'Was My Childhood Really That Bad?'

“Was my childhood really that bad?”

In my 13 years as a therapist, this is, without a doubt, one of the most frequent questions I’ve heard.

Sometimes I hear this question in the context of it being the very thing people asked themselves about for years before finally coming to see me as a therapist.

And sometimes, it’s still a question that surfaces because it’s on my clients’ minds even as they’ve engaged in weekly therapy with me as a relational trauma therapist.

It’s a question that ping-pongs as denial ebbs, numbness fades, and the reality of what reality happened and its impact wars with conflicting ideas about what childhood trauma is, love and loyalty to parents despite their deficits, and contradictory awarenesses of what was.

It’s a question that’s central to childhood trauma recovery.

It’s a question that must be confronted to support the healing process.

But it’s a difficult and almost inevitably painful question to grapple with.

As a relational trauma recovery specialist, here are a few points I want you to know if you’ve asked the question and if you’re still grappling.

The answer to whether or not you had a bad childhood is subjective and yours alone

The answer to “Was my childhood really that bad?" is entirely dependent on your own feelings and emotions. Not the feelings, emotions, and opinions of your parents or guardians, siblings, community members, church members, or the internet.

No one gets to answer this question besides you and you alone. Why is this?

The way we each remember and feel about our childhood is deeply personal, much like a tapestry of memories woven with our individual emotions and experiences.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a renowned trauma expert, beautifully captures this in his book The Body Keeps the Score.

In his book, he illustrates how our personal emotional responses and the way we process events internally play a significant role in shaping our childhood memories.

It's like each of us has a different lens through which we view our past, and it's these lenses that give color and meaning to our experiences.

This understanding is important because it reminds us that it's normal and natural if our view of our childhood doesn't quite match up with someone else's.

So when we talk about childhood, it's not just about what happened; it's about how we hold those experiences in our hearts and minds, subjectively.

And yet, when it comes to what makes a childhood “bad,” what is behind the making has both objective data and subjective nuance.

What makes a childhood “bad” has both objective data and subjective nuance

Research on society's views of what constitutes a "bad" childhood experience often centers around the concept of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

The Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study was a significant investigation into childhood abuse, neglect, and household challenges, and provides an objective framework for identifying negative experiences in childhood.

This landmark study revealed that almost two-thirds of participants reported at least one ACE, with over 20% reporting three or more ACEs. The research underscored a graded dose-response relationship between ACEs and negative health and well-being outcomes.

In other words, the more ACEs experienced, the greater the risk for negative outcomes​​. (If you’re curious about the Kaiser ACE’s quiz, you can take it here.)

The ACE framework has been pivotal in understanding how different forms of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction during childhood can lead to long-term negative outcomes but the scope of the quiz fails to account for all experiences.

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For example, what happens when a female is the abuser?

Or what happens when one isn’t sure if a parent or guardian had mental illness?

Or what happens in broader social settings and outside the family home like in the cases of chronic bullying in middle school, coercion by faith and spiritual communities, or aggression or belittling from teachers or coaches?

The Kaiser ACE’s focus on adversities within the home sometimes overlooks broader socio-ecological factors that also impact childhood experiences.

Indeed, the concept of "embodiment" proposed by epidemiologist Nancy Krieger emphasizes that human biology is shaped by both the material and social world, suggesting that adverse experiences extend beyond just family environments to include wider societal factors.

In my opinion as a trauma therapist, this could look like racial and ethnic discrimination, gender-based discrimination, and community violence.

These kinds of experiences can’t be discounted when inventorying the functionality or dysfunctionality of a childhood, how “good” or “bad” it was.

Despite these limitations, the ACE framework remains a key and objective tool in identifying children at risk and guiding interventions and public health measures.

And beyond these objective measures in the home and outside of it, once again the subjective interpretation of one's childhood plays a crucial role in determining if one’s childhood was “bad.”

The perception of whether a childhood was "bad" is deeply personal and is influenced by individual experiences and emotional responses.

For instance, you may have one or more ACEs—what society would deem objective markers of hard and bad experiences—such as housing insecurity at times in your childhood, but perhaps you also had deeply loving, secure, and attuned parents throughout your childhood. That kind of protective factor is what’s known as a positive childhood experience (PCE).

PCEs highlight the significance of supportive relationships and resilience-building in mitigating the effects of adverse experiences or even how and if someone perceives their objective “bad” childhood experiences as such.

This growing body of research on PCEs underscores the complexity of childhood experiences, demonstrating that childhoods can have objective “bad” experiences in them, but because of how you interpret those experiences, whether it’s because of PCEs or otherwise, determines whether or not if felt subjectively “bad” to you.

So all of this to say, your childhood can be both/and and doesn’t have to be either/or. I'll explain more in a future post. Stay tuned.

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