Healing Developmental Trauma

Developmental Trauma And Recovery

My passion is that everyone who has a history of developmental trauma will have free and abundant access to information and resources that really help so that you feel seen, heard and understood.

When this happens you will naturally understand and appreciate yourself better, realizing how your biography has become your biology, how valiantly your system adapted to help you be here now, and that you have a variety of options to support your continuing healing and integration. More than anything it is my profound belief and passion to help each person understand they are not broken. That there is nothing to fix. We just lost connection with our true Self, our body, and the present moment in order to protect our vulnerability.

I do believe (feel free to disagree!) that when life falls apart as it does for us with these illnesses, it is to show us (sometimes very starkly) that how we were living was not sustainable. That our nervous system and personality had adapted beautifully to survive, which is did – hurrah, you are here! But that it could not in its current state – thrive. The body says no often loudly, so we can learn to say yes to ourselves and to life in new ways.

The road home is to Befriend how we adapted so all parts of us can feel supported enough to gently begin to relinquish their protective hold on our mind and body, and re connect to our body, our true Self and the present moment.

I hope you find this information helpful and useful. Thank you for being you.

Developmental Trauma Introduction

A lot of people with developmental trauma feel like life is more uncomfortable difficult or stressful than it is for others in similar circumstances. Like other people got a manual that we did not.  It might have been that way for much or all of your life. Health may have been a consistent challenge to maintain or you may have suddenly become unwell and not bounced back. If you have syndromal chronic physical conditions, have trouble self-regulating emotions, impulses, do not feel a secure sense of self, have many fears about the environment, are often in fight/flight/freeze/fawn, these are all signs of possible developmental trauma.

There are other things that can cause these kinds of challenges such as neurodivergence, chemical injury etc. So I'm not trying to diagnose you, but I want to suggest that that's a possibility. I want to explain now what developmental trauma is. What happens when there's developmental trauma and it's unresolved. What is the experience at the time, and then what are the results of that experience.

We will then look at what the process looks like of moving from this place where our lives are profoundly impacted and limited by past developmental trauma to a place where we can be relatively at ease, relatively free to live our lives, and free to connect with other people and able to hold our vitality.

What Is Developmental Trauma

One way of describing an experience of early trauma is that it's a situation where as an infant or child we feel unsafe, our needs are not being met, and we feel overwhelmed without enough support, neglected, or it can be truly unintentional like birth trauma.

It is what happens inside of us, in both nervous system and our personality development as a result of what we experience. It could be even before birth, and it could be anywhere up to teens. At home, school or from institutional experiences. 

Many people have buffering factors, someone or a community that gives them the experience of being seen and supported, and that enables us to develop physically and emotionally more robustly. Developmental trauma occurs when this is missing. In this society this is increasingly common as we are losing family, community and village. Predatory capitalism does not make for regulated caregivers or wider support systems. 

Emotions

We are 100% reliant on our caregivers to help us feel our emotions safely due to not having the brain development yet to do that solo. Our brain doesn’t develop fully until our mid twenties. So big emotions can feel very overwhelming as anyone with kids around them will know! We need someone to see us, help us feel safe, and soothe us as we feel tough emotions. We will also model how we see our caregivers feeling their emotions (or how they defend them with avoidance, suppression or other behavioural patterns) 

If we do not have this, our system will find emotions scary and mount a stress response; some variation of fight, flight, freeze, fawn or shut down. This will protect us from feeling that emotion. We can also dissociate from it as the visceral experience of it in our body was too much.

We defend our vulnerability. The child gets protected and we begin to develop adaptive traits to protect them. Such as people pleasing, perfectionism, dissociation, achieving, helping, appeasing, shutting down etc. These are adaptive personality traits in line with how our nervous system is protective ting us (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) and not ‘bad at all. But they are often rigid and do not allow the personality to grow flexibly and responsively to the environment. As adult life gets complex, this can cause further stress and strain on the mind and body.

The diagram below shows how we survive, and how we can compartmentalize the traumatic emotion/experience whilst carrying on into adulthood functionally somewhat normally (normal for us – as we do not know different). It is often only until a trigger like illness, loss, system overwhelm happen that we are brough face to face with what is underneath our adaptive personality and adaptive nervous system patterns of survival. This diagram is from Janina Fishers beautiful work on CPTSD. 

For the sake of survival, really intense emotions, our body has various ways of making them go away. We exile them, push them out of sight out of mind (and often body). But as Bessel Van Der Kolk says ‘the body keeps the score’. Emotions buried do not go away, they stay hidden and waiting to be triggered (sp they can be healed)

Then sometimes years or decades later, something might evoke those feelings coming back up. A relationship challenge, a loss, an illness, a tipping point where our body can no longer contain the experience or sustain the stress response needed to do so.  

But as those difficult feelings come up, our brain and or my body is going to tend to have the same response we had in the first place of, nope, we don't want those as they are overwhelming. This also involves us disconnecting from the body.

Our minds and bodies are so committed to help us not consciously experience unpleasant emotions once we've had a trauma. So, we tend to carry this this burden of emotions, false beliefs about ourselves from early wounds, and generational wounds. At some point, the ongoing stress of this traumatic material can cause illness; physical and mental.

Medical diagnoses (for what we now know are psychophysiological conditions – very real and serious conditions caused by a chronic stress response and trauma) adds to this because people’s focus shifts to the diagnosis and trying to ‘fix’ that rather than perceiving the true pain underlying it. Doctors are not trained to see health as biopsychosocial so diagnosis often adds to the fear, unsafety, and trying to ‘fix’ something ‘wrong’ with us that just creates more and more unsafety and the belief that ‘there is something wrong with me’.

NEEDS

If our needs were also not met as kids, we will disconnect from those too and not be able to access these well in the body often, or feel powerful enough as an adult to get these met.

If we become hungry, if for some reason, as a young child, something happens and we are not fed for a long period of time, and we are hungry for hours or days, then our body will make that hunger go away. If we disconnected from our body due to feeling overwhelming experience – we can also disconnect from these healthy bodily impulses like hunger, thirst, a need to rest, to move etc. Another example is if we have a need for soothing and it does not come and our distress mounts too high – we will shut down and disconnect from this need to (even though it will still be there)

The need just gets turned down or disconnected to. With each need, it's the same thing. Whatever need wasn't met, there's a disconnection that happens from that need during the trauma itself. The might remain hidden for years or forever. And our experience of my needs, in general, might shift. It can really impact our ability to self care. To know what we need when we need it and have the power and esteem to get those needs met by ourselves and supported by people around us. If they have been chronically unmet we may gravitate towards people who will not meet them as that is familiar. If we do land with someone that will meet them – we might not know, or feel safe to let that in.

We might go from being someone who says, “okay, here I am, I'm here in the world, and my needs are met. The world takes care of me.” And after this experience of llack of safety so much that it was overwhelming, we might, in general, feel like, “oh, here I am in the world, and the world doesn't take care of me and is a profoundly unsafe place”.

Over time we might never feel safe. And we might be overly cautious as a result. We might just never, ever leave the house and blame that on the environment, on outside factors, when in fact it is the level of unsafety on the inside that is leading our nervous system to misperceive danger where there is none.

Or we can just become oblivious to the threat because of the lack of safety. Because the lack of safety was so intense, we might disconnect from even my awareness of threats and risk.

We might do all kinds of risky things and not really even knowing they're risky because we have just turned off that whole department? Or we might be going around doing risky things, knowing full well I'm taking risks. My response to the lack of safety is; “oh, well, if I'm not going to be safe, at least I can be alive, and I'm just going to take risks.” Our relationship with safety is affected.

We may have difficulty being close to anybody. We may start to get close to someone and then, at a certain point, like totally freak out and run away. Our subcortical (subconscious) wiring, our programming for how to trust, how to know when to trust or not to trust, how to know when to open up and when to shut ourselves down, all the stuff about navigating relationships, that whole arena is affected.

And different people are affected in different ways. But there's the capacity for building, maintaining, nurturing, breaking off relationships, all in a healthy way that's compromised in some way or in many ways.

How Do We Heal

I'm just going to briefly touch on a few points here as I will go deeper into each one over time.

1)    Feeling and embodying emotion (safely!)

Our bodies, minds and nervous systems are working really hard to keep these painful emotions out of our consciousness. And they have a legitimate motive in doing that, but it happens at a cost. The way that our mind brain body stops us from feeling these strong emotions that are actually there in our bodies is through these chronic fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses that are catabolic – disrupt our bodily functions. So our blood flow might be reduced, our breath might be reduced, the nerves might not communicate as effectively, we are chronically braced, our immune system is lowered, we have higher inflammation.

Our muscles might sort of not lose tension and our muscles or be overtight the blocking. Whatever specific form it takes, interferes with the healthy and good functioning of our bodies and our minds, and our emotions. The physical symptoms themselves can become a psychological defence, another way we keep pre occupied and away from the core pain underneath – which is emotional. Physical pain and emotional pain use the same brain areas, which is why people with developmental trauma are so primed for chronic pain conditions. The priming is already there from early emotional pain.

So finding a way to greet, meet and greet and hold these intense emotions, to learn that while they feel overwhelming, we actually can tolerate them, to discover that, oh, I'm now an adult, and I actually could hold this. Some way of finding, working with, and addressing, and holding those emotions is important.

It is crucial we stop over treating medically and understand the labels of psychophysiological conditions (like CFS, fibromyalgia) are pretty meaningless. The more we attribute to ‘it is the lyme’ ‘it is the mold’ ‘it is the canola oil’ ‘it is the postman’s cat Steve’ – the more we lose sight of what is really in process and needing healing inside of us, and we just try and control our environment more and more to attempt to ‘fix’ what is ‘wrong’. It is a tiring and often very costly hamster wheel. Additional diagnosis also often disempower people more, and begin to get closer and closer to their sense of identity.

2)    Reconnecting to Needs

When we have chronically disconnected from our needs, we can have blocks to accessing these needs, blocks to taking effective action to meet them, and blocks to accepting in support and feeling satiating/relaxed even when they are met. Building bridges back to needs and meeting them internally – and getting support from outside of us to meet them is also crucial. This includes boundaries.

3)    Adequate support and experiences of FELT safety

Another absolutely important element is safety and support. We need to be able to feel safe. And another element is relating to other people, being able to relate adequately to other people, being able to be met adequately by other people, to be seen and heard and witnessed.

And the safety and the relationship, of course, relate to each other very much. It's difficult to feel safe if there aren't any human beings in the world with whom I feel seen. Of course it is going to be difficult to do that emotional work unless we have some safety and some relational support.

And part of the relational piece is that we need to be seen, heard, respected, believed, and mirrored, and supported in our emotional experiences; both are awesome, wonderful emotional experiences and our difficult ones. We need more than just being not hurt by others.

We need to be actively met, witnessed. The empathic witness of ‘oh, yeah, I get that. I get what happened. I'm so sorry’.  It must have been someone who can understand, someone who can resonate so we are not alone with it anymore.

Touch work that helps the nervous system re connect to its innate ability to feel safe and connected can be a great help, so can many kinds of movement practice, social support, pets, nature and plant medicine teachers, spiritual practice. We all need to find roads to re connect in ways our system feels it can tolerate in small titrated amounts. I like to think of this as an existing bodily somatic map of all red flags (unsafety), that over time with space and support we gently turn blue (safety)

3. Re discovering pleasure in titrated ways

In fight, flight, freeze, and shutdown, even though we might feel so fatigued, there is energy in there. It may feel unpleasant and tense, but there is always great life force in there.

So many of us have lost connection with our life force energy and have braced or collapsed so much that we no longer have the capacity to hold it. We might even feel like we don't want to be here. And when we do feel the life force energy, it tends to feel like an intense push, rather than something pleasurable.

So one of the aspects of healing is finding ways to feel alive, to feel truly alive in a way that feels positive, so we can re connect to wanting to be here and to wanting to express and to know that there's some safety to do that.  This can be a beautiful part of recovery as we re-connect with play, or creativity, or nature, or humour.

Another piece is the agency. We need to have the experience of “I can do things, and when I do things, it can be okay, I can do things, and it can work, and there can be a success”. All of those pieces I spoke of relate to each other. Boundaries fall into here too – that we have the right to boundaries and feel able to somatically sense these and hold them to be semi permeable membranes between us, others, and the world.

So we all start somewhere to see which of these might we have some of already? We ALL do as we all have tremendous qualities, strengths and competencies to draw from. And from there, begin to get curious about what we want, need, and can cultivate more of.

There's not a formula or do this 6 week course or learn this system, and then you too will be free from the effects of your developmental trauma. It doesn't work like that in a complicated world where we are all different. It is a highly unique hero’s journey that allows us to grow the self-connection and competencies to grow beyond the limitations of our traumatic past.

Initially, you might feel shaky and unsure. Like a child just learning to walk, you explore new territory and you may falter. But with encouragement, you get up again and again.

Healing from trauma doesn’t mean that you will no longer experience times of emotional distress. It means you can meet it in the present moment.

Western culture makes orphans out of us all by disconnecting us from the living world around us and the spiritual community & support always available. Then pathologizes the natural responses to isolation and trauma. Western psychiatry and still a lot of psychotherapy pathologizing the traumatized person rather than the toxic environment and systems that caused the trauma. This is so wrong and damaging and of course gets internalised by the brave people healing, who in my humble opinion are actually healthier than those who pathologise them.

This internalised shame for trauma gets alleviated every time someone is willing to sit with others experience, learn, and be with them just as they are. Shame dissolves when it is held with presence and non-judgement. There does not need to be pathology around healing. Trauma is the heroes journey of our lifetimes. Symptoms are signs of the pain and tension within needing care. Personally I feel if you are around someone who is genuinely engaged in their healing work, you are undoubtedly with someone incredibly strong, with huge gifts, and they will blossom given the time, space and support they never received.

I feel honoured every day to sit and offer this to my clients. I hope person by person we become willing to offer this to ourselves and others so we can heal our collective trauma.