A new study reveals that childhood emotional trauma increases social avoidance and distress in adolescents, but resilience can help mitigate these effects.
https://neurosciencenews.com/childhood-trauma-social-distress-29462/
I know it can be tempting to make light of emotional trauma when compared to childhood physical and sexual abuse, but the damage done is real. What this study shows us is how emotional trauma in childhood teaches children to be small in the world. They avoid social situations, become anxious around people, and hide from further emotional hurt.
The other important factor in whether they can overcome this is resilience:
Importantly, psychological resilience — the ability to adapt and recover from adversity — acted as a mediator, reducing the link between trauma and social struggles. In other words, more resilient students were better able to cope socially despite earlier trauma.
However, the study also revealed a moderating factor: being a “left-behind” child, meaning having parents who work away from home for extended periods. For these students, resilience was less effective in mitigating the impact of trauma on social distress.
It’s hard to learn to trust people when you don’t have parents who are involved in your life. I know this is true about abuse, and I can only assume it is true for all kinds of childhood trauma. This study shows that leaving kids to fend for themselves is not a solution to avoid the effects later in life.
I had to learn resiliency later in life. I defined it as the knowledge that even if something didn’t go well, if I screwed up at work, did something embarrassing, or said something dumb, that I would still be OK. That is what gave me the confidence to socially engage, rather than the avoidance I had grown accustomed to. Had I felt safe enough as a child, I might have learned that I would be OK at a younger age. That would have made a world of difference in my early adult years, which were a mess when it came to mental health.
I didn’t feel safe as a child. I didn’t grow up knowing that I would be OK even if something bad happened. Bad things happened, and I wasn’t OK because I was alone with them. There was no safe place. I had to learn how to be my safe place. That’s what those kids who struggle with distress and social avoidance are trying to do. Having safety as a child would go a long way to help.