The truth is that we have all experienced some form of childhood trauma. The reason is that our parents are human and therefore flawed. They do their best with the knowledge they have at the time, but since they aren’t perfect, parents make decisions that damage us in one way or another. Often our parents aren’t very self-aware and they tend to pass on their childhood trauma wounds to their children as well, because even their parents fall into the same rule regarding imperfect parenting, their parent’s parents and so on. With this being said, there are different degrees and ways in which a person experiences childhood trauma, but nobody is exempt from it. I will go through a couple of common scenarios that I have found among my clients and my own experiences:
Scenario 1: Parents who spent a lot of their time working
The trauma: Children of these kinds of parents will often feel rejected, neglected and not properly seen/heard. They may feel like an inconvenience or a burden and often feel that other things are more important than them.
In this scenario, some parents are trying to provide for their families. They aren’t intentionally trying to harm their child. They are thinking about their child’s future and providing acts of service to be able to afford their child’s extracurricular activities, etc. However important it is to provide for your family, it’s even more important to be sure that you’re tending to your child’s other very important needs such as quality time, emotional support and words of affirmation.
Scenario 2: Parents who constantly criticize their child
The Trauma: Children with parents who overly criticize them end up having very low self-esteem. They tend to grow up feeling that there’s something wrong with them and gain patterns of people-pleasing. While some of these people may have been motivated to do better, they become over-achievers and often never feel like what they’re doing or who they are is ever enough.
In this scenario, some parents may have the intention of motivating their child to do well, while others are just very hard on themselves and therefore their children as well. These parents don’t realize how damaging being critical of your child is. While it’s important to give constructive criticism, it’s more important to provide positive reinforcement and to use words of affirmation to appreciate your child for the person they are and that they are more than enough.
With those common examples, it’s quite easy to see how our parents can unintentionally damage us or create negative beliefs about ourselves. If this resonates with you and you’re looking to heal, I would love to work with you. Using EMDR, we can remember, desensitize and reprocess the childhood trauma you have experienced and reprogram the negative beliefs you have about yourself associated.