Gudrun Frerichs, PhD

How To Get Over Childhood Stress: The Process Of Getting Hurt

This is the first of two articles about how to get over childhood stress or - how does therapy work - in which I will explain how people get hurt by childhood stress (1^st article) and how they can recover from it (2^nd article “Healing from Childhood Stress and Abuse: How Therapy works”).  I have included the impact of childhood stress seen through neuro-biological eyes because it shows clearly the pathways to how the healing can take place

Getting Professional Help For Stress

When you pay attention to the signals of your body you will be able to do a lot of stress control without the need for professional help. However, some stressors are beyond people’s control – such as the death of a loved one, illness, past abuse/trauma, or general mental health issues.  They can not be changed or controlled and people might require help processing these stressful events and letting them go.

It can be seen over and over again, that people struggle by themselves and wait a long time before they seek professional help. I call that the dentist syndrome. (Who likes to go to the dentist?) Instead of going at the early signs of problems, when a simple drilling and cleaning could have restored dental health, people wait too long and end up with a root canal treatment.

Sometimes a few sessions can put things in perspective and provide the tools needed to deal with those incidents that cause stress.

Breaking The Routine

Breaking the routine is not only a powerful tool in managing stress but it is also useful in many other contexts. Have a different breakfast, skip the TV news and have your dinner at the beach, take your lunch break away from your desk, have a swim at mid-day, or visit a friend unexpectedly.

 Breaking the routine could also mean you spend a Saturday in the garden weeding, in the library checking out books, or going to an art exhibition.

If possible, make sure that you have a mini vacation ever now and so often. It doesn’t have to be something expensive involving hours and hours of travel. It can be a surprise ‘day-out’ with your partner or your children or a long weekend on a campsite or in a motel nearby.

 

Plan Your Day / Week

A common phenomenon is that people put too much on their plate and then get stressed with the responsibilities and commitments they gave to themselves or other people. The best way to limit stressors that are needless is by planning your day, week, or even month.  But you need to be realistic. Even when people plan their day or their week, they often don’t allow for fun and enjoyable breaks, they don’t consider that activities may take longer than planned or that they may be stuck in traffic. Leave plenty of time between activities so that you have room to move.

Planning your week will also allow you to say no to requests that are difficult for you to fit in or that are beyond what you can reasonably expect of yourself. Learning to say NO is a major tool in combating stress – especially for people who have been conditioned to be overly accommodating others.

The Stress Diary

Before you can deal with stress effectively, you need to identify the causes of your stress. Are your stressors external and relate to your work, to problems within family members, financial problems, a loss, housing, your overall work load, friends or neighbours, or your health? Or are your problems more located internally due to the way you think or feel? Are they due to you being a perfectionist, needing to be in constant control, being shy or afraid, struggling with your mood, or to difficulty controlling your emotions?

Use a stress diary – at least for wee while – to identify the daily stressors you are under. You can use the following link to Download Stress Diary

You can see in the stress diary a column for identifying the physical symptoms of stress. It is really important that you become aware of how your body reacts so that you can start identifying stress earlier and take more quickly measures to alleviate stress.

Stress Impairs Thinking

Stress seems to have a negative impact on people’s ability to think clearly and quickly, and attend to new information. The study investigated male doctoral students shortly before and after their board exams and found that although students did not perform well under stress, their brain’s ability to do so bounced back in less than a month after the stress went away. 

This may be quite different in the case of chronic stress that can lead to major health problems such as chronic fatigue, depression, post traumatic stress, and Alzheimers.

Rockefeller University (2009, January 28). Stress Disrupts Human Thinking, But The Brain Can Bounce Back. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/01/090127190442.htm

Impact Of Early Childhood Stress

 For psychotherapists working with people who struggle with the legacies of an abusive and/or traumatic childhood, it is no news that people are affected way past their childhood years. It’s good to see that research is coming to the party and provides scientific evidence for the long-term struggles people have.

"The immune system is not preset at birth…The cells are there, but how they will develop and how well they'll be regulated is very much influenced by your early environment and the type of rearing you have." We know from trauma research the same to be true for people’s self-capacities involved in distress tolerance and emotion regulation.

Indeed, even if the life circumstances improve people show that early childhood stress has a negative impact on their learning capability, on their behaviours, and on their immune system.  Thus they are disadvantages with regard to their future careers, to how they integrate into society, and with regard to their health status.  

Men And Women React Differently To Stress

 There are many areas in life where it can be noticed that men and women respond differently in a number of situations. Recent research with brain imaging has shown that each gender responds differently to stress.

The main difference seems to be that stress caused changes in men’s right prefrontal cortex and in their left orbito-frontal cortex. These areas are usually associated with what is known as the ‘fight-or-flight’ reaction. Thus it can be expected that men deal with problems that cause them stress by going into ‘fight-mode’ that could in some instances involve aggression, or they respond with avoidance and withdrawal.

Stress Can Be Bad For Your Body

Chronic stress can lead to a number of behavioural changes and physical health problems. When a person is subjected to stress the body responds with activating the neuro-hormone ‘Corticotrophin Releasing Factor’ (CRF). In the case of chronic stress this release is increasing in length and volume in areas of the brain associated with fear and emotion. It thereby changes the body's response causing health-related stress problems such as anxiety, depression, irritability, insomnia, and even infertility.

Dermatologists have identified that increased cortisol levels in the body caused by stress can lead to hair falling out, acne breaking out, and to many other problems.

Indeed, stress can lead to an increase in inflammations and central nervous system infections. It is known to affect the effectiveness of vaccines, is linked to endometriosis, and can cause digestive difficulties that range from stomach aches to diarrhoea.

Are You Stressed?

 Before you can make a sensible plan about how to deal with stress in your life, you will have to identify whether you are stressed. I have noticed people sometimes minimize stress producing circumstances and they discount the level of stress they are under. Instead, they get angry with themselves for not ‘functioning’ one hundred percent.

You can test yourself using the Holmes & Rahe Stress Scale. Following the link will bring you to a site where you can test your level of stress. Read the instructions and calculate the level of stress you are under. You can read how to deal with stress in the following articles under the category 'Stress'.