As a clinical psychologist, I hear this all the time: “That was so long ago. I don’t think about it anymore, so I don’t think that’s affecting me.” I understand why people believe this. But the effects of childhood pain don’t disappear just because we stop thinking about the events. They often work in the background and quietly shape how we feel, work, and interact with others. This is especially true for high achievers like professionals and business owners who look successful on the outside but still feel “not enough” or like an imposter on the inside.
What’s the difference?
A single traumatic event, like a car accident or an assault, is easier to point to. Complex trauma, or Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), is different. It usually comes from years of childhood trauma, which can include physical and/or sexual abuse, but often doesn’t. Many clients who seek therapy with me for the first time for anxiety never realized before starting therapy that they experienced emotional neglect from their often well-intentioned and hard-working parents: they grew up seeing and experiencing difficult and scary situations without receiving enough comfort, attention, or emotional connection from the adults who raised them.
Many of us grew up with parents who loved us deeply but couldn’t always show it. Maybe:
None of that makes them bad parents. It means they were doing their best with what they had. But a child’s brain doesn’t know the difference between “my parent is absent because they’re working hard for me” and “my parent is absent.” The nervous system just registers the absence. Psychotherapist Pete Walker, author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, writes that facing having experienced emotional neglect is one of the hardest parts of healing. He describes how easy it is to minimize what emotional neglect actually did to us, and says recovery takes a real leap forward once we let ourselves feel how painful that early loneliness truly was. As Walker puts it, growing up without a parent’s warm attention “creates an overwhelming emptiness,” one that can follow us straight into adulthood if we never look at it.
If any of these sound familiar, it might be more connected to your past than you realize:
Many of us have heard of the fight-or-flight response, but our stress response actually includes four responses:
Many first-generation professionals learned to fawn early, because keeping the peace at home, or making a parent’s hard sacrifices feel “worth it,” felt like the safest path. That same pattern often follows you into your career: the need to overperform, to never disappoint, to prove your worth through achievement.
That’s also what an emotional flashback can feel like. You’re in a performance review or a hard conversation with your boss, and suddenly you feel small, powerless, or humiliated, even though you’re a grown, capable adult who has accomplished a great deal. Your body is reacting to an old wound, not just the present moment.
Here’s the encouraging part. Toxic shame cannot fully heal alone; it heals in relationship, through being seen and accepted by someone emotionally safe. The more honest we are about our struggles with a trusted person, the more shame and loneliness begin to leave us. Modern research backs this up: our ability to calm our own nervous system grows stronger when we regularly connect with someone who feels safe.
This is exactly why therapy can help so much. It’s not about being “broken.” It’s about finally having a steady, caring relationship where you can be honest, be understood, and slowly unlearn old patterns that no longer serve you.
And healing isn’t a straight line. Some weeks will feel like real progress. Others will feel like you’re back where you started. That’s normal, recovery can feel like it moves in circles, and not a straight path upward.
If you’ve spent your life working hard, making your family proud, and still feel like it’s never quite enough, that feeling has a source, and it can be understood and worked through. As a clinical psychologist, my goal is to offer a space that’s caring, safe, and curious. One where you can explore where these patterns came from and find your own answers, at your own pace.
If this resonates with you, individual therapy might be a good next step. You’ve spent your whole life taking care of everyone else’s expectations. This is your invitation to take care of the person who made all of that possible: you.
Source note: concepts paraphrased and cited from Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving.
