Part 1 of the series: When the Past Lives in the Present

You are accomplished, self-aware, and genuinely committed to your growth. And yet something persists: a low hum of anxiety, a tendency to over-explain and over-apologize.  You long for closeness, but breathing over your shoulder is a dread that a genuine connection is terrifying in practice.

Many of the adults we work with come in not because something catastrophic has recently happened but rather because something quiet finally becomes impossible to ignore.   Our patients arrive at therapy carrying these experiences like unmarked luggage, searching for the right bag tags, for answers they have never been given. Many of my patients don’t think of themselves as trauma survivors. Trauma, in the cultural imagination, belongs to dramatic events. What our patients remember is something quieter: a home that didn’t feel quite safe, a parent who was there but not present, a childhood that was fine, mostly, except when it wasn’t.

This series is for them. And perhaps for you.

What Trauma Actually Means

Trauma can emerge from experiences that were never named as harmful. Trauma is not defined only by what happened but also by how an experience landed in your nervous system and what resources were available in your relational home.  The relational home is the inner map we carry of other people: whether they can be trusted, whether we are too much or not enough, whether closeness is safe or always costs us something. Like a turtle’s shell our home travels with us and unless we receive emotional coaching early on we learn what we can expect from others without knowing it.  

The psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow, one of my former supervisors, surmises that we can’t separate trauma from our relational home.  Stolorow describes emotional trauma as the shattering of what he calls the “absolutisms of everyday life”: the implicit, largely unconscious beliefs that allow us to move through the world feeling that it is stable, predictable, and safe. When those beliefs are disrupted, whether by a single event or by years of accumulated experience, we are left with an exposure to our own vulnerability that can be extraordinarily difficult to bear. (Stolorow, 2007; see also his Psychology Today piece  here on  the shattering of safety.)  Without emotional coaching from our relational home, our experiences become too overwhelming and splinter from our logical, rational minds. 

What is Childhood Trauma

The Adverse Childhood Experiences study, a landmark collaboration between the CDC and Kaiser Permanente beginning in the 1990s, surveyed more than 17,000 adults to understand how early experiences shape long-term physical and emotional health. Before this study, the link between traumatic childhood experiences and later inflammatory diseases such as heart disease and cancer was not understood.  The ACE questionnaire measures ten categories of childhood adversity, including abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction, and assigns a cumulative score. While no single instrument can capture the full complexity of a person’s history, the ACE framework gave researchers and clinicians a shared language for recognizing how early stress continues to live in the body and mind across the lifespan.

At Belonging Partnership, we can administer an ACE questionnaire and talk through what your score does and does not tell us about your experience.

Childhood trauma can include any of the following:

• Emotional neglect or chronic misattunement from a caregiver 
• Growing up in a home that felt unpredictable, chaotic, or volatile
• Exposure to conflict between adults in the household
• Parents who suffered from addiction, mental illness or experienced incarceration
• Feeling persistently unsafe, unseen, or unimportant
• Loss of a caregiver through death, departure, or emotional unavailability
• Bullying or painful social rejection during formative years
• Parentification: taking on adult emotional or logistical responsibilities too young
• Chronic criticism, shame, or perfectionist pressure
• Living with housing or food insecurity

Even if these experiences were never labeled as “trauma,” they can create lasting emotional and relational patterns. 

“The existential meaning of emotional trauma lies in the shattering of the absolutisms of everyday life  the system of illusory beliefs that allow us to function in the world, experienced as stable, predictable, and safe.”  Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. | Trauma and Human Existence (2007)

Seven Ways Childhood Trauma Shows Up in Adults

The following patterns are explored in depth across this series. They are previewed here because recognition is often the first step to healing. Many people read a list like this and experience both relief and grief: relief that there is a framework, grief that the framework fits and perhaps that it went unrecognized until now. 

1. Difficulty regulating emotions. Emotional overwhelm, sudden shutdown, a feeling that our response is the wrong size reaction to everyday stress, difficulty returning to calm after conflict. Many patients who come to see us worry that these responses are character flaws. They are not; they are learned adaptations of a nervous system that once needed to stay on high alert.

2. Relationship challenges. Fear of abandonment, people-pleasing, emotional distance, difficulty with boundaries, and sensitivity to criticism. When early relationships were inconsistent or emotionally unsafe, closeness in adulthood can be something we both hope for and dread.

3. A harsh and persistent inner critic. Internal messages like “be perfect,” “don’t be a burden,” or “your feelings don’t matter” often originate in childhood relational homes.  Children who grow up with under-resourced parents often absorb these messages in order to not to perturb the system (their parents’ emotional stability). Responses can become so habituated that changing without support is very difficult.  

4. Chronic overthinking and hypervigilance. Overanalyzing conversations, anticipating worst-case scenarios, and difficulty relaxing or being present. Growing up in unpredictable environments trains the brain to remain ready. In adulthood, that readiness rarely has an off switch.

5. Difficulty trusting others. Emotional walls, fear of vulnerability, a deep conviction that relying on others is dangerous. Hyper-independence is the quietest and most underrecognized form of trauma response.

6. Physical symptoms without a clear medical explanation. Tension headaches, chronic fatigue, digestive disruption, sleep difficulties, and persistent muscle pain that are not otherwise explained medically can all be linked to surviving trauma.  The body holds what the mind has not yet been able to process.

7. Avoidance behaviors. Overworking, emotional numbing, social withdrawal, procrastination, avoiding intimacy or conflict are all strategies survivors use to try to downregulate a worried nervous system.  Because our nervous systems can’t access what the logical mind knows, our bodies can remain on high alert long after the danger is gone.   Avoidance feels like self-protection and functions as a necessary strategy until it begins to limit connection, growth, and a sense of living a full life.

Why the Past Follows Us Into the Present

During childhood, the brain is actively forming and laying down neural network patterns to be efficient and shortcut how it responds to the environment.  When a child experiences ongoing stress, emotional injury, or relational unpredictability, the brain adapts for survival. Hypervigilance, emotional suppression, self-criticism, and withdrawal are not weaknesses. They were functional responses when the options for safety and agency were limited by circumstances beyond your control.

The difficulty is that these adaptations become wired into how the nervous system and the relational self operate, often without our awareness. We carry them into adulthood as personality, as habit, as “just how I am,” long after the original circumstances that created them have changed.

The encouraging reality, supported by decades of research in neuroscience and clinical practice, is that these patterns can change. The brain retains its capacity for reorganization throughout the lifespan. With the right relational and clinical support, the nervous system can learn something new.

What This Means for You

If any of the patterns above feel familiar, you are not broken. You adapted. The question that therapy invites is not “what is wrong with you,” but “what happened to you, and how can we understand it together in order to help you feel better?”

At Belonging Partnership, we use a trauma-informed foundation to help our patients heal.  Our mission is to serve communities that have historically experienced mental health inequity, and to train talented clinicians who bring both lived experience and genuine skill to this work. We serve adults in the Bay Area and accept student health insurance through UC Berkeley and Stanford.

Coming Up in This Series•      Post 2: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: What Trauma Does to Your Nervous System Post 3: Why Relationships Feel Complicated — understanding attachment wounds and how they shape adult connection•      Post 4: When Stress Lives in the Body — the physical symptoms of unresolved childhood trauma and what they are communicating•      Post 5: What to Do Between Sessions — practical tools for adults actively healing in therapy

Did this resonate with you? Forward this post to someone who might see themselves in these pages. Sometimes the most meaningful thing we can do for another person is say: I thought of you. At Belonging Partnership, we offer trauma-informed therapy for folks navigating anxiety, depression, and the long reach of difficult early experience. We serve patients in CA & NY via telehealth and in person in the Bay Area. We accept UC Berkeley Ship and  Cardinal Care Stanford student health insurance. Call 510 319.0365  belongingpartnership.com

References

Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: Routledge.

Stolorow, R. D. (2016, November 10). 9/11 and the election of 2016. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-relating-existing/201611/911-and-the-election-of-2016

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). About adverse childhood experiences. CDC.gov.

Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.

© Dr. Tyia Grange Isaacson | Belonging Partnership | belongingpartnership.com