My wife had the opportunity to attend some training on being trauma-informed at the university where she works. As part of the training, they shared this video about the effects trauma can have on the brain. She shared it with me and now I’m sharing it with you because I think it’s really important to understand this if you’ve experienced trauma or know someone who has. (Which is really just another way of saying, everyone.)
here’s a pretty good selection, take a look if you think it might help. I definitely agree that, especially with younger children, they won’t have the words to talk about feeling anxiety, or to understand what is normal nervousness versus life-altering levels of anxiety. As a parent, it can be difficult to know. Maybe, one of these books might help.
What books have you read about anxiety that you would recommend?
This is what matters. Having people around you with the knowledge and willingness to support you. Far too many survivors, youth and adults, have never had that. We’ve failed them as a society that values our own discomfort with the topic over supporting people we claim to care about.
Until we stop doing that and start connecting with anyone who has experienced childhood trauma, we’ll continue to see all of the negative effects writ large.
If you’ve read much of anything around here, then I’m sure you’ll find it no surprise that I agree 100% with this: The hardest part of recovering from a toxic childhood isn’t just coping with the fact that your emotional needs weren’t met or that you were actively neglected or even marginalized, dismissed, or made…
It’s true, there are people all around you right now who have experienced horrific traumas in their lives, and the reason you don’t know is that they don’t feel safe talking about it. They’ve lived years, even decades, with this truth, only to be met with invalidating remarks like “Why can’t you just let it go?” or “you should be over that by now”, “it wasn’t that bad”, etc.
When your trauma, the thing you are struggling to overcome, is met with that kind of response you aren’t going to rush out to talk about it, which is a shame because talking about it to people who can be validating to us is one of the best ways to actually heal from it and have it no longer dominate our daily lives.
