Trauma Therapy · Childhood Trauma
Childhood trauma and how it shapes us.
Adverse childhood experiences are far more common than people realize, and their effects often show up later in ways that don't look like trauma at first glance. Healing is possible, even decades after the original experiences.
Adverse childhood experiences are common
The CDC reports that nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults experienced at least one adverse childhood experience before age 18. Childhood trauma is not unusual. It is widespread, and it shapes the people we become in ways that often go unnamed because they are so common.
The CDC's adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) framework groups early adversities into ten categories: physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, witnessing intimate partner violence, growing up with a parent struggling with substance use, growing up with a parent with mental illness, parental separation or divorce, and incarceration of a household member.
The original CDC-Kaiser ACE Study and decades of follow-up research consistently show dose-response relationships between ACE count and lifetime risk for depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, chronic illness, and shortened lifespan. The effects are real and well-documented. They are also not a sentence. With trauma-focused care, the patterns ACEs set down can be reshaped.
Beyond the ACE list
The ACE categories captured the major risk factors the original researchers were studying. They do not capture every kind of childhood adversity. Other experiences that often shape children in trauma-shaped ways include:
- Chronic instability (frequent moves, housing insecurity, unpredictable caregivers)
- Medical trauma (serious childhood illness, frightening procedures, prolonged hospitalization)
- Loss of a parent or sibling (death, abandonment, removal)
- Adoption and foster care experiences (pre-placement trauma, attachment disruptions, identity questions)
- Bullying or sustained peer rejection
- Discrimination and community trauma (racial trauma, anti-LGBTQIA+ harm, violence in the community)
- War, displacement, or refugee experiences
- Caregiver who was emotionally unavailable (often without overt harm but with a lasting impact on attachment)
People sometimes hesitate to call their childhood "traumatic" because nothing dramatic happened. Trauma is not about the dramatic event. It is about whether what happened overwhelmed a developing nervous system. Many people who would not describe their childhood as traumatic carry developmental trauma anyway.
How childhood trauma shows up in adulthood
Childhood trauma rarely shows up in adulthood as obvious flashbacks of specific events. More often it shows up as patterns. Some of the most common ways adult survivors of childhood trauma describe their experience:
- Difficulty trusting close others, even people who have given you no reason not to
- Persistent anxiety with no clear current trigger
- Recurring relational patterns that don't fit who you want to be (people-pleasing, choosing partners who are unavailable, pulling away when intimacy deepens)
- Persistent self-criticism or chronic shame
- Difficulty regulating strong emotions — feeling everything intensely, or shutting down and feeling nothing
- A chronic sense that something is wrong even when life looks fine on paper
- Trouble with authority or with people-pleasing depending on context
- Body-based symptoms: chronic tension, sleep difficulties, autoimmune conditions, gastrointestinal issues
- A pull toward overworking or staying busy to keep certain feelings from surfacing
- A sense of being more guarded, more vigilant, or more sensitive than the people around you
Many adult survivors of childhood trauma have never connected these patterns to their early experiences. They've assumed it's just who they are, or that something is wrong with them in a more fundamental way. Often it isn't. It is the predictable shape of a nervous system that was set up to survive an environment that no longer exists.
The path to healing in adulthood
The brain remains plastic throughout life. The same neuroplasticity that made your early experiences shape you so deeply also means new experiences can reshape what was set down. Adult survivors of childhood trauma can experience meaningful change. We see it consistently in our practice.
The treatment for childhood trauma overlaps significantly with treatment for complex PTSD. The phase-based approach (stabilization first, then sequenced trauma processing, then integration) applies. Treatment unfolds over months or years rather than weeks, and that pacing is what makes the work hold.
The modalities we draw on most often:
- EMDR — particularly effective for the discrete memories that shape patterns, often integrated with attachment-based work for developmental trauma
- Attachment-based therapy — addresses the relational patterns and internal working models laid down in early caregiving relationships
- Somatic and body-based work — addresses the body's hold on early experience, particularly for trauma stored before language was available
- Internal Family Systems (IFS) — works with the internal "parts" that often form to manage what felt unmanageable in childhood
- Art therapy — accesses pre-verbal material and offers a channel for expression that words alone sometimes cannot reach
For people whose children are now showing the same patterns they experienced themselves, our work with families also includes the next-generation piece. See our therapy for children & teens page and therapy for adoptive families.
If you are in crisis right now
We are an outpatient practice and not a crisis service. If you or someone you love is in immediate danger or thinking about suicide, please call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or go to your nearest emergency room. Help is available right now.
Ready to work with what you've been carrying?
A consultation is the most direct way to talk through what's going on. Many of our clients come in unsure whether what they experienced "counts" as trauma. The intake call is a low-pressure place to figure that out together.
Learn More
Complex PTSD
When prolonged or repeated childhood adversity meets the adult diagnostic picture of complex PTSD.
EMDR for Children
If your child is currently experiencing what shaped you, EMDR can be adapted for ages 2 and up.
Adoptive & Foster Families
Therapy for families navigating adoption, foster care, and the attachment work that often comes with both.