Empowered Healing: Healing Childhood Trauma

What is Trauma?

Most people believe that to have trauma, you must have experienced a situation such as sexual/physical abuse, something life-threatening, the loss of a child, war, being bullied, etcetera.

Trauma is anything that causes or creates a change in your brain and mental state, which then changes your behaviour. For example, anxiety, depression, fear that something terrible will happen, phobias, panic attacks etc. So, taking this into account, it is clear that a fight you had as a child can affect your confidence. Seeing your parents argue can affect your ability to communicate, or watching a scary movie as a child can make you feel unsafe. Therefore, they have a traumatic effect on you even though they are not seen as a big deal.

These traumas can, little by little or suddenly, change your perception of yourself, people and the world around you, causing you to disconnect from various aspects of yourself and often forget how you or life was before the event.

Your trauma becomes your personality, the way you respond and your behaviour. Therefore, you create a supposedly new reality for yourself and your life. I say ‘supposedly’ because although you are experiencing these changes, it is only a false perception of your life that appears real but is only there because of your traumas. Many of the fears, phobias etc., are quite unlikely to occur in the grand scheme of things.

The most valuable thing you can do for yourself is heal from your traumas. Not a band-aid fix for your symptoms. But rather, getting to the root cause of why those symptoms are there.

In saying that, sometimes the symptoms can be quite severe and debilitating. If that is the case, you may need to address certain symptoms to get to a more calm and clear state to address what created the trauma in the first place.

‘Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.’ – Michelle Rosenthal

All of my clients have experienced some trauma, whether considered big or small by societal standards. For me, trauma is trauma. All of us feel emotions. Fear is fear, no matter what the situation may be. One person’s 6/10 could be someone else’s 10/10 or vice versa, regardless of the severity of the experience.

A person who experiences sexual abuse and a person who experiences their parents fighting every day could equally experience their fear and pain threshold with what they have experienced in life up until that point. Generally speaking but not always the case, people of older age may have experienced more than a young person, so their threshold may be much higher than that of a young person due to life experience.

Regardless of age or gender, when healing from trauma, the most common theme I have come across in every single one of my clients is that whatever situation they want to heal from at that particular moment in their lives, it always relates to childhood trauma.

As adults, we tend to trivialize much of what happened to us as children. The one thing I am passionate about bringing awareness to in my clients is that we do not have the experiences and rational minds we do as adults in childhood. Therefore, to understand our childhood traumas, we must look through that child’s eyes.

If you are seven years old and your parents fight most days, that is a traumatic experience. You may not be able to eat, be afraid of them or be afraid that one of them may leave and abandon you. You may be afraid to speak up, become submissive, a pleaser or not want to be seen, so their anger is not projected onto you. This will affect you and your behaviours, future relationships, partner choice, etc.

Unhealed childhood trauma manifests as:

• Fixing others.

• People pleasing. 

• Co-dependency.

• Need to prove yourself.

• Fear of abandonment. 

• Tolerates abusive behavior.

• Difficulty setting boundaries.

• Does not prioritize own needs.

Childhood trauma is real and a big deal. Whether it be Reiki or Forensic Healing, I take my clients through the key process of looking through that child’s eyes. This allows them to connect to the trauma and understand what was going on to allow a release and healing to begin.

With their newfound awareness, I ask them to become aware of what they, as that precious child, really needed and deserved at that moment. It is often to be loved, nurtured, seen, heard, and made to feel safe or spend time with them. This is a crucial part of the many different pathways of healing your inner childhood traumas that I find both healing and empowering.

As a healer, the best thing I can do for my clients is to create a safe environment free of judgment and listen to them. Listening to their experiences and stories and validating their emotions and needs creates a sacred space for healing conversations and the shifting of stagnant energy, patterns and traumas.

When you choose to heal and make the changes within yourself and your life, you open up a doorway of empowerment that gives you the courage and tools to move forward. Healing really does empower you.