How Childhood Trauma Affects You Across A Lifetime | Patrick Teahan
Clinical social worker Patrick Teahan joins Lewis Howes to discuss how quiet childhood dysfunction creates lifelong patterns of shame, identity collapse, and relationship sabotage, and how to begin healing.
The gist
-
Teahan says covert harm like emotional neglect or gaslighting often causes the same anxiety and intimacy issues as overt abuse, yet is harder to name in therapy.
-
Shame sits beneath all other emotions for trauma survivors, complicating every feeling they try to access and keeping them disconnected from themselves and others.
-
Teahan recommends journaling with your non-dominant hand to reach your subconscious and identify which childhood memory is being triggered in the present moment.
-
Teahan says healthy relationships feel threatening to trauma survivors because their nervous systems are wired to expect chaos, making calm feel like something is wrong.
Also mentioned
12:56
ACE Study
· "The ACE study is a good sort of study to measure the effects of health over time for people who grew up in..."
19:14
Genogram
· "There's an exercise in that work of doing a genogram where you put together your family tree of dysfunction..."
28:15
Dialoguing
· "There's a tool that I teach called dialoguing, which is your journaling on paper between your dominant hand..."
Ads in this episode
T-Mobile 5G home internet. They're paid, so we keep them out of the picks above.
See what Lewis recommends without being paid →
◎
Related episodes
Episodes covering similar topics
The Endless Pain Of Emotionally Mature Partners - Mercedes Coffman
nervous system regulation
The Skill No One Teaches Us About Love | Baya Voce & Dr. Mark Hyman
attachment patterns
More from Lewis Howes