How your childhood trauma is affecting relationships with partners today

How do you know if your childhood trauma is affecting the relationships with your partner today?

Childhood trauma happens in many different ways. Sometimes the trauma is so subtle that people don’t even realize that it is TRAUMA that they experienced growing up.

Many people also downplay their trauma and brush off their childhood experiences like it’s not REALLY that big of a deal. This often happens when the people who hurt us convince us that we were overreacting and that’s something we still believe today. 

No matter what your story or specific trauma is – you were neglected, abandoned, or rejected as a child. You may have experienced a huge shocking traumatic event, or you experienced little bits of daily neglect that added up over the years. 

Sometimes just growing up in a home where you have to sit pretty, smile and hide who you really are can have detrimental impacts. It can be traumatic to grow up with parents who were never intentionally malicious but couldn’t manage their own mental illness and therefore didn’t meet your emotional needs.

Wherever you fall on the trauma spectrum, there is a part of you that was supposed to be loved and taken care of in a healthy, loving way, but was neglected instead. This created a feeling of betrayal and the belief that you are unworthy of love that you hold inside your body until you are able to release it.

The childhood trauma that’s affecting your relationships is trapped in your body.

When our childhood is stripped away from us because of trauma, we lose the ability to trust anyone else and expect that all relationships will end in betrayal. 

This is why it’s so hard to have a healthy, lasting relationship until you’ve released your childhood trauma. We inevitably carry this trauma with us into every single relationship, waiting to be abandoned, hurt, and heartbroken, even though we’re finally in a healthy relationship that is GOOD for us.

Many people try to convince themselves and talk themselves out of their trauma. They tell themselves things like, “My partner is loving and supportive. He’s nothing like my father. I’m safe now.” But the body still shuts down or fights back at the first sign of conflict or discomfort in the relationship.

Your body and nervous system will ALWAYS win over the mind. You can repeat affirmations 97 times daily, but your body will still act as if you’re going to get hurt until it is free of the trauma trapped inside.

Your nervous system plays a vital role in releasing childhood trauma and building healthy relationships.

Childhood trauma has a major impact on our nervous systems. We are hardwired to protect ourselves from feeling pain and harm. When you’ve experienced a lot of hurt in the past, you’ll automatically be hypervigilant to anything that can potentially hurt you again.

That’s why you’ll constantly look for the danger signs, or ways to prove that your partner really IS a monster. You’ll keep waiting for sh*t to hit the fan just so you can be prepared to protect yourself. But it never does because your partner is finally DIFFERENT and more loving than anyone else has been in the past.

It’s crucial to rewire your nervous system for love instead of fear so you can break the pattern of pushing away healthy love. When fear dominates our survival systems, we react before we can even THINK about the way we just acted towards our partner. This often ends up in painful regret about the things we said (or didn’t say) in the moment of conflict even though we know in our minds that our partners didn’t deserve it.

When your nervous system has been rewired, your body no longer gets hijacked by an impulsive need to protect itself. This allows you to CHOOSE how you want to respond instead, even in difficult or uncomfortable situations in your relationship.

Childhood trauma doesn’t have to keep you unhappy forever. It’s possible to let HEALTHY love in. 

Your childhood trauma creates a story within you that you don’t deserve healthy, happy lasting love and yet, it is your dream to have exactly that.

Many people keep attracting unhealthy partners until they release the old trauma, but if you’ve already attracted an AMAZING partner who you’re with right now, I see you – you’re struggling too.

You finally have this opportunity to be in a healthy loving relationship and you can’t even enjoy it. You might be close to sabotaging it completely.

That was the hardest part for me. When I finally attracted my husband, it felt too good to be true. I had literally DREAMED of getting into a relationship with someone like him and finally have the healthy love I deserved. But my trauma made me push him away (until I got him back!)

It’s not too late.

You can still heal your past trauma and save your beautiful relationship. It might not feel possible for you because you’ve spent years talking about how you want to change and maybe even lost thousands of dollars in therapy trying to heal your trauma.

YOU ARE NOT BROKEN. It’s not your fault that talking about it didn’t work. The belief that you don’t deserve healthy love is not something that even meditations and affirmations can fully access and release. The old trauma that’s driving your unhealthy patterns is stored in your nervous system and body, so it must be released through movement.

You deserve to find peace in your body & let love in without fear.

The latest trauma research shows that cognitive-based therapies cannot fully access trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body. Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain-Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal trauma from the physical body or nervous system.

This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for many people. They end up feeling stuck, even after spending decades of therapy and gaining so much self-awareness.

If you relate, you might’ve considered giving up on your healing. You might wonder if a fully integrated healing is not possible for you.

Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing deeply & wholly, because we all have neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection to love, joy, and openness.

But even with an effective neuroscience-backed Somatic approach, going to weekly sessions could still require many more months or years until you feel that “click” in your body that finally makes you feel WHOLE.

That’s why I run Somatic Trauma Healing Retreats where many people experience accelerated, integrated, and lasting healing in just a few days.

(Disclaimer: each attendee must go through an application process that ensures this accelerated healing is possible for them).

If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d love to invite you to check out my retreats! There are several options from women’s healing, plant-assisted, 1:1, and more.