Discussing Childhood Trauma and Its Adult Effects

Theo Vonn and Tim Fletcher Tackle a Difficult Topic

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I listened to a great podcast over the weekend between an incredibly vulnerable Theo Vonn (Vonn is an eccentric standup comedian with surprising depth who has also interviewed Jordan Peterson) and Tim Fletcher, founder and president of RE/ACT (Recovery Education for Addictions and Complex Trauma).

I’ll drop the video here at the top for those who just want to dig in, and add my own commentary below.

A few years back, when a therapist I was seeing at the time told me he believed I had Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), I chafed at the assertion.

I thought PTSD was only for people who had survived something terrible, like the horrors of war. Yes, I had a bunch of issues from my childhood, but I didn’t like the idea of being classed as having the same kind of psychological damage as combat veterans. I didn’t feel that I deserved to claim such a thing.

But over the intervening years, I’ve done a bunch of research on the topic of Complex Trauma. Complex Trauma is when a person endures ongoing, repeated traumatizing events; Simple Trauma is when someone experiences a singular event, like a mass shooting, or a terrible vehicle accident, or an assault, etc.

CPTSD is commonly associated with trauma inflicted by a parent or caregiver. Children who grow up in environments of abuse (whether emotional, physical, or sexual) or neglect commonly manifest symptoms of CPTSD. Symptoms which include:

• Depression, anxiety, and anger issues

• Self-harm

• People Pleasing

• Over-working (even to the point of total burnout)

• Relationship Issues

• Codependency

• Perfectionism

• Fear of Commitment/Intimacy

• Continuing the cycle of abuse

• Addictions

The last one, addictions, has a crazy statistic associated with it. Fletcher, who has long worked with addiction recovery, estimates that 95% of addicts have complex trauma as the root cause of their addiction. The distorted perceptions of self, the dysregulated emotions, the feelings of worthlessness, the learned behaviors of putting others’ needs and emotions before one’s own, etc., all contribute to the felt need for numbing or self-soothing behaviors. Alcohol. Drugs. Sex. Pornography. Eating disorders.

Further, the more points a person scores on the 10-point “ACEs” quiz on traumatic childhood experiences, the more likely they are to suffer physical health consequences later in life. Things like cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and other stress-related ailments.

A great deal of this conversation felt like it was discussing the details of my own life. It’s been really hard to come to terms with this. I never thought my family was perfect. I knew some things that happened growing up were not ok, that there was too much anger and guilt and negativity and overbearing religiosity in my home, and that I repeated behaviors in my own marriage and parenting that I wish I could have left behind. But I guess I just thought that everyone has problems, and I shouldn’t expect things to be different. “Life isn’t fair” was an oft-repeated axiom in my childhood home, after all.

But I have enough self and other-destructive behaviors I haven’t mastered that I finally had to look it in the face. I kept hurting the people I loved and damaging my relationships, and I wanted to stop. I had a huge epiphany four years ago that I had to change, but even once I started making big strides on things like controlling my anger, there were core issues that were simply not being properly addressed, and problems would re-occur.

For example, Fletcher talks about the development of the limbic system, which is known as the “emotional brain.” It develops in early childhood, and has a key role in emotional responses and behaviors that provide immediate gratification. But when a child lives in constant fight or flight because of a constantly angry or abusive parent, or because of neglect, the limbic system becomes hyperactive, and it creates an associated tendency for self-soothing, instant-gratification-seeking behavior. It can override the normal development of the cortex, which is responsible for logical thinking and good judgment. This means that a person with complex trauma can be perfectly normal most of the time, but when they are triggered by something that relates to their trauma — often, this is shame, since shame is one of the deep-seated causes of trauma — they can revert to “child brain,” losing control of their emotions, becoming explosively angry, essentially throwing an adult tantrum.

I’ve struggled with this my entire adult life, and never understood why. It’s incredibly damaging to the people around me. After a blowup, it always feels like a kind of bad dream. “Did I really react like that? Why was I so upset? I feel so embarassed.” It’s the same kind of out of control behavior one sees in a small child who has no idea how to control his or her emotions.

In the podcast above, Fletcher talks a little about co-dependency, but he also has a series of full-length talks on that topic at his incredibly helpful YouTube Channel. His talks always begin with a psychology-only segment, then at the end, he adds a Christian perspective. I appreciate that he doesn’t mix the two, as I’ve often found (even when I was still a believer) that many of the books or talks that deal with marriage trouble or anger issues or other interpersonal topics are a mix of Protestant theology and psychology that can be difficult to untangle.

In the video below (not part of the podcast), he even mentions at the outset of the Christian portion of the talk that the religious worldview that teaches children to fear God because he’s always watching, and if they do something wrong he may just visit his wrath upon them, is absolutely a kind of spiritual abuse. I’ve cued the video to begin at that section (starts around 32:14 if it doesn’t work) but the whole thing is worth your time if co-dependancy is an issue you’re dealing with:

This message was a core component of my upbringing: “God is always watching you, and if you’re doing something bad, even if I don’t see it, he will. And it’s better to be punished by me than by God.” I cannot tell you how large a tree of fear grew from that little mustard seed planted in my brain at the earliest age I could understand what it meant. It is the reason my loss of faith, which was rooted in doubts and objections I had for much of my life, only manifested late in life when I was under so much stress that my ability to fear the consequences of leaving the Church was outweighed by an even stronger set of forces. I never allowed myself to entertain those doubts or questions, because God was always watching. So they festered and metastasized until my faith was terminal.

In a way, I think my reaction to the Church after losing my faith looks a lot like some of the symptoms of Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which is itself a reaction to complex trauma. That’s begun to calm down a bit for me now, but the anger and grief I felt at the beginning were overwhelming. The feeling that I had given the best years of my life for a lie, made critical decisions based on other people’s ideas of who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to do, and let myself be defined by beliefs, expectations, and desires that were imposed upon me rather than my own choices, wants, and needs was profound. I could not escape the indignation that I only had one life to live, that it was more than half way over, and I would never get the chance back to chart my own course in a way that aligned with who I really was, which might have alleviated a great deal of the emotional suffering that came from not being true to who I really was. Or even knowing who I really was in the first place.

Fletcher says, in fact, that people with complex trauma are often disconnected from themselves because they are constantly trying to adapt to and survive their traumatic environments. They become people pleasers, or wear “masks” to assuage the anger of those they fear, are driven by shame, and so forth. Because of this, they often have no idea who they really are. They have to act like someone else for so long to try to stay safe that when they actually become safe, they don’t know how to stop playing the role. They have to tell so many half-truths and lies to avoid getting screamed at or hurt, they lose the ability to even know if they’re being truly honest.

Add in the spiritual component where God is seemingly on the side of the abuser — the 4th Commandment is often invoked to this effect in abusive religious homes — and the fear that God will also punish them for failing to act the way they are expected to behave deepens this tendency.

Healing from all of this is possible, Fletcher says, but he warns that it takes a great deal of work. It requires re-processing of foundational traumas as an adult, “re-parenting” (finding people who can model healthy behaviors), and connection. It’s often difficult for people with complex trauma to connect with others, however. It requires vulnerability, which is often associated, by experience, with being hurt. That pattern of hurt from people who are supposed to be loving and safe creates fear, distrust, avoidance, isolation, etc. Complex trauma sufferers also tend to have a lot of shame and low-self worth, so connecting to others can feel brutally difficult, because the sufferer of CPTSD believes that if people know the “real” them, they will be rejected. They also often live in a state of hypervigilance — a perpetual hair-trigger fight or flight response — and they cannot stop scanning for threats, or even perceiving attacks even when the other person has no such intention. (As I’m writing this, it’s dawning on me that this is almost certainly why I live like an introvert even though my personality test ranks me as highly extroverted.)

I’ve really only scratched the surface of this excellent podcast, and this topic that is relevant to so many of us. If any of this sounds familiar to you, I hope you’ll make the time to check it out.

For me, at least, I think it could be an important step on the path to healing.