If you experienced a less-than-perfect childhood, you may still be dealing with the aftermath. 

Unresolved trauma can impact you more than you realize. It can seep into your relationships, career, physical health, emotional functioning, and decrease your overall quality of life. Trauma that happened in childhood can affect all of these things and make it hard to know exactly why. This is why a key to healing childhood trauma is recognizing the signs that it’s impacting you in the first place. In this post, we’ll cover 10 common signs you might still be affected by childhood trauma—and what you can start doing to heal.

What Is Childhood Trauma?

According to the American Psychological Association, trauma is “an emotional response to a terrible event”. If this sounds a little vague and generalized, you’re right. Trauma isn’t necessarily some extreme, catastrophic event that only a handful of people are unfortunate enough to fall victim to. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it looks like not having our emotional needs met, feeling unsafe, relational turmoil, financial difficulties, or feeling overwhelmed. 

 Trauma is part of the human experience – we will all face it at some point in our lives. However, not everyone who experiences trauma will necessarily have long-term effects. In childhood, we are more susceptible to developing long-term symptoms from distressing events due to our developmental state, limited resources, and need to rely on others for safety. If you have not yet embarked on your journey to healing childhood trauma, there is a chance it could still be impacting you today.

10 Signs You're Still Affected by Childhood Trauma

1) Difficulty Trusting Others

When we are kids, our experiences with others begin to form how we will view relationships for the rest of our lives. Children have to trust adults to meet their basic needs, help them feel emotionally and physically safe, and teach them how to exist in the world. If that trust is broken, the child may begin to view all people as untrustworthy. In adulthood, this can show up as having trouble with vulnerability, fear of betrayal, hyperindependence, and difficulty trusting others.

2) Chronic People-Pleasing or Fear of Rejection

Like it or not, humans need other humans to survive. We are hard-wired for connection. If kids feel rejected by their caregiver or have parents who are emotionally reactive, they might learn to make themselves small to stay safe. The child learns “If I shrink my needs and my wants to prioritize my caregiver’s wants and needs, they won’t think I am too much, too little, etc.” People-pleasing then becomes a survival mechanism to avoid rejection from inconsistent caregivers.

3) Persistent Anxiety or Hypervigilance

Trauma wreaks havoc on our nervous systems – the bodily structure that determines whether or not we feel safe or threatened. The nervous system’s main priority is to keep your body alive. When in doubt, it will always err on the side of caution. If you experienced an unstable or unsafe environment in childhood, your nervous system could have generalized that to interpret the world as a dangerous place. This can result in always being on edge or feeling unsafe, even in calm environments.

4) Emotional Numbness or Disconnection

When you experience trauma, your nervous system reacts by triggering the fight, flight, or freeze responses. If your body senses that you have a chance to either overcome or outrun the threat, you mobilize into either fight or flight. If your body senses that you will not be successful either way, you’ll likely go into a freeze response. Kids are often unlikely to succeed in fighting or fleeing from threat (especially when the threat is their primary caregiver). As a result, freeze is a common response for children facing trauma. When childhood trauma remains unresolved, the nervous system may continue to react to the “threat”, even though it is no longer there. In adulthood, this can look like being shut down emotionally, feeling “flat”, dissociation, or feeling detached.

5) Low Self-Worth or Inner Critic Issues

I’ve mentioned that our childhood experiences build the foundation for how we see the world. Likewise, what happens to us in childhood also begins to shape how we view ourselves. When you were a kid, if you were frequently criticized, your emotional needs were not met, or you did not have the opportunity to explore independence, you may have formed some negative core beliefs about yourself. Signs that your childhood inner critic is still in the picture include negative self-talk, perfectionism, fear of failure, and difficulty accepting criticism.

6) Unstable or Repetitive Relationship Patterns

If your caregivers in childhood were unpredictable or emotionally reactive, you may have learned to expect similar patterns in all of your relationships. As an adult, these expectations can continue if you have yet to heal wounds caused by childhood trauma. This can look like intense fear of abandonment, difficulty maintaining relationships, choosing emotionally unavailable partners, getting stuck in conflict cycles.

7) Strong Reactions to Minor Triggers

Childhood is a key period when it comes to developing emotional regulation skills. As I’m writing this, I can’t help but think of my toddler and how he throws tantrums over things that seem so small. As difficult as this behavior can be for parents, it’s completely normal. Little kids don’t know how to regulate themselves yet, and they need their caregivers to show them how. If this doesn’t happen, it can create holes in key developmental milestones. Combine this with an extra responsive threat response resulting from childhood trauma, and you have the perfect recipe for dysregulation. In adulthood, this can look like mood swings, outbursts, frequently feeling overwhelmed, or “emotional flashbacks.”

8) Avoidance of Conflict or Intimacy

Some people who experience childhood trauma develop what we call avoidant attachment. This attachment style often results from a child’s caregiver consistently being neglectful of the child’s emotional needs. Avoidant attachment in adulthood can look like fear of emotional closeness, conflict avoidance, withdrawing in the face of intimacy, and belief that they do not need connection with others.

9) Struggles with Boundaries

Unhealed childhood trauma can result in difficulty with boundaries for a variety of reasons. It can come from being a parentified child, having caregivers who violated your boundaries as a child or modeled poor boundaries themselves, or never having been able to develop a strong sense of self. Whatever the reason, boundary struggles can have a huge impact on your quality of life. Some common symptoms that you might struggle with boundaries are codependency, difficulty saying no, overcommitting, or isolating.

10) Ongoing Physical Symptoms Without Medical Cause

You may have heard the idea that trauma lives in the body, but it might be surprising to hear that nervous system regulation can play an important role in our physical health. This is largely in part to a body structure called the vagus nerve. This structure starts at the brain stem, runs down through the large intestine (connecting to major organs along the way), and plays a major role in the nervous system. A nervous system impacted by unresolved trauma may experience disruption in vagal nerve functioning, resulting in physical symptoms like headaches, fatigue, digestive issues, and more.

Why These Signs Matter

If you are living in the aftermath of a less than perfect childhood, it makes sense that you are struggling. The truth is that childhood trauma keeps us stuck if we don’t work to heal. It can impact your relationships, physical health, career success, and general quality of life. I want to know if this is where you are, you’re not broken. Your nervous system is doing what it was made to do, and you are responding to unhealed wounds. The good news is that healing childhood trauma is possible.

How to Start Healing Childhood Trauma

• Therapy: There are a variety of different therapy options designed to help you heal childhood trauma, including somatic therapy, EMDR, inner child work, and TF-CBT. If you are interested in learning more, I dive into these modalities in my blog post "How Does Trauma Affect Your Adulthood?" You can also reach out to me and schedule a free 15 minute consultation to chat about starting trauma therapy.

• Self-Compassion Practices: If childhood trauma left you with a strong inner critic, you can begin to heal this by replacing harsh inner dialogue with compassion and understanding. Imagine treating your best friend like you do yourself. Would they still be friends with you? If not, it might be time to develop some self-compassion.

• Daily Nervous System Regulation: One of the first steps to healing childhood trauma is beginning to regulate the nervous system. When I am doing trauma work with my clients, this is often the first place we start. Try incorporating nervous system regulation skills into your daily routine such as breathwork, mindful movement, grounding techniques, or self-care.

• Setting Boundaries: One way that you can start healing the damage caused by childhood trauma is by setting boundaries. This can be both with yourself and with others. Childhood trauma often leaves us disconnected from ourselves and confused about where our true boundaries lie. Start to notice when setting boundaries could make you feel safer, identify what you need to change, and make it happen!

• Finding a Support System: The process of healing from childhood trauma is really hard, and it can often feel lonely. The reality is that there are millions of people out there who feel the same way, and you don’t have to do it alone. You can start to build a support system by getting involved in a therapy group, online community, or opening up to safe friends.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve worked with me before, you know I’m not a therapist who sugar coats things. So, I’ll be honest when I say that healing childhood trauma is hard, but it is possible. If you are struggling, I invite you to explore supportive resources or reach out for help. You can request your free 15-minute consultation with me by using the button below.

If you’re on the path to healing childhood trauma, know that even awareness is a powerful first step. Healing can feel a little messy sometimes, but recovery is worth it.