When people think about trauma, they often picture a major event: a serious accident, physical or sexual abuse, violence, or another experience that threatens someone’s safety. These experiences can certainly be traumatic. However, trauma can also develop through repeated experiences during childhood that shape how we understand ourselves, relate to others, and navigate the world.
Developmental trauma refers to the lasting effects of overwhelming, harmful, or chronically unmet emotional and relational needs during childhood, particularly when these experiences interfere with a child’s developing sense of safety, identity, and connection.
Developmental trauma doesn’t always involve one dramatic event. Sometimes it develops through years of emotional neglect, unpredictable caregiving, family conflict, or growing up in an environment where a child doesn’t feel safe expressing their feelings or being themselves.
These experiences can influence how we manage emotions, respond to conflict, establish boundaries, and develop intimate relationships as adults.
At Room to Rise Counseling, understanding developmental and relational trauma means looking beyond current struggles to consider the experiences that may have shaped them. When we begin to understand how these patterns developed, we can work toward greater self-understanding, healthier relationships, and new ways of responding to ourselves and others.
Understanding the ACEs Study: How Childhood Experiences Affect Us
One of the most influential research projects in this area is the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Kaiser Permanente researchers, including Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda.
The original study, published in 1998, examined the relationship between adverse experiences during childhood and health outcomes later in life.
Researchers identified several categories of adverse childhood experiences, including:
- Physical abuse: Experiencing physical harm or violence from a caregiver or another person.
- Emotional abuse: Being repeatedly humiliated, threatened, demeaned, or made to feel worthless.
- Sexual abuse: Experiencing sexual abuse or exploitation.
- Physical neglect: Not having basic physical needs adequately met.
- Emotional neglect: Not receiving sufficient emotional support, attention, or care.
- Household substance use: Growing up with a household member who struggles with alcohol or drug use.
- Household mental illness: Living with a household member experiencing significant mental health difficulties.
- Domestic violence: Witnessing violence between caregivers.
- Parental separation or divorce: Experiencing the separation or divorce of parents.
- Household incarceration: Having a household member incarcerated.
The original study found a relationship between the number of adverse experiences reported and the likelihood of various health and behavioral difficulties later in life. Subsequent research has continued to demonstrate associations between childhood adversity and a range of physical and mental health outcomes.
The CDC’s broader research on ACEs has found that these experiences are common. National data collected between 2011 and 2020 indicated that approximately two-thirds of surveyed U.S. adults reported at least one ACE, while about one in six reported four or more.
These findings underscore the importance of understanding childhood experiences when considering adult health and well-being.
Importantly, an ACE score is not a prediction of someone’s future, a measure of their worth, or a complete assessment of their childhood.
The original ACE questionnaire captures specific categories of adversity, but it doesn’t account for every experience that can affect a child’s development. It also doesn’t fully capture protective relationships, individual differences, or the meaning a child makes of their experiences.
Two people who experience similar circumstances may respond differently, depending on factors such as their age, temperament, relationships, and access to support.
The purpose of understanding ACEs isn’t to label people by their past. It’s to recognize that experiences during childhood can matter long after childhood ends.
Big T Trauma and Little t Trauma
Another way to understand childhood trauma is through the distinction between what are often called Big T and little t traumas.
These terms are informal ways of discussing different kinds of overwhelming or distressing experiences. They aren’t formal diagnostic categories, and the distinction shouldn’t be used to rank someone’s suffering.
Big T Trauma
Big T trauma generally refers to experiences involving significant threats to physical safety or bodily integrity.
Examples include:
- Physical or sexual abuse.
- Serious accidents or injuries.
- Experiencing or witnessing violence.
- Natural disasters.
- Life-threatening medical events.
- Sudden, traumatic losses.
These experiences can overwhelm a person’s ability to cope and may lead to persistent fear, distress, or other trauma-related symptoms.
When these experiences occur during childhood, their effects may extend beyond the immediate emotional response. A child may develop beliefs about whether the world is safe, whether other people can be trusted, and whether they have the power to protect themselves.
Little t Trauma
Little t trauma generally refers to painful or distressing experiences that may not involve a direct threat to life or physical safety but can still have a meaningful psychological impact.
Examples may include:
- Repeated criticism or humiliation.
- Being excluded, rejected, or bullied.
- Growing up feeling emotionally unseen or unimportant.
- Experiencing chronic family conflict.
- Having a caregiver who is emotionally unavailable.
- Being repeatedly shamed for normal feelings or developmental needs.
- Experiencing a significant loss or relationship rupture.
An isolated experience in one of these categories may be difficult without necessarily producing lasting trauma-related effects. However, when experiences are repeated, occur during sensitive developmental periods, or happen without adequate support, they can contribute to lasting emotional and relational difficulties.
For example, a child who repeatedly hears that they are too sensitive, too needy, or too difficult may begin to believe that their feelings are a problem. Over time, they might learn to suppress their emotions, avoid asking for help, or prioritize other people’s comfort over their own needs.
Although the experiences may appear relatively minor to an outside observer, their cumulative effects can be significant.
The distinction between Big T and little t trauma is less important than understanding how an experience affected the individual and whether its effects continue to interfere with their life.
A person doesn’t need to compare their childhood with someone else’s to determine whether their pain deserves attention.
Complex Trauma: When Harmful Experiences Become a Pattern
Developmental trauma is closely related to the concept of complex trauma.
Complex trauma generally refers to exposure to multiple, prolonged, or repeated traumatic experiences, particularly experiences involving interpersonal relationships and circumstances from which escape is difficult.
For children, these experiences may occur within the very relationships that are supposed to provide safety and care.
Examples include growing up with a caregiver who is physically abusive, living in a home characterized by chronic intimidation or domestic violence, experiencing repeated sexual abuse, or enduring persistent emotional neglect.
When the people a child depends on for protection are also sources of fear, rejection, or unpredictability, the child faces a particularly difficult challenge.
They need their caregivers to survive, but they may also need to protect themselves emotionally or physically from those same caregivers.
This can create conflicting needs for connection and self-protection.
A child might become exceptionally attentive to a parent’s moods, learning to anticipate anger before it occurs. Another might suppress their feelings because expressing sadness or fear leads to ridicule. Another might become emotionally distant because relying on others has repeatedly led to disappointment.
These responses can be adaptive in the environment in which they develop. They may help a child maintain some degree of safety, connection, or predictability.
However, the same responses may become problematic in adulthood.
For example, an adult who learned to monitor a caregiver’s anger may become highly sensitive to a partner’s facial expressions or tone of voice. Someone who learned that expressing needs leads to rejection may struggle to communicate openly in an otherwise supportive relationship.
Complex trauma can affect several areas of development, including:
- Emotional regulation: Difficulty identifying, tolerating, or managing emotional experiences.
- Self-concept: Persistent beliefs that one is inadequate, unlovable, defective, or undeserving.
- Attachment and relationships: Difficulty trusting others, maintaining closeness, or feeling secure in relationships.
- Boundaries: Difficulty saying no, recognizing personal needs, or distinguishing one’s responsibilities from those of others.
- Stress responses: Becoming overwhelmed, shutting down, feeling constantly on guard, or having difficulty returning to a calm state.
- Coping behaviors: Relying on avoidance, perfectionism, compulsive behaviors, or other strategies to manage distress.
In The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explores how traumatic experiences can affect the brain, body, emotional regulation, and relationships. His work highlights the importance of understanding trauma not only as a memory of something that happened but also as an experience that can continue to influence how a person responds to the present.
Complex trauma doesn’t affect everyone in the same way, and not everyone who experiences repeated adversity develops a trauma-related disorder. Supportive relationships, individual strengths, and access to appropriate care can make an important difference.
Childhood Emotional Neglect: The Trauma of What Was Missing
When people think about childhood trauma, they often focus on harmful things that happened to them.
But sometimes the most important part of a person’s childhood story involves what didn’t happen.
Childhood emotional neglect occurs when a caregiver repeatedly fails to respond adequately to a child’s emotional needs. This may happen because the caregiver is overwhelmed, emotionally unavailable, struggling with their own unresolved experiences, or unaware of what the child needs.
Unlike physical abuse or overt emotional mistreatment, emotional neglect can be difficult to recognize because it often involves an absence of something rather than an obvious harmful act.
A child may have received food, clothing, shelter, and an education while still lacking the emotional support necessary to develop a secure sense of self.
Examples of childhood emotional neglect include:
- Rarely having a caregiver ask about or show interest in one’s feelings.
- Being expected to manage difficult emotions alone.
- Having sadness, fear, or anger dismissed or ignored.
- Receiving attention primarily for achievements or good behavior.
- Learning that expressing needs creates inconvenience or conflict.
- Having caregivers who are physically present but emotionally unavailable.
- Being expected to care for a parent’s emotional needs while receiving little support in return.
Not every emotionally imperfect parenting experience constitutes trauma or neglect. Caregivers inevitably miss opportunities to respond well, and healthy relationships include repair after misunderstandings.
The concern is more often a persistent pattern in which a child’s emotional needs go unmet and the child has insufficient opportunities to experience understanding, comfort, and repair.
How emotional neglect can shape adulthood
Children depend on caregivers to help them understand their internal experiences.
When a child becomes frightened, a supportive caregiver might help them recognize the feeling, understand what triggered it, and find ways to feel safe again.
Over time, these experiences help children develop their own capacity for emotional awareness and regulation.
When this support is consistently absent, children may have fewer opportunities to develop these skills.
As adults, they may struggle to identify what they feel or what they need. They may experience guilt when asking for help, minimize their own pain, or feel uncomfortable when others offer emotional closeness.
Some become highly self-reliant because they learned that no one would reliably be available to help them. Others become particularly sensitive to rejection because their early experiences left them uncertain about whether their needs would be welcomed.
In intimate relationships, these patterns may appear as difficulty expressing vulnerability, withdrawing during conflict, overfunctioning for a partner, or feeling lonely even when a relationship appears stable.
Jonice Webb’s work on childhood emotional neglect has helped popularize the idea that emotional absence can leave lasting effects even when a person doesn’t remember an obviously abusive childhood.
The important point is that a childhood can appear stable from the outside while still leaving significant emotional needs unmet.
Recognizing emotional neglect doesn’t require deciding that one’s parents were bad people. Parents can love their children and still lack the capacity, awareness, or resources to meet their emotional needs consistently.
Understanding this distinction can make room for both compassion for caregivers and honesty about the impact of childhood experiences.
Inherited Family Trauma: How Patterns Can Pass Between Generations
Sometimes the experiences that shape us began long before we were born.
Inherited family trauma, also called intergenerational trauma, describes the ways traumatic experiences and their effects can influence subsequent generations. Although we may not have personally experienced the original trauma, its effects may still be reflected in our family relationships, emotional patterns, beliefs, and ways of responding to the world.
In his book It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, therapist Mark Wolynn explores how unresolved trauma within a family can influence later generations. Wolynn encourages readers to consider whether some of their persistent fears, emotional reactions, or relationship patterns might be connected to experiences in their family history that were never fully acknowledged or resolved.
For example, a parent who experienced significant abandonment may become especially anxious about separation from their own children. A grandparent who survived war, displacement, or profound loss may have passed down a strong emphasis on vigilance, emotional restraint, or self-reliance. A parent who grew up in an abusive household may struggle to respond compassionately to their child’s emotional needs because they never experienced that kind of support themselves.
These patterns can be transmitted through everyday family interactions, parenting practices, unspoken expectations, and the ways families respond to distress.
How Is Trauma Transmitted Across Generations?
Researchers have investigated several possible pathways through which the effects of trauma may extend across generations.
Family relationships and learned behaviors. This is one of the clearest pathways. Caregivers may pass along ways of managing emotions, responding to conflict, and relating to others that developed in response to their own childhood experiences. These patterns can continue until someone recognizes and begins to change them.
Family beliefs and unspoken rules. Families may communicate explicit or implicit expectations about emotions, relationships, achievement, and belonging. Messages such as “never trust anyone,” “we don’t talk about family problems,” or “your needs come last” may reflect adaptations to earlier adversity that continue to influence later generations.
Social and environmental circumstances. Trauma can also affect subsequent generations through poverty, discrimination, displacement, family instability, and other circumstances that continue to expose family members to stress.
Possible biological pathways. Researchers are exploring whether trauma-related stress may influence biological processes, including epigenetic mechanisms that affect gene expression. Although this research is promising, the precise mechanisms and extent of biological transmission in humans remain uncertain. It would be inaccurate to conclude that specific traumatic memories or psychological experiences are directly inherited through genes.
In It Didn’t Start With You, Wolynn emphasizes the possibility that unresolved family experiences may be reflected in patterns of fear, distress, and relationships that seem difficult to explain through a person’s own life experiences alone. His approach encourages people to explore family history and consider connections that might otherwise remain unnoticed. However, these connections should be treated as possibilities to explore rather than established explanations for a person’s symptoms.
Recognizing and Changing Inherited Patterns
Understanding intergenerational trauma isn’t about blaming parents or grandparents. Many caregivers pass along patterns they never consciously chose and may not even recognize. They may have been doing the best they could with the emotional resources, support, and understanding available to them.
The goal is to develop a clearer understanding of how these patterns originated and decide which ones no longer serve us.
You might begin by asking yourself:
- What did my family teach me about expressing emotions?
- How did my caregivers respond when someone was frightened, angry, or sad?
- Were there significant losses, traumatic experiences, or periods of instability in my family’s history?
- What unspoken rules shaped my family’s relationships?
- Do I notice similar patterns in my own relationships or parenting?
- Which family patterns would I like to change for myself and future generations?
Exploring these questions can help you develop greater awareness of the beliefs and behaviors you may have inherited through family relationships.
Recognizing a pattern doesn’t mean you must reject your family or disregard the ways previous generations survived difficult circumstances. You can acknowledge the resilience that helped your family endure while also deciding that certain patterns no longer need to continue.
You may not have chosen the experiences that shaped your family, but you can begin choosing how those experiences influence your life today.
By developing emotional awareness, practicing healthier boundaries, and building more secure relationships, you can help interrupt harmful patterns and create a different experience for yourself and those who come after you.
Religious Trauma: When Spiritual Environments Become a Source of Harm
For many people, religious faith and community provide meaning, belonging, hope, and support. Religious communities can offer important sources of connection during difficult seasons of life.
However, religious environments can also become sources of profound emotional or relational harm.
Religious trauma is a term commonly used to describe lasting psychological distress associated with harmful experiences involving religious beliefs, practices, communities, or authority figures.
It is not a standalone diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR. People who experience religious trauma may have a range of responses, and the term is used descriptively rather than as a formal diagnostic category.
Religious trauma may occur when a child grows up in an environment where religious beliefs are used to justify abuse, shame, coercion, fear, or control.
Examples may include:
- Being repeatedly told that normal feelings, questions, or developmental experiences make them sinful or fundamentally bad.
- Experiencing intense fear of punishment, damnation, or divine rejection.
- Being taught that questioning authority is inherently wrong.
- Being pressured to remain in unsafe circumstances to preserve family reputation or religious conformity.
- Experiencing rejection or threats of exclusion for expressing doubts or differing beliefs.
- Being subjected to coercive religious practices or spiritual abuse.
- Being discouraged from seeking appropriate medical or mental health care.
- Being taught that personal boundaries or independent decision-making represent disobedience.
These experiences can be particularly confusing when they occur during childhood because children often rely on caregivers and trusted authority figures to understand what is safe, right, and true.
When a child learns that love and acceptance depend on meeting rigid religious expectations, they may develop a persistent fear of making mistakes or disappointing others.
They may also learn to distrust their own thoughts, emotions, and instincts.
How religious trauma can affect adult relationships
Religious trauma can influence a person’s sense of identity, self-worth, autonomy, and ability to trust.
Some adults experience persistent shame about their bodies, sexuality, or ordinary human needs. Others struggle to establish boundaries with family members or authority figures because they were taught that compliance is a moral obligation.
Some become perfectionistic or develop intense anxiety about making the wrong decision. Others experience grief, anger, or confusion as they reconsider beliefs that once shaped their entire understanding of the world.
For people who leave a religious community, the loss may extend beyond belief itself. They may also lose friendships, family connections, community support, and a familiar sense of identity.
Importantly, religious trauma is not the same thing as having religious beliefs, participating in a faith community, or experiencing disagreement with religious teachings.
People can hold traditional religious beliefs and participate in healthy faith communities. The concern is the presence of harmful experiences, such as coercion, abuse, chronic shame, or the suppression of a person’s autonomy and emotional well-being.
Healing from religious trauma doesn’t require everyone to reach the same conclusions about faith. For some, healing involves finding a healthier relationship with their existing beliefs. For others, it involves changing religious communities, exploring new beliefs, or stepping away from religion altogether.
A respectful therapeutic approach makes room for the individual’s experiences, values, and decisions without pressuring them toward a particular religious or nonreligious outcome.
Other Forms of Developmental Trauma
Developmental trauma can emerge through many experiences beyond those discussed above. Some of the following experiences may be traumatic for a particular child, especially when they are prolonged, severe, or occur without adequate support.
Attachment and relational trauma
Children need caregivers who provide sufficient safety, consistency, comfort, and responsiveness.
When caregivers are frightening, rejecting, unpredictable, or chronically unavailable, children may struggle to develop a reliable expectation that other people can be trusted.
These experiences can influence attachment patterns and later relationships.
An adult may long for closeness while simultaneously fearing it, become distressed when a partner needs space, or withdraw when emotional intimacy increases.
Trauma associated with family conflict
Growing up amid persistent hostility, intimidation, or unpredictable conflict can teach children that relationships are unsafe.
Children may become hypervigilant, attempting to anticipate arguments or prevent conflict between caregivers.
As adults, they may avoid disagreements, feel responsible for other people’s emotions, or react strongly to ordinary relationship tension.
Loss, separation, and disrupted caregiving
The death of a caregiver, repeated separations, foster care placements, or other disruptions in caregiving can affect a child’s sense of security.
These experiences do not inevitably produce trauma. The circumstances, the child’s developmental stage, the quality of subsequent care, and the availability of supportive relationships all matter.
However, when loss or separation is overwhelming and insufficiently supported, it may contribute to persistent fears of abandonment or difficulty trusting that relationships will endure.
Bullying, rejection, and social humiliation
Repeated bullying, peer rejection, or humiliation can affect a child’s developing sense of identity and belonging.
A child who is consistently mocked or excluded may begin to anticipate rejection, conceal parts of themselves, or avoid situations where they could be judged.
These adaptations can continue into adulthood, affecting friendships, romantic relationships, and willingness to pursue meaningful opportunities.
Medical and community-related adversity
Some children experience repeated medical procedures, serious illness, community violence, discrimination, displacement, or other overwhelming circumstances.
These experiences can affect a child’s sense of safety and stability, particularly when they occur alongside limited support or other forms of adversity.
It is important to consider the broader context of a child’s life rather than assuming that trauma occurs only within the family.
Developmental and Relational Trauma Therapy: Understanding the Whole Person
Jan Bergstrom and Rick Butts, co-creators of Developmental and Relational Trauma Therapy (DARTT), have contributed to an approach that considers how early relational experiences can influence a person’s emotional development, identity, and relationships.
This perspective recognizes that people often develop ways of coping with their environments long before they have the ability to understand what is happening or choose how to respond.
For example, a child who learns that expressing anger threatens a relationship may grow into an adult who struggles to identify or communicate frustration.
A child who receives attention primarily through achievement may become an adult who feels valuable only when being productive or meeting other people’s expectations.
A child who experiences inconsistent care may become an adult who alternates between seeking reassurance and withdrawing to avoid disappointment.
These patterns are not necessarily conscious choices. They may reflect adaptations that once helped the person maintain connection, manage distress, or navigate difficult circumstances.
A developmental and relational perspective invites us to explore questions such as:
- What did I learn about myself growing up?
- Were my emotional needs acknowledged and supported?
- What happened when I expressed anger, sadness, fear, or vulnerability?
- Did I feel safe depending on other people?
- What beliefs did I develop about love, acceptance, and belonging?
- Which of my current coping strategies once served an important purpose?
- Are those strategies still helping me build the life and relationships I want?
The purpose isn’t to assign every current difficulty to childhood or to conclude that parents are responsible for everything an adult experiences.
Instead, the goal is to understand the connections between past experiences and present patterns while recognizing that people can develop new ways of relating to themselves and others.
Can You Heal From Developmental Trauma?
Yes. Although early experiences can have lasting effects, they do not determine the rest of your life.
People can develop greater emotional awareness, strengthen their ability to regulate distress, establish healthier boundaries, and build more secure relationships.
Healing may involve several complementary processes.
1. Recognizing the patterns you developed
The first step may be noticing how you respond to stress, conflict, vulnerability, or emotional closeness.
You might recognize that you automatically apologize when someone is upset, withdraw when conversations become uncomfortable, or feel guilty whenever you prioritize your own needs.
Rather than immediately criticizing yourself for these responses, it can be helpful to explore where they came from and what purpose they may have served.
2. Developing emotional awareness and self-compassion
People who experienced emotional neglect or chronic shame may have difficulty recognizing their own feelings or treating themselves with compassion.
Learning to identify emotions, recognize needs, and respond to distress without harsh self-judgment can support healthier relationships with yourself and others.
Self-compassion doesn’t mean avoiding responsibility. It means approaching your experiences with enough understanding to make meaningful change possible.
3. Building safer, healthier relationships
Healing often involves experiencing relationships in which honesty, vulnerability, boundaries, and emotional needs can be expressed without punishment or humiliation.
These experiences can help people develop new expectations about relationships and practice different ways of responding to conflict.
4. Exploring painful experiences at an appropriate pace
Trauma-informed counseling can help people understand the effects of past experiences without requiring them to disclose everything at once or revisit painful memories before they are ready.
Depending on the person’s needs, treatment may focus on emotional regulation, attachment patterns, relational skills, trauma-related beliefs, or other concerns.
Effective treatment should be individualized rather than assuming that one approach is appropriate for everyone.
5. Creating new patterns for the future
Understanding childhood experiences is important, but healing also involves practicing new responses in the present.
This may mean communicating needs more directly, tolerating disagreement without withdrawing, establishing boundaries with family members, or learning to receive support without feeling that you must earn it.
Over time, these changes can help create relationships that are more consistent with your values and needs.
Making Sense of Your Past Without Being Defined by It
Developmental trauma can take many forms. It may involve obvious experiences of abuse or violence, repeated emotional neglect, chronic family conflict, harmful religious environments, or patterns of relational insecurity passed from one generation to the next.
Sometimes the effects are easy to recognize. Other times, people reach adulthood knowing that something feels difficult without understanding why.
You may struggle to trust others, feel uncomfortable expressing your needs, experience persistent shame, or find yourself repeating relationship patterns you wish you could change.
These difficulties don’t necessarily mean you have developmental trauma. They can have many explanations, and understanding them requires considering your individual circumstances.
However, if you recognize yourself in these descriptions, it may be worthwhile to explore how your early experiences shaped your beliefs, coping strategies, and relationships.
Understanding your past isn’t about finding someone to blame. It’s about making sense of your experiences so you can decide what you want to carry forward and what you want to change.
At Room to Rise Counseling, I provide online counseling for adults throughout Ohio, including people who want to understand the effects of developmental and relational trauma on their lives and relationships.
Together, we can explore the patterns that may be holding you back, develop greater self-understanding, and work toward healthier ways of relating to yourself and the people who matter most.
You don’t have to remain defined by the experiences that shaped you. With understanding, support, and intentional effort, it is possible to create room for healing, growth, and healthier relationships.
Interested in exploring how your past may be affecting your present? You can learn more about counseling services at Room to Rise Counseling and schedule a free initial consultation.
References and Recommended Reading
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). An accessible overview of ACEs and their potential effects on health and well-being.
Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258. The landmark ACE study examining associations between childhood adversity and adult health outcomes.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. An influential exploration of trauma’s effects on the brain, body, emotional regulation, and relationships.
D’Andrea, W., Ford, J., Stolbach, B., Spinazzola, J., & van der Kolk, B. A. (2012). Understanding interpersonal trauma in children: Why we need a developmentally appropriate trauma diagnosis. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 82(2), 187–200. A discussion of the effects of interpersonal trauma on children’s development.
Webb, J. (2012). Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. Morgan James Publishing. An accessible introduction to childhood emotional neglect and its possible effects in adulthood.
Bergstrom, J., and Butts, R. Developmental and Relational Trauma Therapy (DARTT). Their work offers a therapeutic perspective on how developmental experiences and relational patterns can influence adult functioning.
Cloitre, M., Garvert, D. W., Brewin, C. R., Bryant, R. A., & Maercker, A. (2013). Evidence for proposed ICD-11 PTSD and complex PTSD: A latent profile analysis. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 4, 20706. Research relevant to the distinction between PTSD and complex PTSD.
Wolynn, M. (2016). It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. Viking. A revised and updated edition was published in 2025.