You have an attachment wound and it’s affecting your romantic relationships.
Your childhood trauma is deeply affecting you. Let’s talk about what you can do to start healing it. It’s important that you’re aware of it because if you’re not, it will continue to affect you negatively without you knowing it, and it will be very difficult to ever heal.
Have you ever had the feeling of just tuning out? Of course you have. We all tune out. Tuning out is a common way to dissociate. Tuning out, especially when we were infants and toddlers, is what we did when we felt stress.
When we were very little if we were verbally abused, emotionally threatened or scared or felt powerless we would go into a stress state. And since we were helpless little babies there was nothing we could really do about it.
As an adult, if we feel stressed, we could walk away or ask the person who’s upsetting us to stop doing the thing that’s upsetting us, or we could ask someone else for help. As a baby, as a toddler, especially if we’re non-verbal, we can’t do any of these things. All we really can do is tune out and dissociate.
Our little baby brains couldn’t handle the stress so it would just sorta turn off. All of a sudden you wouldn’t be plugged into reality and because of that, you’d feel a sense of relief. That’s how you survived stressful moments. Actually that was the only way to survive stressful moments back then. And what should have been a temporary way to cope with stress instead has become a long term way to cope with stress. Hence the tuning out.
Your brain development is powerfully affected by your interaction with your environment and the adults who are taking care of you. In fact the most important factor to your brain development is the interaction you have with your parents or caregivers.
The ideal and best condition for your brain to develop when you’re an infant is when your parent is
emotionally available,
is consistently available,
is feeling emotionally grounded, so not stressed or depressed
and is responsive and attuned to your needs
If you’re not being raised in the ideal environment than anything that gets in the way of it will impact your brain development.
Can we all acknowledge that probably none of us were raised in the ideal environment? I have met zero people in my life that got their emotional and physical needs met perfectly when they were babies. You don’t have to be an unfit parent or caregiver to miss some of these requirements.
Basically if you’re a parent that has anything else going on their life, like a job, raising another kid, a partner that’s going through a tough time, not to even mention, addiction or mental health problems, then you’re going to inadvertently create an environment that’s going to cause stress and trauma for your baby which is going to affect brain development.
If your mom is feeling stressed or depressed then as a baby you tune out. You do this when there are millions of brain connections being made. That’s not good for a developing brain.
Our wonderful little personalities that we develop as children are a direct response to our environment and our needs not being addressed. And then that little personality grows into your adult personality. And unfortunately we don’t grow out of the personality that was responding to stress and trauma. Instead, we create an adult personality that is still responding to our needs not being met.
Our personality is still adapting to our environment. So if my little baby brain felt abandoned by my mom, which it did because my mom was in grad school and had a three year old daughter that needed every second of her attention, then I’m going to develop a personality around that abandonment.
So now, as an adult, when I have a rough day and I go home to my partner but she’s vegging out watching the bachelorette with eyes glazed over, and isn’t providing me the emotional support I need I am going to feel intensly abandoned. I’ll feel like my partner doesn’t care about me just like my mom didn’t care about me.
And that’s a trauma response from when I was a baby. Should I blame my mom. Yes, I’m a therapist and I will always blame your parents or caregivers. Is it fair? I mean, probably not. All parents are set up to fail. Especially if they know nothing about this stuff.
Okay so what can I start doing as an adult to heal the trauma? Great question!
When my partner is paying more attention to a horrible reality show and isn’t supporting me emotionally I need to clue into the fact that I’m feeling anger and first accept it.
I’m angry because I’m feeling neglected. I need to be mindful of the anger and ask myself what it’s all about. I mean sure, my girlfriend is staring at all the hunks on TV and not paying attention to me, that’s triggering. But that’s not really the thing that’s bothering me.
I’m really angry because my mom didn’t pay attention to me or meet my emotional needs when I was a child because she was too wrapped up in other things.
The solution is to be mindful of what’s going on, understand that you’re mad at your caregivers, focus back on the present moment, and be more direct about getting your needs met. My girlfriend doesn’t really care about the bachelorette. She cares about me more. I need to experience that and let that in.
But because it has personally taken me a while to actually do that, I instead responded to my child hood trauma of abandonment by becoming a therapist so that my clients would NEEEED me. What better way to respond to not feeling wanted than to start a profession where you feel constantly needed.
If you don’t want to become a therapist then I recommend you heal your childhood wounds instead. You can do that by being mindful of when you get triggered and calmly and directly asking for your needs to be met. You can also start the healing process by finding a therapist at therapyden.com.
Also, a lot of what I went over today is from one of my favorite dudes, Gabor Mate. So look him up if you want to continue learning about trauma.
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