3 signs you might have had childhood trauma one assuming the worst possible thing will happen at any given time it's called catastrophizing and it happens because you did go through something terrible and your brain is stayed on high alert to keep it from ever happening again to mind-reading or trying to predict what other people around you are thinking it's a survival mechanism the brain started using because of the surroundings you grew up in so we could see those traumatic events coming in order to avoid 3 over focusing on the negative and minimizing the positive it happens because that's a thought pattern it was modeled for you by the people around you when your brain was young and more easily influenced