I recently read an article on how emotional and physical abuse, sexual abuse, and domestic violence as a child, can affect your health in the long term as an adult. Victims of childhood abuse in adulthood are more likely to have long-term chronic diseases. Childhood trauma has other long term effects on people — addictions, the inability to have deep satisfying relationships, an inability to function in society, parenting issues, and many more consequences. Many adults who experienced trauma in childhood suffer from depression, anxiety, and fear. Some adults experience nightmares, terrifying memories, and flashbacks. Some adults will say they feel numb or disconnected from their bodies.
As adults we minimalize, ignore, or deny our trauma experiences — thinking that it really did not affect or impact our lives. Trauma stays deep in our bodies until we begin to process and connect it to our lives. However, trauma leaves deep wounds in a person. Those wounds keep a person from living fully.
A woman told me that her drinking had nothing to do with her sexual abuse; a man told me that his inability to not make a decision based on guilt had nothing to do with his abuse. A dying woman told me that her abuse had no impact on her life even though it was one of the last things in her life she was trying to figure out. It was one of the final memories in her life. I have sat with daughters, of mothers who were abused, and heard the impact it had on them; how the fear those mothers passed on to them affected and distorted their sexuality.
When we deny the pain and reality of our past, we put bandages on a wound that is never allowed to heal. It seeps into our current life and the wound is never healed and, in many instances, it is passed on to the next generation. I had a mother who was severely depressed. She rotated in and out of psychiatric hospitals and accepted an identity that she was just mentally ill. When she started therapy she could not understand how past trauma was connected to any of her mental health issues. As her therapy progressed she started to comprehend that she was not mentally ill but that she had a deep wound connected to her childhood that affected every facet of her life. She started changing the way she thought about herself and connected her past to her present. She began to understand that something bad happened to her but it did not have to define her. She began to understand and build coping skills to deal with her pain, versus going into a psychiatric hospital. When she faced and dealt with her wound her quality of life changed. It was hard and painful work, but her wound/trauma was no longer in control of her life. A new word came into her life — HOPE.
To make the choice to deal with trauma wounds is not an easy one. It brings up memories that we don’t want to remember. It is a painful process. You may feel shame or guilt, but you have to remember you were a child. You were vulnerable and dependent upon the adults in your life. You did nothing wrong. HOPE can be a word in your vocabulary. You can find freedom from your past wounds and live fully.
Mary Jennifer Meister is a licensed clinical social worker at John R. Day and Associates, Christian Psychological Associates, located in Peoria, Normal, Canton, Pekin, Princeton, or Eureka. For more information or help, call us at 309-692-7755 or visit us online at christianpsychological.org.
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