Adverse childhood experiences do not remain strictly confined to childhood; they mature alongside the person, shaping perception, expectation, and relational worldview long after the original events have ended, inserting themselves into professional spaces, intimate partnerships, and most persistently into the quiet hours of the night when distraction fades and the psyche begins its unfiltered questioning.
The nervous system undoubtedly carries the imprint, yet the deeper wound is not just a memory; it is existential, and one’s fundamental assumptions about safety, worth, and belonging. The enduring questions are rarely limited to “What happened to me?” but extend into more destabilising terrain: “Where is my life going?” and “What kind of world do I inhabit?”
Most people, at various points, encounter existential questions that unsettle certainty and disturb the illusion of control. Questions about meaning, belonging, freedom, lovability, and mortality are part of the human condition and tend to arise during transitions, losses, or moments of disillusionment.
For survivors of childhood trauma, however, existential questions are rarely occasional visitors. Instead, there is often a small, stubborn cluster of recurring ones that return with striking predictability, resurfacing across relationships, career shifts, and quiet solitary moments.
As I am hearing those questions in my practice, I want to highlight them here. If you have repeatedly struggled with these, it helps knowing that you are not alone and realising that persistence with which existential questions resurface just points towards the developmental background and our reality of being human, not a sign that you have not “healed” or are “failing” at the answers.
“Am I damaged?”
This is perhaps the most corrosive of all the commonly encountered interrogations, because it does not merely question behaviour or coping; it questions being.
When childhood trauma has been prolonged or chronic, particularly in the form of emotional neglect, humiliation, coercion, or unpredictable caregiving, it does not simply generate symptoms; it infiltrates the formation of identity. Survivors frequently present not with the language of distress but with the language of defectiveness. They do not say, “I struggle with anxiety,” but rather, “There is something fundamentally wrong with me.”
And when life inevitably throws curveballs, challenges and disappointments at us, we tend to go back to this question, relentlessly searching for a confirmation, secretly explaining our struggles as a confirmation of our permanent irreversible damage.
“Why do I keep repeating the same patterns?”
Another recurring concern involves the repetition of relational dynamics that closely resemble early attachment environments: emotionally unavailable partners, controlling dynamics, volatility mistaken for intensity, or chaos misinterpreted as chemistry.
Externally, such repetition can appear self-defeating or self-sabotaging. Internally, however, it often feels strangely normal. The nervous system does not equate safety with what is objectively healthy; it equates safety with what is familiar. Familiarity reduces uncertainty, and uncertainty was once synonymous with danger.
From an existential standpoint, this creates a crisis of agency: is one actively choosing these relationships, or merely reenacting unresolved childhood wounds? Yes, we do a bit of both! It is both a developmental legacy and the burden of being a human that drive our actions. But when repetition occurs, childhood trauma survivors blame themselves readily and harshly, with their memories supplying an abundance of evidence of how they fail themselves again and again. And the cycle of self-blame persists.
“Can I trust myself?”
Childhood trauma frequently includes forms of gaslighting, emotional invalidation, or subtle minimisation in which the child’s perceptions are denied or reframed as exaggerations. In order to preserve attachment as a developmentally necessary survival component the child learns to doubt their own interpretation of events.
As adults, this doubt persists in more sophisticated language: “Was it really that bad?” “Am I overreacting?” “Am I too sensitive?” Such questioning may appear reflective, yet it often represents a fracture in internal authority.
This erosion of self-trust can be more destabilising than overt fear, because it compromises the individual’s capacity to rely on their own experience as a reference point. When I hear clients struggling with self-trust, I remind them that their perceptions, thoughts and observations, as well as gut feelings are rarely wrong but the skill of listening and understanding themselves has been lost. Rebuilding self-trust is a long laborious process for childhood trauma survivors, and it may never be entirely complete. Time and time again they will question their own reality, which is also profoundly human.
“Is the world safe enough to participate in?”
Survivors of a repeated early maltreatment are frequently told that they are overly cautious or excessively reactive, yet prolonged exposure to unpredictability wires the nervous system for vigilance. Hyper-awareness is not irrational in the context of prior danger; it is proportionate to history.
To participate fully in the world requires tolerating a degree of vulnerability that the trauma-shaped nervous system initially interprets as stressful.
The deeper dilemma becomes whether it is possible to lower one’s guard as adults later in life, where more control, agency and safety can be ensured. Participation in life, whether through intimacy, career ambition, or authentic self-expression, will inherently involve exposure to uncertainty, risk taking and leaps of faith. Safety, in absolute terms, is only attainable in a vacuum, away from society and all interactions. Hence the developmental task is not to eliminate risk but to recalibrate it, allowing self to still live a fulfilled and colourful life.
“Am I going to end up alone?”
And perhaps the most haunting existential fear is the anticipation of loneliness and isolation, not merely the absence of relationships but the prospect of being fundamentally unchosen, unseen, or, sooner or later, abandoned.
This fear rarely presents as dramatic expression. More often, it emerges quietly in moments of solitude, carrying a tone of inevitability. For many survivors of childhood trauma, the anticipation of ending up alone is less a prediction about the future and more a projection of early emotional experience into adulthood.
This fear should not be mistaken for immaturity, dependency, or weakness, as clients frequently do. It is developmental memory operating beneath conscious awareness. If early attachment conveyed inconsistency, threat, or abandonment, the psyche may reasonably anticipate repetition. The adult may long for connection while simultaneously guarding against it, oscillating between pursuit and withdrawal in a pattern that appears contradictory but is, in fact, protective.
The task in therapy is to disentangle survival strategies and deeply ingrained fear of loneliness from present reality, differentiating historical threat from current possibility, and gradually testing new relational experiences with deliberation and support.
What an Existential Approach Can Offer
Existential approach acknowledges that whether one suffers from childhood maltreatment or is lucky enough to feel loved and consistently cared for growing up, we are all human. Pondering on these questions is not a sign of an “unresolved trauma” or that one is completely healed. It is a reminder that we are all humans grappling with limitations of our existence, be it mortality, loneliness or search for meaning. It is helpful to realise that a childhood trauma survivor might struggle with increased and intense pain associated with the questions above and also may never feel like they have answers. Existential approach serves as a reminder to be compassionate and accept these struggles as part of human experience. Moreover, it recognises that anxiety, doubt, fear and regret are not glitches in the system; they are part of the cost of being alive. Existential work gives permission to be imperfect without collapsing into self-contempt. It normalises the need to seek reassurance more than once, whether during obvious crises or in the quiet spaces where meaning feels thin. It does not promise relief from uncertainty. It strengthens a person’s capacity to stand in it without turning against themselves.
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