By Kusumanjalee Thilakarathna
If you can remember Dexter Morgan from the popular television series Dexter (2006-2013) you know what childhood trauma made him become. Dexter Morgan was a man with homicidal tendencies who lived a double life. He worked as a forensic technician for the police during the day, but killed heinous perpetrators at night. He had a powerful urge to butcher people. As the plot explained, he developed these drives due to a traumatic event in his childhood that left him soaking for days in the blood of his murdered mother. He witnessed his mother being killed and underwent more trauma as a child before Harry Morgan, a policeman, adopted him.
This popular TV series was adapted from a 2004 novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, by Jeff Lindsay, and it is said that the character of Dexter was based on a Brazilian serial killer named Pedro Rodrigues Filho. Filho was also a victim of childhood trauma, as he was physically abused by his father during his childhood. He was officially sentenced for 71 murders, but was claimed to have killed about a hundred. Like Filho, psychological research suggests that most serial killers were subjected to severe trauma as children. However, not all abused and traumatised children become serial killers.
The connection between childhood trauma and homicidal tendencies sheds some light on the possibility of childhood experiences impacting adults. Deeply traumatic experiences, especially during childhood, can have a very deep impact on adult life, shaping an individual’s personality and life choices. Child abuse, neglect, experiencing a life-threatening illness, witnessing a traumatic event, facing natural disasters, falling victim to bullying, domestic violence, witnessing the divorce of parents, losing someone close – any extremely stressful situation can be listed under the typical definition of childhood trauma.
If an adult faces these events, they’ll struggle to deal with them. Try and imagine the scale and scope of these events through a child’s eyes. How would they process these experiences with their limited maturity of education, socialisation, and life experiences? The struggle begins when they try to understand their role in a traumatic occurrence – “why is this happening to me?” Oftentimes, they blame themselves because they have no other point of reference for why these events occur: “I must have done something wrong”, “It’s my fault Amma couldn’t stand up to Thaththa when he hit her.”
According to research, children who are exposed to abuse and trauma may develop what is called a “heightened stress response”. This stress response can impact the ability to regulate their emotions, lead to sleep difficulties, lower immune function, and increase the risk of several physical illnesses throughout adulthood. An environment characterised by abuse and neglect can also impact a child’s brain development.
One of the most devastating impacts of childhood trauma on adults is the effect it has on self-image. Sometimes, adults may even develop a victim mentality and this can be dangerous, as the way people perceive themselves impacts every aspect of their lives. They may start to believe that others are at fault for their life occurrences or that the world is against them.
Childhood trauma can manifest as the inability to express or defend oneself, and the tendency to bottle up emotions in adulthood. A person may even develop unhealthy coping mechanisms. Childhood trauma can cause people to avoid relationships, or seek unhealthy relationships in adulthood, as it may cause them to view themselves as undeserving of loving, supportive, and healthy relationships.
According to Dr. Gabor Maté, trauma doesn’t have to be a war experience, or some horror that a child has witnessed as Dexter Morgan did. Trauma happens to everybody. It is enough that as a kid, they had parents who didn’t help them process their negative feelings. They were alone and so overwhelmed by the painful reality they disconnected from that part of the self. As they grow up, that part of them remains cut off, and they can’t experience life in all its beauty unless they heal.
Gabor Maté is a Canadian psychologist, physician, and author. He has a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma. As Maté explains in his movie The Wisdom of Trauma, trauma isn’t what happens to an individual, but how the individual reacts to what happened. He says:.. “Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”
To heal, the person needs to go back and realise that they are not their trauma, but it is how other people made them feel. Connecting to that painful part, the individual needs to learn how to express themselves. Dr. Maté proposes a new system to combat trauma – a trauma-informed society – a system in which parents, teachers, physicians, or people who create the systems are not entirely focused on fixing behaviours, making diagnoses, and labelling people with mental illnesses, but aim instead to understand the sources from which troubling behaviours and diseases root, wounding the psyche of the human.
(Kusumanjalee Thilakarathna is a mental health professional and has, over the past 10 years, contributed to several Sri Lankan media publications in both English and Sinhala languages. She mainly focuses on topics related to psychology and counselling in her writing)
If you feel that you or someone you know may be affected by this content or may require help, the following institutions would assist you:
The National Institute of Mental Health: 1926
Sri Lanka Sumithrayo: 0112 682 535
Courage Compassion Commitment (CCC) Foundation: 1333