You haven’t healed your childhood wounds
Are you always hitting a wall when it comes to success, intimacy, or love? These childhood wounds may be the root cause.
by: E.B. Johnson
Childhood is a crucial time in every person’s lie. Coming into this world with a clean slate, our childhood experiences form the baseline from which we piece together all the rest of our beliefs. What happens in childhood informs the relationships we build as adults and the way we see ourselves in the world. When we get wounded in that childhood (and those wounds are left unhealed) we can find ourselves fighting an uphill battle throughout life that we never seem to win.
The childhood wounds that are holding you back.
Are your childhood wounds holding you back in life? Are you being prevented from loving yourself and others because they did not love you in your past? We have to allow for ourselves to see the past for what it was. When we accept that these wounds still exist, we can’t take steps to set them right and make a happier place for ourselves in the future.
Hurtful betrayal
When we are betrayed in some way by our parents or authority figures in childhood, it amounts to major betrayal. We come into the world trusting them to protect us and love us. If they can’t do that, they break the terms of the intangible parent-child contract. This betrayal follows us, and can take the form of physical and emotional abuse, neglect, and outright abandonment.
Endless abandonment
Betrayal to a child, abandonment is a wound on its own which can scar us in innumerable ways. Did your parent or caretaker abandon you physically or emotionally? Did your life suffer because of their loss? The figure can die or willingly remove themselves. The result is the same. They instill us with a fear that everyone else in the future will abandon us too.
Total injustice
Believe it or not, injustice is one of the deepest wounds from childhood that can follow us into adulthood. Were you the victim of a lot of failures or a lot of abuse at the hands of your parents and family? Did you ever get resolution? An apology? A sense that someone cared about the wrongdoing? When we don’t get this sense of justified closure, it can fester into an injustice wound that makes us bitter and hard to connect with.
Instant rejection
Rejection is one of the hardest childhood wounds for us to overcome. To be rejected in childhood is so damaging because our childhood brain is so simple and internalizes everything. When a parent cannot show up for us, our child’s brain reasons we must be the cause. We carry this with us into adulthood, and usually it turns into insecure attachment and a sense of low self-worth.
How to confront your childhood pain and move on.
Until you confront your childhood pain, you can’t accept it for what it was. That’s the first step to moving on, so you have to find the power to accept yourself, your family, and all the wounds inflicted on you in your childhood. Look for professional help and take steps to mindfully clear your life of negativity. When you’re finally ready, you can detach yourself from the past emotionally and find the will to move on.
1. Accept yourself first
There’s no moving forward in the healing journey until you can honestly see and accept yourself for who you are. Not only do you need to identify the things that need to be fixed internally — you also need to know the depths of your strength and your worth. Self-acceptance has to be the first step in confronting all the bad things that happened in childhood, because you have to faith in your ability to thrive and overcome.
Accept yourself and everything that you truly are. You are not flawed. You are not broken, unworthy, or unloveable. You are a beautiful person with the same hurtful experiences that every one of us has. We have all been let down, and all been wounded. It doesn’t detract from our value or our purpose here.
Look in the mirror and fall in love with the person who’s looking back at you. This is a long process on its own, and one that you won’t get through overnight. You need to learn to more clearly see your strengths and all the beauty that you have. Once you can see the positives in yourself, look at those insecurities you were taught. See them as the missing pieces that make up the sum of who you are. Accepting yourself as a whole is how you reach a place of both self-love and self-respect.
2. Then accept who they are
After accepting who you are, the next step in your journey has to involve accepting who the people in your past were too. We usually struggle to resolve our childhood hurts because we struggle to see the people who hurt us. They hide superficial family roles and the belief that power dynamics will hide what’s gone wrong. Accepting the people who hurt you strips their power from them and brings them right back down into a blanket of humanity.
Once you’ve accepted who you really are (and gotten more comfortable with that) take some time to accept your past. You need to accept the people who hurt you and who they really are. Break outside of that veneer they built between you and the emotional truth of your childhood.
See who the people in your past for who they really were. This is not to take away from any happy memories that you have. It’s not to take away from any sacrifices that were made. It’s simply to see the world as it really is. You’re getting outside of your ego, and the ego of everyone that ever hurt you. It’s setting the groundwork for major transformation that will completely wipe away the hurts of the past so that you can embrace a future full of love.
3. Look for professional help
Childhood trauma and wounds are painful, and they leave deep mental and emotional scars across the hearts and minds of our inner child. When we are dealing with major events, it’s crucial that we involve professionals in our journey to resolution and peace. That’s because it’s not always safe to explore these places by ourselves. We need someone with some know-how to shine a light on a better way to see ourselves and our lives.
Don’t undermine the pain that you’re in, or the depth of your wounds. We are sometimes so damaged by the emotional trauma in our early years that we can’t even accurately see the world around us. It’s very much necessary to get the help of a mental health professional in those instances, so that we can make greater sense of what was, what is, and what’s still to be.
Contrary to the naysayers, there are endless options to accessing the help that you need. Online therapy has never been more accessible. Group therapy can also do wonders for the right patient and the childhood wounds. It all comes down to what you need. Think about it a bit like a car-wreck. You may still be tangled in the wreck, and you may not have seen what happened. A professional is a witness of-sorts who can offer us that outside perspective on what might have really happened before and after it came crashing down.
4. Mindfully clear out your life
Because we’re in so much pain from our past, we often collect a lot of negative things around us in order to insulate ourselves. These things are toxic because they are reflections of our past. That trauma and that pain becomes a comfortable norm, so we repeat it over-and-over again in our relationships and behaviors. Until we make a conscious choice to shift these things, they will keep us in the same poisonous patterns that our past lessons brought us to.
Mindfully make clearances in your life. Think of everything in your personal environment as your personal real estate. You only have so much space. If you fill that space up with bad people and negative experiences that drain you, you have no space left to bring in good things and good people.
Take your newfound courage and self-respect and allow it to launch you into a clearing out of the clutter in your life. Cut ties with negative people who look down on you, or those who cause you to look down on yourself. Make plans to end all those challenging and unrewarding opportunities and situation that no longer suit you. The perfect job and the ideal partner and friends are out there, but they can’t come into the picture until you let go of all those toxic things your childhood wounds have brought into your life.
5. Detach yourself from the past
There are a lot of self-help gurus out there that will tell you can totally heal your childhood trauma on your own and just “forget about it”. False. That’s not reality. You’ll never get rid of those scars entirely, nor should you. They are life lessons to be looked back at, and examples of what you don’t want to be. Rather than seeking to block them from your memory, you have to detach from them emotionally so that they no longer have control over any aspect of your adult life.
At some point, you’re going to have to emotionally detach from your painful past in order to embrace a happier future. Much like our relationships, emotions take up room in our brains. When all that space is consumed in fear and doubt, there’s no space for excitement and optimism.
You will never forget what happened to you in your childhood — nor should you. Those events which shaped you are important lessons which can inform the better life you’re trying to build. Forgetting them will bring you no value, but you do need to release the emotional attachment you have to them. When they can still conjure anger, sadness, or fear, they still hold control over you. You cannot be tied to them and move toward your future. Accept what happened, but remove it from who you are and how you feel about yourself.
Putting it all together…
When we struggle to connect and excel in our adult lives, it is very often tied to deep-rooted wounds in our childhood memories. We form our perception of self and the world in our early years, and these lessons shape who we are forever. In order for us to conquer our fears and gain the life we desire, we have to allow these wounds to seal and move on toward grace and a higher purpose.
Foremost, accept who you really are. Get away from the image of self the toxic villains in your life painted for you. You define who you are. Accept that person. Love them. When you are whole, you can step back and accept your family and any other antagonists for who they really were. When you’ve come to a place of being to acknowledge your trauma, look for a mental health professional that can help you make sense of what it all means. Really lean into a recovery plan that works for you physically and emotionally. Don’t rush the process. Clear your life of negative influences and elevate the quality of person you allow into your inner circles. You deserve to be happy. Let this happiness in and emotionally detach yourself from the past. This is the time for you to manifest everything you ever wanted.
- Hornor, G. (2015). Childhood Trauma Exposure and Toxic Stress: What the PNP Needs to Know. Journal Of Pediatric Health Care, 29(2), 191–198. doi: 10.1016/j.pedhc.2014.09.006
- Danese, A., & van Harmelen, A. (2017). The hidden wounds of childhood trauma. European Journal Of Psychotraumatology, 8(sup7), 1375840. doi: 10.1080/20008198.2017.1375840