Recognition

Do I Have Childhood Trauma? And What Can I Do About It Now? | Part 2

Name: Do I Have Childhood Trauma? And What Can I Do About It Now? | Part 2
Uploaded: 2026-09-11
Duration: 10 min 12 s
Channel: Meredith Shuman
Description: Meredith Shuman offers a trauma-informed look at childhood trauma recovery through community, resources, and faith.

Why some childhood trauma leads to lasting difficulty and some doesn't — the role of support at the time, and what recovery through therapy and community looks like.

By Meredith Shuman, MSW · Founder and Executive Director

Quick answer

Whether childhood trauma leads to lasting difficulty often comes down to the support a child had at the time of the traumatic event; children with parents, siblings, teachers, or other supportive people around them are more likely to process trauma and function well later in life. Recovery itself usually involves leaning into community, both professional support like therapy and personal relationships, along with trauma-informed resources and understanding of how the brain and body respond to trauma.

Key takeaways

Our brains form from the back forward and bottom up, so childhood abuse or neglect shapes the pathways our brains develop, and some of those pathways are not healthy.
Recovering from childhood trauma often takes years and can involve returning to therapy at different life stages, as Meredith Shuman describes doing in her 20s, 40s, and 50s.
Understanding the science of how trauma affects the brain and body can help remove shame by showing that bad things that happened to us are not our fault, though how we respond is our own responsibility.
Whether someone experiences a traumatic childhood event and still functions well later in life often depends on whether they had a supportive community, such as parents, siblings, teachers, or coaches, present at the time of the trauma.
Community, both professional support like therapy and personal support like friends and family, along with solid resources and, for some people, faith, are key pieces in processing childhood trauma.

Common questions

How do I know if I have childhood trauma?

You may recognize childhood trauma by identifying as a victim of difficult or abusive parenting or experiences, even if you can't remember or understand every detail. Leaning into community and reflecting on how you were raised can help you recognize patterns connected to childhood trauma.

Why do some people recover from childhood trauma while others struggle?

It has to do with who was in that child's community at the moment of the traumatic event. Children who had supportive parents, siblings, teachers, or coaches around them at the time are more likely to process the event and believe they are not alone, which helps them function well later in life.

What can I do if I had childhood trauma?

Lean into community, both professional support like a qualified therapist and personal relationships like friends, family, or a small group. Understanding trauma-informed resources about the brain and body, and for some people, faith, can also support healing.

Full transcript

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Introduction

In childhood, as hard things are happening to us, abuse, neglect, our brains are forming around all of that. Welcome to part two of the topic, Do I have childhood trauma? This topic is pretty complex, and so we decided to divide this video into two parts. If you haven’t watched the previous video, please feel free to check the link out, and that’ll make more sense as we enter into the content here. So we’re just going to jump right in. Thanks for being here.

Leaning Into Community

There are so many other ways that we can understand or know that maybe we’ve had childhood trauma. Another way is for us to lean into our community. And that really takes us into the topic of what do I do? So say I have had some childhood trauma. Maybe I can’t identify all of it. Maybe I don’t understand all of it. Maybe I don’t know all the details or remember all the details of it. But say I know that I had some childhood trauma, and I can say for myself that I identify as a victim of childhood trauma.

In the ways that I was parented, my mother, who has now passed, she really suffered from a lot of mental health issues. And because of that, the way that she parented me was quite abusive growing up. So I won’t go into as much of that detail in this particular video, but just know, in a lot of ways, I get you. I get it.

How the Brain Forms Around Trauma

What’s difficult about childhood trauma is that as our brains are forming, they form from the back forward, and from the bottom up. So what’s happening is, in childhood, as hard things are happening to us, abuse, neglect, our brains are forming around all of that. It’s very easy for us to develop ways of thinking, pathways in our brain, that actually have to work around the abuse and trauma that we’ve experienced. And sometimes those pathways that we form are actually not very healthy. So in that way, we really want to work through this stuff. We really want to process it, understand it, and in any way that we can, get to the other side of it, which sometimes can take years.

It’s taken years for me, and it’s happened at different stages of my life, where I really dug into therapy and processing in my 20s, and then I went again in my 40s, and in my 50s now. I’m still in therapy, still digging into these corners and areas of my life.

What Can We Do About It

So let’s talk some about what can we do once we feel pretty sure that we’ve had some childhood trauma. What can we do about it? There are really three or four big areas for us to look at.

Number one is community. Who are the people around us? Are they safe? Are they people that pour into us? When I say community, there’s professional community, and then there’s our personal community. Professional community can be a really good, solid therapist. I’m a huge advocate for therapy. Of course the person needs to be highly qualified, it needs to be a fit for you, and there’s certainly bad therapy out there, but for the most part, if you do some really solid research, you can find really great people out there who are super well trained to come alongside you specifically in the challenges that you might face from childhood.

That’s professional community. Then your personal community, people you’re in romantic relationships with, parents, siblings, friends, perhaps someone or people from your church, maybe you have a group of people that get together on a Friday night, or a small group, or something like that. These folks, it’s so important to stay connected to them as we process and work through potential childhood trauma.

Resources and Understanding the Science

The second thing for us to really look at is our resources. That’s part of what we’re trying to provide here, that the more we understand science, and I have a faith that believes that we were created, the science that helps us to understand how we were created and how our brains work and how it connects to our bodies, and where stress is stored in our bodies, and what our reactions to all of that are, that’s so important for so many reasons. One is that when we understand that a lot of this is biology, it helps us take some of the shame out of it. It helps us to understand that these things are not my fault. Bad things that have happened to me are not my fault. How I respond, that is on me. What I do with my responses, my interactions, my relationships, that’s on me. But the bad things that have happened to me are not my fault.

If I understand science and the brain and the body and all those kinds of things, it helps me to understand, okay, some of this is just my body responding in a moment, responding to a trigger or an activation, responding to a challenge or a person that might not be safe or feel emotionally safe in the moment. So resources, very, very important. And again, we’re always going to try to focus in on sound research. We also want to hear from you guys about places and websites that are really helpful for you. Share those resources with us.

Faith as Part of the Picture

As I mentioned, I am a person of faith, and it’s just really the way that I view the world and the way that I really believe that healing is possible, and the spiritual world, for me, my faith being in Jesus, is so critical to my understanding and development in terms of how I understand mental health. So if faith is a piece for you as well, then that is a third or fourth way to really lean in as we struggle through understanding our childhood traumas and what to do about it.

Why Some People Seem to Do Fine

So we’re at the end of our video, but I want to answer the question: why do some people, if one in four or two-thirds of us have experienced some sort of trauma in childhood, that’s a lot of people, why do some people seem to float along and do fine, find what’s normal, right, that’s complicated to do, but seem to function well in society, and some of us are so debilitated, challenged, or fill in the blank there.

Here’s the answer, and this is all research-based too. It has everything to do with who that child’s community is at the moment of the traumatic event. If you read any of Bruce Perry’s work, he talks a lot about this, and that book, What Happened to You, was a huge eye-opener for a lot of people. But if a child experiences a traumatic event but has parents, perhaps siblings, teachers, coaches, Sunday school teachers, people that are around them and supporting them in it, then even though the traumatic thing happened, their brain is able to process and believe, but I’m not alone in it. I’m sure you’re with me, right? Like you can see the difference. Bad things happen, but if I know I’m not alone in it, I’m going to get through it.

So that is how most people who come out of childhood trauma and are highly functional, doing pretty well, or managing fine in society and our culture, it has a lot to do with how they were supported at the time of those traumatic events.

Closing

So that’s the end of our video. I hope that was helpful for you. Please subscribe or give us some comments. Give us some questions, offer some resources of your own if you have suggestions for us or for this community that we’re building here. And I want to always remind myself and remind you as well that on this journey, trauma does not get the last word.