Key Takeaways
- Childhood trauma in adults can negatively impact relationships, leading to unhealthy attachments, poor communication, and control issues.
- Untreated childhood trauma can eventually get passed on to future children and grandchildren in the form of generational trauma.
- Your own lingering childhood trauma or generational trauma can drive you to eventually struggle with drug or alcohol addiction.
- Trauma-focused treatment programs at Sana at Stowe can help you finally break the cycle of trauma and achieve lasting recovery from your addiction.
The effects of childhood trauma in your life can endure for decades and even generations. On the other hand, you may even be the recipient of inherited generational trauma as a result of childhood trauma experienced by your parents or grandparents. Though its associated events may have happened decades ago, childhood trauma can still create a long-lasting ripple effect in your life and the lives of others.
Lingering childhood trauma can cause relationship issues as an adult, generational trauma in your descendants, personal addiction struggles, and more if left untreated. But with the right help, you can break the cycle of trauma and find real, lasting recovery. That’s why we prioritize trauma-focused care at Sana at Stowe, a holistic, evidence-based addiction treatment center in the Green Mountains of Stowe, Vermont.
How Childhood Trauma Affects Relationships
Once you’ve experienced childhood trauma from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), your brain’s development and your body’s stress response can actually change. As a result, your long-term physical and mental health can be negatively impacted. That means you can continue to experience symptoms of childhood trauma as an adult.
Lingering childhood trauma in adults looks like many things, including ongoing relationship struggles. But how does childhood trauma affect relationships? Often it interferes with your ability to relate to people in a healthy way, communicate well, and trust others in general:
Unhealthy Attachments
The long-term impact of childhood trauma can eventually cause attachment disorder in adults. An attachment style defines how you understand the world around you and how you relate to others. Consequently, childhood trauma and relationships intertwine when you’re exposed to ACEs. This drives you to adopt unhealthy attachments in childhood due to your trauma. And many times these will continue on as an adult, such as:
- Dismissive-avoidant: You become emotionally unavailable with others due to your negative views of other people in general, leading you to avoid closeness with others
- Anxious-preoccupied: Your low self-esteem drives you to seek constant validation from others. At the same time, you’re always worrying about the intentions of others, fearing that they may abandon you
- Anxious-avoidant: Also referred to as fearful-avoidant attachment, you fear that your partner or friends will withdraw from you, causing struggles with maintaining close intimacy with others
Poor Communication
You often learn how to communicate and interact with others as a kid based on what your parents demonstrated at home. However, if ongoing ACEs occurred in the home, the ensuing childhood trauma can affect your relationships by diminishing your ability to communicate well.
As an adult, you may continue the cycle of passive aggressiveness, yelling, or other harmful communication patterns you experienced as a child in the home. In addition, it can be difficult for you to talk about emotionally complicated subjects or express your feelings to others because this was never modeled to you growing up. You may even continue to pass these patterns onto your children in the form of generational trauma.
Control and Trust Issues
On top of the issues above, you may become overly controlling in your relationships, too. ACEs can make you as a child feel out of control or lacking in the security you need to control your environment. This can lead to overcorrection as an adult, driven by the urge to always be in charge in a relationship.
Not only does your drive to be in charge create difficulty building healthy friendships, but you also may attempt to control your romantic partner as well. In addition, you may have a hard time trusting your partner, friends, or other relationships.
Further Fallout: Generational Trauma
While it may be hard to believe that trauma from your childhood can cause so many challenges in adulthood, the effects don’t stop there. The ripples may continue in the form of generational trauma, negatively impacting your children, grandchildren, and other descendants.
What is Generational Trauma?
According to the Cleveland Clinic, generational trauma (also known as intergenerational trauma or transgenerational trauma) refers to the passing down of overwhelmingly negative, traumatic experiences to new generations in the family. Think family baggage. Emotional burdens. Harmful tendencies. The previous generation’s lasting struggles with childhood trauma become hardwired into their kids and grandkids.
If generational trauma occurs in the next generation, it can often lead to a number of physical, mental, relational, and economic challenges, including:
- Interpersonal violence and abuse
- Substance abuse
- Anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions
- Financial strain
- Chronic disease
- Problematic relationships
Biologically, trauma can even change the way your genes are expressed. Called epigenetics, this process can also be a fallout consequence of generational trauma. Though your descendants haven’t experienced the source trauma themselves, they still can inherit the same gene expressions or responses.
Addiction: A Long-Term Consequence of Childhood Trauma and Generational Trauma
Sadly, one of the main long-term consequences of lingering childhood trauma is addiction. ACEs can make it challenging for you to regulate difficult emotions and stress, so you naturally can seek out feel-good experiences to cope.
As you get older, these coping mechanisms can get unhealthy, such as drugs or alcohol. And the continued struggles associated with childhood trauma in adults don’t help, either. By regularly using these substances as coping mechanisms, you can eventually develop an addiction.
Those impacted by generational trauma can struggle with substance abuse and addiction, too. There’s a good chance they’ve taken on unhealthy patterns from their parents or grandparents. You might be able to relate to this, yourself. Perhaps you’ve seen previous generations in your family use substances to cope with challenging situations or negative feelings. You may have even developed mental health issues of your own as a result of the environment you were raised in (and even experienced your own ACES trauma at home growing up).
Before long, you may be continuing the family tradition of drug or alcohol addiction, yourself. Just like your parents, grandparents, and so on. And the impact of generational trauma continues. If you don’t take steps to heal, there’s a good chance you’ll pass along that generational trauma onto your own children and grandchildren, too.
The Cycle Ends Here: Trauma-Focused Addiction Treatment at Sana at Stowe
If you feel like you’ve been in an ongoing cycle of addiction and trauma—whether from your own unresolved childhood trauma or generational trauma in your family—we can help. At Sana at Stowe, we address trauma and addiction recovery together.
Breaking generational trauma or unresolved childhood trauma requires a trauma-focused (or trauma-informed) approach to treatment. Our addiction treatment programs adopt a relational-cultural model of viewing and addressing trauma. That means we see trauma as happening on an individual and social level. Consequently, our treatment team comes alongside you in the treatment process as a partner, not a distant practitioner lording power over you.
Offering a full continuum of care, we treat trauma utilizing the principles of polyvagal theory. As a result, we focus on restoring your safety, connection, and dignity in the treatment process. By doing so, you can reclaim your inherent worth and recover your awareness—which empowers you to heal from your trauma.
By overcoming trauma—your addiction’s root cause—you can then take steps to achieve true, lasting recovery from drugs, alcohol, or other substances. This means receiving whole-person healing in your mind, body, and spirit, not just alleviating symptoms or cravings. We even empower you to learn healthier coping mechanisms and self-care practices so you can maintain healthy overall wellness long after your treatment ends. To learn more, call our team today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are adverse childhood experiences (ACES)?
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), ACEs are characterized by stressful or traumatic events occurring during your first 18 years of life that disrupt the promotion of safe, stable, and nurturing family relationships. The APA goes on to say that every 2 out of 3 children will experience one or more traumatic events before age 16, so a majority of Americans will have at least one or more ACEs. Common ACEs that you can experience include:
- Divorce
- Having a parent in jail or prison
- Emotional or physical neglect
- Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse
- Substance use in the home
- Living with someone with a mental illness
How do I know if I have an addiction?
You may have an addiction if you’re experiencing the following addiction symptoms:
- Having intense urges for a substance
- Gradually needing more of the substance to get the same effect
- Failing to meet family obligations and work responsibilities because of substance use
- Avoiding social occasions or skipping recreational activities
- Experiencing withdrawal when you try to stop substance use
- Using the substance despite the problems it’s causing in your life and relationships
- Driving or taking other risks, such as having unprotected sex, while under the influence of the substance
SOURCE: Brown University
