Can you imagine something happening to you decades ago still having an influence on your life today? When you experience trauma in childhood, its impact can be far-reaching, lasting well into your grownup years. If left unchecked, it can lead to major consequences such as addiction and mental health disorders. But its negative fallout can also be more subtle: it can hurt your relationships as an adult, too. Let’s take a look at how childhood trauma affects relationships in adulthood.
Understanding ACEs and Childhood Trauma
Childhood trauma occurs when you experience a dangerous, scary, or distressing event during years 0 to 18. The experience of childhood trauma could be associated with something that happens directly to you, or something you witness happen to another person. In the moment, you may feel helpless, upset, or terrified. Such traumatic events can occur from anywhere, but in childhood they’re commonly associated with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines adverse childhood experiences as traumatic events that occur in childhood during a set period of time. Or, alternatively, they can be aspects of your childhood environment that harm your sense of safety, stability, and bonding. Common ACEs that can lead to childhood trauma include:
- Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse
- Physical or emotional neglect
- Divorce
- Substance use in the home
- Living with someone who has a mental illness
- Having an incarcerated parent
When this ACEs trauma occurs, it can change your brain’s development in childhood and your body’s response to stress. As a result, adverse childhood experiences can have a lasting impact on your mental and physical health. But how does childhood trauma affect relationships when you’re an adult?
How Childhood Trauma Affects Relationships: Attachment Styles
Your early childhood environment influences the attachment styles you learn to develop as you grow up. Your attachment style is how you perceive the world around you and how you relate to other people. So when you’re exposed to ACEs at an early age, the resulting connection between childhood trauma and relationships grows. That means the unhealthy (also called insecure) attachment styles you develop as a child due to trauma can often continue in your life as an adult, such as:
- Anxious-avoidant: Also known as fearful-avoidant attachment, anxious-avoidant attachment leads you to worry that your friends or partner are withdrawing from you, leading you to struggle to maintain close intimacy due to these concerns.
- Dismissive-avoidant: This makes you emotionally unavailable with other people due to your negative views of others. As a result, you aspire to maintain self-sufficiency without letting anyone get too close.
- Anxious-preoccupied: Anxious-preoccupied attachment leads you to struggle with poor self-esteem, causing you to need validation from others all the time. Yet you also fear others will abandon you, leading you to worry about the intentions of your partner or friends.
How Childhood Trauma Affects Relationships: Trust Issues & Fear of Intimacy
Trust issues are one of the main byproducts of how childhood trauma affects relationships in adulthood. This is because the people you trusted in childhood, such as your parents or caregivers, may have been the cause of your ACEs trauma. As a result, you may learn not to trust others in general, which carries into your adult relationships. Even if there’s no reason to distrust someone, that can become your natural response. This causes you to be suspicious of those you’re in relationship with, which may drive you into isolation and keep others at a distance.
Alongside your trust issues, you may have a fear of intimacy as well. No matter if it’s emotional, experiential, or sexual intimacy, you fear having close relationships with others, letting your guard down, and being vulnerable. You may desire these types of relationships, but your fears keep you from forming these lasting connections. Often this is a defense mechanism to keep you from potential hurt or danger associated with your past trauma. Some signs you’re afraid of intimacy include:
- Fearing commitment
- Serial dating
- Low self-esteem
- A history of relational instability
- Perfectionist tendencies
Childhood Trauma and Adult Relationships: Communication & Control Challenges
As a child, you learn how to communicate based on what you see and experience in the home. But if you were exposed to childhood trauma in the home, your ability to communicate in a healthy way may be diminished. In fact, you may even repeat as an adult the harmful communication patterns you experienced as a child, such as yelling, constantly arguing, or being passive aggressive. At the same time, you may struggle to express how you feel to others, let alone talk about important subjects because you didn’t see this modeled well in childhood.
Experiencing ACEs as a child may have also made you feel out-of-control, or that you were incapable of being in control of the things around you. Consequently as an adult, you may feel the constant urge to be in control or in charge in a relationship, as well as attempt to control your partner.
Heal from Childhood Trauma at Integrative Life Center
In many ways, unresolved childhood trauma may be driving your relationship struggles, as well as any addiction or mental health issues. If you’re unsure, take our free Childhood Trauma Test to find out if you’ve experienced ACEs in your past.
Childhood trauma and relationships can be very much intertwined, but they don’t have to be. With the right help, you can heal your trauma and restore healthy relationships. At Integrative Life Center in Nashville, TN, we take a trauma-informed care approach to healing past traumas, addiction, mental health disorders, and other struggles. Contact us today to learn more about what we treat.
