Child Development
3 Stages of Healing Childhood Wounds
We all leave childhood with something, but our lives can lead us to healing.
Posted April 30, 2021 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Believe it or not, none of us had a perfect childhood. We all leave with something—emotional scars from memories we can’t shake, triggers that make us feel anxious and small or angry, events that hurt us and which we still as adults can’t quite make sense of to resolve. These emotional wounds, like physical ones, leave us sensitive to touch, whether they come from the comments and actions of others, or from our own thoughts and internal dialog.
Kids are wired to be resilient and as a child, you coped in some way. But your options were limited and usually narrow down to accommodating, walking on eggshells, and being good; withdrawing and shutting down; getting angry and rebelling; becoming self-sufficient and not trusting or leaning on anyone; being hypervigilant, always on-guard, and looking around corners. Some of us have a combination of a couple of these, Plan A and Plan B.
Adulthood provides you with the opportunity to heal these wounds. You are no longer a child, and you not only can have a wider view of the world and others but with a developed brain, one that is less emotionally driven, more rational. You now have more control, have more choices, including forming relationships with others who can give you what you need. Together, through these means, you can change your view of the world, yourself, others.
Easier said than done.
In my experience, the path to healing our childhood wounds is more often not a direct path. Our lives naturally guide us towards healing but we move through stages. Here are the 3 most common ones:
Stage 1: You continue doing what you do.
In this stage, you carry forward into your adult life what you learned as a child. Though you are in an intimate relationship with your partner who is less critical and more understanding than your parents, you still can find yourself walking on eggshells, or you still flare up and go into fight mode when threatened, you are still always anxious and obsessing about worst-case scenarios, you still pull back, shut down, and withdraw when stressed.
And these old ways work in the same way that they worked when you were a child. By accommodating your partner stops escalating; you feel a bit less overwhelmed if you expect that worst; if you get angry and push back, you feel a bit more empowered, and others (temporarily, at least) back down. But the effects are minimal; they have consequences. You are still suffering and are on guard. You are left with the same feelings of isolation, of you-against-the-world, of not trusting, of spending so much of your time and energy fending others off; you are still anxious.
Stage 2: You swing to the opposite pole.
Eventually, you realize that you are not living the life you imagined. You are burned out or fed up with always giving in, or always worrying, or tired of always fighting the world. You decide to do it differently. So you move toward the other pole.
Instead of accommodating, you now get angry, dig in your heels, take strong stands and push back. Instead of always rebelling and getting angry, you now realize that others may back down but the problem is never solved, or your anger gets you into new trouble, and so you try to dispel your anger and be more agreeable. Instead of always feeling anxious you take medication to calm yourself down, or if you were withdrawing you push yourself to speak up. But your attempts are often sloppy and unproductive and you question what you did; you still wind up feeling a bit lost, or lonely, or misunderstood.
Stage 3: You reach a more compassionate middle ground.
But all this pushing or calming or stepping up were helpful in their own ways. While your breaking out of your childhood ways in whatever form they took may have left you with hindsight regrets about your reactions and behaviors, the breaking out in itself was important. You created a new sense of power, you learned, most importantly, that you could change yourself. Now you can take those lessons, see what worked and what didn’t, and modify your behavior.
Rather than being reactive, you now can be proactive. You’re not just angry but are more assured and assertive in a way that others can hear you better. You can get triggered but you know you are getting triggered and can slow your reactions down, make better choices, not over-react, not cut-and-run, not think in terms of black and white. You can now begin to seek out relationships that support you and can begin to cast aside the ones that don't, or even better, begin to change those that only perpetuate your wounds.
The underlying key here is that through your efforts, regardless of how effective or ineffective they may seem at any given time, they are effective because they create opportunities. As your present changes, so too does your past. You realize that your parents are not the black-and-white, one-dimensional figures that you always saw before, but were and are real people struggling with their own problems. Because you have had experience being an adult, you understand that life is more complicated than you previously believed. You begin to forgive them and others from your past. And you begin to forgive yourself.
So where are you in this healing process? What do you need to move to the next level? Sometimes it is therapy, sometimes it is medication to break the cycle or address the underlying driving problem, sometimes it is setting new goals and trying out new behaviors that you never considered before.
Your life can heal you. Knowing what your wounds are and how they affect your life is half the battle. The other half is up to you—to realize that you are not that child, that the past is the past, that the present and future are in your hands.
You can do this.
