It's not what's wrong with you, It's what happened to you by Anna Schott, LISW-S

It’s not what’s wrong with you, it’s what happened to you.  

People consistently show up for therapy thinking they are crazy, inadequate, damaged, abnormal, intrinsically flawed, incomplete, and deficient because they are innately defective.  These beliefs are actually the result of adverse childhood experiences and traumatic events.

Changing this perspective from “what is wrong with you” to “what happened to you” changes the course of therapy and assists in externalizing negative experiences and cognitions.  You are not innately defective. You believe these things about yourself because of a wide variety of adverse experiences that reinforce these beliefs.  

Need proof?  
CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is one of the largest investigations of childhood abuse and neglect and later-life health and well-being.  It scores the number of adverse childhood experiences a person experiences before the age of 18. There are 10 types of childhood trauma measured in the ACE Study. Five are personal -- physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect. Five are related to other family members: a  parent who's an alcoholic, a mother who's a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, and the disappearance of a parent through divorce, death or abandonment. The ACE Study reveals a relationship between the number of ACEs and severity of negative health and well-being outcomes across one’s life.  As the number of ACEs increases, so does the risk of alcoholism and illicit drug addiction, depression, health-related quality of life, heart disease, liver disease, poor work performance, financial stress, risk for intimate partner violence, sexually transmitted diseases, smoking, suicide attempts, early initiation of sexual activity, adolescent pregnancy, risk for sexual violence, and poor academic achievement.  In a nutshell, the adverse experiences present in childhood lead to so much stress on the body and mind creating a whole slew of negative health, mental health, and addiction diagnoses later in life.

Changing the focus of therapy from coping with symptoms to healing adverse childhood experience allows the present to be free from the influence of the past. ​

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