22 Signs of Repressed Childhood Trauma in Adults

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Getting Help as a Grown Up Struggling to Cope with Trauma

When you have repressed childhood trauma, you generally have no recollection of the trauma resulting in the struggles you are having in life. Emotional problems, memory loss, and difficulty regulating emotions are just a few of the signs of repressed childhood trauma in adults.

Even if you don’t remember experiencing childhood trauma, these signs might indicate that your brain has blocked out parts of your childhood. The symptoms that result from repressed childhood memories are hard to live with and can make having healthy relationships difficult.

All of this may sound familiar if you or a loved one are struggling with trauma. But there is hope to be found with effective trauma treatment at Catalina.

Without a concrete recollection, it’s very hard to identify repressed trauma- unless you know what to look for. In this article, we’ll talk more about what repressed childhood trauma is, the symptoms that it can cause, and the proven options for treatment at Catalina Behavioral Health.

What is Repressed Childhood Trauma?

Repressed childhood trauma (also called dissociative amnesia) happens when the brain cannot remember parts of your childhood. This is a defense mechanism that protects the brain from reliving that experience. Unfortunately, even when these memories are repressed, it can result in symptoms that are hard to live with.

Sadly, childhood trauma is more common than you may think.

Statistics of a national survey of 12-17-year-olds conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration showed that 39% of children experienced violence, 17% experienced physical assault, and 9% experienced sexual abuse.

What Types of Traumatic Memories Might Be Repressed?

Not all adverse childhood experiences are the same. Any time that a child or adolescent faces an event that causes intense fear or makes it hard to cope, there is a risk of childhood traumatic stress.

Here are some examples of events that might cause trauma:

• Parental neglect or abandonment
• Witnessing intimate partner violence
• Psychological or emotional abuse
• Physical or sexual abuse
• A serious accident or life-threatening illness
• Losing a loved one violently or suddenly
• World events like terrorism or natural disasters
• Violence in the community or school
• War or refugee experiences
• Parental deployment, injury, or loss
• Commercial sexual exploitation

Early childhood trauma from events like these can alter the developing brain. Keep reading to learn about the signs of repressed childhood trauma in adults, and take our childhood trauma self-assessment here. If you struggle with symptoms like these, reach out to our team at Catalina today.

Our accredited facility offers various therapies proven effective at treating repressed childhood trauma so that you no longer have to live with the past.

22 Signs of Repressed Childhood Trauma in Adults

Even if you cannot remember the trauma that you experienced as a child, there are likely signs of repressed memories that you can identify. Let’s take a look.

1. Triggers and Repressed Memories

When an individual with repressed childhood trauma is triggered, they may or may not experience flashback symptoms related to the memory. While this can include flashes of the actual trauma, it’s also possible to experience the same feelings that you had when the trauma occurred.

Individuals may also experience high anxiety or panic attacks, strong negative emotions including anger, shame, disgust, or grief, and feelings of reliving the trauma.

2. Increased Risk of Mental Health Problems and Physical Illness

When you have an intake for mental health issues, it’s not uncommon to be asked questions about your childhood or any traumatic events you may have experienced. This is because childhood trauma is a major risk factor for the development of several severe issues later in life.

Mental health conditions also take a toll on the body physically. Survivors of childhood trauma often have lowered immunity and a greater chance of developing chronic health conditions including autoimmune disorders, heart disease, and diabetes.

3. Not Remembering Large Chunks of Childhood

Typically, children start forming memories once they reach the age of 3. In individuals with repressed childhood trauma, however, large chunks of time may be missing. You may be missing weeks, months, or years of your childhood.

Dissociative amnesia specifically is believed to affect survivors of sexual abuse or incest. It is also more likely to affect adults whose childhood trauma began at a younger age.

4. False Memories

Trauma survivors may have memories of events that never actually happened. This false recollection of events may seem like a lie but the memory is very vivid.

False memories may be caused by suggestive therapies like hypnosis. Another theory is that the memories are formed as the brain tries to fill in the blank spots caused by dissociative amnesia before treatment with EMDR can help with trauma processing.

5. Feeling Overwhelmed by Stress

Repressed traumatic memories often rewire the brain. According to traumatic stress studies, traumatic experiences from childhood specifically affect the emotional brain in areas related to fear, stress, and emotional regulation.

Chronic stress happens when normal stress builds over time. Even in normal stressful situations, this can result in mood swings, strong unexplained reactions, and overwhelming chronic stress.

6. Low Self-Esteem

It’s not uncommon for individuals suffering from child sexual abuse or childhood abuse to blame themselves for what happened. Even being the child in the situation, unresolved trauma leads to subconscious guilt and shame. Characteristics of low self-esteem include:

• Excessive need for external validation, which can result in promiscuity
• Troubles setting boundaries or standing up for yourself
• Intense emotions regarding inadequacy or feelings of shame
• An inability to accept flaws and a need for perfectionism
• Constant negative self-talk and criticism
• Making poor life choices

Low self-worth often manifests deep in the brain. As these negative habits are something learned in childhood, those with low self-esteem often need to work with a mental health professional to relearn thought patterns and make them more positive than negative.

7. Constantly Seeking Validation

Often, those who go through emotional, sexual, or physical abuse from their caretaker seek validation even as an adult. They may form dysfunctional relationships with partners because of this. These individuals may also put their wants and needs aside to gain external validation from the people around them.

8. Self-Overestimation

On the opposite end of the spectrum, childhood trauma in adults may present as narcissism, psychopathy, and sociopathy. This happens from being over-confident and believing that the rules do not apply to you.

This classification of trauma symptoms results in behaviors like lying, manipulation, projection, black-or-white thinking, and inconsistencies. It may also result in legal problems.

9. Trust Issues

Often, trust issues created by long-forgotten trauma greatly impact a person’s life. When children are betrayed, neglected, abandoned, or abused as children, they subconsciously believe it will happen again in adulthood.

As a result, they may push people away. It can also be hard to maintain healthy adult relationships and/or result in enmeshed family dynamics.

10. Anxiety and Other Mental Illness

Those who undergo a traumatic experience at a young age experience changes in the brain. They learn from an early age that they are not protected and there is danger in their environment. These early beliefs lead to frequent anxiety symptoms like rapid heartbeat, racing thoughts, irregular breathing, sweating, and more.

Childhood trauma can also result in other mental conditions as well, including PTSD, C-PTSD, and depression. There is also an increased risk of suicide and suicidal ideation.

11. Black or White Thinking

With black-or-white thinking, adults with repressed childhood trauma label things as all “good” or all “bad”. This type of cognitive distortion makes it hard to think rationally.

As a result, individuals struggling with black-or-white thinking may have symptoms like problems regulating emotions, impulsivity, overreactions, mood swings, and unhealthy relationships.

12. Avoidant Behaviors

Whether consciously or unconsciously, it’s not uncommon for survivors of physical abuse or other traumatic experiences to avoid people, places, and things that remind them of the traumatic event.

For example, they may avoid family members, especially if that person reminds them of the abuse. They also may not talk about certain periods of their childhood and may avoid places like their hometown or childhood home.

13. Hypervigilance

Like with anxiety, unhealed trauma survivors feel like they must constantly be on alert. Often, this is caused by feeling the need to prevent the trauma from happening again. This state of hypervigilance often continues until the trauma is revisited and the feelings and thoughts associated with that trauma are dealt with.

14. Anger

Being angry is normal, especially when responding by going for a walk, venting to a friend, or in other healthy ways. However, some individuals experience intense mood swings and angry outbursts in interpersonal relationships, even over small things.

If anger is affecting your interpersonal relationships, it’s best to seek treatment with effective exposure therapy or another therapy that is going to help you heal.

15. Childish Reactions

Individuals experiencing childhood trauma undergo experiences that change their prefrontal cortex during development. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for things like impulse control and emotional regulation.

There is also heightened activity in the amygdala, which is the emotional support of the brain. When undergoing severe stress, it’s not uncommon for individuals who have undergone trauma to respond childishly because the emotional part of the brain is over-active and the rational part of the brain is under-active.

16. Difficulty Managing Adult Relationships

In individuals with unresolved trauma from childhood, it’s common to see an insecure attachment style that results from abuse, neglect, or inconsistency from parents or caregivers. This inconsistency in early childhood makes it hard for these individuals to form healthy relationships as adults.

Subconsciously, they believe that they will be abandoned or neglected again. This results in an insecure attachment style, trust issues, abandonment issues, and controlling tendencies.

17. Revictimization

Childhood trauma increases the risk that you’ll choose partners and friends that repeat the pattern of abuse in some way. Individuals who revictimize themselves may:

• Choose friends or partners that are abusive, neglectful, or dysfunctional
• Act abusively themselves
• Harm people around them
• Fail to reach goals because of sabotaging and self-destructive
• Neglect emotional or physical needs
• Engage in unhealthy sexual behaviors that mimic sexual violence from the past

Often, this revictimization is something that happens on a subconscious level. Cognitive processing therapies are the most effective way to address and challenge these patterns to form healthier, more wholesome relationships.

18. Difficulties Concentrating

Even when you don’t make a conscious mental effort to repress trauma, there is a certain amount of mental energy your brain can focus on. With this focus on repressing past trauma, trauma survivors might be disorganized, distracted, and forgetful.

This is sometimes misdiagnosed as ADD or ADHD, rather than being recognized as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

19. Extreme Fatigue

Repressed childhood trauma has a way of taking a mental and physical toll on the body. The emotional energy from things like being in a constant state of hyper-vigilance and repressing childhood memories can be exhausting. Furthermore, some people experience nightmares, night terrors, insomnia, and other sleep problems that also contribute to fatigue.

20. Increased Risk of Addiction or Substance Abuse

Even when you repress memories of traumatic events, the body remembers what the mind does not. It’s not uncommon for this trauma in adults to result in substance abuse or addiction.

While unhealthy habits like smoking, drinking, or using illegal drugs are most common, it’s also possible to be addicted to gambling, sex, eating, or even shopping.

21. Chronic Pain

There are persistent and problematic claims that those who undergo a traumatic experience in childhood also take a toll on their physical health. It does not matter how physicians classify repressed memories or the traumatic event, studies show there is a 45% greater risk of chronic pain following childhood trauma.

22. Disocciative Episodes

Dissociative episodes are periods where a person loses touch with reality, most likely during a time of extreme stress. These episodes are signs of repressed childhood trauma and cause symptoms like:

• Entering a dream-like state
• Losing sense of reality
• Out-of-body experiences
• Feeling numb or emotionally detached from feelings
• Unintentionally zoning out
• Memory loss from trauma regarding people, places, and events during an episode

Often, those who have experienced childhood trauma begin detaching from reality in childhood. It’s a way to disconnect themselves from the traumatic event they are experiencing.

How is Unresolved Childhood Trauma Treated?

There are several approaches that may be used to treat these signs of repressed childhood trauma in adults. Sometimes, medication may be recommended to manage depression, anxiety, insomnia, and other physical symptoms.

Various therapies may also be used to treat unresolved childhood trauma in adults, including:

Prolonged exposure therapy– During prolonged exposure therapy, clients are encouraged to slowly and consciously approach traumatic memories and the resulting thoughts and emotions. According to psychological science research, this gradual approach teaches the mind that memories are not dangerous and do not need to be repressed.

Cognitive processing therapy– Like cognitive behavioral therapy used to treat certain mental health disorders, cognitive processing therapy focuses on challenging unhelpful thinking patterns related to traumatic experiences. As you challenge beliefs about yourself, others, and the world, it is an opportunity to change your thought patterns and heal.

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)– During EMDR, clients focus on recovered memories while experiencing stimulation at the same time, typically eye movements. The goal of this short term therapy for childhood trauma and other precipitants to PTSD is to reduce repressed emotions and the vividness of the memories.

If you believe you’ve experienced childhood trauma, call our team at Catalina to discuss these and other trauma treatment options for repressed childhood memories today. We can work together to help you heal from childhood trauma caused by adverse childhood experiences.

As you go through this process, it’s important to remember to be kind to yourself. Many of the effects of physical, sexual, mental, and emotional abuse are hard to live with. Be patient and trust the process. Unresolved childhood trauma in adults is rooted deep in the brain and learning new thought patterns, behaviors, and habits is going to take work.

Start Healing from Repressed Childhood Trauma at Catalina

If you identify with many of these signs of repressed childhood trauma in adults, give our team at Catalina a call. Because of the way that trauma survivors repress traumatic memories, you may not even realize you’ve undergone a traumatic experience. What you will notice though is all the negative ways that these signs of repressed trauma have impacted your life.

At Catalina Behavioral Health, you’ll be able to work with one of the trained professionals on our team to treat PTSD and other mental health conditions and identify the most effective therapies and treatments for your trauma. It’s never too late to take back control of your life. Pick up the phone and start the healing process today!