Yes, yes you can.
It took me a really long time to accept this, but it’s true. You can have all kinds of happy memories from your childhood, you can recognize that you always had enough to eat, you can know that your family loved each other, and still experience childhood trauma. Let’s talk about how that’s possible.
My Classic Happy Childhood
I had a pretty happy childhood. I think when I talk about my invalidation and trauma, people assume I grew up in a loveless, cold household, but that wasn’t the case at all. My family is loud, boisterous, funny, and affectionate in our own way. We didn’t look at each other in the eye and say “I love you, you know that right?” But we shared inside jokes and had board game nights and snuggled together on the couch.
My mom worked nights as an OR nurse so she could be with us during the day, take us to the library and the pool and our grandparents’ houses during the summer, and help us with homework during the school year. She made us a home-cooked meal almost every single night my entire childhood. My dad worked his way up from accountant to controller, taking on more hours than he probably wanted to help support four kids who were involved in sports and band and needed new clothes constantly because we all grew like weeds.
My siblings and I fought and yelled and made fun of each other, but we also played together all the time. I had built-in friends my entire childhood. We invented our own games and built forts when we were little, and as we got older, we talked about significant others and college and friend drama. I have so many memories with my siblings that highlight my childhood with streaks of happiness and togetherness.
I had a happy childhood. And I experienced childhood trauma.
Childhood Trauma Is Not Always Obvious While It’s Happening
If you’d asked me when I was 15 if I thought my childhood was traumatic, I would have laughed and said no. You would have gotten the same response at age 18 and 21. If you’d asked when I was 23, I still would have said no, but I would have hesitated. I wouldn’t have laughed. And now, at 26, I know the answer is yes, though I might still say no if you asked me in person because I’m still not sure how, to be honest about my experiences without my security blanket, the internet.
Because my childhood was so happy, I didn’t see how it could also be traumatic. I have issues with black-and-white thinking, where something is all one way or all the other. Because I knew for a fact that my childhood was good, both objectively and in my own opinion, I thought it couldn’t also be traumatic. Which meant all the parts that weren’t so happy didn’t count. They must have been exaggerated by my dramatic nature, or I must be remembering them wrong, or they must be completely normal and I was weird for being upset by them.
Plus, the “little t” traumas of my childhood were a regular part of my daily life. If I had accepted the reality that they were truly traumatic while I was living it, I would have had a hard time getting through my day most of the time. It was much easier to assume I was the problem. To internalize what I could and deny what I couldn’t.
This is the definition of trauma. The failure to integrate a disturbing event into your internal narrative of reality. It doesn’t matter if 99% of that reality is happy and supportive. If that 1% is completely counter to what you know to be true and it splits off and takes on a life of its own, you’ve got trauma on your hands.
Okay, But Literally Everyone Is Traumatized Then
Well, yes and no.
Yes, it’s true that when you understand the real, lived experience of trauma beyond the stereotypes of military combat or sexual assault, an alarming number of people have experienced trauma and are living traumatized lives, often without knowing it. But if you read that blurb above and thought, “Well, of course, that’s my experience, that’s everyone’s experience,” that’s a classic sign of childhood trauma.
It’s cliché, but many people who experience childhood trauma have parents with their own unresolved childhood trauma. And if they’ve made it to adulthood without resolving that trauma, they had to find a way to live with it. One of the most common ways of coping with trauma long-term is denial. They tell themselves it wasn’t that bad, or that others have it worse, or that life is just like that, and they can’t expect everything to be perfect all the time.
Then, they repeat the traumas they experienced with their own children, and when their children are upset, they teach them that denial. They tell their children that it’s not that bad, or others have it worse, or life is just like that and they can’t be perfect all the time, and the children grow up believing that this is normal.
It’s Not Normal
I’m here to say that growing up feeling inherently bad or thinking you’re responsible for everyone’s emotions or walking on eggshells around everyone in your life is not normal. You should not have been taught to ignore your internal signals that said “this isn’t right.”
You should not have been taught to ignore yourself.
And if you were, that “counts” as childhood trauma. You have every right to take that pain seriously and do your best to heal. You don’t need anyone else’s permission to heal, and even if you deserve one, you don’t need an apology or closure to move forward. You can create your own closure through reparenting, where you use your current position as an adult to provide for your inner child’s needs that were ignored or ridiculed in the past.
Finally, I want to say, you aren’t hurting anyone by accepting the reality of your trauma. You have a responsibility to your own wellbeing that comes before your responsibility to make others feel comfortable.
I’m planning on writing more posts about reparenting, inner child work, what “counts” as trauma, and more, so make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss anything.
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Megan Griffith is the blogger behind Healing Unscripted, a mental health blog all about healing through validation and community. She hopes her writing can help trauma survivors feel seen and understood. When she’s not writing, you can usually find Megan dying her hair, eating ice cream, or going on walks with her husband and son.
Thank you very much for writing this, it explains so much to me.
The light bulb finally went off.
Megan, thank you so much for this article! You are spot on in this description. It took me until I was 58 years old to acknowledge the abuse that was intermingled with my happy childhood. I grew up with six brothers and sisters, my parents were married for 67 years until my father passed away in 2017. We had it all. Christmas mornings filled up both the living room and the den. We had long cross-country drives in the Chevy station wagon to visit relatives in the Midwest, or go to Disneyland in LA when it opened, or go camping in the Rocky Mountains. We did talk about how we loved each other, how lucky we were to have such a strong, close-knit family. But we all got “spanked” when we misbehaved. Mom would abandon us to our room to wait for Dad to come home and ask us if we preferred his hand or a belt or a hairbrush or a switch from a tree outside. When I was 16 I went to swimming practice with bruises that went from the middle of my back to my knees and I told everyone I crashed my bike. When I was 17 my little brother tried to kill himself at 11 years old.
I got married and left my hometown at 23 years old. My rage destroyed that marriage and my two kids still talk about how awful it was. At 35 jobs in 30 years of working. My rage almost destroyed my second marriage. The book I want to write is titled “Waiting To Die, or how my happy childhood ruined my happy adult life.” You can’t tell by looking at me the PTSD that I live with, as I share this with friends they are shocked. The thing that shocks me is not that I was abused, but that the abuse I suffered was actually so pervasive.
Please keep writing about this. I think this is vital work in slowing the tide of abuse. Thank you.
Megan- I had identifiable trauma my whole childhood- as I have often wondered so kids who have good parents and childhoods have any type of trauma? After reading your article – I see that it can happen – but what exactly was your childhood trauma ? What you described is what I wished for growing up . This article has me stumped …
Thank you so very much for your share. I’ve been in trauma focused therapy for two years and still struggle to accept that the verbal and emotional abuse dealt out by my mother is responsible for the many cPTSD symptoms that I have at agr 72! The problem is complicated by the responses of many people who knew both my parents well (including my siblings) and idealized them. I recognize now that whereas my childhood includes a great many happy memories, my relationship with my mom as a small child was what would now be called an “anxious insecure” one, and that even as a child, I was very depressed. I made my first suicide attempt at age 12.
Thank you, I felt a huge wave of relief and permission to acknowledge my own feelings after reading the first few words in your article. I’ve had people tell me that because I had both parents and they loved me that I couldn’t possibly understand “real” abuse. Yet here I am at 45 years old , no healthy relationships , spouse or friends, a list of jobs or responsibilities I’ve managed to screw up and living in my mother’s garage. I’m a mess of a shell of who I started as and I’m exhausted of scratching the proverbial rock bottom. No money for a therapist and desperately trying to prevent any of my ill formed habits or traits from rubbing off on the most important person in my life, my son. I’ve battled addictions of all kinds from sex to drugs and alcohol and I win for short stents but I’m running out of steam and desperately seeking a way to confront and conquer my inner demons once and for all. I hope that running across your article is a sign that the universe is throwing me a little help.
Thankyou. Like you I had a happy childhood, and for the most part of my life I’ve been happy. I’m over 50 now, male, and my emotions leak out everywhere. I’m almost in tears having just read this article. Yes I had a happy childhood, happy memories, loving parents… But I do remember ‘theres always someone worse than you’ and words to that effect.