Healing from childhood trauma – What happens when you start listening to your inner child?
Healing from childhood trauma can be messy – it can take time, but it’s possible to live a life with meaning, purpose and enjoyment.
If you’re googling childhood trauma late at night, this post should help you explore the process of exploring whatever went on in your upbringing, and how therapy might help you to feel happier and more content in your life now. It’s not always easy, but as a therapist working with clients who often want to think about their childhood, it can be a bit like emptying a wardrobe, sorting out what you want to keep, and tidying it all up as you go. Basically, it gets a little bit messy before you get to the ‘aah, that’s better’ moment. (But the result is worth it!)
What does this actually look like?
You might know that your childhood was chaotic, or traumatic – it might be really clear due to your lived experiences. However, you might also be a little unsure, things felt off, or as an adult, you’re noticing that your childhood doesn’t sound anything like your partners, work friends, or mates did. When you think back, something feels like it wasn’t right, or you’re very anxious now. You might be struggling to trust people or feel close to your loved ones. You’re frustrated by it because you want to be, but can’t seem to feel safe letting people in. Alternatively, you want them to be close all the time, but you can’t find a balance!
You might find that this sense of wanting someone nearby makes you feel quite anxious a lot of the time, and that this gets in the way of you being able to fully enjoy life.
You might notice that there are things you find really tough, and that others seem to breeze through, but often, experiences growing up lead us to develop coping mechanisms that worked for us in childhood but just don’t align with our lives as adults. What enabled you to survive emotionally then sometimes means that when you experience similar events in adulthood, your emotions come out in different ways.
For instance, as a child, if you heard constant criticism, such as ” your painting isn’t very good” or that a sibling’s work was better, even framed as jokes, “not to give up your day job”, it might lead to you feeling inadequate. You might resist sharing things with others as an adult and receive feedback like harsh criticism, even when not intended that way, because your system has learned that any criticism is a threat. Whilst this is an oversimplified explanation, hopefully it does the job of illustrating how these patterns can begin.
In starting to see how these patterns begin, you might also start questioning whether there are parts of yourself that you have previously questioned, that could be attended to with some compassion or curiosity.
What is childhood trauma?
In this sense, where I’m writing, I’m considering any experiences in childhood that may have felt overwhelming, all-consuming, or overridden a sense of ‘normality’. Childhood trauma could include experiences that prevented a child from coping, involved threats to safety (including emotional safety), security or life. This could include abuse, neglect or household dysfunction.
These events are often known as Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs (Which I’ve written more on here). They can have a lifelong impact, emotionally, physically and psychologically, without proper support. In an ideal world, that support would be early and preventative, but that’s often not the case, or not available, or these things aren’t spotted earlier in life.
How does childhood trauma show up in adulthood?
If you’re just starting to feel like your childhood is affecting you, there are so many different ways it could be impacting you now. You might feel like you keep reliving the same experiences and memories on a loop, constantly repeating the same stories, flashbacks, and feelings. It doesn’t mean that you are being dramatic or oversensitive, or that you should somehow be ‘over it’ – if you’re finding it hard to let go or forget about certain memories or times, it could be that you have got unprocessed events that you’re struggling to leave in the past.
Sometimes, especially with traumatic experiences, the body and the nervous system are still wired in a way that they are experiencing those experiences as if they’re still happening. For example, if your house got robbed in the daylight and there were lots of police cars and sirens, you may still experience the sounds of sirens as being one that’s really triggering. Your nervous system might be ready to protect you from a threat, even if rationally, you know that in this moment, you’re actually in your living room watching TV, and it’s just coming from a TV show. It doesn’t make the feeling any less real or less frightening.
Signs your inner child is re-experiencing things as an adult:
- You might find that you are highly emotional when left alone, when feeling left out, or unsupported.
- You withdraw or shut down when things feel overwhelming, even in situations that others seem to handle easily
- You struggle to regulate your emotions — going from 0 to 10 very quickly, or feeling completely numb
- You find it hard to trust people, even those who have given you no reason not to trust them
- You feel a constant low-level anxiety, like you’re always waiting for something to go wrong
- You are highly self-critical and find it difficult to accept praise or feel proud of yourself
- You people-please, over-explain, or shrink yourself to keep the peace
How childhood trauma affects relationships and daily life
Childhood trauma doesn’t just live in your past; it shows up in the present, often in ways that feel confusing or frustrating, because they don’t seem connected to anything happening right now.
In relationships, you might find yourself swinging between wanting closeness desperately and pushing people away when they get too near. You might struggle to believe that people who love you will actually stay. You might find conflict, even mild disagreement, completely overwhelming, because somewhere in your nervous system, conflict still means danger. The alarm bells will start ringing.
Day to day, it might show up as chronic exhaustion, difficulty making decisions, a harsh inner critic that won’t quieten down, or a persistent feeling that you’re fundamentally different from everyone else. You might have built a very functional, capable exterior, and feel quietly disconnected underneath it.
None of this means something is wrong with you. It means your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do. It’s protecting you from something that, for a long time, needed protecting against.
Is healing from childhood trauma possible?
Yes – although it’s not straightforward, it’s really important to know that you don’t have to stay stuck.
Healing from childhood trauma – or any trauma isn’t about going back and changing what happened. It’s not about endlessly reliving painful memories or deciding that your parents were awful people, or even spending years in therapy before anything shifts.
It’s about coming to a place of understanding and accepting the patterns that developed in response to what you experienced, and gradually, carefully building new ones. Ones that work for the life you have now. Rather than the one you were trying to survive, or built in adaptation to how things were.
Working with trauma in therapy can often include both the mind and the body. Because trauma isn’t just a ‘bad memory’ – it’s stored in the nervous system. This can mean that talking alone isn’t enough. Therapy can help you process what happened at a pace that feels manageable and develop a more compassionate, kind relationship with yourself. Slowly, you build a sense of safety that perhaps wasn’t available to you growing up.
Where do you go from here?
This is where the therapeutic relationship, I think, is so important. In building that relationship in therapy, you can get to a place where you can really start to know yourself, your feelings and what it all means to you in the here and now, rather than working from past triggers.
Imagine knowing what you actually feel! And being able to trust that feeling enough to act on it. Imagine disagreeing with someone and then not having to spend three days replaying the conversation. You might be able to be in a relationship where closeness feels safe, rather than terrifying. You might get to a place where you don’t have to work so hard just to feel okay.
That’s not unrealistic or a fantasy. That’s what becomes possible when the underlying patterns are understood and worked through. I see it happen. Not overnight, but it happens. Sometimes it can even go back and forth a bit – you might make some real progress and then feel like it’s gone backwards a little bit – being honest, that’s okay too. It all starts with getting curious about what’s going on for you, and having support there can help fight any critical inner voice.
If you’re wondering whether childhood emotional neglect might be part of your story, I’ve put together a free guide that goes through the most common signs in plain language. You can download it here.
If you’ve read this far, thank you, and I think that matters. It can be a really difficult thing to start looking at your childhood and going, “I think I need to do something about how this is making me feel”. The fact that you’re here, getting curious about yourself and your history, is already something.
Healing from childhood trauma is possible. It takes time, and it’s rarely a linear process. But with the right support, things genuinely change.
I offer a free 15-minute discovery call for anyone thinking about starting therapy. No pressure, no commitment; just a conversation about whether we might be a good fit.
Hannah Campbell is a psychotherapist based in Southend-on-Sea, working online and in person. She specialises in trauma and childhood emotional neglect.