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Childhood Trauma Makes it Hard to Form Connections

Your childhood brain may have been wired for survival and not connection with others

There are many factors that determine how deep trauma wounds us. Among them are the age when the trauma was experienced, and the frequency. Children are less resilient than adults and when they experience trauma or a series of traumatic events in their young age, it can have debilitating effects on them not just in their childhood, but throughout their lives.

During childhood, their brain cells are firing up daily and forming connections to lay the pathways for thoughts and behavior patterns in adulthood. Their worldview is also being shaped by differences between safety, threat, and danger to life that are reinforced over time. How they view themselves is also developed as well as their resilience. This is when they learn to connect with others.

Babies and young children may not have the full vocabulary to communicate yet, but still do enough communication to keep them alive and connected to others. Crying to be fed, burped or to have diapers changed, cooing and smiling when stimulated — they want to feel safe and connected. When their requests to connect are met, they feel regulated by their carers and this is also how they learn to regulate ourselves — by co-regulation.

Face to face interactions, vocalizations, play, gestures of parents and siblings to children are how they co-regulate and learn safety, danger and threat. Play like “Peek-a-boo” is a perfect illustration of how babies understand safety. The trust is ruptured when the face is covered and repaired as the entertainer reveals themselves, over and over again.

Having experienced numerous instances of co-regulation, babies and children will be able to regulate others and themselves. This is how they build the resilience that helps them face adversity in their adulthood, and their self-esteem.

Photo by Rui Xu on Unsplash

In the absence of these interactions, there will be no development of an appropriate safety/threat system and co-regulation abilities.

When there is no co-regulation, children will learn to regulate themselves without regulating with others first. This type of regulation is not as a result of safety but because of a need to survive. As they regulate to survive, their brains will develop to view being in survival mode as normal.

At all times they’re constantly on edge — even when they aren’t in an actual crisis situation. This can lead to a whole host of problems down the line, including anxiety and depression. In previous articles, I write about how the brain is wired based on our experiences and living in sympathetic activation — anxiety.

A “mentally stable” and resilient person is a well-regulated person. A well-regulated person is able to feel safe and connected with others. This person has a capacity for friendship and connection with others — some resources necessary for well-being.

A person who is not well regulated will not be able to find joy in relationships. They cannot feel safe to develop and nurture relationships with others, because of being always in survival mode. Such a person self regulates not for connection, but for survival — an example is an over worker, who never receives nourishment or joy from their jobs and their relationships often suffer as a result of that.


The occurrence of trauma in a person under the age of 18 has been termed as an Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). Children who have these adverse experiences are more likely to be violent and victimized adults. It also may also have long-term negative effects on health.

Some ACEs are:
• The experience of violence, abuse and neglect
• Being witnesses to violence in the family or community
• Attempted suicide or death by suicide of a family member

A child being scared of getting hit or getting hurt means that their brains will be rewired to view the world as a dangerous place. Their bodies become wired to be prepared to be hit, neglected, abused and making them susceptible to long term biological effects — immune system malfunctioning, inability to pay attention and concentrate, being hyper-alert to what is going on and constantly waiting for danger.

The child cannot play, explore or form relationships because they are always alert for danger. Their worldview becomes negative.

Children have overwhelming feelings of wanting to be taken care of and when they do not get that, they learn to numb themselves and their feelings. They grow up and find other ways to “stuff their feelings” with an increase in behavioral problems, drug taking and alcoholism . There is a huge correlation between substance use and child abuse. Other children stuff their feelings by being exceptionally good in school as over-achievers.

I’d like you to imagine this child who has learned to stuff their feelings as an adult. It will be very hard to open up with other people when you have grown up with the expectation that you will get hurt. You cannot feel safe with others and your relationship with them is marked by withdrawal, violence and an inability to be there for each other.

It is worrying that this trauma could become inter-generational. They may bring dysfunction to the lives of their own children because they are vulnerable to repeating the patterns they learned in their childhood. This will probably continue until the cycle is broken.

Inter-generational trauma is an issue of brain development. Individuals have what is known as learned helplessness and hopelessness because of the unending adverse experiences in their lives. They will stop trying to improve their situations even when there are possible alternatives. Some researchers have described the trauma as becoming embedded on a genetic level when it passes through many generations.

However, there is hope, the cycle can be broken and it starts with something as simple as the awareness of its occurrence within ourselves and our communities.

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