Childhood trauma made you have to raise yourself which was no easy feat.

You were a curious, sensitive, compassionate child.

The child who was light-hearted and kind. A curious child who always wanted to know "why?" But you were also sensitive. You realize now you lived in an environment where this couldn't possibly be nurtured and it hurt you.

You're still trying to please others around you and make them smile. You feel like you're still having to keep up with the role you had in your family.

You feel like you can't have a voice, and it's best not to be seen or take up space.

It was common for you to constantly feel like you were tiptoeing around, reading a parent's mood, and living in often, unspoken patterns of everyday life.

Feeling the human touch of love, witnessing a soft smile or extended arms reaching out for you was rare because it just didn't happen during your childhood.

How Trauma Affected You as a Teen

You always thought the way you were treated growing up was normal. Everything you went through had to be the same for others. It wasn't until you started getting older that you realized your friends didn't have the same experiences you did.

This made you want to get away from it all. You thought about ways to get away and sometimes you did by rebelling or running away from home. Spending as much time as you could with others-friends and their families, neighbors, teachers, or a trusted relative was something you did as often as you could.

What you didn't realize is you were already a cycle breaker.

Effects of Childhood Trauma on You

By all accounts, you've made it. All on your own. You're a successful professional, a loving parent to your children and fur babies, a thoughtful friend, a supportive spouse or partner. But you didn't come away from your childhood unscathed. The pain from the past keeps you from living the life you've earned and worked hard for, in peace and with joy.

You've noticed you try to avoid negative emotions at all costs-sadness, anxiety, anger, stress. This is because when you experience any emotion as a sensitive woman, you feel everything more deeply whether positive or negative.

To avoid feeling anything negative, you might stay as busy as possible or distracted, do more mindless eating, exercise to the point of exhaustion, stay super focused on your children or work. Anything to restore a sense of balance. But if you hold up a mirror, you can see and feel the sadness, anxiety, and drain of energy, just from avoiding having to feel certain feelings or thinking about the past.

You still try to keep that smile on your face and make others feel happy. It's sometimes difficult to maintain boundaries and you may struggle with trying to be the perfect mother, friend, partner, spouse, or professional. This proves to be exhausting.

Anxiety has a way of stealing your light.

You worry about so much. When you finally feel like you're not worrying about something, there's something else you start worrying about.

What you worry about most is how what you're going through affects your sense of contentment in life, your relationships, or your own children. Your children are the most important humans in your life and you want the best for them. You don't want them to go through what you went through and you don't want your experience to affect them in any way.

It's ok to let go of this now.

Understanding patterns are here because of what happened beginning in childhood, and how these patterns can change by caring for yourself without judgment; dropping unrealistic expectations of yourself; quieting the harshness of your inner critic; moving to a secure attachment, and creating new, healthier patterns for yourself, will be key in our work together.

The respect for the resilience you had as a child, grieving what you may have lost, transforming the trauma into healing, and importance of doing the work for yourself starts when you're ready.