Your Original Wound from Childhood Trauma
When you go through childhood trauma, it leaves a wound that follows you through life. Even if you heal this wound, its scar affects your relationships, career, parenting style, self-esteem, and perspective on the world. Your original scar can lead to self-sabotage if you don’t have the tools to handle it correctly.
In this blog, we’ll discuss original wounds and how you can attempt to heal them.
What is an original wound?
An original wound can occur from a variety of sources such as rejection, abandonment, physical child abuse, emotional child abuse, sexual child abuse, or betrayal. When an original wound occurs, you often have trust issues as a result, and this makes it difficult to move past the devastation. In fact, it tends to impact our self-worth in relationships.
You can obtain an original wound at any point during early development. This includes pre-natal or late adolescence. It jeopardizes self-worth, which creates issues within your individual social system.
Understanding an original wound can be difficult for people who do not have one, but it’s best understood by analyzing relationships. We’ll discuss the specifics of this in the next section.
How do original wounds impact relationships?
Original wounds often indicate why we repeat relationships – even good ones. Repeat relationships can be a good occurrence if they’re healthy. However, this isn’t always the case for those who have original wounds. Original wounds often impact the self-worth of the individual, which prompts us to choose destructive relationships as a way of addressing the original wound.
So, you may have heard that victims of abuse end up in a cycle, and this is the notion of the original wound. Repeated relationships occur again and again because of the way that we see ourselves and the world that we live in. For example, a little girl who grew up with an abusive mother may end up in an abusive relationship once again as a grown woman. However, it isn’t because she specifically chooses these abusive relationships. She doesn’t like the abuse. Rather, it’s because she grew up in an abusive system, and it is common to repeat relationships. Because an abused little girl associates love and pain with a relationship, she has difficulty detangling the two and continues to think that her abuser will love her.
Relationships have a way of becoming a habit, and sometimes you can become stuck in the cycle without realizing why. An original wound (or lack thereof) can often be the source of the behavior that steers your relationships. Understanding your original wound and getting to the root of it can allow you to begin the process of healing it.
Is an original wound only about relationships?
While original wounds manifest in relationships, you can experience your original wound in other areas as well. Original wounds hold a number of negative beliefs related to our self-worth. Thus, it often takes time to understand the deep emotional pain that comes with acknowledging negative self-thoughts that have occurred due to original wounds.
You may believe that there’s something wrong with you, that you have no value, that you cannot do enough, that you’re alone, that you’re inadequate, that you’re powerless or loveless, or that you’re incomplete. It can be difficult to realize the issues related to our self-worth due to our original wound as well as the resulting actions (repeated negative relationships).
Regardless, you are able to put yourself on a healthy path today. Original wounds will continue to sabotage your best efforts because you don’t know they exist. Until you deal with them at their core, you won’t be able to find peace and fulfillment.
Are you ready to heal your original wound?
Derek Clark is an inspiring keynote speaker and trainer helping adults create healing experiences for victims of childhood trauma. Healing a child’s original wound starts with adults knowing more about how to help. The original scar is deep within their childhood and that can be a lot for anyone to handle.
Fortunately, you have childhood trauma expert and conference keynote speaker Derek Clark on your side. He’s been through it all – survived horrific child abuse, foster care for 13 years, rejection, homelessness, abandonment…a survivor to thriver…truly a trauma to triumph inspirational story. He’s ready to help your conference attendees or employees offer hope and strategies to help survivors of childhood trauma. Visit www.StopChildTrauma.com to learn more about how to reserve keynote speaker Derek Clark for your next event.
