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Childhood Trauma Recovery Program

Our earliest experiences create the lenses through which we view the world — and those lenses can be distorted by trauma. Trauma doesn’t have to be a life or death situation. Any event that felt dangerous or frightening can leave an indelible mark. If left untreated, the echoes of childhood trauma can carry into adulthood, leading to physical and mental health issues.

The right treatment can help you overcome these experiences and allow you to move forward into a more hopeful tomorrow. At The Sanctuary at Sedona, our holistic approach to trauma recovery empowers you to break the chains of the past and release the trauma stored in your mind, body, and soul. The Sanctuary at Sedona is a 30-Day minimum, residential, alternative, holistic childhood trauma treatment center.

The Impact of Childhood Trauma

Feeling bad from time to time is a normal part of childhood. But traumatic experiences go deeper than that. They entail threats to our psychological well-being that are so severe, that they affect our very spirit and change our entire perception of reality. This can include abuse, neglect or growing up in a household with authority figures who struggle with addiction or mental health disorders.

Talk to An Expert

Kelley Alexander JD. Program Director of The Sanctuary at Sedona discusses the Sanctuary’s Integrative Treatment for Childhood Trauma

Table of Contents:

How to Recognize the Effects | Overcoming Childhood Trauma | How Does Childhood Trauma Manifest in Adults? | Integrative Treatment for Childhood Trauma

How to Recognize the Effects of Childhood Trauma

Trauma at this stage is so confusing, it can often be hard to recognize. We may not even realize the extent of it until the way it presents in our lives as adults forces us to unpack it. You may be experiencing the effects of childhood trauma if:

  • You don’t recall much of your early childhood at all
  • The memories you do have are more like small glimpses than contextualized stories
  • You repeatedly find yourself in toxic relationships with unavailable people
  • You feel like you don’t have a firm grasp on your personal identity
  • You’re hypersensitive
  • Conversely, you feel out of touch with your emotions

Depending on how severe your experience of abuse was, you may feel like your childhood was stolen from you. When you’re raised in an environment that’s lacking in love and support, you don’t have a good reference point for healthy relationships, and you might play out similarly problematic ones throughout your adult life. If you felt from a young age that none of your emotional needs were important, you probably learned to bury and suppress them. As an adult, this leads to passive-aggressive behavior as you’re afraid of the consequences of communicating straightforwardly.

A history of verbal abuse also adds to your catalog of self-criticisms, amplifying negative self-talk in a way that takes concerted effort to overcome.

Overcoming Childhood Trauma

Trauma is defined as an event that overwhelms our capacity to cope. While stress can be a good thing – a certain degree of it is required for motivation – when it accumulates over time, it can become toxic. When we have an intense stress response, we’re biologically designed to physically respond to it (this is the phenomenon known as “fight, flight or freeze”). But if we’re in a constant state of fear – which is what happens in abusive home – it profoundly affects our developmental health.

Childhood trauma is incredibly common. It’s estimated that at least 67 percent of the population has had at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE). The impacts of this cannot be underestimated: in a recent study of 17,000 adults, if a person had even two ACEs, their rates for depression, suicidality and drug use were exponentially higher. Those with six ACE scores were shown to be 40,000 times likelier to commit suicide.

Childhood trauma dramatically affects your brain development, immune system, hormonal systems and even the way your DNA is read and transcribed. People exposed to childhood trauma in high doses have triple the rates of heart disease and lung cancer. ACEs decrease life expectancy by up to 20 years.

While some of these outcomes can be attributed to high-risk behaviors like substance abuse that often result from trauma, even when those aren’t a factor, you’re still at higher health risk due to your sustained stress response. Trauma increases stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that aren’t meant to stay in your system at high levels for long periods of time.

Childhood trauma also lends itself to addiction. When you’re in a constant state of survival, you adapt by learning how to regulate that state – and not always in the healthiest of ways. This could manifest as drug or alcohol abuse, self-harm or disordered eating. While these behaviors soothe the emotional impact of trauma in the short term, this maladaptive strategy has very negative long-term implications including risks to your physical and psychological health. Yet despite its obvious seriousness, many of today’s doctors aren’t trained in screening and treating this issue.

Integrative Holistic Treatment for Childhood Trauma

If childhood trauma is holding you back from achieving your dreams and finding fulfilling relationships, there is a better way. The Sanctuary offers a 30-day-minimum childhood trauma recovery program. Our center is a safe and supportive environment where you can work through uncomfortable memories and deep hurts. 

Even if your trauma is coupled with addiction or mental or emotional health issues, we believe you can gain freedom and learn what it takes to move past childhood trauma. 

How Childhood Trauma Manifests in Adults

Trauma is defined as an event that overwhelms our capacity to cope. While stress can be a good thing — a certain degree of it is required for motivation — when it accumulates over time, it can become toxic. When we have an intense stress response, we’re biologically designed to physically respond to it (this is the phenomenon known as “fight, flight or freeze”). But if we’re in a constant state of fear — which is what happens in an abusive home — it profoundly affects our developmental health.

Childhood trauma is heartbreakingly common. It’s estimated that at least 67 percent of the population has had at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE). The impacts of this cannot be underestimated. In a recent study of 17,000 adults, if a person had even two ACEs, their rates for depression, suicidality and drug use were exponentially higher. Those with six ACE scores were shown to be 40,000 times likelier to commit suicide.

Childhood trauma dramatically affects your brain development, immune system, hormonal systems and even the way your DNA is read and transcribed. People exposed to childhood trauma in high doses have triple the rates of heart disease and lung cancer. ACEs decrease life expectancy by up to 20 years.

While some of these outcomes can be attributed to high-risk behaviors like substance abuse that often result from trauma, even when those aren’t a factor, you’re still at higher health risk due to your sustained stress response. Trauma increases stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that aren’t meant to stay in your system at high levels for long periods of time.

Childhood Trauma and Addiction

Childhood trauma also lends itself to addiction. When you’re in a constant state of survival, you adapt by learning how to regulate that state — and not always in the healthiest of ways. This could manifest as drug or alcohol abuse, self-harm or disordered eating. While these behaviors soothe the emotional impact of trauma in the short term, this maladaptive strategy has very negative long-term implications, including risks to your physical and psychological health. 

Yet despite its obvious seriousness, many of today’s doctors aren’t trained in screening and treating this issue.

Childhood Trauma and Relationships

Attachment is a biologically based system that’s designed to protect us when we’re infants. We form bonds with our parents that encourage us to get close to them — they, in turn, comfort us, nourish us and protect us. When we have healthy attachments, we feel safe.

As a child, your primary attachment is your parent. As an adult, it may be your partner or spouse. But because these early experiences shape the way we connect with others, unhealthy attachment styles developed during childhood often come back to haunt us in the form of toxic intimate relationships. We may continually seek out partners that are abusive, neglectful, emotionally unavailable or otherwise not in our best interest, because our subconscious tells us this is normal.

Many of us who have survived childhood trauma develop a fearful approach to relationships, where we want emotional closeness but find it hard to trust or depend on others. Without even realizing it, you might find yourself in a pattern of distrusting relationships, mistaking ill-treatment and uncertainty for excitement. Underlying all of this is a deep-seated fear of rejection because your childhood showed you that when you trust someone and make yourself vulnerable to them, they will only hurt you.

Childhood Trauma and the Brain

Our early childhood experiences influence the way our brain forms connections — including which parts of the brain they’re formed in and how strong they are. Your ability to control your own emotions is largely dependent on these neural pathways. And because we have a limited amount of mental energy, if a large part of it is consumed by anxiety and fear, there’s significantly less of it available for things like emotional intelligence.

If you’ve been chronically traumatized, you may have a hard time moving experiences out of your working memory and into long-term storage, which is why they tend to feel so fresh and painful, even long after the event has passed. This is why it’s so easy to become triggered when you encounter something emotionally or physically that brings up past dormant memories.

Epigenetics and Intergenerational Trauma

Those of us with trauma are all concerned about passing it on to our children. But while we tend to think of this in terms of our behavior, new research shows trauma can also be passed down through our genes. The epigenome, which sits on the DNA strand and turns gene expression on or off, affects the way we pass on our DNA and how it’s expressed in our children.

While this might lead us to believe that we can’t escape years of generational trauma, the truth is that this genome can also express resilience. And knowing that your resilience factors not only benefit you, but affect the next few generations, sheds new light on the value of treating your trauma and doing your self-work to the absolute best of your abilities.

Integrative Treatment for Childhood Trauma in Sedona, Arizona

For trauma treatment to be effective, it needs to be attuned to your deeply rooted need to feel safe, secure and comfortable.

If this didn’t happen for you in your childhood, it can happen now. It’s never too late to gain the skills you need to navigate your inner life, and your external relationships, more successfully. And the good news is, there are plenty of reliable resources available to help you do exactly that. Our brains are adaptive — just as they adapt to form negative patterns, they can also develop positive ones. And when you do this with awareness, you step into a level of personal power you’ve never experienced before.

You can heal from trauma. Countless people who have been through our integrative, holistic trauma treatment program have experienced freedom from childhood trauma and addiction. During your time at The Sanctuary, we create a personalized plan built around your unique needs that combines science-based therapies and holistic complementary treatments. We will partner with you as you:

  • Pinpoint the extent of your trauma and areas of concern
  • Identify disempowering beliefs and unhealthy coping strategies
  • Learn how to establish meaningful relationships
  • Name and discuss your emotions
  • Understand how to better care for your body, brain and spirit
  • Release traumatic events that are holding you back

Let Us Help You Overcome Childhood Trauma

At The Sanctuary, we’ll never judge you for your experience. You’re welcome here just as you are. And we’re ready to lead you on a healing journey that will change the rest of your life. Feel what it’s like to restore a sense of love, connection, belonging and peace to your life.

Reach out to us online or call us at (866) 247-9792 to learn how.

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