I spent the morning today planning curriculum for Mothering As Medicine with pediatrician and ACESAware trauma educator Rachel Gilgoff, MD. We were commiserating on the sorry state of affairs in the mental health world when it comes to adequate trauma screening, expressing frustration at the lack of standardized screening for developmental trauma, also known as attachment trauma, relational trauma, or Complex PTSD (C-PTSD.)
While many trauma survivors understand why they struggle after Big T traumas like sexual abuse, the abandonment of a parent, or growing up around domestic violence and child abuse, people who experience developmental trauma often struggle, especially relationally, and they may not even realize that something wasn’t right at home.
We call it “developmental trauma” because these kinds of little “t” traumas of everyday life interfere with healthy childhood development and can have lifelong repercussions if left untreated. And because developmental trauma happens in relationship, it also frequently leads to relationship trauma in adult life, which often retraumatizes the dynamics of childhood.
Examples of Developmental Trauma
What kinds of things fall under the category of developmental trauma?
- Inability to set or respect boundaries
- Lacking the ability to know what you need or ask to get your needs met
- Not knowing who it’s safe to trust and who you should keep your distance from
- Scanning the world to figure out who’s “one up” and who’s “one down”
- Attachment wounding resulting from not getting an infant’s core needs for connection with the birth mother met (because of adoption, surrogacy, a check out, addicted, mentally ill, or narcissistic mother, illness of the baby or mother, etc)
- Having a controlling, dominating, or perfectionistic parent
- Having a parent who wouldn’t let you develop autonomy, agency, and an individual, separate sense of self (because they saw you as an extension of themselves)
- Being the golden child, lost child, or scapegoat of a narcissistic family system
- Growing up with indoctrinated belief systems resulting from fundamentalist religion or a cult
- Being power hungry, approval seeking, materialistic, superficial, or achievement-oriented because unconditional love was not on the menu
- Lacking basic social and relational skills because you had no good relational role models
- Not knowing how to repair inevitable ruptures in relationships
Want to dive deeper into discovering whether you might have experienced impairment in your development because of the way you were treated relationally in childhood?
DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA QUIZ (from Lissa Rankin’s book Sacred Medicine)
While there is no well-studied, universal score like the ACE score to assess risk for developmental trauma, The Body Keeps The Score author Bessel van der Kolk has suggested adding Developmental Trauma Disorder as an addition to the DSM.34 Even so, his proposed description does not include a way to diagnose, calculate, and study risk the way the ACE score does. In the absence of a well-studied developmental trauma-informed way to test yourself, you might ask yourself the following questions to get a sense of your own developmental trauma burden.
Before your 18th birthday:
Did you often feel that at least one of your parents wasn’t capable of connecting with you in a loving and bonding way, leaving you with poor self-esteem, chronic shame, or the feeling that you’re somehow damaged?
Did you often feel like you could not trust one or both of your parents to attune to you, protect you, and meet your needs?
Did you often feel like you had to the be the grown up or caregiver in the family when you were still the child?
Did you often feel like one or both of your parents smothered you, engulfed you, dominated you, or wouldn’t let you individuate, make your own choices, and become your own person?
Did you often feel like you were expected to be a perfect, high achieving, good girl/boy who made your parents proud or you’d be severely judged, rejected, punished, shamed, or abandoned?,
Do you live with a persistent feeling of nameless dread or terror without understanding why?
Do you prefer being alone to being around people, fear and avoid closeness with people, or struggle to maintain intimate relationships?
Were you raised without good boundaries or the ability to say no, set limits, or protect yourself?
Did you grow up feeling like you were an imposition or burden to one or both parents?
Do you seek out spirituality or have frequent mystical or esoteric “out of body” kinds of experiences?
Do you struggle to know what you need or ask others to help you get your needs met?
Do you frequently feel overwhelmed, struggle with adult responsibilities, or fixate on your one big problem, assuming that if it could only be solved, everything would be fine?
Did your mother have a difficult pregnancy or traumatic birth, or were you born prematurely or hospitalized at an early age?
Did one or both parents fail to help you normalize, feel, process, and handle difficult emotions?
Did one or both parents feel hurt or rejected when you tried to pull away, rebel, or become your own person?
Were one or both parents self-absorbed, narcissistic, or unable to see you as separate from them?
Do you tend to stay “in your head” or over-intellectualize, rather than being in your body or your emotions?
Is it hard for you to manage conflict, express displeasure, or stand up for yourself?
Do you try to stay below the radar, make yourself invisible, or otherwise keep yourself small and safe?
Would you identify as highly sensitive, an empath, or neurodiverse?
Do you struggle with low energy, diminished life force, lack of motivation, difficulty staying focused, achieving tasks, or feeling pleasure, or following your dreams?
*There is no scoring system for this quiz, but in general, the more you answered “yes,” the more likely it is that you have some challenges in your life as the result of the way you were raised.
Mothering As Medicine
If reading this activates your nervous system, try taking a few deep breaths. Go outside for a walk. Try silent meditation. Do a few yoga stretches. Pet your animal. Go to the gym. Give yourself a hug and a lot of self-compassion. Or listen to some of my guided meditations here.
We’ll be diving deeper into the origins of developmental trauma, how to help prevent it if you have young kids, and how to help yourself and your kids heal and develop more safe intimacy and heart connection if the harm has already been done.
Although it can be uncomfortable to focus on the ways we were inadequately parented, especially when we realize this may cause us to have challenges in our own parenting, it can also be deeply rewarding to begin to heal these wounds in ourselves and our kids.
My daughter Mira and I had the privilege of being able to do IFS therapy together, so I could hold space for her parts injured by what happened during her childhood. And because we have that foundation, my hope is that she’ll come to me and let me bear witness to her Mommy wounds as she grows up and new awareness develops over time. What better way to make amends than to pay for therapy for our kids, when we can, and to own our part in order to help them heal?
If these ideas about healing from the way we parent and were parented resonates with you, join us for Mothering As Medicine.
Save $100 if you register for Mothering As Medicine here.
And if you have a longing to heal your own developmental/ relational trauma, we invite you to join us in our ongoing IFS community of practice devoted to healing relational trauma LOVE SCHOOL.
