Is This About My Childhood? — Part Two

More on How Early Experiences Affect the Way We Feel, Think, and Relate to Others

There’s a good chance you’ve heard that your childhood matters to your mental wellbeing. But why and how it works is not something that we can easily point out.

Part one of this series explored how ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) connect to your adult mental health. We saw that so much of what happens to us tends to influence the way we are as adults. We also saw that there are several very impactful correlations.

For instance,

• Increased likelihood of adolescent dating violence (being physically harmed, or physically harming someone else, in a dating relationship)¹.
• Increased likelihood of adult sexual revictimization (being sexually assaulted or otherwise sexually victimized again later in life)².

We’ve talked about how much of an impact these can have, especially when we consider that a large majority of children grow up with more than one factor.

According to one study, 20% of children studied grow up with 3 or more risk factors³. As pointed out, the impact of such experiences in childhood rises cumulatively: “Multiple risk factor exposure is detrimental to children, and the more risk factors they are exposed to, the worse the outcome.”

This has large ramifications, far beyond those of just the therapy room. Consider the two points I’ve recapped above.

The first point is clearly showing how disheartening this correlation can be. The increased likelihood of committing violence has a sort of ripple effect that society has to bear. The second, revictimization, means that a person who experienced ACE is more like to experience more abuse (sexual or physical, in this case). This is a topic that can be explored in its own post, but it does often seem that trauma somehow “begets” more trauma. This is one way that this happens. The cycle of repeated abuse, revictimization, often begins in childhood.

But Wait, Something is Missing…

These studies created a new wave of investigation into the meaning of childhood experiences. But they’re not perfect.

Part of the problem with these studies, is that they tend to focus on relatively arbitrary categories of adverse experiences.

A 2013 article by researchers Evans, Li, and Whipple, talked about how the categories studies assign are equalized for mathematical reasons, and that “data on risk intensity are lost”³. In simpler terms, they are saying that we don’t know what’s really connected to what, we just have the overall trend, the average among many different factors. The details are taken out.

McLaughlin and Sheridan wrote about this, too, saying that the data we have is rather limited when we try to understand how childhood experiences affect development⁴. For instance, take a look at the following two histories:

1. physical abuse + sexual abuse + domestic violence
2. poverty + neglect + maternal depression

Within the ACE and risk factor research, we don’t differentiate between the two. They both count as a score of 3. But, clearly, these are very different developmental environments, and will likely influence the child’s life differently.

Adversity isn’t a Terminal Diagnosis

This post is meant to help you start to understand how the connection between our childhood experiences and current difficulties.

By writing this, however, I am not trying to communicate that we are all doomed if we have had any adversity in childhood.

Even for children who experienced adversity, the research tends to show optimistic results. For instance, one researcher writes that “mental health problems are not inevitable consequences of being maltreated” and that “access to socially supportive relationships can buffer individuals from the adverse effects of maltreatment.”⁵ This has been supported by research time and again^6,7,8.

Not only that, but research demonstrated very clearly that treatment is effective for adults who developed PTSD after childhood abuse⁹, for complex PTSD, including emotional dysregulation, negative beliefs about oneself, and relationship difficulties¹⁰, and even for people with long-standing and complicated trauma-related difficulties¹¹.

So, What Now…?

At this point, I hope I have established two things:

First, our childhood experiences can continue to affect our mental health, relationships, behaviours, and reactions well into adulthood.

Second, our patterns don’t appear out of nowhere. They develop in a specific context. Therefore, understanding how they came about helps us know what to do next.

A reaction can be unhelpful today and still make sense in the environment in which it developed. Understanding that context gives us a much clearer idea of what we are actually trying to change.

It helps us understand the uniqueness of our reactions, because change only works if we direct it at ourselves.

It also gives us a better explanation than deciding, “This is just who I am.” It’s quite the opposite of an excuse. It doesn’t us the right to act in harmful ways, but it does help us understand what we can do to start to break those patterns.

But there is still a very important question missing:

How?

How can criticism become shame?

How can neglect affect the way we connect with other people?

How does being ignored or overlooked as a child become intense anger when someone feels skipped over decades later?

This is what the next post will explore.

Rather than looking only at whether childhood affects adulthood, we will look at exactly how this happens.

We will explore some of the ways children learn from their environments, how the brain and body adapt to repeated experiences, and why reactions that once made sense can continue long after the original situation has changed.

Understanding where a pattern came from does not automatically change it. But it gives us a place to start.

And, of course, it’s much more useful than simply blaming ourselves for having it.

Give Me Something Worth Investigating

I keep a running list of mental-health topics to research and write about. If there is a question you think is worth investigating, send it to me.

You can reach me through LinkedIn, Facebook, or the Contact page on my website. I love hearing from you!

References

(1) Miller, E., Breslau, J., Chung, W.-J. J., Green, J. G., McLaughlin, K. A., & Kessler, R. C. (2011). Adverse childhood experiences and risk of physical violence in adolescent dating relationships. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 65(11), 1006–1013. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.2009.105429

(2) Ports, K. A., Ford, D. C., & Merrick, M. T. (2016). Adverse childhood experiences and sexual victimization in adulthood. Child Abuse & Neglect, 51, 313–322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.08.017

(3) Evans, G. W., Li, D., & Whipple, S. S. (2013). Cumulative risk and child development. Psychological Bulletin, 139(6), 1342–1396. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031808

(4) McLaughlin, K. A., & Sheridan, M. A. (2016). Beyond cumulative risk: A dimensional approach to childhood adversity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(4), 239–245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721416655883

(5) Jaffee, S. R. (2017). Child maltreatment and risk for psychopathology in childhood and adulthood. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 13, 525–551. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-032816-045005

(6) Collishaw, S., Pickles, A., Messer, J., Rutter, M., Shearer, C., & Maughan, B. (2007). Resilience to adult psychopathology following childhood maltreatment: Evidence from a community sample. Child Abuse & Neglect, 31(3), 211–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2007.02.004

(7) Powers, A., Ressler, K. J., & Bradley, R. G. (2009). The protective role of friendship on the effects of childhood abuse and depression. Depression and Anxiety, 26(1), 46–53. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.20534

(8) Schumm, J. A., Briggs-Phillips, M., & Hobfoll, S. E. (2006). Cumulative interpersonal traumas and social support as risk and resiliency factors in predicting PTSD and depression among inner-city women. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 19(6), 825–836. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.20159

(9) Ehring, T., Welboren, R., Morina, N., Wicherts, J. M., Freitag, J., & Emmelkamp, P. M. G. (2014). Meta-analysis of psychological treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder in adult survivors of childhood abuse. Clinical Psychology Review, 34(8), 645–657. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2014.10.004

(10) Karatzias, T., Murphy, P., Cloitre, M., Bisson, J., Roberts, N., Shevlin, M., Hyland, P., Maercker, A., Ben-Ezra, M., Coventry, P., Mason-Roberts, S., Bradley, A., & Hutton, P. (2019). Psychological interventions for ICD-11 complex PTSD symptoms: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine, 49(11), 1761–1775. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291719000436

(11) Coventry, P. A., Meader, N., Melton, H., Temple, M., Dale, H., Wright, K., Cloitre, M., Karatzias, T., Bisson, J., Roberts, N. P., Brown, J. V. E., Barbui, C., Churchill, R., Lovell, K., McMillan, D., & Gilbody, S. (2020). Psychological and pharmacological interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder and comorbid mental health problems following complex traumatic events: Systematic review and component network meta-analysis. PLOS Medicine, 17(8), Article e1003262. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003262