How Trauma Affects Our Relationships
The Experience We Had with Our Parents Affect the Experience We Have with Our Partners
The struggle to form healthy and stable intimate relationships is very common in those of us who have experienced emotional trauma. Most of us grew up in homes where we did not have a healthy emotional connection with our parents, and our parents did not have a healthy connection with each other. So, many of us entered into adulthood without an intuitive sense of what a healthy relationship even looks like. While we may be acutely aware of what it’s like to be in a dysfunctional family and don’t want to repeat those patterns in our own relationships, we often struggle to do things in a healthier way. Not only did patterns of violence, abuse, emotional neglect, or growing up in a dysfunctional environment impact how we experience emotions and distort the development of our core self-concept, it also affected our ability to successfully form stable and secure attachment bonds.
Growing up in an unhealthy environment led to many of us developing some coping strategies to help us deal with not getting our emotional needs met. While those coping strategies helped us adapt to an unhealthy family system so that we could function when we were children, they can get in the way of our ability to form and maintain healthy emotional connections as adults. Unless we intentionally focus our energy on breaking dysfunctional ways of relating, we may end up repeating some of the same dysfunctional patterns in our own relationships that we observed in our caregivers.
The Attachment Bond Defines the Relationship
An attachment bond is much like a partial fusing of the soul that connects the emotional lives of each person in the relationship and creates a unique sense of completion and wholeness. It is as though each holds the presence of the other in their heart. These emotional connections are like a gravitational force that serves to organize the emotional lives of each person into a stable orbit around the other. It is this bond that creates the sense of togetherness, being loved, and feeling supported. It insulates each person from the terror of isolation, calms the emotional systems in the brain, and can even reduce the sensation of pain. It is the center of the interpersonal universe that fulfills a very primal drive for connection and plays a central role in our psychological and emotional health, both as children and as adults.
In childhood, attachment bonds form a critical connection between children and their primary caregivers. It creates a secure base upon which children develop their understanding of themselves and the world around them. Attachment bonds not only help ensure the physical survival of the child, but also direct the development of their core sense of self and their ability to emotionally self-regulate. This second function is perhaps the most relevant when it comes to our relationships and emotional well-being. The way in which we formed attachment bonds with our caregivers as children has a profound influence on how we form relationships in adulthood and whether the general theme of our emotional life is one of self-compassion or self-shame.
Attachment bonds in adulthood serve many of the same purposes as they do in childhood, but they differ in one important way. While childhood attachment bonds are dependent relationships, where the child is completely dependent on their caregiver for nurturing and support, adult attachments are interdependent relationships where each partner mutually provides nurturing and support for the other. They are the secure base upon which couples build their lives together and move through life as a team.
Trauma and Loss of Attunement
Unfortunately, most of us who have experienced emotional trauma while growing up will tend to have difficulty with relationships. This happens for two reasons. The first reason is that we will tend to have developed attachment styles that get in the way of our ability to maintain our emotional connection with our partner, particularly during times of conflict. Depending on the type of attachment injury we experienced, we may find ourselves feeling anxiety about rejection and abandonment, emotionally shutting down, being uncomfortable with intimacy, or experiencing relationships as unstable and chaotic.
The second reason is that we will tend to experience periods of emotional dysregulation from our trauma that make it difficult for us to remain emotionally present with our partner. Because the emotional attachment bond is supported through the emotional attunement of both partners, when one or both partners become emotionally triggered, that dysregulation will create a temporary strain or break in the sense of connection, which then can trigger an unhealthy attachment pattern of either shutting down (withdrawal) or anxiety (pursuit).
This combination of insecure attachment style and periods of dysregulated emotion conspire to undermine our ability to remain present with each other during times of heightened distress. Couples who have good repair skills may have the ability to reconnect after a period of conflict and develop strategies for remaining present with each other during times when they are struggling emotionally. Unfortunately, if couples do not have good tools for repair, the cycle of unresolved conflict may lead to a build-up of emotional scar tissue that makes it more and more difficult to be present with each other over time. Despite the fact that two partners may love each other and want the relationship to work, the repeated cycle of disconnection and lack of repair can lead to a loss of the emotional bond and eventual failure of the relationship.
Emotional Inflection Points
Most of us have experienced being in a conversation with someone that was going well, and then suddenly the tone of the conversation seemed to shift into being more emotionally charged. What may have started out as a calm discussion turned into a tense or adversarial exchange where we suddenly felt at odds with each other. If we could go back in time and replay the conversation slowly, we invariably find a moment in time when the tone shifted. There was something that was said or some gesture that seemed to mark the moment when the tone of the conversation changed. I call those moments of change inflection points.
An inflection point is a moment in a conversation when a trauma response is triggered in one or both of the partners, and the emotional shift from the trauma response will be felt as a change in the emotional tone of the conversation. Because these inflection points often arise from emotional trauma, not only will the emotional tone change, but so will how each partner perceives the situation.
Once the emotional state of one or both partners begins to flood with dysregulated emotion and the fight or flight response becomes activated, the conflict will often no longer be centered around the topic of the original conversation. The underlying driver of the conflict will tend to center around feelings of being unheard, unsafe, invalidated, helpless, or unvalued. As long as the argument continues to center around the original topic, rather than addressing these underlying emotional triggers, things will continue to escalate as the partners argue over whose perspective is the correct one.
Managing Inflection Points
A very important skill in maintaining a sense of connection is to recognize when an inflection point has occurred and to pause the conversation to explore what happened. Simply taking an objective look at what happened during the inflection point without judging who is right or wrong can be very helpful. What gets in the way for most people when they try this is that they feel such a need to be right that they simply cannot even hear what their partner is saying.
Learning to pause and name the emotion being triggered can help us remain emotionally attuned and present with each other during times of distress. If we are able to do that, it will help reduce the intensity of conflict in our relationships and help us deepen our sense of connection with our partner.