Introduction

Research shows that childhood traumas cause disease – even when these traumas are not followed by environmental factors or habits associated with disease. Repeated humiliation from a mother, for example, can cause you to develop autoimmune diseases and even lung cancer in your forties as a direct result – even if you ate a relatively healthy diet, exercised regularly, and did not indulge caffeine, alcohol, smoking, or street drugs. Studies that controlled for these factors found that even adults who lived healthy lifestyles who suffered severe trauma in their background were more than twice as likely to develop disease, and more than four times as likely to develop depression.

Even “mild” trauma, such as being “almost raped” a single time in childhood, or being teased at school, has been scientifically correlated with significant increase in disease risk. For an overview of this correlation and how it is being addressed in San Francisco, listen to Nadine Burke Harris's talk.

Different kinds of trauma, and the age which it occurs, have different impacts on physical, emotional, and mental health. Genetics, unsurprisingly, are also a factor; if you have the “short/short” variant of the serotonin gene (originally associated with depression, and more recently associated with being a Highly Sensitive Person or HSP), your brain will release nearly double the hormones to cope with stress, which means that sensitive individuals are at higher risk of developing health problems as a result of childhood traumas.

Following wars (highly traumatic events, of course) there have always been cases of mental and emotional instability. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is relatively well-known. However, the subject of developmental trauma and “adverse childhood experiences” is a new field of study that holds the key to effectively treating a wide scope of chronic and mysterious symptoms.

You may find some of the information on this page startling or upsetting as it may remind you of your own childhood experiences. If you do not feel equipped to handle this upset on your own, please consider reading this with a supportive friend or family member.

Page Outline

Introduction

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Infancy Trauma | Developmental Trauma in Infancy

Toddler Trauma | Developmental Trauma as a Toddler

Trauma Creation

Selective Identification

The Role of Fragmentation in Relationships

Multiplicity Recognition Matters

Transactional Relationships

When Relationships Begin

Healing Infancy Trauma | The Root of Codependency

Healing Toddler Trauma | The Root of Weak Boundaries

A Highly Sensitive Person with Developmental Trauma

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

The acronym PTSD has become a household word that most people understand – even if they are unaware of what it stands for. The classic example is that someone goes to war and they come back with nightmares, flashbacks, and other signs of emotional instability. Post-traumatic stress is generally characterized as something that comes from a single incident. In contrast, developmental trauma is about chronic occurrences in childhood that shape your personality as you develop. Let us compare.

Single Incident Trauma	Chronic Trauma
Responsive to treatment	Responds poorly to intervention
Fits PTSD diagnosis	Does not fit PTSD diagnosis
Extreme, relevant symptoms	Personality-integrated symptoms
Frequent, relevant nightmares	Inconsistent nightmares
Avoids trauma-related stimuli	Perceives world as generally unsafe
Symptoms begin right after trauma	Symptoms may take years to become obvious
Isolated, relevant triggers	Generally oppositional or anxious behaviors

Infancy Trauma | Developmental Trauma in Infancy

Normal interactions for a baby include things like pointing, smiling, making “coo” noises and having adults respond with noises and gestures of their own. Trauma happens when there is a severe breach or a chronic breach of this normal interaction. For example, if the only care-giver is depressed and doesn’t respond for weeks (or even as little as days), this will create trauma due to chronic lack of response. For a two-minute sample of how rapidly an interaction can change by simply having an unresponsive mother, watch this brief clip that demonstrates the “still face” experiment.

If you were traumatized as an infant, part of you remains at the stage where it doesn’t even want to meet its own needs. This part of you is just a baby, and needs mom to meet all of your needs. Your baby-self needs mom to be able to do this without the benefit of a shared spoken language.

To heal infant trauma, the adult needs someone to treat them as a baby again – not in a demeaning way, but by intuiting their needs and meeting them. When this is done for a long enough period of time, in conjunction with meeting other infant-needs, the baby-fragment moves on to being a toddler-fragment.

Another infant need is a constant care-giver who always cares how you feel. Those of us with infant trauma – which is most anyone born in the 1980s and 90s – need someone who is attuned to our emotions, who notices our posture and expressions, and who consistently cares.

Toddler Trauma | Developmental Trauma as a Toddler

The toddler phase is all about developing healthy boundaries. The concept of the “terrible twos” and the toddler constantly screaming “No!” is about the development of autonomy. A developmentally healthy relationship for a toddler is having caregivers who are attuned and able to help the child coregulate their emotions. This means that the adult can step into the toddler’s emotional reality, and help guide it. This isn’t done with force, but with loving coaxing which takes into account the genuine best interests from the perspective of the specific toddler.

A healthy dynamic with a toddler must include providing them with ample choices. This could mean offering them two different pairs of socks to wear, different forks at breakfast, and two different playtime activities. Give them choices at every opportunity, allowing them to feel what it means to have their own personal yes to something. This is the development of identity. The more they can have a self, the less they will feel the need to exert a self through rebellion.

To understand boundaries, identity, and how these relate to trauma and your life at large, read my related essay, Your Boundaries = Your Identity.

If your boundaries were repeatedly violated as a toddler or young child, then you learned that you could not be yourself and also have connection with someone at the same time – either they would abandon you or they would force you to behave the way they wanted you to. (The former leading to abandonment trauma and the latter leading to enmeshment trauma.)

If you were traumatized as a toddler, then part of you remains at the toddler stage before autonomy is fully developed. One symptom of this is always asking, “What do you want to do?” without ever asking yourself what you want, or dismissing your own wants as unimportant.

For a detailed look at what this condition looks like, I highly recommend watching Teal Swan’s videos, I can have me, and I can have you too and Developing Healthy Boundaries.

Toddler-you needs to make decisions and have them honored. This requires having friends and/or an intimate partner assist your healing process. It is a relational trauma, and it requires relational healing. Your friends need to understand how important it is for you to develop your own autonomy and then get on board with your process.

Healing can be as simple as this: the people in your life prompt you to express your feelings and desires, and then they honor those needs and desires. After a year of this treatment most people report that it is coming naturally for them to express their boundaries among trusted individuals and that they no longer need prompting. Some even progress to being able to express their boundaries to strangers in just a few months.

Trauma Creation

How is chronic, developmental trauma created?

These are standard practices in our culture, which is why virtually everyone has a least some developmental trauma.

We all have different aspects stuck at different development stages. When I began my trauma-recovery work, I had aspects of myself frozen at every stage (baby, toddler, child, adolescent). I uncovered these over years, and began the healing process. This is not something I could do alone, however. Relational traumas require healing relationships.

You can begin to identify developmentally frozen aspects in yourself by noticing times when you feel upset beyond what seems reasonable. This is an indication that past trauma is involved. An early clue which showed up when I was twenty was how strongly I felt about folding grocery-store paper bags. I became strongly indignant when someone else tried to do it for me. This was a strange response. When you have a strong reaction that seems odd, stop and think about it.

When I introspected about how I felt about the paper bags, I used the emotion I felt about them to travel back in time to an incident that had been forgotten until that moment. Suddenly I was a toddler again and my father had wanted me to fold up a paper bag. It was intended as a puzzle, and I took it very seriously. I felt I had to fold that bag or risk rejection from my parents. I was so overwhelmed that I began to cry. The task was beyond my ability at the time, and it frightened me that my parents were insisting I should be able to do it.

After recognizing this (relatively minor) traumatic incident, my strong feeling about paper bags rapidly faded away.

Of course, much stronger memories may arise. In cases like this, I recommend using an appropriate form of consciousness alchemy which feels good to you such as perspective alchemy, the completion process, or parts work. Above all, be sure that you validate the emotions you had at the time of the trauma.

Selective Identification

When enough of our fragments of self have matured to adulthood, we usually make the choice to selectively identify with our adult aspects. Then these developmentally frozen aspects of ourselves only surface when we’re especially stressed and unable to maintain our adult persona.

The confusing part about this is that we display a fully-formed, healthy adult most of the time, but then we experience mysterious meltdowns. We blame it on “stress” but the stress is just the trigger, not the root cause. In fact, the trigger is not even bad. The trigger acts as a vortex trying to suck us back into the original wound so that we can heal.

Generally speaking, people wear very thick masks of adulthood, but every person has aspects of self that stagnated a long time ago that come out when stimulated in the right way. Not only do negative parts of our childhood selves get stuck, but playful, curious, creative fragments too. This is why some people rely on alcohol to feel playful, or drugs to feel creative. Substances can act as a dissolving agent on our protective, adult persona, and once that has happened several times with a given substance (such as alcohol), then it can be further reinforced as a hypnotic anchor. This is why people will still act drunk even if they only think they have been drinking, when, in fact, it was an imitation beverage.

To determine how identified someone is with their adult persona, try this:

Ask: “Were you well-behaved as a child? What was your worst misbehavior?”

Pay careful attention to their response: Are they explaining how their parents felt, how their teacher felt, how their “victims” felt, or how they themselves felt as a child?

People who are highly identified with their adult self will not identify with their child self, but rather, they will tell the story from the perspective of the relevant adult, saying something like, “I was such a handful growing up.”

When you actually empathize and identify with your own experience, you will say things like this instead: “Growing up, I felt very isolated. Mom was unresponsive to me emotionally, so I had to fight for her attention in every way I could.” This, as you might guess, is a much more psychologically healthy place to be.

Not everyone has fragments that “reach adulthood,” however. Some receive so much developmental trauma that they have trouble relating to the idea they are adults. (Although, other factors can contribute to this. Shocking current events can create an incentive to dissociate from present-day, for example.)

This experience exists on a spectrum. For most of us, feeling weird about being an adult is a passing feeling which arises when we are more in touch with our inner childhood fragments. For some, however, adulthood is so entirely unobtainable that a person can not manage their affairs whatsoever. Such individuals can’t function in society the same way a three-year-old could not function as an adult in society.

The totality of trauma exists on a spectrum. While some people have thousands of internal fragments from their trauma burden, others only have a few dozen. Yet all of us experience some degree of fragmentation from our childhood experiences. Even those of you who claim you had “great upbringing” – that’s your selective identification talking. This doesn’t mean you don’t have adult capacities or otherwise negate the rest of who you are.

The important thing to recognize is that everyone needs care, even if they are acting like they don’t. For every person you meet, including your doctor and your psychologist, you’re encountering the part of them that has selectively identified with their functional, adult self. Hidden inside is (usually) a screaming inner child.

The Role of Fragmentation in Relationships

Having your perspective split into many fragments affects all aspects of your life, but none more than your relationships with other people. When you’re in an intimate relationship with someone, you start to see all their different “sides” – their fragments. You see their joys, meltdowns, and triggers. You begin to learn what things can “set them off” and make them behave like an entirely different person. Being aware of how developmental trauma works can greatly enhance your ability to communicate and create repair in your relationships effectively.

One of my clients who was struggling with being inconsolable. She would regularly enter a meltdown state and become unresponsive to her husband. He found this terrifying. She would cry and cry, not answering his questions with anything beyond a nod or a shake of her head. She told me in one session, “I thought about it and now I feel baffled. He was telling me exactly what I wanted to hear. So why did I just keep crying like that?” This had been happening on-and-off for months, ever since she had experienced a profound recall of what her babyhood experience had been like.

She was unable to receive comfort from her husband’s words because she had gone into an infant state. Babies feel better through actions, such as being held and rocked – not through abstract concepts. You can’t tell a baby, “Don’t worry, it’ll be better tomorrow,” expect the baby to be comforted. A baby understands touch, tone, and facial expressions. It doesn’t understand the subtly of resentment versus anger, but it does understand the vast difference between loving touch and defensive distance.

My client, like myself, was born during the era of the “cry it out” parenting craze. This horrifying advice went against thousands of years of mammalian instinct doing the right thing. For those of you who went through this infant horror, you may not recall the experience visually. However, we recall infant experiences somatically. My client was able to get in touch with her infant trauma through watching videos of babies crying. This gave her a powerful, visceral response. She curled into a fetal position and began crying and shaking. This response is the memory.

As I have done with myself and others, I utilized the tools outlined in my book, Perspective Alchemy, I was able to gently coax my client into putting her babyhood experience into words. This can be challenging, as we did not have words as a baby. Some people are entirely nonverbal when connecting to an infant memory. In these cases you can communicate by asking Yes or No questions, which can be answered with a nod or headshake.

In my case, much of my babyhood trauma came down to be physically ill. This made my experience much more confusing and upsetting. My parents were giant gods who could fix anything, were they not? As an infant I not only felt abandoned when nobody came when I cried, but during one of the times I was sick, I also felt betrayed. Of course my parents were, in truth, trying to do everything they could for me. But I did not understand their anxiety or upset; I simply knew that things were very, very wrong.

Understanding developmental trauma can help us see what our own mysterious emotions mean. My client learned that whenever she felt inconsolable, it was her infant self. Her husband learned to respond to this shift in her by softening his tone of voice and offering her loving touch. By wrapping her in his arms and gently rocking her, she would quickly calm. After a year of these occasional incidents, they stopped happening. She was able to unstick this part of herself through relational healing.

Multiplicity Recognition Matters

We need to see recognize the positive and negative truths of each individual’s capabilities. Each person we meet has aspects which are capable and powerful. There are ways in which they offer us valuable lessons. Yet each person, no matter how professional they may seem, also has aspects which are wounded and desperate for help.

If we fail to see this, we’ll go around labeling some people as “healthy and capable” and others “hopelessly broken.” This labeling hurts everyone -- including ourselves.

Pigeonholing someone as “healthy and capable” is a disservice because it disregards their inner child crying out for help. Just because they’re also doing that to themselves doesn’t make it kind for you to do it too. Highly resourced people are often very rewarding to help, and can become highly loyal friends if you can access and help their wounded aspects.

Pigeonholing someone as “hopelessly broken” is also a disservice because it disregards their gifts. They have experiences that are valuable to share, and often they have a surprising level of expertise in the areas that interest them most. Invalidating the parts of them that are knowledgeable or capable only furthers their wounding. Those who are the most dysfunctional are often highly insightful because they are not as cut-off from their emotional wounds. These people often have the capacity to heal more deeply and more quickly because they are already in touch with their hurt inner-fragments.

Labeling people in a black-and-white fashion is also a disservice to yourself because you miss out on opportunities to boost your own sense of value by helping the so-called functional people, as well as opportunities to learn from the so-called dysfunctional people.

Worst of all is labeling yourself “completely functional” or “completely dysfunctional.” Recognizing the truth of your multifaceted internal fragments allows you to use the more resourced aspects of yourself to help the hurting aspects of yourself. For example, if you’re feeling a strong emotional reaction to a video that you’re watching and you begin to cry, you can use the more adult aspect of yourself to go to someone who cares for you (or call them on the phone) in order to give external support to the part of you in need.

Most people identify with their adult self and reject their traumatized aspects of self in order to conform to society’s expectations and demands. Most people fail to have self-compassion when they identify only with their “rational” aspects. However, you can, instead, leverage your various aspects of self to help each other out. For example, learning more about how emotions work to the point where you understand how perfectly rational they actually are can help get your parts to cooperate with one another. This one style of parts work.

Failing to do this kind of work with yourself has astounding consequences. Our way of being dismissive toward our own pain translates to being dismissive of others. We are all bordering on psychopathic behavior when we tune out the suffering of others, ignoring homeless people, or turning a blind-eye to a spouse who is suffering and coping through addiction. We can tune out the suffering of others because we have not even tuned into ourselves. This is how trauma is passed from generation to generation: the adult who chronically disowns their own pain also chronically dismisses their child’s pain, traumatizing the child.

Transactional Relationships

Developmental trauma causes transactional relationships to form. Each individual comes to the relationship having failed to have all their needs met in childhood, and still feeling the need for someone else to meet these needs. One person may come into the relationship feeling unable to take care of themselves by holding onto a job or managing finances and another might enter that relationship feeling inadequate. They make a contract that is often subconscious, although some may make it openly.

The one who can’t provide financially for themselves pairs with the one who can’t provide emotionally for themselves and they support one another. If this dynamic is completely subconscious, it can become highly destructive. Because the agreement is subconscious, neither person feels very secure. They can sense the conditionality of the relationship, and yet because it isn’t explicit, they can’t rely on what the conditions are.

We want to believe there is a difference between relational and transactional, but this difference does not exist. What relational actually means, in transactional terms, is this: everything for everything. Everything I have, for everything you have. Everything I can give, for everything you can give. But few people are actually making that trade.

Is the idea that all your relationships are transactional is making you uncomfortable? It has that effect on most people. We all wish to be “good” people, and we have been taught that being good means loving unconditionally. But to love people unconditionally would mean that you would still love someone even if they switched diets, religions, and politics. Sadly, we are all lying to ourselves when we try to claim our love is unconditional. See: Unconditional love.

Instead of trying to make your love unconditional, try to make the conditions as transparent to yourself and your partner as possible. This may be challenging at first, but it helps set up expectations aligned with reality, preventing you both from being blindsided by reality later.

If you’re experiencing subconsciously conditional relationships, it’s because you learned it from the adults who were in your life when you were a child. It’s a given that your primary care-giver(s) also had subconsciously conditional relationships. Lacking any pristine example of a healthy relationship to learn from, you grew up soaking up the patterns, copying techniques and concepts from the adults you had in your life. What you’ve seen in movies hasn’t helped much either, as most romances are actually displaying the same patterns in glorified ways. Few romance movies even touch on the “hard stuff” that we all have to confront if we want a truly connecting, spectacular relationship.

Most self-help I encountered throughout my twenties was focused on ending co-dependency through self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, this involves repressing the aspects of you that deeply need human connection in favor of struggling alone. While some few people seem to master self-sufficiency from an exterior perspective, these people are almost always those with an avoidant attachment style – which means they were already afraid of intimacy and commitment.

Read my related essay: The Myth of Self-Sufficiency

In general, striving to meet all of your needs on your own compounds your existing trauma.

Think about it: Your existing trauma was that your care-givers weren’t meeting your needs for feeling connected, loved, seen, felt, heard, and significant – and now, here you are telling yourself that nobody will ever meet your needs, so you’d better grow up and meet them yourself. Imagine telling a infant to “grow up and hug itself.” It’s a sad image, but highly analogous to popular teachings today.

When Relationships Begin

At birth you can’t yet conceptualize of yourself as separate from your mother. You can’t yet have a relationship with your mother, because you can’t yet think of yourself as separate from her. It isn’t until you start to develop an idea of your “self” as being separate, individual and unique that you begin to develop relationships.

A healthy transition would look like this:

You begin to develop your sense of self, and Mom is still there smiling, but not hindering your newfound desire to crawl away from her.

You begin to develop preferences and you express “yes” to foods you like, and “no” to foods you dislike, and Dad is there nodding his head and taking away the plate you rejected without reprimand.

You learn your boundaries, including when it feels like a boundary violation to be left alone, and you express these boundaries. You tell your sibling or friend when it doesn’t feel okay for them to leave you alone, and they listen and care.

At times, you express your needs to everyone and nobody can meet them at the moment, but because you have parents, siblings, neighbors, and friends who care about you, usually someone is always there for you, so you aren’t traumatized by the rare occasions when nobody can.

You accept yourself, and you develop the ability to meet your own needs as you mature, and because you feel confident, and capable, you find it easy to help others.

Think about what you’ve witnessed actually happening. The Terrible Twos: This time period is when children are trying so very hard to express their boundaries, but the adults aren’t respecting the wishes of the child. So they rebel and rebel, until eventually, the stakes are too high and they surrender to the conditional reality of their relationship with adults.

The child manages to appear to conform (becoming the golden child), or they are unable to conform (and they become the scapegoat). Internally, the golden child convince themselves that they actually wanted to be “Momma’s perfect boy” all along. Or, the golden child may learn to subvert the adults in their lives by pretending to conform while simultaneously maneuvering to get their needs met. If the child can’t manage to do either of these, they become the “problem child” or “family scapegoat” as a last result – the child who is always in trouble.

While the exact age varies, humans are doing the critical work of developing their sense of self from three months old to three years old. We go through another stage of individuation during puberty, and a third when we leave home. Each of these stages is about defining ourselves and discovering autonomy. In each of these stages the social response we need most is respect for our choices.

It is okay for adults or peers to express concerns and to explain alternatives. The problem is that we often receive scorn rather than concern. We are often chronically disregarded, dismissed, or overruled. This is invariably damaging to one’s ability to choose for oneself. Autonomy is central to identity, and without knowing who we are, it is nearly impossible to feel confident about any of our life choices.

Without making choices and seeing their consequences one fails to develop an accurate databank of experiences, and thus, we fail to develop confidence. Instead, there is a chasm of uncertainty inside. The saying that “thirty is the new twenty” is a tragedy – it is taking people a full extra ten years to figure out who they are.

While indigenous tribes allowed children to make choices and understand consequences from the beginning, the modern child is rarely truly autonomous until they’re twenty. Is it any wonder that today’s youth are far less accomplished than the teens of the past? The United States declaration of independence was written by young men of nineteen and twenty-two. Can you imagine people of that age today drafting such a document on their own initiative?

Healing Infancy Trauma | The Root of Codependency

Developmental trauma forms when any area of oneself is unable to progress or grow. Parents and school systems that use guilt to manipulate children will cause deformed self-concepts in these children. Instead of forming healthy self-concepts about their weaknesses and strengths, they are saddled with the painful belief that they are irreparably defective. This belief is too painful to confront, and so it is hidden away, kept in “cold storage” so to speak, unable to progress or grow. Often this guilt is aimed at children in response to their inability to meet their own needs, which compounds pre-existing infancy trauma.

It is having our physical and emotional needs met completely as babies that allows us to become curious about meeting our own needs as we grow. If this doesn’t happen, then part of us remains stuck at that phase, waiting for someone else to meet our needs for us. This can show up as feelings and thoughts like, “I just wish someone could take care of me,” or “I wish my life was like a spa – being touched, waited on and cared for all the time,” or “I wish my partner would pay attention, understand me better, pick up on my cues and not require me to spell everything out.” These thoughts and feelings are natural responses to feeling neglected as a baby. Society tends to label this behavior as “codependency” and encourage you to become independent as the cure. However, this approach adds further trauma to the existing trauma.

Developing an adult part of yourself who looks out for this neglected baby aspect is critical in finding healing. If you can afford it, seriously consider whether going to a spa on a regular basis would give you the sense of being pampered that you need. Or, join or start a ladies’ group for gathering to give each other massages, facials, pedicures, manicures, hairdos, and cleansing vegetable juices. Another balm may be a weekly session with a therapist or co-counselor. While the specific issues discussed may or may not be resolved, the consistent connection with someone who listens and compassionately considers you will do some good toward healing the infant within. You can also consider seeing a completion process practitioner who can help nurture you through your childhood traumas in a direct way.

Infancy trauma may be labelled as “learned helplessness.” Strategies for combating this can be helpful or harmful, depending on which fragment of you is engaging in the therapy. Empowering your adult/cognitive aspects to help the helpless aspects of you will be helpful. Shaming the “helpless” aspect of yourself in any way with further traumatize this aspect of you, and so will repressing the aspect of you that feels helpless.

Ask yourself what feels like an “outgoing boundary violation” in your relationships and express your needs to the people closest to you. For example, one of my clients realized that part of the problem was her husband’s snoring, which caused them to sleep in different rooms. But her infant self needed someone to be there with her when she woke up. Waking alone was causing her a somatic stress response – and the longer she went without a calming experience with her husband, the more often she had nightmares.

What she arranged was that her husband would become her alarm clock and come into her room to gently wake her with kisses. After a week of this her husband reported to me that she was half as clingy as usual, and she reported that she felt far less anxious. After a month, she felt her emotional fragility had melted away. She felt less fractious at work, and more calm and responsive to their son.

Expressing your boundaries to your loved ones is critical. If you can’t be honest with yourself and others about them, you will subconsciously aim to get your needs met anyway, and the manipulative, subconscious methods are often destructive. It is common for us to become snarky or spiteful with someone when we feel like they ought to be doing something for us at a visceral level, but we often do not even recognize what is missing consciously. We end up yelling about how they never clear their hair off the bathroom floor when what is actually wrong is that they are not greeting us warmly when they get home each day.

If you have felt miserable but felt it was “too much to ask” your partner to accommodate you, you may have found yourself turning to addictive behaviors such as doom scrolling, pornography, or alcohol. Or you may simply find yourself awake with insomnia, telling yourself negative stories about your relationship. In more extreme cases, some people take excessive medications or cut themselves because they feel so desperate for help, and yet entirely unable to ask for it.

If the people in your life genuinely love you, they will do their best to help you. This does not mean that they will be able to be everything you want them to be. They may have stressors or traumas of their own which prevent that. But at the least, it should be safe to ask. If it is too hard to have this kind of discussion with the people closest to you in your life, it may be time to find new people to connect with. Alternatively, it may be warranted to examine your communication style and see how it might be sabotaging the intentions of your conversations.

Remember that babies have no capacity or desire to meet their own needs. Don’t ask the infant part of yourself to “speak up” about its needs. It is up to you, the adult part of you reading this – the more cognitively developed aspect of yourself – to listen for cues from all aspects of yourself. Feeling shame, embarrassment, despair, and anxiety are all signs that some aspect of you is not getting its needs met. Use your intellect to interview yourself and find answers to what is going on inside. Then use your compassion and communication skills to seek loving ways of helping yourself, which includes asking others to help you. If you are unsure how to talk with aspects of yourself, you can use my book, Perspective Alchemy, as a guide.

Healing Toddler Trauma | The Root of Weak Boundaries

Ever notice that so many adults have an inability to say, “No”? Even when they don’t want to do something, they still say, “Yes.” You’re afraid you might hurt someone’s feelings, or you’re afraid that someone might stop liking you. Worst case scenario, you’re afraid saying “no” too often to your spouse will lead to divorce, splitting up your child’s family and home.

It’s classic for women to violate their own boundaries by agreeing to have sex when they really don’t want it. Why do we do this? Part of the story is because it is also classic for girls to grow up with distant fathers. Young women quickly learn that they can barter away their sexual boundaries to get glimpses of connection with men.

In some cases, we can create a long-term barter where a man will connect with us as often as we want, so long as we give them sex as often as they want. Young aspie girls are often learning to do just this – becoming promiscuous because they are so hungry for connection and yet not socially conforming enough to receive it. Many aspie girls have learned to make this exchange by the time they are fourteen – and this is not always a bad thing. It provides much needed social-regulation neurotransmitters which promote neuroplasticity whilst simultaneously providing social training. But not all of this social training is helpful: some of it furthers existing shame, poor self-image, and a blurry identity.

There is more to this story, however. It isn’t just that girls grow up with fathers they can’t connect to. Another large part of the story happens when you’re a toddler. This is the stage of life where you’re learning your boundaries and asserting them. If your attempts at asserting your boundaries is met with strong disapproval, you will learn that you can’t both have your boundaries and have love at the same time.

Here’s an example: Stacy is two and learning how to say the word “no.” She’s good at it, unlike her adult counterparts. To Stacy, saying “no” allows her to assert her her selfhood. She is expressing her own individual will which is separate from her mother’s will. This development of boundaries is healthy, but Stacy’s mother finds her daughter’s outbursts to be invalidating, disrespectful, and threatening.

Stacy’s mother chooses a beautiful dress for Stacy to wear, but Stacy yells “no” and runs around naked instead. Stacy’s mother, intent on maintaining discipline, grabs Stacy and tells her that she is being disobedient, disrespectful, and unladylike. Stacy yells “no” again, but Stacy’s mother tells her she can either calm down and put the dress on, or she can sit in the corner for the next twenty minutes, facing the wall. Stacy, intent on maintaining her boundary, stalks to the corner and stands there, angrily crying.

Twenty minutes feels very long to Stacy. She gets tired, and she stops crying. Her mother comes over to her and hugs her and tells her that she loves her very much. She says, “Now that you’ve cried it out and calmed down, let’s put the dress on and get breakfast.” What an insult! Stacy was given a choice between the time-out and the dress, and she took the time-out and is still forced to wear the dress. What is the lesson here?

Stacy is now too tired and miserable to argue anymore. She cries a little more, but acquiesces to the dress. Stacy’s mother feels as if the situation is resolved, but in truth, Stacy is far from “all better.” On the contrary, Stacy has just had a dose of boundary trauma: she has learned that she can not assert her boundaries without being punished and violated. She has learned that her choices do not matter because she will be forced to comply anyway. She has learned that what she wears is for the purpose of pleasing someone else, not herself. Is it any wonder so many young women obsess about wearing the “right” thing? Is it any wonder that so many people conclude that they have to choose between autonomy and connection?

Stacy continues to attempt to assert her boundaries, but every time she is met with the same result. Her mother shames her and puts her in time-outs. At school she is made to write lines or sit out. She learns to suppress her need for autonomy in favor of her need for closeness. Stacy becomes clingy and experiences intense separation anxiety.

Stacy doesn’t feel like she can take care of herself, so she gets into relationships where she can get the closeness and care she requires, so long as she continues to sacrifice her boundaries. She ensures that she is the “good girl” that her boyfriend desires. Stacy makes him feel appreciated and needed, and she bends to his will, making him feel powerful and important. In return, Stacy doesn’t have to be alone or uncertain. Stacy finds out what her boyfriend likes her to wear and makes sure to only wear dresses that he likes.

Stacy’s story is just one example. There are infinite varieties of how traumas can interact. If you’re a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), like I am, then you are also prone to sensory overloads which has many compounding effects. Furthermore, HSPs are often shamed for being weak, shy, or unstable in addition to other traumas.

A Highly Sensitive Person with Developmental Trauma

The neuroscience around being a Highly Sensitive Person continues to advance at a startling rate. As it turns out, there is not a singular sensitivity gene – there are thousands. Depending on what array of sensitivity genes you received, you will be more sensitive to social situations or sounds, textures or beauty, artistry or emotions. For a long time it was estimated that twenty percentage of the populate was highly sensitive, but that was based on a specific gene associated with sensitivity which impacts how serotonin behaves. Now that we know there are many more genes involved, it is not as clear-cut how to define those who are highly sensitive versus those who are not. Like everything else, it is a spectrum.

Sensitivity genes affect how your brain works, causing you to be able to assess more information and make more connections from your sensory stimuli.

Because a highly sensitive baby will expound more on their incoming stimuli, they will be more sensitive to disorders in their parents. If Mom is always making facial expressions that don’t match her tone, this may distress a highly sensitive baby more than other babies.

The “terrible twos” can also be more painful for highly sensitive individuals, as every time you are unable to assert yourself you may feel the social rejection far more keenly.

Adults in your life are likely to label you as “too weak” and try to get you to “toughen up.” When you burn out more quickly than other children, it is also taken as further evidence of your weakness. This leads many Highly Sensitive People to become hyper independent so that they can keep other people and their loud, shaming ways away from them. Many other Highly Sensitive People swing the other direction and become very needy, dependent on someone who is less sensitive who can speak for them, or cover for them when they need to hide and recuperate.

Studies on trauma has historically rarely take into account whether individuals have sensitivity genes, but new evidence suggests that sensitive individuals are not only more prone to intense childhood trauma (as this is a subjective experience), but they are also far more receptive to therapy. The same genes that make you expound more on traumas and negative experiences also cause you to be more receptive to social support and other positive experiences.

Healing

I hope you have found this information helpful and that you will pursue your own healing with deep compassion for yourself and what you’ve been through.

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