siblings but with God as well.
- The creed that ruled my wife’s childhood was, “Dignity above all else.” Her family didn’t share feelings and kept their emotions to themselves. The breakthrough came when she found it was okay to confront issues with ourselves and others and that it actually increased her sense of well-being.
- Sam is a friend with a son in recovery for substance use disorder, and his family was invited to the facility for counseling. At first, Sam wondered why the therapist was so focused on repeatedly asking questions about the early lives of everyone in the family. They weren’t the ones in recovery! It took a while, but it finally became clear why: they had their own traumas to deal with as well!
- l know people who were bullied as kids, felt unloved by their parents, struggled to fit in as teenagers, or endured other trauma-like circumstances. It seems that all of us have things that have gone on in our early lives that lead to insecurities and pain that we desperately want to lessen.
We don’t need to obsess on self-analysis, but it is useful to understand why we feel the way we feel and do the things we do. In severe cases of trauma, it is best to seek the help of a counselor. But overall in our day-to-day lives, it is healthier to plan for the future and live in the moment rather than looking backwards all the time.
Trauma is not an excuse for our choices, but it may sometimes be a reason for some of them. Our best approach for dealing with early-life trauma is to pause to become aware of our emotions, evaluate what caused them, and choose to take positive steps to keep them in perspective so we can increase our well-being.
It can be an epiphany when we become aware of any trauma-like experiences we faced in our early years. Even better, it becomes a breakthrough when we take steps to get better.
Question: What memoires do you have of troubling incidents from your early years?
Action: Pick 1 of those situations and think of the ways that it was traumatic for you.
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