A subject within trauma
Childhood trauma
What happens when you are small does not always leave a memory. Often it leaves a way of functioning.
As a child I learned not to ask for anything, and now I no longer know how.
What is meant by it
Not only the events that have a name. It includes experiences nobody registered as happenings: an unpredictable environment, a parent who was emotionally unavailable, responsibility for managing adults' moods, repeated dismissal, having to be invisible so as not to cause trouble.
What separates this from a single event is that here the context is the fact. There is no day to recount, and precisely for that reason many people arrive convinced they have no claim on the subject.
Cumulative forms
These are the hardest to recognise from the inside, for a simple reason: if an environment was the only one you knew, you have nothing to compare it against.
The signal often arrives from outside and in adulthood — the surprise of seeing how another family works, or someone's reaction to a story you had always considered ordinary.
Why it surfaces in adulthood
A way of functioning built in childhood was a solution rather than a defect: anticipating moods, not asking, attending to others before yourself are strategies that worked in that context.
They become a problem when the context changes and the strategy stays. Many people arrive after a recent event — a stable relationship, the birth of a child, a position of responsibility — that required something the strategy does not know how to do.
What remains in the body and in memory
Memories from that period are often fragmentary: isolated images, sensations with no narrative, or gaps that come as a surprise. This is not a failure of attention, and it is consistent with how memory works under prolonged activation.
What is preserved better is not the content but the response: the alarm that goes off at a tone of voice, the tension that appears in situations that do not warrant it today.
You do not need a clear memory
It is the most frequent worry among people weighing up whether to start: thinking they do not have enough material.
The work does not begin with reconstructing the facts. It begins with how you are now — what happens day to day, what you avoid, what activates and when. What concerns the past arrives to the extent that it explains the present, and no further.
How the work goes
First a base gets built: understanding how things function now, and stabilising what needs stabilising. The account arrives when there is something to hold it, which is among the reasons the pace is set together.
Childhood trauma is also the field in which I have carried out research: four of my published works concern this subject. That is not a guarantee of anything — it is why this is ground I know from more than one side.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Fragmentary memories or gaps are consistent with how memory works under prolonged activation, and they are not an obstacle: the work does not begin with reconstructing facts but with how you are now. What concerns the past arrives to the extent that it explains the present.
No. It also includes the forms with no episode to recount: an unpredictable environment, an emotionally unavailable parent, repeated dismissal, having to manage adults' moods. These are often the hardest to recognise from the inside, because if that environment was the only one you knew, you have nothing to compare it against.
It is not a condition of the work, and it is not my decision. Some people come to want it, others do not, and the work functions either way: the object is how that pattern operates in your life now, not a reckoning with someone. If the question comes up, we look at what you expect it to produce.
Dr. Giuseppe Iannone — Psychotherapist
FIRST STEP