Parenting Pointers - Emotional Maturity and Childhood Trauma

Childhood trauma has long lasting detrimental effects to a person’s life. Childhood trauma can significantly impact adulthood, shaping one's emotional well-being, relationships, and overall quality of life. These experiences often lead to difficulties in forming healthy relationships, managing emotions, and coping with stress. Recognizing if you've experienced childhood trauma is crucial for healing and personal growth.
Lisa Goodpaster is the founder of The Stephood Project - a social awareness campaign addressing parental alienation and the danger of not co-parenting our kids. She is a parental alienation survivor, childhood trauma educator and author of newly launched book Alienation: When Parents Won't Parent. I had a chance to interview her to learn more.

How can childhood trauma affect adult relationships?

When our caregivers reject us or are unresponsive to our needs, we may develop an insecure-avoidant or dismissive-avoidant attachment style.

What happens to us as children can affect the attachment style we carry into our adult relationships.

When you have an unhealthy attachment style, you may have a hard time recognizing your partner's emotions or responding appropriately to his or her feelings. You may feel uncomfortable when your partner shows anger or sadness and does not know how to react. And you may pull away, or grab on too tightly, thus harming both your relationship and the person you love.

What is parental emotional unavailability, and how can that affect children?
When parents are emotionally unavailable they are not present or attuned to their children’s needs. For example in my book Alienated ‘when parents won’t parent’ I explain one of the most frustrating parent patterns for kids to witness is when parents can't get over the past.

Parents who are emotionally unavailable become consumed with their own trauma and often will put their emotional needs onto their child. This is called parentification. Basically when the child turns into a mini adult helping the parent.

For example; Parents who are going through a divorce understandably struggle with the stress and changes that accompany divorce. The issue is when parents lack the awareness that their kids are watching and worrying when they notice mom or dad or upset.

Parental emotional unavailability plays a significant role in our children’s mental health which is emotional neglect.

How does emotional maturity affect a child's sense of stability and support?
When parents are emotionally mature they’re able to help their children understand and process their own emotions. When we understand our emotions and are able to express and release them we learn how to cope effectively thus becoming more emotionally stable which in turn allows children the safety and stability to grow up whole.

When children don’t learn how to express their emotions out of survival, many children will automatically suppress their emotions out of shame, not knowing or fear.

How can adults heal from previous childhood trauma?
Awareness of one negative behavior and patterns they adopted in their own childhood. Studies show that while childhood emotional wounds may have changed your brain, your innate neuroplasticity means that you can change it again.

How can caregivers recognize their own lack of emotional maturity and work to improve connections with their children?
Caregivers can use mindfulness to notice their own reactions or moods towards their children especially when caregivers are stressed. One of the best ways to connect to our children is to listen to them. When caregivers and parents listen to their kids without judgment, the same area of the brain that allows us to feel loved is also activated.