What you’ll learn in this video
- How early childhood experiences shape the way we relate to others as adults
- Why trauma includes not only what happened, but also what was missing
- Why certain emotional patterns can feel so difficult to change
- How healing involves creating new emotional experiences that help the nervous system feel safe
In this video, Luc Boudreau, Registered Psychotherapist and EMDR specialist, discusses how early childhood trauma can affect our relationships with others into adulthood. In this video, Luc explores a powerful and often overlooked truth about trauma: it’s not only about what happened to you, but also what didn’t happen.
He explains how early attachment and relational experiences shape our sense of self, our nervous system, and the way we move through the world.
If you’ve ever wondered why certain patterns feel so hard to change, Luc offers a compassionate perspective—there’s nothing “wrong” with you. Many of the struggles you carry may be intelligent adaptations your nervous system made to keep you safe.
True healing, he shares, isn’t about thinking your way out of trauma, but about creating new, corrective emotional experiences that help your body finally exhale and feel safe again.
Transcript
It’s not only what happened to you, but what didn’t happen to you. I think for a lot of people, they’ll focus on what was good in their childhood and that’s great, right? But also if people want to start better understanding why they’re struggling with certain things, it’s also really important to to understand that attachment trauma or like relational type experiences can have detrimental effects on our sense of self and on our sense of self in the world, like how we interact with others.
There’s nothing wrong with you and perhaps the thing that you’re struggling with is simply a way that your nervous system adapted to keep you safe at the time. Right? So it’s about recognizing that your body actually works really well, you know?
But now it’s about informing that wound. That it is no longer in the past. Right? That it’s no longer needed as an adult. But, again, the thing with trauma is we can’t change the impacts of trauma by trying to think it through. A lot of times people come and they’ll say, well, if I can just figure out how to do…
If I can, you know, talk to myself in a more positive way or if I can just do this differently. But it’s really not that we really have to look at trauma from helping the client get a corrective emotional experience so that their nervous system can take that big sigh, right? That can start to feel safer.