Your Wounded Inner Child Is Affecting Your Adult Relationships
Here’s how.
Love. What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you read that word? Is it joy? Is it intimacy? Is it discomfort, or maybe pain?
Here’s why I’m asking this question: what you perceive love to be, is exactly what you’ll experience in your relationships.
If you see relationships as something complicated that takes all your freedom away, then that’s the type of relationship you’ll attract.
If you believe that love is painful and that it inevitably leads to suffering, guess what? You’ll always end up in relationships that make you suffer.
If, on the contrary, you see love as this amazing feeling that lights you up, you’ll invite into your life people and situations that will prove to you that love is, indeed, fascinating.
And where do your beliefs come from?
The answer is simple: they come from your inner child.
How Was Your Childhood?
Real love is not something you need to earn or fight for like in the movies. It‘s something you deserve just because you exist.
The problem is that many of us didn’t receive love in the very first stages of our life — and those stages teach us what we know about love and relationships.
This means that if you want to understand and break down your beliefs about love, you need to turn inward and look at your childhood.
- Were your parents physically and emotionally present?
- As a child, did you feel loved by them — unconditionally loved?
- Or did you feel like you had to prove yourself to earn their love? (Like getting good grades, being the golden child)
- Did you live in a stable, caring, supportive environment? Or was unstable, stressful, and chaotic?
- Did your parents accept you for who you are? Or were they constantly trying to change you and influence your decisions?
- Did they encourage you to set boundaries and express yourself? Or did they punish you/ get distant when you were honest and assertive?
Take as long as you need to get in touch with how you feel about your parents. Be honest about your hidden feelings, memories, wounds, and thoughts. Don’t be afraid — I know it hurts, but this is how you heal.
The 4 Attachment Styles
Attachment theory was first created by British psychologist John Bowlby, who described attachment as a “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.”
Bowlby believed that the earliest bonds formed by children with their caregivers have a tremendous impact that continues throughout life. It was not until the mid-1980s, however, that researchers began to take seriously the possibility that attachment patterns may play out in adult relationships.
Now, psychologists recognize four main attachment styles: secure, avoidant, anxious, and anxious-avoidant.
Essentially, the attachment style you’ve developed is based on your relationship with your parents, and it affects how you behave and interact in your romantic relationships.
- Secure attachment: you’re comfortable with intimacy. You can form secure, loving relationships with others. You’re able to depend on others without becoming completely dependent.
- Anxious attachment: this attachment style is associated with neediness. You have a deep fear of abandonment, you seek constant validation, and you’re constantly worried about being rejected/left behind.
- Avoidant attachment: your independence is very important to you. You tend to push people away, and it’s very difficult for you to be vulnerable and trust others.
- Anxious-avoidant attachment: it’s a combination of both. You desperately crave intimacy, yet you also avoid it at all costs. You need to feel loved but you’re afraid of forming close bonds with others.
If you’ve formed a secure attachment style, it means your caregiver(s) responded quickly and consistently — so, as a child, you learned that you could depend on other people and express yourself freely. This is a crucial factor because it allows you to get into healthy, stable, loving relationships.
If, on the contrary, there was poor parental availability and it caused you anxiety, you probably tend to attract emotionally unavailable partners who show you the love you were used to getting: unstable, superficial, and unreliable.
When trying to understand your attachment style, the more important questions you should ask yourself are:
- Is it easy for you to trust other people?
- Do you seek intimacy, or do you push it away?
- How sensitive are you to rejection and abandonment?
- How exactly do you view love and relationships? Do you believe love is supposed to be stable and safe? Or do relationships make you feel anxious?
When we’re brave enough to go within, we take our power back. We stop being a victim of our circumstances.
I don’t know how was your childhood. But I do know you deserve to feel loved and accepted.
You’re worthy of love — including your own. Why don’t you start there?
