How Trauma Paints Our Relationships
Picture your brain as a canvas full of brushstrokes. Each stroke represents an experience that you’ve had. While some strokes are vibrant, bright, and full of life, others may be a bit more dark, muted, and heavy, representing the traumas that have left their marks. That trauma can often feel like a rogue artist, splattering paint on your canvas in places where it doesn’t belong, especially in our relationships. Those past hurts, whether from childhood or more recent experiences, can create patterns in how we connect with others. Maybe you often engage in defensive language, mistrust, or you don’t always feel safe, avoid conflict all together, hesitate, or maybe even choose partners who are more chaotic rather than peaceful. These experiences are not just happening for you. So, know that you are not alone.
Trauma is the result of distressing or disturbing events that overwhelm our abilities to cope. Car accidents, natural disasters, violence, loss, childhood abuse, rape, unresolved chronic stress (e.g., living in a neighborhood with high crime rates), past abusive relationships, unstable childhood, and more can be the cause of trauma.
Complex trauma, also known as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), is another emotional response that refers to the repeated exposures to traumatic events over a prolonged period of time. It could be caused by ongoing abuse, neglect, or exposure to violence. Where a single traumatic event can trigger PTSD and its symptoms, complex trauma can deeply effect your overall sense of self, relationships, and your ability to function in everyday life. When we struggle with trauma, we are often struggling with emotions, have difficulty trusting others, and are likely to be experiencing long-term mental health challenges.
How Trauma Affects Relationships
Trauma is more than just a memory, and sometimes it presents itself when you least expect it. When navigating relationships, trauma can cause you to be hyper-alert, noticing every little change in someone’s tone or body language. Maybe trauma leaves you feeling numb and emotionally disconnected from partners and other relationships.
Fight, Flight, Fawn, or Freeze
Trauma can trigger four basic responses: fight, flight, fawn or freeze. These responses might look like picking fights over seemingly small things, shutting down emotionally, or wanting to flee the relationship altogether. And let’s not forget shame, the sneaky shadow that makes you question your worth and pushes you away from love.
Fight
Fighting as a response is about confronting the perceived threat. Becoming easily irritated or angry with your partner over small things, verbal lashing out, looking for ways to control your partner, and dominating conversations and decisions to gain and maintain that sense of control.
Flight
Flight involves avoiding or escaping the perceived threat. In relationships this can look like emotionally distancing yourself, avoiding difficult conversations, leaving rooms when conflict arises, abruptly ending relationships, and a fear of vulnerability and closeness.
Freeze
Freezing is when we become immobilized or shut down when faced with a threat. If freezing is your response, maybe you struggle to express feelings or needs, your passive or silent during conflict, you feel “numb” or disconnected from your partner or find it difficult to engage in the relationship emotionally.
Fawn
Fawning as a response involves pleasing or appeasing the threat to avoid any harm, codependency, or difficulty setting boundaries. In relationships you may go out of your way to avoid conflict through constantly agreeing with your partner, likely at the expense of your own needs. You may struggle with being assertive out of fear that it may lead to rejection or harm.
Trauma and Attachment
Trauma can influence the types of partners that you choose in addition to the dynamics we create in our relationships. You may repeat familiar patterns by choosing partners or relationship dynamics that mirror unresolved issues from the past. If you grew up in a chaotic or unstable environment you may find comfort in choosing relationships that feel familiar to that childhood chaos, leading to patterns of conflict or instability. Trauma can also diminish self-worth and make you believe you don’t deserve healthy, loving relationships. This can cause you to stay in abusive or unsatisfying relationships, settle for less, or constantly seek validation from partners.
Trauma can also affect our attachment styles since those are mostly developed in childhood. Attachment styles (e.g., secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized) affect how we form and maintain adult relationships, and though they are capable of being changed, unresolved trauma can distort our attachment styles.
Secure Attachment
When someone has a secure attachment style, their early experiences were likely positive and full of supportive relationships, leading to confidence in relationships, effective communication, and trust in partners.
Anxious Attachment
Anxious attachment may develop from inconsistent caregiving or emotional neglect, leading to clinginess, codependency, pleas for validation, fear of abandonment, or constant seeking of reassurance from partners.
Avoidant Attachment
An avoidant attachment style can stem from trauma involving rejections, criticism, or emotional unavailability from caregivers. This can lead to someone who struggles with intimacy, avoids closeness, has difficulty with emotional expression, and may even distance themselves from partners as a form of protection.
Disorganized Attachment
This type of attachment style can develop from severe forms of trauma, such as neglect or abuse. If you often find yourself conflicted between wants and needs, desires for closeness and distance, you may have a disorganized attachment style. Unpredictable behavior, moving between clingy and rejecting behaviors, feeling confused or overwhelmed in relationships can all be an impact of past or complex trauma.
Recognizing Trauma's Impact
Unresolved trauma can present itself in many ways, such as becoming overly defensive, or evading certain topics. These behaviors are often from past experiences that have shaped our communication style, making it less about connection, and more about protection. For individuals who have experienced childhood trauma, unresolved trauma has a lasting impact on how to bond and express love in adult relationships. Left unhealed, trauma can lead you to repeat patterns from the past, where you unconsciously reenact old emotional wounds and responses in current relationships.
Coping and Healing Strategies
Healing from trauma is taking back control of your canvas full of brushstrokes – it requires time, and the right amount of brushstrokes kissed with brighter shades of paint. Begin your healing journey through practicing self-awareness in order to help you understand and prepare for your healing process. Self-awareness looks like recognizing emotional triggers and understanding how your past experiences influence your current behavior, while actively working to respond differently.
Engage in grounding techniques. Practicing deep breathing and mindfulness can serve as helpful grounding techniques that encourage you to stay present during challenging moments. Mindful drawing is another grounding technique to keep you present when the past threatens to overshadow the present.
Committing to forms of self-care is crucial for healing from trauma. Having a self-care routine, and engaging in recreational activities or hobbies, can help to manage symptoms, promote healing, and maintain healthy connections with others. Prioritizing yourself offers stress reduction, emotional regulation, grounding, a sense of control, empowerment, self-compassion and more.
Relationship care is another way to cope and access healing. Seeking out and nurturing healthy relationships creates supportive and safe spaces to be heard and seen. Partners can help to regulate emotions and provide comfort in difficult moments. Relationships offer spaces to connect and feel a sense of belonging, which can reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness. Remember that it will be important to balance self-care with relationship care. Establish healthy boundaries that promote healing and autonomy, in turn strengthening your relationships and overall, well-being.
Utilizing professional help, such as therapy, to engage in inner work can help you to explore and understand emotions on a deeper level. Approaches like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) can provide structured methods for processing trauma. Art Therapy is another tool that can serve as a powerful tool for healing trauma, as it offers non-verbal ways to process and express hard emotions, we may not otherwise be able to put into words.
Supporting a Partner with Trauma
Giving support to a partner who has experienced trauma takes empathy, understanding, and a non-judgmental and safe space that allows them to freely express themselves. When navigating delicate conversations, it’s important to listen actively and be patient, as they are navigating their healing journey. Encourage your partner to seek professional help, as therapy can be vital on a road to well-being. Self-care is also crucial. Prioritizing your own needs and taking care of your own mental and emotional health ensures that you can be a stable support for yourself and others, especially in relationships.
Challenges and Recovery
Healing from trauma doesn’t come without its challenges. When trauma has taken its toll, it may feel like your brain’s canvas has been smeared and splattered with all sorts of chaotic colors. All the past hurts staring back at you – colorful but dark. In the wake of trauma, trust can be fragile. Trauma can deeply impact our ability to trust others and manage our emotions, making maintaining close relationships difficult. Emotional intelligence can be affected, making it hard to read others. Expressing feelings may be challenging. Trauma is also linked to other mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety, which can add layers to the healing process. Try to remember, the path to well-being is like creating a masterpiece. It’s messy, it’s hard, and it often doesn’t make sense until you step back and see the bigger picture. Communication and support are the brushes and paints that will help you and your partner create a relationship that’s not just surviving but thriving.
Healing from unresolved trauma is possible. Once you start your journey, embrace the fact that healing is not about erasing your past but integrating it into a new, healthier picture with colors that represent every piece of you.
