Is Your Traumatic Childhood Making Relationships Difficult?
Mark (not his real name) thought he should have settled down by now. Almost 20 years ago he had fled his abusive family determined to make a fresh start. His dream to be happily married was just that. His first marriage seemed like a repeat of his parents’ marriage; he verbally attacked his wife almost daily and once she had to go to the hospital when he beat her.
He had lost track of how many women he had dated since his divorce and he did not think the current one would last much longer. Lovers complained that he would not let himself get emotionally close to them. Nothing seemed to work; he had read all the self-help books about positive thinking, and while the antidepressant helped him come out of the black holes, he was not able to find a mate and keep her. By the time I saw Mark, he was close to despair and suicidal thoughts occasionally floated in.
Perhaps you, too, have had childhood trauma and wonder now if that contributes to your relationship difficulties.
Trauma and Recovery: Ties That Bind You to the Past
The trauma that you experience as a child can have long reaching effects into your adult relationships, despite your best intentions. Long after you have left the traumatizing environment, you may notice that you easily become angry or depressed. Intimacy is difficult; at times you feel physically numb and the thought of trusting someone makes you very anxious. As soon as a potential mate indicates she or he wants to get closer, you run the other way, fast! You are stuck in a threat response.
What Happened In the Past?
Mistreatment when you were a child could have overwhelmed your nervous system and lead you to getting stuck in a threat response. In other words, your nervous system continues to act as though the threat you experienced as a child is still happening now. Let’s look at how this happens.
Like animals that face threat from a predator, your nervous system is designed to go through a specific biological sequence of steps to keep you alive. As a child, when you perceived that danger was near your body automatically mobilized to defend itself and sent instructions throughout your body to run or fight. As a child, however, you may not have been able to do either and you froze, like a deer caught in the headlights. In addition, unlike animals in the wild who successfully fight or run from an enemy and who later can shake off the extra energy and rest, you may have felt continually threatened that your nervous system never got to relax.
As an adult, your nervous system will continue to act as though danger is near until it gets to complete all of the biological steps. It is these incomplete self-protective impulses that can give rise to the symptoms similar to Mark’s.
What Happens When the Biological Steps Are Not Completed?
Biological Step 1. Stop and startle.
With frequent mistreatment as a child, the slightest sound can startle you now.
Biological Step 2. Scan the environment to locate the threat.
If you never knew when or where you would be hurt as a child, you may be looking frequently for danger everywhere when you are an adult. This could prevent you from even trying to form a relationship.
Biological Step 3. Evaluate the situation to determine if it is dangerous.
Unpredictable abuse in the past can put you always on guard as an adult. If you should enter a relationship, it is easy for you to suspect that the other person will mean you harm.
Biological Step 4. Fight or flee if the situation is dangerous or become immobile if it is life threatening.
Hiding or making yourself appear small may be the best you could to protect yourself when you were a child. As an adult the urge to fight and flee can show up as anger or depression (a form of anger) and leaving relationships prematurely.
If your nervous system determined that you were about to die when you were a child, it mercifully let you not feel physically or emotionally what was happening. As an adult you may continue to do this even when there is no threat; consequently, intimacy is difficult.
Biological Step 5. Release any residual energy and rest.
Shaking, changes in body temperature and spontaneous movements of the body are several ways you release residual energy. This may rarely have happened as a child if the abuse was persistent and may not happen as an adult if the previous four steps are still incomplete.
What Can You Do Now?
Pay attention to what triggers or sets you off.
If you tend to become angry, depressed or anxious, notice what is happening just prior to the rise of these feelings or to the urge to lash out or get away.
Look for patterns in
· What your partner says or does. Sometimes the use of certain phrases, tone of voice or gestures will send you back into the memory of the abuse.
· Where you are. You may be fine until you are in a place that reminds you of where the abuse took place; other times, you may see an object or smell a scent that triggers a memory of the trauma.
· Your thoughts. When you are strongly critical of a situation, it could reflect your dislike of something related to the abuse.
Give yourself a time out
When you notice that you are being triggered, take time to remind yourself that you are reacting to a memory. When you experience the memory, chemicals flood into your system to warn you of danger. Most likely the danger your system perceives is actually from the past and is not happening in the present. If this is the case, be as non reactive as possible. Focusing on your breath, sitting quietly or taking a walk can help. Fortunately, the chemicals are usually short lived and within a few minutes, the danger signal turns off.
Talk to your partner about what sets you off and ask for help.
While asking for help from your partner can feel risky, especially if it was not safe for you to do this with your caregiver, it may ultimately lead to increased intimacy in your relationship.
1. To begin, ask your partner when it would be good to talk about your reaction and how together you can work toward decreasing your reactivity. Choose a time when you feel relatively calm.
2. Describe in a matter of fact way how you respond when you or your partner does or says specific things. Avoid blaming yourself or your partner.
3. Brainstorm together specific changes you and/or your partner can make to avoid or minimize the behaviors that provoke you.
4. Decide to try out one or two different changes for a certain length of time then reevaluate your success at the end.
5. Repeat the above four steps as necessary.
Engage the help of a professional who understands how trauma affects the body.
To significantly diminish the effects of the abuse, your nervous system will need to complete any unfinished biological steps I mentioned above. A therapist can help you do this in such a way as to not further overwhelm your system. By completing the steps, your system will stop acting as though the danger is happening now. Consequently, how you interact with your partner will be based more on what is happening today rather than what happened on the past. You will be able to come out of a threat response. Working with a professional who focuses strictly on changing your thoughts about what happened may have very limited benefit.
But Wait…
I think too much damage has happened already to my relationship and I’m not sure if I change whether my partner will stay with me.
That may be true. Whether a relationship can survive a certain degree of damage, as you say, depends on many factors including you and your partner’s perception of how you weathered difficulties in relationships in the past, your commitment to one another and how much support each of you receive from outside your relationship. Couples’ counseling may help you to sort all this out.
Most likely, the effects of your past abuse will continue to affect the current relationship and those that follow until your nervous system gets to complete the biological steps I mentioned above. Trauma symptoms can sometimes go underground for a while, but often will resurface when we think about getting close to someone. Addressing these symptoms either in individual or couple’s counseling could significantly change your life for the better.
I suspect something happened when I was a kid, but I don’t have any clear memories. Can this approach help me?
Working at the level of how your body and nervous system were affected by the abuse does not require that you have memories of what happened. If the abuse happened before you had a good vocabulary it is most likely that you will not be able to tell the story in words. Your body, however, will remember and can complete the impulses to fight or flee that arose when you were hurt. To learn more about working with trauma when you don’t remember what happened, you may want to read another article I wrote called “How Can the Trauma of Childhood Still Be Affecting Me?”
It’s not just me who gets reactive; my partner does this, too.
When you say your partner gets “reactive”, I assume you mean that her or his behavior toward you also seems to be related to past trauma. This can bring a lot of additional pain into a relationship. As you learn more about what sets you off and tell your partner this, the two of you may be able to negotiate ways to minimize those interactions that trigger you. Likewise, if your partner can do the same, the volatility in your partnership can diminish. Both of you could most likely benefit by working either individually or as a couple with a professional who can support you to address your bodies’ responses to past threats that are still being played out in your current relationship.
What Happened to Mark?
As is typical of many who have experienced abuse as children, Mark alternated between anger and anxiety. The impulses that arose to fight and flee when he was a child still needed to be completed.
Some guidelines that I followed in my work with him included:
· Inviting him to describe pleasant experiences and to track how his body responded. By starting with pleasant experiences, he began to feel safe enough with the process of tracking body sensations such as the degree of muscle tightness, how deeply he breathed and temperature changes.
· Directing his attention to those times when he was reactive with his partner. By just telling a small portion of the story and by shifting his attention between that and pleasant memories, he was able to unpack the energy that had been stuck in his body since the childhood abuse. During one session, he noticed that his feet started to move all of their own accord when he remembered how his father had beat him. In his mind he saw himself running to the safety of his cabin. This was his body’s way of completing a flight response. Afterward, he was quite surprised how tired he felt even though he had never left the chair in my office.
· Encouraging him to practice tracking his internal experience when he was with his partner. He noticed that over time he could more quickly identify when he was about to become reactive with his partner. One indicator was that he noticed an intense tightening in his gut. This awareness gave him the cue to take a time out before he erupted in rage.
Mark began to notice a change about a month into therapy. His feelings of helplessness had diminished so that he no longer felt suicidal. After several months he was able to better recognize when he was viewing the current situation from the perspective of a scared child. He found that he became reactive less often and to a lesser degree. When his girlfriend reassured him that she wanted to support him in dealing with the abuse, he began to ask her for help when he became triggered. Continued therapy helped him to experience emotions as less scary, and he began to show more of his tender vulnerable side. The physical numbness subsided. He and his partner became closer and the need to run from the relationship faded.
Summary
1. The effects of childhood abuse can last into adulthood and affect how you engage in a relationship.
2. To decrease the negative effects of the abusive past:
a. Pay attention to what is said or done just before you become reactive
b. Take a time out to let the emotions run their course.
c. Talk to your partner about what set you off
d. Seek additional help from a professional who knows how to help you resolve trauma symptoms by working with your nervous system.
Next Step?
If you suspect that some of the problems in your relationship could be due to childhood abuse, consider that this could be a real possibility. Know that if this is the case, there are very effective ways to move through and out the other side of this part of your history. If you need additional treatment, seek individual or couple’s therapy with a Somatic Experiencing professional or read Beth Dennison’s books: Clearing Trauma and Threat and Safety. These books offer clear and simple graphics to help readers understand the survival biological responses and how to complete them.
