11 therapy concepts to help heal your broken childhood

[00:00:00]While there are a million therapeutic concepts, as a licensed clinical psychologist with a doctorate and a master's and a bachelor's degree all around psychology, there are 11 concepts that I promise you you need to know if you want to truly heal your life, your relationships, your childhood, your trauma, and to even deal with life on a day-to-day basis. Understanding these concepts is truly powerful. I'm going to tell you 11 things you need to know that have taken me decades to learn and really understand, and I hope you'll explore each one of them as needed.

[00:00:39]Number one, the first and most important concept is that you need to understand attachment theory. Now, this seems like, okay, we've heard this a million times, but specifically, you need to understand disorganized attachment if you had a really complex childhood with complex caregivers. Most of the books written talk about the secure, anxious, and avoidant styles, and many of them leave out the fourth style called disorganized attachment. At the heart, while they're all important to know, if you have disorganized attachment patterns as a result of your childhood, very common if your parents were eggshell, if they may have had treated or undiagnosed borderline narcissism, at the core, what you can experience is a sense of being both anxious and avoidant in relationships. And this happens when your caregiver is the source of safety and also the primary source of fear in your life. Reminder, attachment theory really looks at how the quality and quantity and type of caregiving responsiveness or not we receive in the earliest years of our life and frankly throughout our childhood and lifespan as a young person, how that shapes what we come to believe, relationship security, love, connection, emotions, how to be in relationships. Do I reach out to you when I'm distressed or do I have to sort it out on my own? Does clinging to you and protesting that you must not leave me work or does me pulling back and making you anxious work? That's attachment theory, so important. Number two, you need to understand what family systems theory is.

[00:02:27]Now, you don't have to know all the details, but what really helps is to understand the theories which many of us learn in these sort of marriage and family programs. That every relationship, a family dynamic, is a system in which one person has an effect on the other people. Now, some people have more of an effect on the system than others. This is what I talk about when you have an eggshell family where you walk on eggshells, when one person's mood determines the safety or the temperature of your home, for example, that person has a lot of power to influence the level of anxiety in the system. How much are we safe or unsafe?

[00:03:09]The concept is that a family is an emotional unit in which there's an interconnectedness that occurs. And within family systems thinking, we have concepts like interconnectedness, how a change or conflict with one member can cause a ripple effect in the system and others, differentiation of self, meaning that one of the goals for us is to become un-enmeshed from the family unit and to build a sense of balance and closeness while also creating a sense of separateness. The very common word boundaries often has come out of this movement. Triangulation, this is the idea where if you have two people in a system with conflict, they'll often pull in a third to relieve that anxiety or conflict. Could be a child, could be an ex, could be a substance, could be a job. Multigenerational trauma and transmission in terms of how patterns get passed down. You need to understand that how you grew up and all of the factors around your family system and how it functioned or disfunctioned can be incredibly important. Number three is the idea of understanding emotional abuse and neglect. This is the most prevalent form of harm all over the globe, and yet it has been the least studied and researched and even the least defined, which is a huge part of why it hasn't been studied. There's lots of disagreement in cultures and countries and continents really about what creates or contributes to an experience of emotional abuse or neglect. Remember that emotional abuse is a process in which a child or person feels unwanted, unloved, rejected, unseen, invalidated, as if they don't exist in a way that is worthy of their own separate emotions being identified.

[00:05:00]And this gets confusing because there are lots of forms of emotional abuse.

[00:05:05]Probably even more important in some ways and confusing is the concept of emotional neglect. And that is because neglect is about what parents or caregivers or partners don't do. How they don't show up for you, the things they don't say, your emotions they don't see or honor or regard. And understanding this concept can be paramount to working on your trauma because especially if you had the Christmas card looking perfect family that everyone thought was great except for when you went home after the ski trip and made the Christmas card, no one talked about anyone's feelings. No one really honored it when you were crying in the car and said, "Hey, you know, essentially how are you doing? How are you really doing?" So, the wound and the grief we have and the longing is often confusion. Confusion occurs for both those who experience emotional abuse and neglect because you can't often put your finger on it when it comes to emotional abuse. It's not always so clear, though it can be like name-calling or gaslighting. But, it can also be using harmful joking passive-aggressive nicknames, dismissing your emotions, not talking about your feelings like I said when you're crying after something important to you didn't go well. And the thing with neglect is that once again, you're grieving something that you don't necessarily know you didn't get. And this becomes for both of those the connector between why you believe deep inside that you were just really at the end of the day bad, broken, why you feel such deep shame, but often cannot be labeled. So, understanding those two concepts can really be the gateway to understanding where to go in working on yourself, your sense of self, your stories, your trauma, your pain, your physical health. The next one is understanding what defense mechanisms are. And this is really important because this is how a lot of those childhood wounds play out in our adult life. What are defense mechanisms? A defense mechanism is sort of an automatic, unconscious psychological response or strategy we use when we feel anxious, sad, difficult feelings, or threat to our sense of self, to our well-being in the world. And they're things like denial, that's not happening even though it's happening, projection when we basically attribute our own unacceptable thoughts or feelings onto someone else and accuse them of what actually we are feeling, rationalizing things overly, well, they harmed me because they had a bad childhood. True, but that doesn't make the abuse okay.

[00:07:45]Displacement, where you redirect an impulse or an emotion from a dangerous target to a safe one. So, for example, you come in the door and instead of yelling at your partner, who you're mad at, you yell at the dog, right? Or you kick the dog, that's the famous example.

[00:07:59]Sublimation, where you channel unacceptable urges into socially acceptable or productive activities, like sports. So, you're aggressive, but you take it out in sports, but you actually have an anger and an issue happening in your life. So, understanding how these adult responses show up in your life can really be the key to insight. When someone says, "You're projecting." And you're like, "No, I'm not." You're denying. You're engaging in denial and projection. So, you can look at the parts that you need to own, that belong to you. Being a victim, victimizing yourself, and not taking accountability. So, defense mechanisms, ala Freud, despite his complex history, can be very helpful in examining your role, as much as understanding your traumatic experience, your abuser. The next one is really understanding borderline personality disorder, as much as narcissistic PD. The truth is that because narcissism has blown up for so many reasons, people are often not understanding that borderline behaviors, this relational storminess, and instability, and sense of self, can also be going on. And where it really shows up is where I've talked about we get good love and bad love. With narcissistic people, we don't get so much good love. We get some, perhaps, if they get a sense of value by being a certain version of themselves to us, like being the good dad, what good dads do, which happens to align with what you love. But, the borderline piece is where parent, for example, can show up and be extremely helpful, give you money, babysit your kids, and then turn around and accuse you of stealing from them or trying to hurt them or being harmful.

[00:09:41]And so, it's really confusing and understanding under the umbrella of emotionally immature, borderline, and narcissistic, any of those, including things like substance abuse, bipolar mood disorders, but really getting an understanding of how those can manifest in our caregivers and how we can absorb them and make sense of them is really important and it can reduce the most common experience of child trauma with complex caregivers, which is confusion.

[00:10:09]Once I understood, I said it in a million videos, that I was reading a book in my doctoral program that I said, "Oh my god, my mom has untreated borderline." It was the first time I could say, "It's actually not me."

[00:10:20]Because all this time I thought, just like she said, when things went sideways, it was still somehow my fault.

[00:10:27]I wasn't being compassionate enough. I didn't understand her. Or people will say, like I said earlier, "Oh, well, they had trauma, too." Still not an excuse for poor, harmful, consistently abusive behavior. So, understanding the nuances and differences there can be extremely powerful in removing guilt and shame, and also navigating how to be in relationship or not with these parents or caregivers or partners or exes or co-parents, if they are still alive and you have to still engage with them or you choose to. The next one is understanding that trauma does not live in your body. Trauma lives in your brain. Your body sends signals to your brain, and that is how your brain makes sense of what is going on. And reconstructs the trauma every time you have a memory of it, your brain is reconstructing another version.

[00:11:16]Remembering that the brain is a predictive organ. This idea of an emotional brain and a cognitive brain and a, you know, reptilian brain is one of the greatest myths ever transmitted over the course of time in psychology.

[00:11:29]Even the fight or flight response is not what you necessarily think it is. What we're talking about is a brain in overdrive on threat prediction. And when you understand that there is a construction of every single memory and experience you have, that your brain relies on predictions, and the more predictions of threat you make, the more threat you will find, it reorganizes the way you can understand yourself and how to begin to change those predictions through questioning is this a threat?

[00:11:56]How am I responding? How do I want to respond? What are my options? That is what my book is about and we'll talk a lot more about that. And really quickly to say that understanding complex PTSD and PTSD are important, especially things that you may not think are traumatic because they are actually complex trauma. They occur in relationship to other people. The next one is understanding that toxic stress from these chronic events that occur in childhood or adulthood, they do make our body sick. The traumas do make us sick.

[00:12:30]They come up in things like wearing down our immune system and over producing hormones and survival systems so that we feel sick. We actually develop cancer, diabetes, chronic illness. This is the ACEs studies, A C E S, the adverse childhood experiences studies. If you understand these and how the smallest thing that you don't necessarily think is trauma is traumatic, it can change your life and understand how you proceed with healing yourself. The next one is understanding your triggers as they connect to your childhood and how the triggers, things that make you feel small, ashamed, angry, activate the little child, the the inner child that lives within you. So making connections between your inner child, which is really that part of you that is always a perpetual child inside and and often still very much living in the adult body and present and what activates that little child in healthy and unhealthy ways is helpful in terms of self-care and compassion and things like that. The next one is understanding the role of neurodivergence. And this is a whole other video, of course, but do you have ADHD or autism? Remember, trauma also creates changes in nerd neurodivergent paths potentially in the brain. And understanding how those things can shape and inform the way you experience trauma. For example, many autistic people have developed trauma to things that the neurotypical person might think are no big deal. There are also more traumatic experiences for people who have trauma and autistic and ADHD brains through the way they interact with the world and other people. For example, I've always said with ADHD, one of the worst things is not even the forgetfulness or lack of organization, it's the why'd you do that? Or the very common rage response and anger response in almost every person with ADHD I've ever known. It could be the sensory issues. It often is and we don't realize it. And so these kids get diagnoses like ODD and blamed and shamed when really what's going on is they're being activated and can't manage their response to that impulse to to deal with the trigger. And then the last two were understanding how to be compassionate, how to express self-compassion to yourself, to talk to yourself with love and compassion, to find ways to literally help heal and become that inner parent through re-parenting yourself, setting up your life in a way that says that you matter, trying to get more sleep, trying to see the psychiatrist if you need it, trying to exercise. Understanding that healing is about doing. It is not just about intellectualizing and thinking. Most of us understand what's wrong with us. We just don't know how to access the resources or maintain them to feel better. And so to to me, it's about understanding how to implement all the things I just shared in your life in a real way. Not perfectly and not all the time, but you must learn to engage in ways that actually demonstrate that you are worthy of healing in the first place. So, these are the things after all these decades of books and courses and patients I've learned and I just wanted to share those with you. There are many more important concepts. Please feel free to share yours in the comments, but know that I promise you if you understand these things and how to implement that, you can truly change your life. Thanks for being here. Have a beautiful day. Don't forget to follow me on Substack, Instagram, and TikTok.

[00:15:54]Posting a new Substack tonight or tomorrow and it's going to actually be a educational fictional story about four therapists in group therapy for peer supervision. And we're going to go through every week different scenarios uh using therapeutic concepts to teach.

[00:16:09]So, hope you'll join me there. All right. Have a beautiful day. Take care.

[00:16:12]Bye.