Experiencing trauma as a child can have a lasting impact. It’s not uncommon for these negative childhood experiences to cause difficulties for adults later down the line. Here we’ll look at 20 ways that experiencing trauma as a child may be negatively affecting your adult life.
Can’t Maintain Healthy Relationships
The NSPCC reports that children from traumatic environments often have unhealthy relationships with their caregivers. This can lead to insecure or disorganized attachment styles in adulthood, making it hard to maintain healthy relationships.
Low Self-Esteem
Low self-esteem is common in those who endured trauma as children. Many types of trauma stem from negative treatment towards us as children, which can lead to feelings of worthlessness or not being good enough. This can then continue into adult life.
Difficulty Trusting Others
Traumatic childhoods are normally defined by a caregiver who did not take care of us as they should have done. This can lead to difficulty in trusting others, given that one of the first people we tried to form a trusting relationship with let us down.
Anxiety Disorders
If you had a traumatic childhood, you may have found yourself on constant high alert – always walking on eggshells and not being sure when the next explosion was coming. As adults, this heightened state of anxiety can present itself in many different ways, including various anxiety disorders.
Depression
Depression can be directly linked to childhood trauma in some cases. This is because those with a history of trauma were often led to believe that they weren’t good enough as a child. In adulthood, this can significantly impact our mental health.
Poor Physical Health
Stress, low self-esteem, and unhealthy coping mechanisms, caused by a traumatic childhood, can have a knock-on effect on physical health in adulthood. According to a journal in the National Library of Medicine, these factors can prevent us from looking after ourselves as we should.
Aggressive Behavior
Those who grew up in a household where trauma was present may be more aggressive in later life. This might be because the child learned to copy the behavior of an aggressive caregiver, or because living in a traumatic environment put the child on high alert – resulting in intense emotional reactions to minor triggers.
Avoidant Behavior
Children who grew up in a traumatic environment may have developed various coping mechanisms to take themselves out of the situation. In later life, these avoidant behaviors can realize themselves in different ways, such as substance abuse and excessive spending.
Trouble Making Decisions
If your caregiver reacted harshly to you making mistakes as a child, this can result in difficulty making decisions later in life. Even as adults, we remember that we were punished or scorned for making a bad choice, and this fear affects our ability to make decisions.
Difficulty in Social Situations
If you were exposed to trauma as a child, you may find social situations difficult. This is because you were not shown how to form and maintain healthy relationships as a child. Therefore, as an adult, you may not have a blueprint for how to relax and behave in social situations.
Eating Disorders
A traumatic childhood can often lead to adults having a low sense of self-worth. As a result, trauma survivors may often feel that they are not good enough, which can lead to destructive behaviors. A journal in Science Direct links the relationship between childhood trauma and eating behaviors.
Avoiding Intimacy
When childhood trauma is caused by one of our closest caregivers, this can result in problems regarding intimacy later in life. We learn that we shouldn’t let our guard down, even around people we love. Often, this means that we sabotage relationships before they get serious, or choose to isolate instead of risk getting vulnerable.
Fear of Change
Trauma in childhood can easily bring a fear of change in later life. As a result, adults may stay in unhealthy situations to avoid the unknown, turn down positive opportunities so as not to make any changes, or become emotionally paralyzed when faced with major life decisions.
Attracting Abusive Partners
As children, we learn about the world from our caregivers. If they are abusive, we may subconsciously find such behavior familiar. This can result in choosing partners who are similarly abusive without realizing it.
Compulsive Behaviors
A traumatic childhood can lead adults to feel out of control. To cope, they might develop repetitive habits to try and handle stress. Without good management, these habits can easily disrupt daily life.
Money Problems
Childhood trauma can cause adults to act impulsively and take risks, especially with money. On top of this, trauma survivors may try to self-soothe through spending. This behavior can lead to financial problems if it isn’t kept under control.
Difficulty as a Parent
Growing up without good parental role models can make it difficult for adults to know what a healthy parenting style looks like. They might also risk repeating their own upbringing, continuing a cycle of trauma.
Can’t Hold a Career
Childhood trauma can make keeping a job hard for adults. First, a stable job might feel strange for those used to chaos. Second, those with trauma might not think they’re worthy of their career because they have low self-esteem.
Trouble Sleeping
Nightmares and insomnia caused by childhood trauma can cause problems for adults. Nightmares may directly relate to the trauma itself, or be caused by anxiety and depression that can develop later in life. The University of York states that these sleep disturbances can be linked to PTSD.
Relying Heavily on Others
Your childhood trauma may have made you rely heavily on others. This can happen if you had an overbearing parent who didn’t let you do things for yourself. As a result, you may excessively ask for others’ opinions and advice without trusting your own instincts.
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