Healing Early Childhood Trauma
Plus how high-control religion can traumatize the smallest of children
A couple months back, I ranted about how I, as a therapist, kinda hate CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) because of its focus on the conscious aspect of problems and healing, and its assumption that most problems can be solved through just choosing to think differently about them. Today’s topic is an excellent example as to why modalities focused on intellectualizing our way to change just don’t cut it! We’re talking about treating preverbal trauma. How can we heal trauma we don’t even explicitly recall? Let’s discuss.
I recently was trained about using EMDR to help heal trauma that occurs before our minds are even able to record events in a narrative, explicit-memory fashion: that is, trauma from even before birth to about age 3 or so. (The training even touched on intergenerational trauma, which is kind of mind-blowing to think about! Trauma probably isn’t just what happens to you, but what has happened to your ancestors: possibly through epigenetics and what genes get turned on or off???).
Even though our conscious memory doesn’t recall what happened… in the name of the popular trauma book, the body keeps the score.
The idea that our body and our emotional center of our brain hold information that we don’t have explicit memories about is key to how to treat this type of trauma. As an aside, I was fascinated to learn that when we experience our body as holding the information, it is actually the right hemisphere of our brain, where emotional processes are stored! We just feel it as a body sensation, instead! 🤯
When would you consider treating preverbal trauma?
Since we have both clinicians and therapy participants here (and people who are both at different times!), I’ll try and be somewhat general but still with some meatiness thrown in.
If there is something you know happened in early childhood (0-3 or 4): say, a traumatic birth, a stay in the NICU, separation from parents, time in foster care, or abuse or neglect, it’s a clear reason to engage in treating preverbal trauma. Not saying you *have* to jump into it, and for many clients it’ll take a long time to build to that, but there is more than likely something there to treat.
But another reason is if a client has done a lot of work on issues that are conscious to them, but still seems to be stuck. They’ve processed — even through EMDR or another powerful trauma treatment modality — some traumas they can remember, but they still have a deep-seated sense of unworthiness, or fearfulness, or a sense of not belonging in the world. Or, in EMDR terms, they cannot get their SUDs (subjective units of distress) down to 0 but also can’t say what would help it change.
Things I might listen for with clients is where the problems they describe feeling in their current life don’t seem to altogether match what they experienced leading up to it. Where you get the sense that something else is contributing to why they are feeling such an intense level of distress, even though we collectively can’t put our finger on it.
Times like this, I might choose to “trust the process” of exploring what we don’t know to see if it might unlock something for us. As my trainer said, “Work with what you have, and get what you can.” It’s going to feel incomplete and like you’re wandering around in the dark, which is accurate. Because that’s the nature of preverbal trauma! We didn’t have language to organize and understand our experience: sensations and emotions were just happening to us. So they get stored in a similar way: impressionistic, imagery-based, and general feelings about the self and other.
Using EMDR and somatic methods to treat preverbal trauma
Typically in EMDR, one would select a specific memory to work on, determine the (or a) negative belief that developed from that memory, and what a person wants to believe about themselves instead. However, in preverbal trauma, most of that isn’t going to be accessible, because… it’s preverbal! We didn’t have the ability to store events in a narrative fashion in our brains, or the words to conceptualize what was happening.
So instead, we might work with a general time period, or if someone knows something happened, we could work with a known event and basically project what they think they felt like. Using the principle of “work with what you have; get what you can,” the self-healer trusts whatever sensory information is available. It might be a tight back, a creaky elbow, an increased heart rate, or tightness in the throat. Or it might be a feeling of darkness or blackness with sporadic flashes of light. Then you just do bilateral stimulation / dual attention stimulus (same thing) and let whatever needs to process, process1! Also, tactile BLS/DAS can be more effective in preverbal trauma because our early lives are so sensory and tactile. Cool, right?
Tying in religious trauma with preverbal trauma
Much of the religious trauma most of us are working through or have worked through is at the verbal level — it might take some thought and a lot of digging, but there’s usually memories or specific beliefs we can point to that are shaping our experiences today. However, I want to highlight that the controlling religious system that raised us probably also caused preverbal trauma because of the parenting methods promoted and the theology spoon-fed to the adults, whose job it was to cram innocent kids into controlled, controllable little holes.
At DL and Krispin Mayfield’s new Substack
, they write about the impact of Religious Authoritarian Parenting on us at the individual and societal levels. Just yesterday they had a discussion post about how Dobson et al emphasized that everyone is born with original sin, and thus parents need to see their children of every age as being sinful when they try to exert their willfulness and sense of independence. A toddler meltdown is not an emotional reaction to being overwhelmed or wanting a sense of control in their big, difficult world — it’s a sinful act of defiance that the parent needs to squash as quickly as possible. The child should understand that the parent (as the stand-in for god) is the ultimate authority, and the child’s job is to simply obey without question.Ugh. It’s so sad! I notice even just writing those sentences, I feel unsettled in my gut, a heaviness in my heart, and a completely irrational feeling of being in trouble or doing something wrong. [Side note: I’ve been looking for my next EMDR topic to work through with my own therapist and maybe I just found it 😅]
Those early years that we don’t remember are full of potential: for things to go really well, but also to go really wrong. It’s not much of a stretch of the imagination to see how many of us, if we were raised by parents imbibing the Dobson et al parenting methods, would have experienced some pretty traumatizing things in our early years. If we feel an innate sense of badness, shame, being “in trouble,” not being good enough, being afraid of authority figures, trouble trusting others… it might be time to look at our earliest years and not just the stuff we can consciously recall!
What does this post bring up for you? Is there a rabbit trail you’d like me to go down in a future post? (currently thinking about teenagers + religious authoritarianism + identity development). Are you familiar with somatic-based modes of healing, and/or what have you found to be helpful?
For the sake of this post, I am obviously WAY oversimplifying everything. I also want to note that people who have experienced more severe forms of preverbal trauma, or trauma in general, are going to need lots of preparation and containment work before diving into actual processing. (that’s what I’m skipping over in this post). Lots of grounding and regulating strategies, lots of parts work (IFS style or ego state work) to get all the parts of someone on board so a scared/resistant/controlling part doesn’t go sabotaging the process down the road. Plus some psychoeducation about emotions, windows of tolerance, and I even just learned about “resetting affective circuits” which will make absolutely no sense until you’ve tried it yourself. There’s just… a lot! But I also want this to feel like it’s approachable and it’s doable, because I think this kind of healing work is SO important!
So much is relatable here, but I'll focus on the Dobson tantrum thing. That was such an explicit and relentless part of my childhood. When I finally went into therapy in my early twenties, I remember what a breakthrough it was to hear my Christian therapist at the time say, "But what if tantrums aren't sin?"
My parenting was not influenced by Dobson at all - I was more a Dr Spock baby, and my upbringing wasn’t churched, but being born in the UK in the early seventies, there was a kind of authoritarianism built in to most adults and all of the systems one existed within. Corporal punishment was used in the home and in schools, and shaming was thought to be a good way of “encouraging”!
Your last paragraph describes most of my life experience. Reading Laura Anderson’s book “When Religion Hurts You” made me realise that the “high control social norms” can be just as harmful as the high control religion she describes.
I’m only now beginning to see how much my social upbringing harmed me, since I am learning a different way of interacting in life as part of my person-centred psychotherapy training.