How to Heal Trauma From Childhood

I used to think trauma looked like flashbacks. Like dramatic breakdowns in the middle of the night. Like sudden, vivid memories playing in your mind like a horror movie you can’t pause. And sometimes it does. But more often, it doesn’t.

What I didn’t know is that trauma is quieter than that. It hides in reactions. In eye rolls that feel like rejection. In a friend’s delayed reply that turns into they hate me in your head. In wanting to disappear after you speak up in a meeting. In needing control over the smallest things because somewhere, someone made you feel powerless.

Trauma doesn’t always knock on the front door and announce itself. It slips in through the back. It shows up in how fast your heart beats when someone raises their voice.
In the tension that floods your chest when someone walks away during an argument.
In the way you shut down when someone tries to love you too well.

You’ve done the therapy, read the books, maybe even forgiven the people. You tell yourself you’ve moved on.

But then you get triggered. And suddenly, you’re not thirty-something anymore, you’re five.
Or twelve.
Or seventeen and small and scared and aching.

But there’s no memory attached. Just the body remembering what the mind has learned to bury.

That trauma isn’t just something that happened...it’s something that stays. Not always as a story. But as a reflex. A tightening. A numbness. An overreaction that feels like an overreaction even as you’re doing it.

And that’s what no one told me.

I used to shame myself for those moments. For snapping. For ghosting. For crying over nothing. For pulling away when someone got too close.

But now I know.
That was my nervous system talking. That was my younger self panicking. That was trauma, not weakness. Not brokenness.

If I had known sooner, maybe I would’ve softened sooner. Maybe I would’ve met those reactions with curiosity instead of cruelty.

So if this is you...If you find yourself reacting in ways you don’t understand, if you feel things that don’t match the moment...don’t rush to judge it. Don’t shame the part of you that still doesn’t feel safe.

That’s just your body remembering. That’s just old pain trying to protect you. And it makes sense. Even if it no longer serves you, it once did.

But now you get to choose. To slow down. To ask yourself, what am I feeling? instead of what’s wrong with me?
To stop treating your reactions like character flaws and start seeing them as messengers.

You’re not crazy. You’re not too much. You’re just responding to things you were never meant to carry.

And now? Now you get to heal. Not by forgetting...but by learning to stay.

To breathe through the reaction.
To remind your body that you’re safe now.
To hold yourself the way no one else did back then.

Trauma comes back as a reaction. But healing comes back as a choice. One small, tender choice at a time. Start here if you feel the pull.