Signs That Childhood Trauma Is Impacting Your Adult Relationships
Your early life experiences can impact how you see yourself, other people, and the world. When you experience hurt, betrayal, abandonment, and many other painful emotions from your past, it may be difficult to trust and feel safe in your current relationships.
If you want to be present in your life, to react differently than you have in the past, and to be calmer, happier, and more positive about your relationships, then it is time you look within. You may need to explore how a lot of your current issues take you back to your childhood. You may see that your current feelings of abandonment, fear, anxiety, and unworthiness have been very familiar to you, and they can go back as far as you can feel and remember them.
Here are some signs that your childhood trauma may be impacting your adult relationships…
You Withdraw -
In relationships, you may notice that you withdraw or shut down when you feel hurt. You may feel that you do not know how to manage your emotions, therefore, you engage in what seems normal or safe to you. You may engage in unhealthy behaviors such as drinking or doing drugs as an automatic way to numb what you are feeling. You end up disconnecting from yourself because it is too uncomfortable and painful to experience.
You Lash Out -
You may also lash out at your partner because that is how you learned to survive and defend yourself when you feel attacked. You may yell or say and do the same hurtful things you experienced in your early life. How many times have you said to yourself, “I do not want to be like…” your parents or anyone who may have hurt you as a child?
You Constantly Feel On Edge -
You may find yourself on edge all the time because feeling calm is too scary and unpredictable, so you need to feel “in control” by being ready for any type of threat. You may struggle to feel relaxed because of the anxiety that arises from trusting and letting things be in your life. Controlling gives you a sense of peace. Feeling vulnerable is not something you are comfortable doing and this stems from traumatic events you have not been able to deal with.
You Feel Intense Loneliness -
If you experienced abandonment as a child, you may feel a deep loneliness that never goes away, even when people are around you. You may experience a deep fear that your partner will eventually leave you, just like your father or mother did. Or that their feelings for you will change, just like you experienced before.
You Feel Unloveable -
You may also believe that you are unlovable because of a divorce or abuse you lived through as a child. If you have a parent who struggled with drugs and alcohol or was absent, you may experience fear of rejection. When your partner rejects you, the need for approval gets triggered, leading to unhealthy behaviors such as acting self-destructive or being vindictive trying to hurt them back however you can.
You Struggle to Express Your Thoughts & Emotions -
It is very common to feel unsafe expressing your thoughts and emotions. You may have been raised in an abusive environment or experienced physical, environmental, emotional, sexual, or medical trauma. When you experience a traumatic event, you may have a hard time expressing, identifying, and managing your emotions. Not knowing how to regulate your emotions can lead you to get stuck in a flight, fight or freeze response.
Emotions can trigger protective responses of intense anger and fear. You will experience an automatic reaction to fight the pain in order to escape from the present situation and the memories from your past. It is important to learn how to give yourself permission to feel the good and the bad, so when you feel rage, anger, and pain, you do not identify those emotions with the hostile father or the unavailable mother, or the abusive parent.
You Can Heal From The Past… You Deserve to Live a Full, Vibrant Life!
When you embark on a healing process, the emotional wounds get reopened, and you will need to work on releasing the energy from them. The energy that you experience when facing trauma gets stored in your body, and this is the reason why you may shake, sweat, breath heavily, or feel tension and pressure in some parts of your body.
It is important to receive guidance from a counselor who can help you resolve and process buried emotions. Allowing yourself to heal from the past will give you a better opportunity to move forward not only with your current partner but also with the most important person in your life, yourself.
In relationships, you may find that you tend to re-create the patterns you experienced early in your life. If you do not get curious about what is moving within you, what you are trying to avoid will continue to show up in your life.
If you are ready to work on healing your past trauma and improving your relationships, including the relationship with yourself, contact Tatiana St. Germain for your complimentary consultation at 954-391-5305.
I provide counseling and Heart Centered Hypnosis/Hypnotherapy at our beautiful offices in Coral Springs, Florida, and online in the state of Florida. I look forward to working with you!
