Your childhood trauma is killing your relationship

When we fail to heal and resolve the trauma of our childhood, it takes a direct toll on the quality of our adult relationships.

by: E.B. Johnson

Childhood trauma is complex and troublesome, following us well into our adult lives and the relationships that we build there. When we fail to put the pain of our pasts to rest, it can cause serious issues in our present-day lives. That includes our romantic relationships and the lives we build with those we love most in this world. If we want to get our happily ever-after, we have to put our childhood trauma to bed once and for all.

Lack of love in childhood is a major problem.

Our childhood sets the stage for our adult lives and how they will unfold. This begins with the relationship we build with our caretakers and expands and manifests through the experiences and relationships we lean on in adolescence. If these childhood experiences are self-affirming and confidence building, then we become secure and confident adults. When our childhoods are plagued by trauma, things can take a different turn.

When we struggle in our childhoods, we often struggle in our adult relationships too.

The trauma we experience in childhood is an experience that lasts for a lifetime. It doesn’t end when we turn 18 or when we move away from home. It follows us, and it manifests in unlikely places like our intimate relationships and careers. Childhood trauma activates our central nervous systems and also disrupts our cognitive and mental development. This adds up to make confused and insecure adults who struggle to make sense of themselves and the relationships they’re building.

How our childhood trauma manifests in our love matches.

Are you are your partner fighting more than ever? Are you developing an unhealthy obsession with them? Or experiencing a loss of truth? While we may not always realize it, this can often be as a result of unaddressed trauma lingering in our pasts. Want to bring yourselves back together? Put yourself back together by admitting how your childhood is impacting your relationship.

Loss of trust

Trust is a delicate thing, and it’s a concept we start building on from the moment that we are born. The relationship with our caretakers is the first reference point we have for this idea of trust. When we learn that we can’t rely on our parents to respect us or keep us safe, we go on to apply this logic across our other relationships. When you can’t trust your idols in childhood, it becomes hard — if not impossible — to do it in the span of a couple of hours.

An inability to be open

Stable and trusting relationships require partners that are willing to open up and share themselves and their lives. When childhood trauma strikes (and we fail to resolve it) we can find that it becomes impossible for us to feel safe sharing ourselves with people we’re supposed to “trust”. In order for us to get back to partnerships that are rewarding and fulfilling, we have to learn how to be open and honest with our loved ones.

Poor decision-making

The events of childhood don’t impact only our emotional equilibrium for a short time. It physically alters our brain chemistry, and can impair cognitive development, which means it affects our ability to think rationally, retain memories, or even process emotional information. This leads to individuals who settle for relationships that don’t add up, partners which are damaging, stupid, or otherwise poisonous in their own way.

Abusive behavior

Abusive behavior is rarely something that happens randomly. More often than not, it is behavior that is learned from growing up in an abusive environment (or at the very least, an environment in which abuse was not discouraged). Are you willing to harm or punish your partner if it means getting “justice” or fulfilling some deeper need to inflict the type of pain that was inflicted on you? This type of abusive behavior and toxic manipulation makes it impossible to get close to anyone in any real way.

Dysfunctional emotions

Is controlling your emotions a battle? When things go wrong, do you find yourself exploding or lashing out? An inability to command your own emotional state is a very common sign of dysfunction in childhood. More likely than not, you learned that negative feelings were more effective and acceptable than vulnerable ones. Your parents probably lashed out at you a lot and lashed out at one another too. This didn’t teach you how to handle your emotions. It taught you to bury them until you blow up.

Unhealthy attachment

Perhaps the most common sign of unresolved trauma in our relationships is that of attachment. The way we attach to other people is important. When you don’t learn how to form healthy attachments early in life, it becomes harder to do it as you age. Unresolved childhood trauma can result in obsessive and toxic attachment, or a lack of attachment (avoidance) at all. Both of these extremes are unhealthy and don’t make for fully realized partnerships.

What you need to do to heal.

Unless you want to lose your relationship (or others who mean just as much in your life) you have to find a way to heal and resolve your childhood trauma. By clinging to all that hurt, we’re putting up walls where we should be building bridges. Getting back to the core of the love we feel — for ourselves and one another — requires that we make our peace and forgive our inner child for everything that happened to them.

1. Take off your rose-tinted glasses

The first step in recovering from any damage in our lives is to first acknowledge that damage for what it is. The same goes for our childhood trauma. Although it can be hard to accept things for what they were, we have to take off those pretend glasses of childhood and admit what happened to us. Once we take off these rose-tinted glasses, we can better understand ourselves and our wounds.

Until you take off your rose-tinted glasses, you will never be able to see your childhood for what it really was. Stop burying your parents and caretakers under the centuries of parental-expectations. Fess up to who they were and let their truth alleviate some of that weight you’ve been carrying all these years.

You can love the people who hurt you and still acknowledge what they did wrong. You can still have a happy childhood, while admitting that events there were wrong. One is not mutually exclusive of the other. Be brave and stand strong as you look back at what happened. Be brutally honest with yourself. Admit what happened and lay the guilt of those who wronged you squarely at their feet where it belongs.

2. Change your perception

Perception is everything when it comes to healing and seeing our childhood trauma for what it really is. So many people get lost in the pain of their past trauma because they get caught on the ground with it. We have to lift ourselves up and see what happened from a removed place, so we can take the emotion out of it and start to heal.

Intentionally and mindfully change your perception of self and the childhood that lies behind you. To admit what went wrong is not to change who you are. It’s not to lessen all the challenges you’ve overcome, or undermine the successes you’ve claimed along the way.

Change your perception of childhood trauma. Rather than seeing it as a core part of who you are, see it as another life-lesson — another book in the ever-expanding library of life-lessons you collect every single day. Don’t give it power over you. Instead, detach yourself from it emotionally and view it from a distant place. This will allow you to be more honest about what happened and to process it accordingly.

3. Get the help that you need

There is no rule out there who says you have to heal or find peace on your own. Sure, you are responsible for building your own happiness, but you can still get support along the way. After all, you didn’t get hurt on your own. Why should you recover on your own? When you make the decision to bring yourself back from childhood trauma, reaching out to people you can trust is one of the best things you can do.

It’s not always possible or wise to engage in deep memory recovery without the help of a licensed mental health professional. Our memories and our emotions are complex and powerful things that are closely tied together. When we don’t tread carefully among them, we can find ourselves overwhelmed.

Be brave enough to open up and ask for the help you need. If you don’t feel safe opening up to an expert just yet, then find a small handful of people that you trust enough to share your experience with. Let them know how you’re feeling and let them know that you would appreciate their support (or their advice) if they’re free. We’re social creatures. We don’t get hurt alone, and we don’t generally heal alone either. Don’t be afraid to reach out to someone who can help you.

4. Be the parent you didn’t have

When our parents are the cause of our childhood trauma, it can lead to really complicated feelings that are hard to make sense of. Rather than ruminating and focusing on everything they didn’t do for you, you have to empower yourself to move on and leave those memories in the dust. A great way to do this is by re-parenting your adult self.

It’s time for you to be the parent you never had. Re-parenting is a powerful technique that can dramatically transform the way we relate to our inner child, and the way in which we heal and recover from childhood trauma and abuse.

Learn how to re-parent yourself the right way and see that there’s a much more beautiful way to connect with the core of who we are. We aren’t defined by our parents. We aren’t defined by what they want for us or what happened with them in the past, nor are we defined by anyone else that hurt us then, either. Be that parent that protects your inner child and makes it clear that they are safe and loved for exactly who they are.

5. Teach yourself to deserve more

Childhood trauma teaches us a lot of things, but what it primarily teaches us is to make ourselves small and deny ourselves happiness. A joyful life cannot be lived this way. If you truly want to build a life that provides you with fulfillment, you’ve got to accept the fact that you deserve everything in your life that is yours. You deserve to be happy and respected, but you have to believe that before it will come to you.

You deserve more than what happened to you in childhood. You deserved people who took better care of you, and you deserve more love than you got. That love and that sense of child-like security can still be yours, though, when you get determined to have it on your own terms.

Teach yourself to deserve more. Stop settling for people and experiences that make you feel worse about yourself or worse about the shadows you’re trying to put to rest. Stand up for yourself and the things that you want. Consciously remove yourself from toxic people and toxic situations. Little-by-little your subconscious will start to realize the lesson that you’re laying out for it: this life is yours and you have a right to fill it with the things that make you feel safe and loved.

Putting it all together…

Although we might bury our childhood trauma in the past, it follows us like a bad set of luggage. When you fail to heal and recover, your trauma can follow you into the present and impact everything from your career prospects to your relationship successes. Want to build happier partnerships? Put your childhood trauma to bed once and for all.

Take off your rose-tinted glasses and admit what happened to you and who did it. Once you admit where you’re at, you can plan where you want to go. Change your perception of the healing process and see it as a blessing — not a curse. Get the help you need and don’t be afraid to open up to loved ones who you trust, or mental health expert. Once you’ve started to open up, you’ll notice it becomes much easier to be honest with yourself. It also becomes easier to re-parent yourself and the inner child that’s longing to be loved and accepted inside. No matter what else happens, remind yourself that you deserve more and stand up for your happiness and your joy in this life.