Is childhood trauma affecting your adult life?

It always feels like millennials are caught in the middle, from being the last to know what life was like before the Internet to literally being called the sandwich generation. This is even more obvious when it comes to parenting. On one hand, we’ve been raised by a post-war generation who believed in strict rules; that “children must be seen and not heard” and that in general, emotions are for the weak. We were raised to look after our parents on the guise of filial piety, and that everything they said was the law. 

But now as parents ourselves, we are discovering just how much our parents impacted our own emotional wellbeing. Many of us are also beginning to learn just how traumatic our childhoods were. 

Our parents’ parenting 

“It was only when I had my first child that I realised how much I didn’t want to raise my child the way my parents had raised me,” says Cora* age 40. When her daughter was born, the marketing manager began to read about gentle parenting and childhood trauma, both as a guide to raising her daughter, which then resulted in her learning more about her issues. “Just reading parenting advice like ‘acknowledge your child’s feelings’ made resentment boil up in me, because it wasn’t something my parents had ever done for me.”

Dr. Tsao I Ting of Redwood Psychology highlights that emotional neglect is one of the main issues millennials might have faced in their childhood. This is also considered an Adverse Childhood Event (ACE). “There is a local study that shows that about two-thirds of local residents have experienced at least one ACE,” she says. “One of the ACEs that I would highlight is emotional neglect – which is defined as emotional needs not validated or attended to. As a performance-driven society, parents sometimes forget and perhaps do not have the bandwidth to attend to their children’s emotional needs.” 

Dr. Tsao goes on to elaborate, “Emotions form a big part of the experience of being human and when we are unable to get in touch and make sense of our emotions, we can lose the humanness while chasing after achievements without much purpose or meaning.” 

Another experience many children in Singapore go through is learning the concept of “face”. 

“When a child expresses feelings of upset, they may appear amplified to parents who find it hard to deal with strong emotions. Fear of embarrassment or ‘losing face’ may result in unhelpful reactions to “stop” when a child has a tantrum or a meltdown,” says Corrine Lim of Clarie Psychotherapy. “The child learns that it’s not okay to feel nor express their emotions, and to be themselves – they may learn to shut off their emotions instead. One may lose touch with their own emotions with the prolonged repression of feelings.”

Ella* age 36, says her parents were kind and clearly loved her and her sister growing up, but “face” was very important to them and they would get angry whenever the siblings fought or got upset. “I feel this resulted in me always doubting my feelings,” she says. “My default position in an argument was that the problem was mine. I find it difficult to trust myself and it’s led to some pretty messy relationships with friends and partners, and even bosses at the office.” 

Ella recalls making attempts to engage both her parents emotionally, telling them about her friends or asking them about their life experiences, but remembers largely being met with brief, irritated answers. “I don’t think they really knew how to speak with me on that level,” she says. Now a mum to a four-year-old boy, she finds herself making a concerted effort to ask him about his day and spend quality time with him while managing her small business. 

Echoing this, Corrine adds, “Many Asian families may not ‘know’ how to show concern verbally – sometimes it comes across as scoldings or criticisms. The authoritarian parenting style with reserved expressions of concern where there is a power imbalance, lack of emotional validation and indirect way of showing care through actions rather than words, can have a negative impact on a child’s emotional development.”

Healing as an adult

While we would like to think we’ve left our childhood trauma in the past, deep-seated issues and the limiting beliefs they might have caused tend to rear their heads in our adult life. Facing these issues, and dealing with them in therapy can be a helpful way to move forward and past issues that have kept us from feeling better about ourselves.

Says Sara Menon of Alliance Counselling, “Something I find really useful is understanding who we are as adults, and time-stamping who we were as children. With trauma, the ability to make sense of time gets distorted, and we can fall back to older ways of thinking, feeling and being automatically. When we step into ourselves and our capacities as adults, by exploring our values, our actual physicality and capacity to manage, hold or problem solve, we can develop healthier ways of responding to old hurts and establishing safety.” 

Corrine notes that clients don’t often actively look to heal their childhood trauma, but rather to better understand themselves and deal with recurring behaviours. 

“When a client is ready to address and heal from their adverse childhood experiences, the priority is to provide safety and pace clients with the assurance that it’s okay to pause or take a different approach to be able to process and heal. It’s important not to get caught in the blame-game, so that it doesn’t become another challenging cycle to break free from. 

She stresses that everyone’s journey is different and that progress is not always linear. It’s good to ask questions like “What would the healed version of me be/think/do?” As well as remind oneself “It’s okay(to be me, to be kinder to myself, to prioritise myself.” 

Cora agrees that while it was hard at first for her to prioritise her needs, therapy has helped her resolve some of her limiting beliefs. “My mum still dismisses my feelings when we argue about my daughter’s care. Sometimes it makes me rage, but I tell myself I can’t change her, only how I react. I think for our generation that’s going to have to be enough because our parents aren’t going to change. I guess we can only hope our kids will.”