To Overcome Childhood Trauma, Get in Touch With Your Inner Child

How parenting my daughter helped me heal myself

My daughter can be really hard to live with. I know, it’s a statement best not uttered in mixed company, but it’s true. Sometimes it’s just not easy to parent her. She flies off the handle for no reason, obsesses about things that either don’t matter or aren’t likely to happen, and simply cannot cope when things don’t go according to plan.

There was the time the school put on a talent show and, before she ever chose a talent and filled out the application, she was wailing on the floor, worried she wouldn’t “get the part” by having her audition approved. And the time when I explained my pregnant belly pushes on my lungs and can make me short of breath and she burst into inconsolable sobs for half an hour exclaiming, “I don’t want your baby to kill you!” And the time she started worrying about Donald Trump starting World War 3 and the country descending into chaos and … well, okay, I’ll give her a pass on that one.

I have to confess, I tighten up inside when I sense one of these rants coming on. “Stop,” I think (and often say aloud), “just stop it already.” I fall back on one of my motherly tics. “That’s not how things work,” I say. Or, “Worrying about that now isn’t helpful.” Or, in my least proud moments, “Why must everything always be so negative with you? Think about the positives!”

It never works. She continues spinning out, and I continue getting frustrated. Logic doesn’t work and we end up in different corners of the house, me yelling and her crying and both of us feeling like garbage.

I shake my head seeing these words in black and white. She’s eight, and immature for her age at that. She’s got a documented history of anxiety issues. And here I am expecting her to have a level of reasoning that most healthy adults I know struggle to achieve.

On my best days, in my best moments, which I regret to report are too few and far between, I change my tack.

Instead of, “Stop,” I say, “Let’s take a break to figure out what’s got you stuck.”

“That’s not how things work,” becomes, “What are you worried will happen?”

Instead of trying to logic my way around her issues — which, let’s be honest, is really just an attempt to get her out of my hair quickly — sometimes I’m able to break through my own exasperation and empathize with her.

I sit her on my lap, and I hold her close. “It sounds like you’re really concerned about this,” I say. “How can I help?”

And we talk.

She walks away calmer, and I walk away feeling like less of a failure as a parent, almost every time.

Mental illness is not rational

As difficult as it can be to help my daughter, it is easy to pinpoint her issue. The word anxiety seems to have been created for her, so perfectly does its definition distill her behavior and coping strategies.

My own issues are a little more complicated.

And that’s understandable. I’m older than her by a few decades. I went through a lot of trauma as a kid and a young person — trauma to which she hasn’t been exposed. There is a lot to pick apart in order to really get down to the healing I’ve been waiting to do all these years, and it can get quite messy.

My trauma response has largely manifested as a tendency toward addiction. Most of my vices have come and gone over the decades, leaving food as my primary hangup, the oldest and the hardest to quit.

I can remember showing signs of food addiction as early as elementary school. Today, I can go through months without a setback and then slide back so hard I get whiplash.

I’ve had the hardest time understanding it over the years. I have a science background. I understand the ins and outs of nutrition science better than some of the outdated dietitians I saw when I was still in denial about my psychological issues. I can tell you not only what is physiologically happening in my body when I binge but also what my mental state is before, during, and after a binge. But still, I binge.

“Let’s look at that,” my therapist says.

“I don’t want to,” I say back. It’s not a refusal, just a statement. If it sounds like an eight-year-old to you, you’re not alone.

“Talk through what goes on in your mind when you think about not eating that bag of cookies you’ve got your eye on,” she suggests.

All that runs through my mind is a string of irrational thoughts. It won’t be there later. I’ll never be able to have that kind of cookie again. THE WORLD WILL END. I shake my head. “It’s ridiculous!” I shout. “It’s like talking to my kid. None of it makes any sense!”

She raises her eyebrows at me and a sack of bricks hits my chest. “How old were you when you first remember feeling this way?” She doesn’t have to ask the question; I don’t have to answer.

Empathy trumps logic

The word that has felt closest to describing my most difficult moments, the word that keeps coming up over and over again as I continue trying to separate myself from my trauma and find a thread with which to stitch myself back together, is alone.

It’s not that my parents weren’t around — it’s that when they were around, they were more worried about smoking and drinking than they were about whether I felt nurtured or cared for. My emotional needs, and at times even my physical pain, were dismissed and I felt like an inconvenience a good deal of the time. I don’t remember a single time when either of my parents showed compassion for me. “Oh, you’re fine,” I can still hear my father saying. Doesn’t matter what the issue was. Whatever it was, I was fine.

“What do you wish someone had said or done instead?” my therapist asks.

I can’t think of the answer to that question right away. So my thoughts turn to my little girl, to what works for her when every ounce of logic in my body can’t touch her.

“Maybe if someone had tried to understand,” I say, and as soon as I say it the tears begin to flow because I know it’s true.

It’s in this moment that I realize I’ve been going about this all wrong. For my entire adult life I’ve been stuck on the fact that my eating disorder makes no sense. I’ve been trying to use my adult logic on a problem that developed before my capacity for logic did.

For years, whenever someone suggested that I might eat to compensate for something I’d been missing, I dismissed the idea out of hand because it didn’t make any sense. I ate because I wanted to.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if there’s some truth to the idea that food fills a void for me, illogical as it may seem.

Food was always there. It tasted good, it made me feel good, and it was something I could control on my own. I finished that box of crackers in one sitting because I wanted to prove that I could. I obsessively ate one of each flavor of candy from the package because I wanted things to be even.

When I got to the point of feeling out of control, I tried to logic my way out of that, too. It’s easy to stop bingeing. Just don’t do it. You’ve got control over your behavior. But attempting to use this kind of logic just dismisses my very real panic, the same way I was dismissed over and over all those years ago.

It’s kind of like telling my eight-year-old to just stop when her anxiety is spinning out of control. Even if she wanted to, she doesn’t know how.

Healing means empathizing with the little kid that inhabits my subconscious

I’ve been looking for a direct line between my childhood trauma and my relationship with food, thinking that perhaps if I can do something to sever that line, my eating disorder will disappear. I haven’t found one.

Now I realize that’s because there is no straight line.

My eight-year-old self didn’t make the conscious connection between my childhood experiences and my need to stuff massive amounts of junk into my face. But according to some childlike logic, one thing did lead to the other.

I am two people inhabiting one fractured psyche. I am a grown, well-adjusted mother and spouse, with a career and a house and a car and a dog. And I am a damaged, traumatized kid searching for a way to feel the love she didn’t get when she needed it the most.

In order to fully heal, I need to find a way to talk to that little girl in a way that she can hear it. And I know from decades of trying that using an adult sense of logic won’t do the trick. I need to give her what she never got from the people she was supposed to trust the most — not even me.

Since this little girl exists only inside me, I can’t very well take her onto my lap and hold her tight. Empathizing with my inner child looks much differently than it does with my daughter, and it’s not easy. But there are some ways it can be done, and they can work not just with my binge eating but with other forms of anxiety and behaviors that might seem irrational to our adult brains.

How to talk with your inner child

First and foremost, kindness and understanding will always be more effective than harshness and dismissal. We can be our own most hurtful critics, and the negativity only serves to fulfill the narrative we have already constructed for ourselves. In order to empathize, we must seek to understand.

“Stop doing that.” “Why can’t you just…?” “See, this just proves…”

This is just a snippet of the one-sided narrative that plays on repeat in my mind during my dark moments, designed to shut down my actual thoughts and emotions before I can begin to process them.

Instead, we must do the much harder — and much more productive — work of asking ourselves some really deep questions…and then listening, nonjudgmentally, to the answers.

“What are you feeling right now?” “What’s making you want to…?” “What would happen if you didn’t…?” “How can you give yourself what you need in a healthier way?”

See the difference? These are questions. And questions invite answers. The answers can be difficult to hear, and — and this is important — they probably won’t make any sense.

Which brings me to the most important part of all, perhaps the most valuable lesson parenting an anxious child has taught me. Whatever you do, you cannot dismiss these answers. You are not allowed to tell your inner self her feelings and motivations don’t make sense. You are only allowed to do one of two things: Acknowledge and speak these feelings, and ask further questions.

I’ll say it again. Your adult logic will not want to accept your childlike response. It will seem irrational and disorganized. It won’t make any sense. That doesn’t matter.

What this little kid needs is the emotional version of that hug, sitting on your lap.

She needs to feel heard, and she needs you to say, “You’re right. That does sound really hard. Let’s work through that together.”

And, once you’ve done that, the real work begins.

Invisible illnesses are so difficult to manage, in part because it’s hard for others to understand what they can’t see. It can be even more difficult to understand the debilitating effects of trauma on the developing brain, because “trauma” is not a diagnosis. Yet it still manifests itself for a lifetime, a double-invisible influence, informing the beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world and guiding our behavior, especially in times of struggle. For, me everything started with childhood trauma.

Join me here every second and fourth Monday, where I explore the invisible influence of past trauma on current beliefs and behavior. Find all my past columns and subscribe for updates here.