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How Relationships Change After Healing Your Trauma
3 ways our perspectives change about relationships.
The following content includes experiences and discussions around difficult topics such as trauma, emotional challenges, childhood maltreatment, or toxic relationships. While my intent is to educate and share personal insights, some readers may find certain content emotionally distressing. This article is for informational purposes only.
There can be a ‘comfortable’ familiarity in holding on to trauma, especially if it’s all you’ve known, or all you’ve been taught. Walking around exhausted all the time, numb, feeling misunderstood, judged, or betrayed in your relationships can feel like it’s just another day with the same pattern. When these patterns are longstanding and have replayed often enough, you can start to believe this is just how relationships are. These are the same dynamics that identify love as something that is supposed to be earned and where it can be impulsively taken away at a moment’s notice, leaving you feeling more betrayed, empty, and vulnerable.
So, when does this pattern stop?
For some, the realizations can come on slowly and only over time. If you fall into this group, you have probably noticed that it was only after these patterns have replayed over and over, which left you no option but to pull off the rose-colored glasses and accept that things need changing in your life. In this dynamic, relationships are viewed through a lens of the idea of the person as being the answer to healing your pain. Your trauma may surface in familiar ways such as gravitating to people who don’t value you or see you for who you are, but rather who they expect you to be. This can leave you feeling emotionally drained by constantly compromising parts of yourself to ‘fit’ into their expectations or agenda.
And, no matter how hard you try to make things different, the inevitable patterns replay where you again feel betrayed, hurt, and alone. The reality is that these relationships are a reflection of your own unhealed wounds, including the misbeliefs you hold about yourself, your fears of abandonment or rejection, and a need for validation. The irony is that when unhealed trauma is running the show, it can actually reinforce your fears and become a…
