How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adult Life

Psychotherapy and ADHD Coaching

By Hanada Kardassopoulos, RP, MACP, M.Ed. Registered Psychotherapist |  Founder, Live Your Life Therapy | Toronto and Virtual  |  Ontario-Wide

In my work as a therapist, many clients do not initially think of their experiences as trauma.

They describe it as overreacting, shutting down, overthinking, or feeling too much, or nothing at all.

But over time, we begin to see that many of these patterns are shaped by earlier experiences, often in ways they have not fully connected.

As Gabor Maté describes, what shows up later in life is often not a flaw in who someone is, but an adaptation to what they experienced. Not because they do not understand their reactions, but because their system learned how to respond in order to cope.

In sessions, this often shows up as a part that pushes them to overperform, a part that shuts down when things feel overwhelming, and a part that is constantly anticipating what could go wrong.

At one point, these responses made sense. They helped manage something that felt like too much. But over time, those same patterns can begin to feel limiting, confusing, or exhausting.

The work is not about getting rid of these parts. It is about helping clients begin to understand them, relate to them differently, and support them so they no longer have to carry the same roles they once did. When that begins to happen, things shift. Reactions soften. There is more clarity, and clients begin to respond rather than react.

What Trauma Actually Is

Trauma is not defined by the event itself. It is defined by what happens inside the person who experiences it. Dr. Gabor Maté articulates this distinction with precision: trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you (Maté, 2022). Two people can experience the same event and carry entirely different imprints from it, depending on the support available to them, their developmental stage, their nervous system, and the meaning they made of the experience at the time.

This is why so many adults arrive in therapy not recognizing their own history as traumatic. They compare their experiences to what they believe trauma should look like, find them wanting, and conclude that their struggles must be a personal failing rather than a comprehensible response to real difficulty. The threshold for what qualifies as trauma is far lower than most people believe, and the impacts are far more pervasive.

How the Body Keeps the Score

Childhood experiences shape the developing nervous system in ways that persist long into adulthood. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, one of the largest investigations of its kind, found a strong dose-response relationship between the number of adverse experiences in childhood and the incidence of physical health problems, mental health difficulties, and relational challenges in adult life (Felitti et al., 1998). The nervous system learns what the environment requires of it, and it organizes itself accordingly.

For a child growing up in an environment of unpredictability, criticism, emotional unavailability, or threat, the nervous system learns to stay alert. It learns to scan for danger, to brace for impact, to manage by shrinking, performing, or disappearing. Those adaptations are not pathological. They are intelligent responses to the conditions at hand. The difficulty is that the nervous system does not automatically update when the conditions change. The child grows up, but the survival strategies remain.

Bessel van der Kolk's foundational research describes this as the body keeping the score: the physiological imprint of early experience remains active in the body long after the original threat has passed (van der Kolk, 2014). Adults then find themselves having responses that feel disproportionate to the present moment, because they are not only responding to the present moment. They are responding to every moment in the past that felt similar.

Recognizing Trauma Responses in Adult Life

Trauma responses in adulthood rarely announce themselves clearly. They present as personality traits, relational patterns, and chronic states that have been present for so long they feel like simply the way a person is. Common presentations include:

• A persistent drive to overperform, rooted in the early learning that love or safety was conditional on achievement

• Difficulty tolerating stillness or rest, because the nervous system learned that vigilance was necessary for survival

• Shutting down emotionally in conflict, a freeze response that once protected against overwhelming threat

• Chronic people-pleasing and difficulty with boundaries, developed when the needs or moods of others had to be carefully managed

• A harsh inner critic that speaks with the voice of early environments that were demanding, shaming, or dismissive

  
  

None of these patterns are character flaws. Each one was learned. Each one made sense in the context in which it was formed.

Working with Trauma Through IFS, Visualization, and Narrative

The most effective trauma therapy does not ask clients to revisit painful memories in detail or to override their responses through willpower. It works with the parts of the person that are still carrying the weight of the past, and it does so with curiosity, compassion, and care.

Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, provides a precise and humane framework for this work. IFS understands the mind as a system of parts, each with its own role, history, and emotional truth. Protective parts, which IFS calls managers and firefighters, developed to keep vulnerable parts, called exiles, from being overwhelmed or exposed. The inner critic, the perfectionist, the shutdown response, and the hypervigilant scanner are all protective parts doing their best to manage a system that learned it was not safe to be fully present.

In IFS-informed therapy, the goal is not to eliminate these protective parts but to approach them with genuine curiosity: to understand what they are protecting, how long they have been working, and what they need in order to trust that the system is safe enough for something to change. When protective parts experience that trust, and when exiled parts are witnessed and unburdened, the entire system begins to reorganize. Reactions that once felt automatic and overwhelming become more spacious and manageable.

Visualization work deepens this process by engaging the imagination as a pathway to parts that cannot always be accessed through language alone. Guided imagery allows clients to meet their parts in a more immediate and embodied way, creating experiences of safety, reparation, and connection that the verbal mind alone cannot generate. For many clients, particularly those whose early experiences were pre-verbal or body-based, visualization opens a door that talking alone keeps closed.

Narrative Therapy completes the picture by attending to the stories clients carry about themselves. Trauma produces identity-level conclusions: that one is fundamentally damaged, inadequate, unlovable, or too much. Narrative Therapy externalizes these conclusions, separating the person from the story, and supports the client in locating evidence of a preferred self that has always existed alongside the problem-saturated narrative. Writing as a therapeutic practice within this framework gives clients agency over their own story, allowing them to author a more complete and compassionate account of who they are and how they came to be this way.

When Things Begin to Shift

The shift that occurs in effective trauma therapy is not dramatic. It is quiet and cumulative. Clients begin to notice a moment of pause where there was once only reaction. They recognize a familiar pattern with something resembling interest rather than shame. They find that a response that once flooded them now passes more quickly. They begin, sometimes for the first time, to extend toward themselves the same compassion they have always offered others.

This is the work. Not the elimination of the past, but the gradual freeing of the present from its grip.

Your History Does Not Have to Define Your Present.

If you recognize yourself in these patterns and are ready to understand them differently, I invite you to book a free 15-minute consultation. Working with adults across Ontario, I offer trauma-informed psychotherapy that is grounded in IFS, somatic therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Compassionate Inquiry.

Book Your Free Consultation: lifeyourlifetherapy.janeapp.com

www.liveyourlifetherapy.com

Virtual sessions available across Ontario  |  No waitlist

References

Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.

Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness and healing in a toxic culture. Knopf Canada.

Pennebaker, J. W., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening up by writing it down: How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Schwartz, R. C. (1995). Internal family systems therapy. Guilford Press.

Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal family systems therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. W. W. Norton.