How Does Trauma Affect Intimate Relationships & Attachment?

Human beings are relational beings; we require connection to thrive and survive. We are impacted and shaped by those who cared for us growing up as well as our cultural and social contexts.

Infants and children in particular are “attached” to their mother or primary caregiver. Sometimes, those we trusted to take care of us during childhood failed to do so through abuse (what happened to us) and neglect (what didn’t happen to us and what we didn’t receive). When this happened, we learned ways of adapting and surviving to get our needs for love and connection met.

In other words, how we expect others to treat us, how we treat others, if we believe we are worthy of love, and how we love others are the effects of our early childhood experiences, cultural influences, and social environment.

Our early experiences impact our ability to form healthy interpersonal relationships with not just others, but with ourselves.

Essentially, attachment trauma impacts our ability to feel safe with others and ourselves.

We feel chronically unsafe, mistrustful, and anxious in relationships, and this manifests through the push and pull of desperately craving healthy connection, yet also fearful and ambivalent of connection and pulling away.

The Hidden Effects of Trauma on Relationships

• Emotions:

  • Restricting, avoiding, and/or averse to emotions; not having vocabulary or language to describe emotions and prioritizing logic and intellect instead.

  • Or conversely, feeling too many feelings all at once and unable to make sense of them; feeling overwhelmed, numb, “too much”, and out of control.

• Difficulty Trusting & Self-Reliance:

  • Learning at an early age you cannot rely on others to get your needs met and thus ignoring those needs or attempting to meet them yourself.

• Fear of Being Alone & Intimacy:

  • Deeply fearful of relationships while simultaneously craving emotional closeness.

• Nature of Communication Styles:

  • Using humor to deflect, self-deprecation, demanding, yelling, having fragmented discussions or keeping secrets, withdrawing, isolating, and maintaining silence.

• Insecure Anxious Attachment & Codependency: Difficulty establishing secure attachments to others by keeping others close.

  Manifestations can include:

  • Needing frequent validation from others

  • Fear of abandonment

  • Being overly dependent in relationships

  • Hghly sensitive to others’ actions and moods

  • Feels emotions intensely and deeply

  • Unsure/shaky core of self; dependent on what others think of them (“There’s something wrong with me; I’m too much, I’m not enough”)

  • Anticipating what others need/want at expense of own boundaries and own need/wants

• Dismissive Avoidant Attachment & Counterdependency: Difficulty establishing secure attachments to others by keeping others at a distance.

  Manifestations can include:

  • Sabotaging healthy relationships

  • Fear of vulnerability and intimacy

  • Pushing others away, avoidance, and isolating self

  • Emotions are in control

  • Focused on external things such as status, accomplishments, and success

  • Lack of a core self

  • Difficulty trusting and letting others in emotionally (“I cannot depend on other people to get my needs met; I can rely on myself and have to do it myself”)

When unresolved trauma is not understood and healed, it can wreak havoc on our relationships with ourselves and others we care about. Sabotaging relationships is a common theme.

However, healing is possible. There are many ways to heal. Therapy can be one such way.