4 Signs Childhood Trauma Is Impacting Your Adult Relationships
Strategies to heal and cultivate healthier connections after childhood trauma.
Lack of attachment or feeling unsafe can make it hard for trauma survivors to build healthy adult connections.
Trauma can impact survivors' ability to trust, express emotions, set boundaries, and regulate emotions.
Survivors heal and build healthy relationships through self-awareness, boundaries, compassion, and support.
Do you often wonder if your partner will be there for you when you need them the most? During conflicts, do you tend to withdraw, push your partner away, or react with an emotional outburst? Do you also have difficulty expressing or asserting your needs in relationships?
If you've experienced childhood abuse—whether physical, sexual, or emotional—you may be facing relational challenges. Childhood trauma can have a lasting effect on your ability to form healthy, secure attachments in adulthood. The quality of our early relationships, particularly with primary caregivers, plays a significant role in how we connect with others as adults, especially in intimate relationships (Silva et al., 2024).
Why Childhood Trauma Makes Emotional Connections Challenging
In my clinical practice, trauma survivors frequently express dissatisfaction in their relationships. These challenges often stem from core beliefs such as "No one can be trusted," "I can't express my feelings safely," or "I am unworthy of love." These beliefs, common among trauma survivors, can significantly impact the ability to trust others and create difficulties in forming and maintaining healthy connections (Ferrajäo & Elklit, 2020).
Secure attachments in childhood help us build trust, feel safe, and regulate emotion—key factors for healthy relationships in adulthood. Conversely, a childhood marked by abuse can result in insecure attachments, leaving lasting emotional scars that carry into adulthood (Bowlby, 1973). If this resonates with your childhood experience, you may struggle with trust, self-confidence, and emotion regulation, which can impact your communication, conflict resolution, and connection with partners (Heller & LaPierre, 2012).
How Trauma Impacts Relationships
1. Challenges With Trust and Emotional Intimacy. It’s natural to struggle with trust and vulnerability after experiencing abuse and broken trust in childhood. For trauma survivors, vulnerability can feel unsafe, and expressing emotions might have previously resulted in rejection or harm. As a result, you may have developed coping mechanisms, such as emotional withdrawal or repression. While these mechanisms protect you, they can also create emotional distance in your relationships, leading to misunderstandings and disengagement.
If you find yourself doubting whether your partner will be there for you when needed, you may react with jealousy, withdraw, or even try to sabotage the relationship during conflicts. While this is a defense mechanism against further hurt, it prevents deeper connections from forming.
2. Fear of Abandonment or Rejection. Feeling unsupported in childhood and internalizing the belief that you are unworthy of love can create a fear of abandonment by your partner, leading to persistent anxiety. If this resonates with you, reflect on whether you tend to cling to your partner, overanalyze situations for signs of rejection, rely too heavily on them for emotional support, or push them away at the slightest hint of abandonment. These actions can unintentionally create the very situation you fear.
3. Struggles With Boundaries. Childhood abuse often involves blurred or violated boundaries, making it difficult to establish healthy boundaries in adulthood. This might show up in intimate relationships as challenges asserting your needs, respecting your partner's boundaries, or maintaining your sense of self. These struggles lead to resentment, burnout, or emotional exhaustion.
4. Difficulty Regulating Emotions. As children, we learn to regulate emotions through our caregivers' example. However, childhood trauma can leave us without healthy emotional coping skills. Reflect on how you respond to stress or conflict in relationships—do you have intense outbursts, withdraw, or shut down? These signs of emotional dysregulation can create a toxic cycle in relationships, leaving partners feeling overwhelmed, confused, or hurt. As conflicts escalate, this can lead to further disconnection and misunderstanding.
4 Strategies for Healing and Building Healthy Relationships
While the effects of childhood trauma on adult relationships can be significant, they are not permanent. Healing is possible. Here are some strategies that can help:
1. Self-Awareness. One of the first steps in healing from childhood trauma is building self-awareness. Recognizing trauma-based patterns and understanding the roots of your fears and insecurities can help you break unhelpful behaviors in relationships. Self-reflection exercises, journaling, and mindfulness practices can all be helpful tools for fostering greater awareness.
2. Communication and Establishing Healthy Boundaries: Effective communication is essential for building trust and intimacy. For those who struggle with vulnerability, taking small steps toward openness can gradually deepen emotional closeness. Approach the conversation with calmness and clarity about your needs.
Practicing assertiveness and self-respect is key to breaking the cycle of trauma-related people-pleasing. Set clear, reasonable consequences for when your boundaries are crossed. For example, if your partner tends to ignore you when you speak, use “I feel” statements to express your needs and emotions without blaming them. You might say, “I feel hurt when I’m ignored. If that happens again, I’ll need to speak to a friend who will listen.”
3. Compassion: Healing from trauma is not linear, and it takes time. It’s important to approach both yourself and your partner with compassion. Recognize that trauma affects how we respond to conflicts, which can foster empathy and understanding in your relationship. If you feel you reacted poorly during a conflict, offer yourself the same compassion you would give a friend. Remind yourself of the kind of things you would say to them in that situation.
4. Seeking Support: Establishing a support system is essential for healing. Surround yourself with supportive friends, family, or a therapist who can provide the compassion and nurturing you need. Therapy can be a safe place to reframe unhelpful beliefs about yourself and others, develop helpful coping strategies, and improve communication skills. If you are not ready to work with a therapist, consider support groups or books that can help you process lingering trauma.
Copyright by Stacey R Pinatelli, Psy.D.
Excerpted in part from my book Hope and Healing for Survivors.
Stacey R Pinatelli Psy.D. - Website -
References
Bowbly. J. (1973). Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books.
Ferrajão, P. C., & Elklit, A. (2020). World assumptions and posttraumatic stress in a treatment-seeking sample of survivors of childhood sexual abuse: A longitudinal study. Psychology of Violence, 10(5), 501–508.
Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: how early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.
Silva, A., Ferreira, S., Silva Pinto, É., Rocha, S. A., & Barbosa-Rocha, N. (2023). The Relationship Between Childhood Abuse and Adult Attachment Styles: The Mediator Role of Sensory Over-Responsivity. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 33(2), 236–254.
