How Childhood Trauma Impacts our Romantic Relationships.
Here we are in February, the month of “love.” Whether you celebrate it or even like the holiday of Valentine’s Day, it’s here and can trigger thoughts and feelings about relationships. In my area of work, relationships are talked about A LOT. People are often learning what impacts their ability to have a healthy relationship, and then how to have a healthy one. Often, our ability to have a healthy relationship is an outcome of what we learned or did not learn growing up.
Most likely, if you are hanging around here, reading my blogs, or following me on social media - you have experienced a significant relationship hurt/wound or childhood trauma that impacts relationships. So I hope you find this blog helpful, validating, and supportive as you are on your relationship healing journey. As always, if you need more support - send me a message, because I’d love to help. :)
With that, let’s dig in..
How Our Childhood Trauma Impacts Our Romantic Relationships:
Childhood trauma doesn’t just stay in our childhood. If not worked on in some way - it often continues to stay deep inside us and shapes every aspect of our lives. This includes, how we connect with others, how we show love or accept love (or don’t show or accept it). How we feel about ourselves, our self-worth, our abilities, our confidence. In our fears of people, abandonment, trust in ourselves and others, and how we seek validation. Its ripple effects go deep and wide. However, where I see childhood trauma show up significantly in my practice is in adulthood romantic relationships (and parenthood, but that’s for another time).
That’s because our first experience with attachment, love, safety, security and trust with our caregivers, carries over into how we view all relationships - especially our romantic ones. The term attachment-style has been widely talked about, and that’s because it’s a term that describes and explains how important our first caregiver/attachment figure was, in our ability to show and receive healthy love, to feel safe, secure, and be able to connect with others.
Most likely if you grew up in a home with abuse, neglect, chaos, emotionally immature/difficult parents or some other type of trauma, you were not given the ability to form a secure attachment style. Which means, your early life experiences did not lay the foundation for you to have healthy and securely-attached relationships with others, especially a romantic partner.
Effects vary by person and trauma type, but common ways childhood trauma shows up in adult/romantic relationships include:
Development of an insecure attachment style, which means we become anxious, avoidant, or disorganized in our attachment style. This often shows up as fear of abandonment, clinginess, emotional withdrawal, or inconsistent closeness. We struggle to feel safe, secure, and to show and/or accept love.
We struggle to feel trust and safety in our relationships. We struggle to trust people, especially our partner or feel safe in physical or emotionally intimate moments. Often shows up as a persistent fear of expecting betrayal or to be hurt (eventually).
We struggle with emotion regulation when engaging in conflict, repair, or difficult conversations - leading to outbursts, shutdowns, dissociation, or panic during conflict or closeness.
Easily/Highly triggered by events/situations/people/moments that feel familiar to past trauma that hasn’t been healed/worked on. Meaning, you respond to a situation or person in ways or in an intensity that doesn't fit what actually happened in that moment.
Repeating poor relationships, because they feel familiar - despite being unsafe and unhealthy.
Persistent hypervigilance, attempting to control a partner, or being on guard. If you are trying to keep yourself safe to not be hurt or a victim again, you might seek control often through policing, strong rules, conflict, threats, or even manipulation.
Struggles with intimacy and sexuality, which can lead to complete avoidance of sex/intimacy or on the other side be compulsive and overly sexual compared to your norm/desire. You might also struggle with sexual fears, dissociation or shutting down during intimacy.
Low self-worth and difficulties with boundaries, which causes you to seek too much external validation, forsake your own needs, lack boundaries, and tolerate poor treatment.
Give too much of yourself too soon, to be loved, accepted, or wanted. Or, you don’t let people in to keep yourself safe.
How these behaviors can play out in relationship patterns include:
Push-pull relationships, where one partner is a seeker and will pursue a partner that withdraws and shuts down.
Over independence in relationships because no one else is trustworthy enough to lean on and allow in, so it’s better just to “take care of me, because they can’t or won’t.”
Overly caretaker, because similar to over independence - no one can be trusted, so I should just do it myself. And/or- you’ve learned it's safer to make sure everyone is taken care of or you have learned your role is to take care of others.
Repeatedly unhealthy relationships, because familiarity is safer than the unknown. What we are familiar with, our brain tells us is the safest path. And also, it’s hard to do something we don’t know how to do.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but these are some of the most common behaviors in adult/romantic relationships I see often, as a result of childhood trauma.
Although this list can feel daunting, there’s hope for our relationships - no matter what we grew up in or have learned. Some of us might have to do more work than others, but it’s never too late to take time to work through our past trauma and learned behavior that leads to unhealthy/insecure relationship styles.
With an increase of awareness, education, and better understanding of your relationship habits, you can learn how to have a healthier relationship with yourself and others, no matter what you grew up in. With time you can learn to recognize and label triggers, identify what healthy vs unhealthy love is, how to trust yourself so you can trust others, and grow in intimacy at a pace that is healthy. This does usually include time, trained professionals, increased education, and intention - but it really is worth every ounce of effort.
What’s amazing about my job is I’ve had the privilege of seeing the incredible resilience of people that come from some of the most difficult stories - but they’ve chosen to do things differently. They recognize life hasn’t always been fair, but they are choosing to heal, learn and grow, instead of retreat and repeat. It’s so worth it.
Human connection is what makes our lives beautifully full. It has its moments of complicated and hard, but in the healthy ones - the good far out weighs the bad.
Let me know if you need me, because I’m over here if so! I’d love to support you with individual or group sessions. Reach out to learn more.
With love,
Jessica