Ways trauma can impact your relationships and tips to handle it
Understanding trauma and handling it effectively are crucial if you want to prevent it from affecting your current relationships. Here are a few ways trauma can harm your relationship and some advice on how to cope.
Childhood trauma can impact adult relationships in multiple ways. Unresolved trauma can create challenges in communication, intimacy, and trust which can hinder our relationships. The impact of trauma is more about the way we respond to events and internalise them. It is important to process the trauma and to feel safe in your body and experience love because when you’re feeling safe in your body, you’ll be able to feel safe connecting with another. (Also read: How to deal with childhood trauma? Expert offers insights )
Lucille Shackleton, Behavioural Scientist & Accredited Counsellor defined trauma in her recent Instagram post as, "Trauma is an emotional response. It's how we process an event that has deeply impacted us. In the moment we might go into our fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. The effects of trauma can be long held and impact the body, mind and spirit." She further shared information about trauma and how it impacts relationships and tips to handle it.
The four trauma responses :
Fight - you might become defensive and attack in order to protect yourself from being attacked. It could look like verbally attacking and blaming someone.
Flight - you might get up and leave the situation or emotionally check out and dissociate. You are physically or mentally getting out of there!
Freeze - you might stop responding and disengage with the event or conversation. You might move into numbing behaviours or simply pretend everything is fine.
Fawn - you might people please in order to deescalate the situation. You might deny your thoughts, feeling, and needs to appease others and keep the peace.
How childhood trauma might impact adult relationships:
Trust issues - if we didn't have secure, trusting relationships as children or if that trust was betrayed by those who should have been protecting us, we may experience difficulty trusting partners.
Communication - we may struggle to express our thoughts and feelings and not know how to explain our emotional world.
Stress level - we may experience increased stress if we experienced a lot of stressful events in childhood and be triggered more easily.
Dissociation - we may dissociate or 'check out' when issues come up in the relationship as that was the childhood coping mechanism.
Reactivity - we may be more reactive and appear to be sensitive to things others don't understand.
Safety - we may need more reassurance in relationships and long for a sense of security.
Intimacy - it may be difficult to truly let people in and experience intimacy.
Self-sabotage - you may have internalized the effects of the trauma and find you self-sabotage in your relationships.
Libido - it might affect your sex drive and interest in sex as well as your ability to enjoy sex.
Equality - it may influence your sense of worth and esteem which may affect the value you place on yourself versus your partner and the relationship.
Tips to handle past traumas in current relationship:
• Let each other know about your history or past traumas and what happened to you when you feel safe enough to do so.
• Tell each other what your triggers are, how those triggers make you feel and if there are ways to avoid those triggers in the relationship.
• Tell your partner how they can help you when you become triggered or reactive.
• Tell them what helps you to regulate your emotions. For example do you need a hug, a moment alone, to talk about it?
• Make a plan when you're calm and connected so you know what to do if either of you are triggered so you can support each other.
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