What if your effort to personal growth is hampered because of childhood stress?
Imagine feeling so locked in hurtful moments that you might have not made a sense of.
What if you holding up to emotions that you can’t filter out? Just read on! It’s going to take just 3Mins reads, and that will help you understand why you suck at personal growth.
Before we continue, I will let in on few things!
- We are on a journey for emotional healing, and whatever childhood stress that is affecting your life as an adult shouldn’t be.
- You should understand that everything your parents, caregiver, or guardian did for you while growing up, they did because of their love for you, or the unconscious patterns that their parents subjected them to.
Now let’s continue!
What happens in our early years of life goes a long to affect our decades of life to come, that’s why childhood experiences whether negative or positive can have such a significant impact on our mental and physical health.
Growing up, we’re always at the mercy of our parents, solely dependent on how much love, care, and attention we should get. We grow up allowing the hurt, the disapproval, the love, and the support, to become part of our childhood experience
Living through childhood should be a total package of fun, happiness, and crazy. But, sometimes it isn’t. When it’s beautiful, it ushers you to an amazing adulthood. But when there’s a pattern of trauma, emotional abuse, neglect, or abandonment, it chips away at any child’s sense of stability and undermines self-worth; which sticks to you for a long time.
One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood – Agatha Christie
Childhood emotional trauma impacts adulthood as you can experience feelings of shame, guilt, trust issues and unable to relate to others, tipping emotions, anxiety and depression, anger, and worry.
The result of my childhood experience has left me with no choice but to be nothing else. One of the things that has made me emotionally rigid is that I’m afraid to end up just like my mum or with the same partner just like my father.
At a tender age, our life is already shaped whether we believe it or not. Even before you know it, you begin to see things that you don’t have the innate capacity to explain how you feel. You absorb more than you can ever imagine that radiates now in your life today.
You’re shaped to either become rigid, timid, accommodating, naive, independent, reckless, or too low self-esteemed, materialistic, distrustful, and insecure. The list can go on and on without an end especially when our emotions are always placed at the tipping balance. The outcome becomes an adult attachment disorder that defines us based on our childhood bitter and traumatic experiences.
My childhood is a part of my story, and it’s why I’m who I am today and why my career is what it is – Misty Copeland
With such emotional imbalance, you’re left to wonder that there must be something wrong with you. In the ability to regulate your emotions, you assume you’re an imbecile worthy of all neglect. You feel the need to fix the broken part of “YOU” that you think your life solely depends on and can’t live without.
You feel all the urgency to mend your anger, anxiety, and depression and cure your inner sadness. You’re amazed at how low you feel and can’t explain what’s dragging you to the ground.
You’re hurt because all you know is pain and what you feel is bitterness and hurt, that can take many years, and a lot of patience for you to explore and clarify your inner self that the hurt is undeserved and there are a lot of things going on in an adult’s life that you’re entirely blameless and shouldn’t affect your life.
Sometimes you have seen your other parent humiliating the other, ignoring or hurting you, and you’re left to feel so in marriage or other relationships out there. And you find yourself creating no room to have one or be in any relationship, because of the eyes you see people and from the angle you view them from.
Once as a child your sense of identity is shattered, it takes years of hard work to rebuild those broken pieces and start trusting again.
Or if you’ve been subjected to seeing a specific parent endure or go through pains when responded with intense contempt by the other parent. You might have difficulty starting your own family with the fear of becoming just like your parent. And you don’t trust yourself to make your kid feel safe or even care about them.
Or all you know in life is abandonment, you’ll grow up feeling you don’t deserve to be loved. All you can think about is “why they left you”, and when you can’t understand the “why” you feel as though you don’t warrant the attention and the affection of others.
You go on to blame yourself for being the reason your parents abandoned you. As an adult, you feel you must convince people around you to be with you. You feel like you must find love then you chase after love (as though you know what it is ) anywhere just to find a sense of belonging. You feel like making people stay with you because that’s what you understand as Love.
The trauma can go on and on.
They are emotional wounds you’re enduring that make it easy to generalize others as the same. The self-defense, characters, and mentalities formed in response to our childhood experiences become the standard template we use to interpret anything or anyone.
We grow up to expect that everyone will turn out to become violent and turn on us just like the people we grew up with- hasty generalization.
It’s not that you don’t long for affection or desire to live a beautiful life and relationship, you just can’t afford any confrontation or the baggage that goes on in a raging relationship even when the root of your emotional imbalance has long disappeared. You can’t afford to tip your emotions or have to condole with your other emotional trauma.
Your emotions have resorted to different ways to cope and survive, whether is to detach or restrain, endure or fight back, withhold or vent it out. Just about anything to keep it alive and protect it from more pain.
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