Do you often get angry with people and you’re not really sure why? Have you tried to manage your stress levels but your doctor’s advice isn’t working? You could be suffering from childhood trauma.
Your adult personality is built on the foundations of the relationships you had with your caretakers during childhood. If you didn’t get the attention you needed, or you suffered abuse, this could cause problems in your adult relationships, and you could even struggle to manage your emotions.
Understanding Your Emotions
It could help to take an objective look at your childhood experiences. As a small child, you depended on your parents or other caretakers to give you the love and support you needed. Your very existence depended on the love and attention you received from them.
Sadly, many people continue to idolize abusive childhood caretakers throughout their lives, which means they can never really build the self-esteem to separate from them and build independent lives. That’s why you get adult children who are still abused by their elderly parents.
Repressed Emotions
As a child, you wouldn’t have been able to manage your negative feelings and you would have had to repress them to be able to continue living with people who neglected or abused you.
Adults sometimes transfer the negative feelings they still have for their childhood caretakers onto other people. This means we could end up with relationship problems in our private and professional lives.
Recognizing what happened to us is the starting point to improving our mental health.
Low Self-Esteem
Your childhood trauma could also have caused you to form false beliefs about yourself, which can cause low self-esteem, for example, you might believe something is wrong with you, and that you don’t deserve to be loved. You might even experience panic attacks, depression, or aggressive behavior.
Inner Child Therapy
This type of therapy can help you understand your childhood experiences, and get rid of negative beliefs, such as that you’re not good enough, or that you’re a bad person.
If you had a traumatic childhood, inner child therapy can also help you deal with troublesome behavior such as alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders, gambling addiction, and relationship issues such as co-dependency.
The therapy will help you become more conscious of what you need in your life, and also help you set healthy boundaries in your relationships and choose more suitable romantic partners.
Final Thoughts
Psychology Today has a useful search functionality that can help you find a therapist close to you. You can search per country, and it’s even possible to find online therapists, so you don’t have to leave the comfort of your home, to start working on becoming the best version of yourself.
