Childhood trauma is such a deep and sprawling topic that trying to understand the full scope of its impacts can feel like trying to drink from a firehose.
One psychiatrist has identified a significant characteristic of people with a traumatic childhood that shows just how far-reaching a problematic upbringing can be — and underlines why much of what happens in our lives as adults isn’t necessarily our fault.
Dr. Alok Kanojia, known online as Dr. K, says childhood trauma distorts how people think about their future.
We’ve all known, or maybe even been, one of those people who seems to have all the talent and ability in the world but is seemingly never able to get out of their own way and succeed. There are lots of potential reasons for this, of course, but Dr. K suggests childhood trauma is chief among them.
In an interview with podcaster Steven Bartlett on his “The Diary of a CEO” podcast, Dr. K explained that when a kid grows up in a traumatic environment — and it’s important to note that Dr. K is not talking about single, discrete traumas but a full-on traumatic upbringing — “something very important happens in the brain, where it stops planning for the future.”
This is because their traumatic environment teaches them, time and again, that stepping outside of right here, right now survival, to plan and think about the future is dangerous.
“Any plan for the future can change depending on whether your parent is drunk or not,” Dr. K said, using parental alcoholism as an example. “And then if I was gonna have a birthday party, I told all my friends, and it got canceled; now that hurts so much.” That pain is unbearable, so kids learn not to even open the door to it.
Children who grow up in traumatic environments strive to be invisible in order to protect themselves.
“Children who grow up in traumatic environments learn to be invisible,” Dr. K went on to say, and this, in turn, causes a change in the way they think of the future. “Trauma’s about surviving today.”
He then used as an example a former patient who, when he was a child, “would be able to tell within the first 60 seconds to five minutes when their dad got home whether they were gonna get beaten today.”
This puts the kid in a position where “your brain looks at your day, and there’s no point in planning for tomorrow. All of your brain’s resources are about surviving today: ‘How do I not get abused? How do I make sure that my parents don’t notice me?'”
It’s important to note — and an all too often forgotten truth — that trauma can take many forms besides physical abuse. “It can be highly controlling; it can be even like children who are parentified… [or] you have a parent who’s very chronically ill and is depending on the kid to take care of everything. That’s traumatic, too.”
All of these result in that quest for invisibility, Dr. K said. It’s all about “How do I make sure that my parents don’t notice me?” That way, the abusive or traumatic reality can stay at rest, or at least at arm’s length, for as long as possible.
I experienced this in my own upbringing, which was traumatic on multiple fronts, and as Dr. K described, it turned me into an adult who lived a sort of double life: One in which I was only partly able to truly be myself; and another that was completely fallacious and shut down but which kept my family from attacking me. The things I wanted in life had to go by the wayside, of course, because living that way is an extraordinary amount of work.
Lots of therapy, along with boundaries with my family (and their choice to estrange), has freed me from this to an extent. But even all these years later, I still struggle to not shut myself down the moment a goal or aspiration comes to mind. Old habits die hard, of course.
There is also a physical dimension involved in this, and that is part of how adults stay locked in survival mode.
Dr. K went on to explain that this process has a physiological component. “What happens when we get traumatized? We go into survival mode. We go into protective mode,” he said. And since an entire traumatic upbringing keeps us basically locked in that “fight or flight” survival mode for years at a time, it disrupts the physiological parts of future planning as well.
“We have two states of the body,” Dr. K explained. “We have our catabolic state where we’re breaking things down; we’re trying to survive the moment. And we have our anabolic state when we are building for the future.”
This system is part of why we get a burst of cortisol to run away from a predator, for example. It’s an evolutionary way to “sacrifice the future to survive the present,” as Dr. K explained it, by breaking down our muscle tissue with a burst of cortisol that allows us the explosive energy needed to run from a tiger back in the day.
The problem is, this is the same system that trauma kicks into gear — our amygdala, the so-called “lizard brain” that controls fight or flight, doesn’t know the difference between a chaotic parent and a tiger trying to eat us.
“So when you grow up in a traumatic environment,” Dr. K explained, “you can’t plan for anything because your home environment is so chaotic… You’re focused on survival. That becomes baked in.”
This creates adults who are “bound by external stimuli.” In Dr. K’s parlance, basically, if something happens TO us, we can respond. “But I cannot derive an internal sense of motivation at all because now that there’s an external deadline, I have to survive that deadline.”
In short, we go into survival mode “because the part of [our] brain that plans for the future has been disabled” by the years-long feedback loop of having to fight to make it through the day.
The good news is, however, that this is absolutely not permanent. Therapy, especially trauma-focused therapy, can help us to unpack how we got to this point and learn how to break the cycle.
Self-led techniques like somatic exercises, meditation, and activities that stimulate the vagus nerve are invaluable tools for tackling the physiological aspects. They help to quiet that “survival mode” part of the nervous system and bring the parasympathetic nervous system back online after years of shutting down.
The bottom line is that if you’re a traumatized person who has struggled to break free and move forward, it’s not your fault. You also have the power to begin leading yourself out of it.
It’s a lot of work, but it can be done, and it is absolutely worth it.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.
