Healing Childhood Trauma
Food is about as basic as you can get. Everyone needs food to survive. Yet food and eating is also a way to soothe, to comfort, to support and nourish. It is no wonder then that basic way of soothing gets overused and distorted in unhealthy ways. Consider what happens when there is a trauma, especially in childhood but it could be at any time. Trauma is about a shocking or disturbing event that OVERWHELMS us with feelings that we don’t know how to cope with. That trauma could be physical,emotional or sexual abuse but it could also just be witnessing something happening to someone we love, or losing a cherished person or relationship. The important issue here is that trauma causes us to feel overwhelmed, not know how to cope and feel pain at the disturbances within us. At that time it is natural to go to the easiest or most available form of comfort -to many that is FOOD!… Then food can start out as a comfort but then gets overused in destructive ways, with compulsive overeating (stuffing the feelings down).. binging and purging (stuffing it and then purging feelings out), or anorexia ( starving as a means to gain control in a world that seems out of control ).. Making some of these connections is often the first step in recovery to find more positive and healthy ways to cope.
Marlena Kushner, MFT
Women’s Therapy Services
Sometimes it’s hard to think that the small painful events in our childhood can merit the term – “trauma”. It may be easier to consider events such as physical and sexual abuse, severe neglect,or the death of a parent or sibling to be traumatic. But there are also the smaller traumas in childhood that occur from circumstances in daily life…Like you make a mistake in a classroom and a mean teacher humiliates you or you are excluded by a set of the “popular” crowd and you’re feeling alone and left out, or you are teased and bullied by an older sibling or classmate. Any of these events from childhood can turn into traumas that stay stuck in your consciousness and have effects later in your adult life. Sometimes the more subtle experiences, like being neglected repeatedly by busy but well meaning parents, can be more difficult to heal because it is harder to recognize the experiences as being “traumatic”. When a memory is traumatic, it stays with you. With that memory is the powerful emotional painful feeling you had at the time of the event along with negative beliefs about yourself that can persist in time. These thoughts, images and sensations can stay stuck in the body and mind and can affect you as an adult. Negative beliefs like ” It’s my fault” or I’m unloveable” or “I’m not good enough” can distort your present reality. Low self-esteem, shame, depression and anxiety are symptoms that can develop as a result of childhood trauma.
One of the first steps in the recovery of healing from childhood trauma is recognizing what has occured. Whether the trauma is large or small, there is a tendency to minimize its effects or dismiss the feelings associated with it. We can retain old ideas that crying over something in the past makes us weak or that being vulnerable opens us to further humiliation. So it’s easier to stuff it down, deny what has happened and pretend that our feelings don’t matter. When that occurs, these childhood injuries can stay stuck with our old perspective as a child who is limited by knowledge and experience. It is hard to accept that anything good can come of reliving or sharing our painful memories of past traumas. Yet it is through this first step of recognizing the trauma that the injured child within can have a chance to heal and to develop a new and fresh perspective that is grounded in the present reality.
Marlena Kushner, MFT