How Childhood Trauma Manifests in Your Body
Image by Julien Tromeur/Unsplash
We increasingly understand both the extent and impact of childhood trauma. Once seen as a rare, extreme phenomenon, research now shows that trauma is widespread. And experiences not seen as traumatic can, in fact, be highly traumatic for sensitive, vulnerable little humans. To understand this, it’s helpful to think about the difference between an adult’s mind and body and a child’s. Events that might be painful, but manageable for adults can be highly stressful and overwhelming for kids.
For example, imagine the story of Casey, a seven-year-old living with her parents, who fight all the time. She finds their anger extremely scary and stressful, because it’s in her home, which is supposed to be the safest place on earth. It involves her caregivers – the people who are supposed to nurture and protect her. Casey is small and physically vulnerable, so is powerless to stop the fighting or intervene. And her mind, brain, nervous system and body are all highly sensitive and underdeveloped, so her ability to cope, to be strong and resilient, is far less than an adult’s.
As I often say to my clients, when you are small and scary things happen, what can you do? Your brain automatically goes into a fight-flight-freeze response, cycling between the options to see which is the best bet to keep you alive. Casey can’t fight, because she is small and the angry adults are bigger, stronger and louder than her. She can’t run, because this is her home and she has nowhere else to go. So she freezes, feeling overwhelmed with fear but unable to take decisive action, instead hiding under the kitchen table and covering her ears, feeling paralysed and unable to move until the yelling stops.
What trauma does to your body
This kind of scary, overwhelming experience was once seen as unpleasant, but not traumatic for kids. But we now understand that to be wrong – being around highly threatening experiences and environments like this, over and over throughout childhood, is what the founder of EMDR, Dr Francine Shapiro, calls ‘small t’ trauma. And we call the impact on poor little Casey’s mind-body system ‘traumatic stress’, which is why it’s so damaging to her still-growing body. Because, as we all know, repeated experiences of stress are not good for us.
A recent large-scale study into the way this kind of childhood trauma shows up in adults’ bodies really caught my eye. Marika Rostvall and colleagues, from the renowned Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, examined the data of one million Swedish women born between 1974 and 2001. This is a huge dataset, made possible by the Swedish register system, which tracks people’s health data from birth. Rostvall and her team made the shocking discovery that women who had experienced high levels of childhood adversity – such as having to move around a lot, having a parent with substance-abuse problems or being exposed to violence – were 60 per cent more likely to develop endometriosis as adults.
I just couldn’t believe this figure, so kept reading and re-reading the paper until it sunk in. This is an especially important finding because endometriosis is an extremely painful, and often debilitating condition affecting around one in 10 women worldwide. There is currently no cure and doctors are still not entirely sure what triggers it. This study suggests that chronic inflammation may be to blame – and inflammation is linked to stress, which brings us back to childhood trauma and the repeated experiences of stress, triggering an inflammatory response in the body.
If you are suffering from endometriosis or any other trauma-linked condition, I am truly sorry. I have written before about my own physical health issues, which clearly link back to my own childhood trauma. And I will explore this, as well as the most effective ways to recover from a traumatic childhood, in my self-help book due for publication in May 2026.
In the meantime, any of my breathwork, meditation or guided-imagery practices will help with your trauma healing. You can find them in my Insight Timer collection, my online store or now on my YouTube channel. Here is my Colour Breathing Technique, which is a highly effective antidote to stress.
I hope you enjoy it – and, if you did experience childhood trauma, that you find your own unique path to healing.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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