12 Reasons why trauma may be getting in the way of your relationships
The problem with unresolved trauma is that ignoring it never helps you get anything you want from your life. However, even if you are taking steps to improve your life, you may still be acting in ways that harm your relationships. This is not to blame you for bad relationships but to give you some facts that are getting in your way of having good ones. After all, relationships take two people, but you are only in control of one of them.
- Trauma Affects Brain – Actual imaging shows damage to the amygdala in people who have suffered trauma. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that in some cases, if the trauma is prolonged, there is no way to heal the damage. However, you can acknowledge it and work through the issues it causes anyway.
- You Had Poor Examples – If you grew up in a traumatic environment with parents and adults around you who also did not have well-controlled emotions and who made mostly bad decisions until you learn the difference, you will keep repeating the problems – even unconsciously.
- You Have Unrealistic Expectations – The truth is that having any expectations at all about anything other than yourself is a recipe for disappointment.
- You Suppress Positive Emotions – When you feel good, it begins to make you uncomfortable, so you try to do something else.
- You Lack Trust – It’s extremely hard for you to trust other humans, including those close to you who have done nothing to harm you.
- You Lack Boundaries – You have trouble setting boundaries for others or recognizing theirs because you’ve never experienced it before, or your brain has been altered with drugs, or even simply your own brain chemicals.
- You Feel Intense Emotions – Whether it’s sadness or happiness, you feel all the emotions, and you feel them super intensely to the point of overwhelm due to poor regulation of your brain chemicals.
- You Don’t Know Who You Are – If you were raised in a neglectful, abusive, or otherwise problematic environment growing up, sometimes it’s hard to become an individual as you simply seek to survive.
- You Feel Chronically Unsafe – Do you feel unsafe all the time regardless of if you’re home, at work, or elsewhere? If your safety has been challenged in the past, it’s hard to get it back sometimes without a lot of work.
- You Feel Anxious About the Relationship – When you begin new relationships, do you feel scared and anxious and don’t even try in the first place because you already know you’ll be disappointed? That’s a trauma response.
- You Avoid True Intimacy – Do you find that you want to do things to either avoid or destroy true intimacy by forcing sex or by unconsciously ruining special moments just to avoid intimacy?
- You’re Insecure and React in Difficult Ways – If your insecurity in relationships causes you to be clingy, co-dependent, or act in difficult ways that seem dramatic to others, this is also a serious trauma response that needs to be addressed.
If you want to overcome your trauma and build satisfying relationships, the first person to work on is yourself. First, discover who you are and redefine your principles, morals, and values so that you can design the life you genuinely want to live by working through the trauma and healing yourself before you try to build new relationships.
By Team MITM LLC,
