TRAUMA REASONS

Why do some children experience life in anger and grow up having anger be their first line of defense?  Children that are rejected or subjected to harsh treatment are filled with rage.  The reason for this is, they experience internal conflict over this rage, and they battle trying to stifle this intense feeling.  Van Der Kolk says, “when children must disown powerful experiences they have had, this creates serious problems, including ‘chronic distrust of other people, inhibition of curiosity, distrust of their own senses, and the tendency to find everything unreal.’”  Imagine not being able to trust your own senses or losing your natural curiosity.  Do you ever watch young children and get mad when they ask “too many” questions or go around touching everything?  That is because we cannot relate to their curiosity as we have learned to inhibit it.  Traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence are far more common than people realize or are willing to admit and even harder to realize the effect it had on us. 

Additionally, a history of childhood sexual and physical abuse is a strong predictor of suicide attempts and other self-harm.  These realizations, Van Der Kolk says, led him to determine that the gravest and most costly public health issue in the United States is child abuse.  This child abuse also manifests itself in the need for incarceration.  If we adults work on ourselves we can improve not only our lives but the lives of our children that we have been entrusted to care for.  This could possibly be the solution to generational poverty, incarceration, drug use, and a whole host of other ailments that we have seen the rise of over the decades.

Since we now know this is how trauma affects us, why do we continue to allow our adult selves to live in the past trauma?  Because it is the devil we know.  Lets move away from the devil we know and move into the light.

How do you reconcile your feelings today?