English Version | What happens in childhood stays in childhood?

Often called emotional triggers, they are reflected in everyday life in situations where past traumas are activated. They happen without any control - or awareness - over them, and it is crucial to recognize them in order to then solve them. It is not impossible, it is just difficult. But it is worth the effort: all in the name of a more serene existence.

Few things are as difficult to dissect as the mind and all that it embodies. Where do childhood traumas begin and end when we want to find a justification for a certain behavior? And when does personality come into play? What is ingrained in us that makes us act "like this"? What is just a "bad temper", "weakness of spirit", or an ingrained "mania"? The line that separates what is ours from what we acquire throughout our existence, through our life experiences, is thin and it is often difficult to identify what is what. I have always cultivated a keen curiosity about matters of the mind, and I have always considered that the best way to evolve as human beings is to try to understand what is "wrong" within us, to change it and, who knows, to be led to a more peaceful experience: with ourselves, with others, with the world. For these and other reasons, I have spent my life doing therapies of various kinds. It all culminated in psychoanalysis, a clinical branch that takes charge of going to the depths of the unconscious, but also to the “deepest” phase, childhood, to dig as if there was no tomorrow. And then, from there, to draw as many insights as possible. I did weekly sessions for some time until I got tired of exploring. My resistance to continue with the consultations was (also) related to the following thought: "I got it all figured out, I already know what situation X or event Y back there contributed to behavior Z today. But isn't that enough of 'beating around the bush'?" And I called it a day and ended my tour of the confines of my psyche. "Trauma is much more than a story about something that happened a long time ago," wrote psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk in his book, The Body Keeps the Score (2014), a title that quickly became a top reference on the subject of childhood trauma and its connection to adulthood. "The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories, but as disturbing physical reactions in the present." In this regard, The New York Times writes: "The central argument of the book is that traumatic experiences - everything from sexual assault and incest to emotional and physical abuse - become embedded in the oldest, most primitive parts of our brains that have no access to conscious perception. This means two things: first, the trauma is lodged in the body. We carry a physical mark of our psychic wounds. [...] What obscures the memories, convinces us that the victimization is our fault, or covers up the event with shame so we don't discuss it."

Marta Calado, clinical and health psychologist, explains: "Childhood is a phase that has a great influence on adult life because the experiences we go through when we are small remain marked forever in our minds, and [they] can be responsible for the so-called childhood traumas, especially those that were not pleasant and marked us with negative emotions.” A child's central nervous system, she stresses, does not filter what is considered good or bad: "A child does not relativize like an adult, and so children carry all events in their memory, without any kind of evaluation of what they experienced. Sooner or later, traumas always end up manifesting themselves." She says that neglect, abandonment or rejection, permissiveness or authoritarianism, physical and verbal abuse, lack of affection, bullying, cause emotional damage with an impact on the brain and mind, which generates negative effects on the individual's mental health. "The mental constructs that we learn and consolidate in our personality are called negative and limiting beliefs, and they manifest in adulthood bringing psycological prejudices such as fear of rejection, insecurity and other anxiety problems, without the individual having any control over their manifestation." Trauma theory emerged in the 1960s of the 20th century, from numerous areas of social concern: recognition of the prevalence of violence against women and children (rape, battering, incest); identification of the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans (at the time, of Vietnam); and awareness of the psychic scars inflicted by torture and genocide, especially with regard to the Holocaust. We obviously cannot talk about trauma and childhood without mentioning Freud. Although the father of psychoanalysis never denied the reality of incest in the stories he heard from his early patients, he preferred to direct his attention to the drama of internal conflict. Similarly, the psychic shocks and disappointments suffered by the Great War led him to speculate on the types of pathology (flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and compulsive repetitive behavior) inflicted by the experience of conflict. However, his penchant for grand narrative led him away from an investigation of how traumatic experience affects individuals towards the realm of universal theory, culminating in his formulation of the "death instinct" or Thanatos - the concept was born in opposition to the life instinct, or Eros, and was defined as the generator of unconscious drives and organic arousal (i.e., a unity), which appears as the quest to return to the absolute rest of non-existence. And Jung? The Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, founder of analytical psychology, understood, in turn, that traumatic experiences are necessary, but insufficient in themselves, to produce symptoms of prolonged stress response. According to his view, traumatic experiences impact the internal psychic processes of the ego and self.

Faced with a sea of theories that modern society offers around this theme, it becomes urgent to understand who is right: after all, do traumas dictate life sentences or not? Psychologist Marta Calado asserts that since people are different, there are different reactions to situations that may be traumatic: "We are talking about psychological traumas, with emotional repercussions, many of which originated in childhood, but even so, childhood traumas do not always relate only to very dramatic life events, since it is not the situation experienced that is important, but how each person reacts to the situation. This is why, sometimes, we don't understand how a certain event affected a certain person so much, and how another person came through another terrible event unscathed.” She adds that there are people who become as if emotionally stagnant on certain events in their childhood: "In certain clinical cases, out of guilt or shame, they deny it throughout their lives, such as when a teacher constantly humiliates a child in front of the entire class with derogatory names, a teasing that extended to peers on the playground, and the parents never knew because of fear of it getting worse." Conducted by physicians and researchers Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study brought together 17,500 adults who were asked about their history of exposure to what they considered "unfavorable situations," such as sexual, physical, or emotional violence; physical or emotional neglect, mental illness, chemical dependency, or parental imprisonment; parental separation or divorce; or domestic violence. For each "yes," they received one point on the ACE chart. By relating ACE scores and health outcomes, they concluded the following: first, that ACEs are incredibly common - 67% of the population had at least one ACE and 12.6%, one in eight, had four or more ACEs. The second finding concluded that there was a dose-reaction relationship between ACE and health outcomes: the higher the ACE score, the worse the health outcomes. For a person with an ACE score of four or more, the relative risk of chronic obstructive lung disease was 2.5 times higher than that of someone with a zero ACE score. For hepatitis, it was also 2.5 times higher. For depression, it was 4.5 times higher, and for suicide, 12 times higher. A person with an ACE score of seven or more had three times the risk of dying from lung cancer. Of course, this makes sense: someone who has had a difficult childhood is more likely to smoke, drink, or engage in behaviors that can ruin one's health. "This is not science. It's just 'bad behavior,'" you might say. But that's precisely where science comes in. Today we understand, more than ever, how early exposure to adversity contaminates the development of children's brains and bodies. It affects areas like the nucleus accumbens, the brain's pleasure and reward center that is involved in the process of chemical dependency; it inhibits the prefrontal cortex, necessary for impulse control and executive function, a region crucial for learning. And, in MRI scans, significant changes are found in the amygdala, the brain's fear reaction center. In short, there are indeed neurological reasons why people exposed to high doses of adversity are more likely to exhibit high-risk behaviors. What's more, even if you don't engage in high-risk behaviors, you are more likely to develop heart disease or cancer. The reason has to do with the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the body and brain's stress response system, which commands the "fight or flight" reaction.

Let's imagine that we are in a forest, and we spot a bear. Immediately, the hypothalamus sends a signal to the pituitary gland, which in turn sends a signal to the adrenal gland, which commands, "Release stress hormones!" The heart speeds up, the pupils dilate, the airways expand, and you are ready to fight the bear - or, better yet, to run away from it. The problem is when the bear shows up every night and that system is activated over and over again, going from being adaptive or lifesaving to maladaptive or unhealthy. Children are especially sensitive to this repeated activation due to stress because their brains are still developing. High doses of adversity not only affect brain structure and function, but also the developing immune and endocrine systems and even the way our DNA is read and replicated. Marta Calado assures that it becomes really difficult to maintain a peaceful life in the presence of certain traumas, since they challenge emotional self-control, besides making the adult hostage to many situations where emotional triggers from the past are lodged: "The adult feels tied down, suffocated, and limited in their actions. At some point, people may realize that much of what holds them back today may stem from old reflexes, from unhealed pains. In this sense, it is all the more opportune to 'excavate' childhood, the more the needs of the individual's psychological intervention reveal this usefulness, in the sense of restoring their quality of life and giving them back their inner peace and well-being." Of course, to seek help adults have to recognize that they need help, and many "only discover the origin of certain childhood traumas through the therapeutic relationship established with a particular mental health specialist ("I finally found a Psychologist with whom I identify."), at a specific stage of their life path (for example, divorce, unemployment, motherhood, grieve)." She also reminds us that there are other protective factors that can moderate the influence of a traumatic event in childhood: "The coexistence of positive life experiences, the existence of attachment figures that facilitate positive reinforcement, such as siblings or grandparents, or even certain temperament characteristics, such as a tendency to externalize emotions. What is certain is that there are people who manage to overcome childhood traumas, but there are others who always remain stuck in the past." In the words of Carl Jung, "What you resist persists." Which is the same as saying that it is better to nip it in the bud. It may hurt at first, but isn't the agony of confrontation preferable to living a lifetime as a hostage of one's own shadow?

Originally translated from Vogue Portugal's The Innocence Issue, published February 2023.Full story and credits on the print issue.