How Childhood Trauma Triggers Adult Anxiety
Are you living with persistent, unresolved anxiety? Does it seem as though it's always been with you? If your anxiety goes as far back as you can remember, it may be that your discomfort has roots in childhood trauma. Do you wish that you could live without fear, worry, or that on edge feeling in your gut?
When you think about the roots of your anxiety, what comes up for you? If you're like legions of anxious adults, childhood trauma might be triggering internal upheaval, getting you down, or wearing you out physically. Worse the life you long for may feel out of reach.
What can you do to change things? First, it's important to identify how past trauma and/or ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) have affected your ability to tolerate uncertainty and make sense of your emotions.
Key Ways Childhood Trauma Triggers Adult Anxiety
Childhood Trauma Creates an Unstable Emotional Foundation
Your trauma likely created a sense that the world is untrustworthy and unreliable when you needed it to be safe and nurturing. Whatever your experience, you likely reached a point whrer you recognized that you woundn't be rescued and reacted in ways that keep your mind as safe as possible. Those coping mechanisms may not have been the healthiest long term.
Your current anxiety likely stems from that old dread, worry, and feeling that you might be at the mercy of others if you aren't careful. Do you worry all the time, carastrophize, or jump to worst-case scenario conclusions?
Perhaps you cannot enjoy life much or look forward to much because trauma taught you not to expect much from life or people.
Early Trauma Can Live On in Your Body
Experiencing bodily abuse as a child could create anxiety for you now that plays out in a physical manner. Certain sensations, intimacy, and other body-related feelings may indicate that the trauma of the past is actually being held in you like a bodily memory. As a result, you may be jumpy, hypervigilant regarding your body, or lean toward a lack of physical touch.
Self-Limiting Beliefs and Negative Self-talk Are Born from Childhood Trauma
When you consider your childhood trauma, you may or may not remember much of it. At any rate, you may have come away with ideas about your worth. Today you may find yourself engaging in perfectionism, trying to people-please, or holding yourself back from dreams and goals. You feel too confused by the past to tryst yourself and value your own needs. Shame, negative self-image, and distrust can create a perfect storm of unproductive emotions that keep your thoughts racing and your life stuck.
Early Trauma Taints Your Ability To Trust and Embrace Vulnerability
Trust is vital for forming calm, trustworthy relationships. Being rejected, abandoned, neglected, or betrayed wreaks havoc on your ability and desire to connect. You may feel unable to maintain relationships or hold too tightly to people who aren't good for you.
Either way, you likely feel troubled now by a low tolerance for uncertainty in your relationships.
How Anxiety Treatment Can Help
The truth is, trauma is relative and specific. It’s also true that your experience is unique to you and deserves special attention. You may not fully realize how much childhood trauma contributes to your adult anxiety. That being the case, some professional guidance is helpful in providing coping tools and a way forward.
All in all, an important step toward recovery in adulthood is feeling safe and free to work through your past. In therapy, you can start to unpack your perceptions, overwhelm, and stress responses. In time, you can start to gain more peace and put more of the past firmly behind you.
When you are ready, please read more about trauma therapy and feel free to reach out for a confidential consultation soon.