CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
We’re all able to recall mild instances of childhood trauma, but a cumulative dose of adversity in childhood affects our ability to deal with it way into adulthood
We tend to talk about the momentous things that happen in our past, such as experiences of car accidents, illnesses, robberies and impactful weather events. These situations tend to replay themselves through our dreams and flashbacks and we often refer to life ‘before’ or ‘after’ the event. Dr Jade Wu, a clinical health psychologist, writes in Psychology Today that there are also a range of equally significant, ‘slow burn’ and insidious types of childhood trauma apart from the foregoing, such as sexual abuse from a trusted adult, a much-loved but suddenly absent parent (due to a jail sentence, for example), and situations that resulted in repeatedly broken trust or dashed hopes.
She says that one thing her work has highlighted is just how common childhood trauma really is. For example, one high-profile study of 17,000 people, carried out between 1995 and 1997, found that 64 percent of participants ticked off at least one of the 10 items on the adverse childhood events checklist. Additionally, such incidents of trauma can potentially affect us psychologically, cognitively and physically, contributing to a range of chronic illnesses, interfering with healthy adult sexuality and distorting our sense of time and reality.
A study on the link between childhood trauma and adult health was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. In this study, ‘Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study’, a questionnaire about adverse childhood experiences was mailed to 13,494 adults. The seven categories in the questionnaire included psychological, physical, or sexual abuse; violence against their mother; or living with household members who were substance abusers, mentally ill or suicidal, or even imprisoned. These categories were then compared to measures of adult risk behaviour, health status and disease in later life.
Results revealed that participants who had experienced four or more adverse childhood categories had 4- to 12-fold increased health risks for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempt; a 2- to 4-fold increase in smoking, poor self-rated health, and 1.4- to 1.6-fold increase in physical inactivity and severe obesity. The number of categories of adverse childhood exposures also showed a graded relationship to the presence of adult diseases – ranging from ischemic heart disease, cancer and chronic lung disease, to skeletal fractures and liver disease.
In an interview with New York Times journalist Karen Weintraub, Dr Nadine Burke Harris advises that “the science is showing, No. 1, that the greatest risk [to individuals] is the cumulative dose of adversity — your total exposure, how these pile up”. Weintraub and Burke Harris touch on how Dr Larry Nassar apparently molested generations of female gymnasts; and no one stopped it for years. Author of The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, Burke Harris says “the tendency when it comes to trauma is to want to shy away from it. That’s part of the cycle of how trauma works, that we don’t like the way it feels to talk about it so we try to push it away.” Burke Harris’s message to readers is that, fortunately, people are “recognising that trauma lives in the body” and that “a lot of prevention can happen” when people realise that childhood adversity is a risk factor for how positively we are going to deal with stress in adulthood. Just being aware of this is a valuable starting point.
While advanced Cognitive Behavioural Therapies take their place in treatment programmes according to the type of post-traumatic stress that a patient is experiencing, research is uncovering that the best place to start is with relaxation therapies and techniques.
My Deep Relaxation Therapy is designed to reconnect body and mind in a gentle but effective way while releasing much of the stress held within the body as a result of past trauma. I listen to my clients and learning of their trauma I can, gradually, help them reach a very deep level of relaxation to release their stressed muscles and, afterwards, I give relaxation techniques for ongoing healing. In time, this process retrains the neural pathways (links to the brain which controls thinking and body functions) to help us to more easily cope with stress. If these pathways are overloaded through the effects of trauma then they cannot retrain themselves without assistance.