The Impact of Childhood Trauma on Adult Survivors
5 unique challenges adult survivors experience.
If you ask ten different people how childhood trauma has affected their lives, you will get ten different answers. Yet, the one overarching theme they all share is how early trauma has impacted the quality of their adult relationships. Many end up in relationships with narcissistic partners where their core wounds are reopened time and again within that relationship. If you have experienced this, then you can probably relate to the endless cycle of people-pleasing in an attempt to please the unpleasable.
Others may end up with partners who are a cookie-cutter stamp of their selfish, negligent or abandoning caregiver because these kinds of relationships feel like home. If this dynamic resonates with you, then you may be choosing this type of partner in an attempt to overcome your trauma by repeatedly being re-exposed to it. Yet, while Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion has been debunked as little more than self-sabotage, the compulsion to conquer your trauma may be keeping you stuck in it.
Still others may confuse unpredictability as “exciting” if volatility was conditioned as normal early in their lives. If this dynamic seems familiar to you, you likely learned things backwards where unsafe was learned as “safe”. These…
