Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse

Shame and Childhood Abuse

Shame often accompanies and follows adult survivors of childhood abuse. Sometimes shame reveals itself as denial about what happened. We may minimize it and say it didn't effect us and that we came out untouched and unscathed. We may tell ourselves we're making a bigger deal out of it than necessary. If we do finally attempt therapy, we may feel even more shame wondering why we're not feeling better, why all the talking isn't making the pain go away.

Perhaps though, you have made some degree of progress through talk therapy and gained insight into why you do what you do and feel how you feel. Maybe you've even tried alternative approaches like meditation, yoga, and clean eating, and to some degree they have helped, at least with managing the emotions that were once unmanagable. However, you may still feel broken or permanently damaged wondering why with all the trying, you're still not "feeling" better.

As a child, if you were exposed to chronic stress, violence, and a lack of safety, or lacked a felt sense of love, it is the mammalian (limbic system) and reptilian (brain stem/amygdala) part of the brain where the trauma is stored. This is the area of the brain that's deeply connected to the body, where our autonomic nervous system resides. The autonomic nervous system is a bundle of various nerves that run through our head all the way through our body. Some of those nerves extend from the brain and some are in the spinal cord, which relays signals to and from the brain.

Why is the autonomic nervous system important?

If you've ever noticed, when you feel an emotional sensation, you may feel tightness in your jaw, your shoulders, your chest, diaphragm, stomach, or even hips. All of these areas are connected to that region of the brain I mentioned earlier, the brain stem and limbic system. Since traditional talk therapy doesn't access that area, the trauma stays stored and frozen in the body ready to be activated at any moments notice. And while you may attempt to "think" your way out of fear, numbness, loneliness, or sadness, it rarely if ever works, thus perpetuating the shame beliefs- that something is fundamentally broken and flawed about you when it's not, you just haven't had the right access to that area of the brain in order to begin thawing out the held trauma so that your body can restore back to a state of ease.

The way out then, is to access the areas of the brain responsible for the nervous system. How can that be done? By newer approaches such as brainspotting. This form of therapy is an incredibly promising approaches to healing and releasing the trauma stored in the deep midbrain.