YOUR EARLIEST RELATIONSHIPS SHAPE YOUR FUTURE
From the outside looking in, you might think I had grown up in a happy and close family. I would have told you the same when I was a child, as well as for most of my adult life. I always had enough to eat; I was encouraged to excel in school and sports; and I didn’t experience any physical or sexual abuse. But as I’ve since learned, the absence of obvious abuse doesn’t negate the possibility of emotional neglect and related attachment trauma.
As a child, I was surrounded by stress and illness. My older sister experienced life-threatening health crises in her childhood, and for years my mom suffered her own chronic health and pain issues, which were never openly acknowledged in my family. Similarly, we didn’t talk about our feelings, whether we were happy or sad, or directly confront one another if we felt hurt or angry. We were relatively happy after all, right? Why would we ever need to discuss or confront anything?
Instead of connecting on an emotional level, I bonded with my parents and sister through stress and anxiety. Over and over again, when another health crisis or daily stress arose, our focus as a family would align in shared worry until the issue resolved. Everyone would run to care for the “urgent” needs of the stressed, sick, or otherwise upset family member, regularly neglecting their own needs in the process.
Exposed to the consistent repetition of those patterns, I learned over time that my needs and feelings weren’t as important as the needs and feelings of those around me. While I knew my family loved and cared for me, I never truly felt that love or consideration in an emotional sense. When I got upset, as all children do, I needed to be listened to and emotionally soothed or comforted. Since my parents’ attention was usually unavailable and consumed by the current crisis, I began to limit how much I shared with them, fearing that I would add to the family’s already overwhelming stress level. Eventually, I learned not to acknowledge having needs at all—or at least, I tried not to show my vulnerability in order to avoid the possibility of feeling disappointed if no one was there to support me. To keep myself safe, I became detached, suppressing my feelings and walling myself off from my emotional world. Those coping strategies became my defensive shield, which I instinctively used to try to protect myself from feeling hurt in relationships for years to come.
My story is, of course, my own, and yours will be different. Regardless of our unique individual journeys, our earliest attachments impact the habits we bring into our adult relationships, especially our romantic ones. Although these habits rarely serve our best interests today, they feel familiar, comfortable, and therefore safe. Because these habits are stored in our subconscious mind and repeated automatically on a daily basis, they are often difficult for us to observe, and we often struggle to consciously see the active role we play in our relationships.
We can learn, however, how to witness our conditioning and create new habits that will better meet the needs we have today. As we come to see and understand that our conditioning is a remnant of our past experiences, we can relieve ourselves of the shame we may feel as a result of our often dysfunctional relational habits. When we recognize and accept the active role we play, we can harness our ability and power to change our relationship dynamics. Because, ultimately, we will need to change the way we show up in our relationships if we want those relationships to change.
After I realized that the common thread in all my dysfunctional relationship patterns was me, I empowered myself to begin to shift my dynamics with others. I started to see how I only felt comfortable when I sacrificed my needs in order to avoid the discomfort I felt when disappointing others. I didn’t have or set clear boundaries—or any boundaries at all. Disconnected from my authentic needs and desires and constantly overstepping my limits, I ended up feeling emotionally distant and resentful while I continued to hold others responsible, always leaving relationships in search of a more “perfect” partner. Unaware of my own subconscious habits, I blamed others for our relational issues and expected them to change without addressing my own role in creating my continued circumstances.
Only when I started to more honestly witness myself did my relationships begin to evolve. I realized that finding or maintaining healthy relationships would mean making myself emotionally healthy, too. I’d have to do something that felt very uncomfortable at first. I’d have to learn how to honor my own needs and desires by creating new boundaries with others and learning how to be patient and compassionate with myself along the way.
UNDERSTANDING HOW EARLY CHILDHOOD TRAUMA AFFECTS YOU
The truth is, when it comes to our relationships, we repeat what we experienced or learned. So if we grew up in a stressful or chaotic environment, didn’t witness healthy habits, or were emotionally neglected or ignored, we repeat the same dynamic as adults in our relationships with others. Even though we may not be aware of it, our past, especially our attachments with our parent-figures, is wired into our mind and body, where it drives us to instinctively seek out and re-create the same kind of relationships as adults. These are our trauma bonds, our conditioned patterns of relating to others in a way that mirrors or reenacts our earliest attachments with parent-figures.
Before we dive deeper, it’ll be helpful to define a few concepts that we’ll explore throughout this book.
Let’s start with the term trauma. When most people hear the word, they often immediately think of the suffering an individual might experience in the wake of a catastrophic or violent event, like a natural disaster, war, rape, incest, or abuse.
Though trauma is certainly caused by all these incidents, it also results from any stress that exceeds our ability to emotionally process the experience causing continued dysregulation to our body’s nervous system. This includes the overwhelming stress that occurs when we don’t have the things we need to feel safe and secure, including emotional support. When we don’t consistently feel safe and secure or when we fear that those whom we rely on for our survival won’t consistently be available to us, we experience a lack of certainty and control. This activates our body’s stress circuit, otherwise known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (we’ll talk more about that here)1, which impacts our body’s ability to cope with our current circumstances.
Continual shaming of our emotions, denial of our experiences or reality, or emotional abandonment or neglect can all activate our body’s stress circuit and create traumatic emotional overwhelm. This impact can occur in a single moment (which is often the case in some of the events listed above), or it can accumulate slowly over time, building up inside us, often without our conscious knowledge. When we aren’t able to process our emotional responses, they become imprinted in our mind and body, staying with us and ultimately influencing our thoughts, feelings, and reactions for years to come.
In addition to the stress we experience within our homes, the environmental stress of systemic, cultural, or collective trauma affects a large majority of us keeping us disconnected from the supportive relationships we need for emotional safety and security. Collective trauma occurs when a single event or series of events—such as a natural disaster, financial insecurity, war, colonization/systemic inequities, gender/cultural oppression, or pandemics—create a lack of safety for a group of people, a community, a country, or the greater world. Collective trauma impacts the way people relate to themselves and others, affecting everyone differently, based on our conditioning and intergenerationally modeled coping skills.
Just as we all have unique emotional experiences, we all have different reactive patterns and learned coping strategies based on our specific childhood conditioning, even if we can’t consciously recall what happened to us as children. If you’ve ever participated in traditional therapy or read about behavioral science, you’re likely familiar with the concept of conditioning, the process by which the beliefs, behaviors, and habits that we learn through a repetition of experiences are stored in our subconscious mind, where they drive our automatic reactions, impulses, and motivations.
Though we can certainly create new habits by making new choices and having new experiences as adults, most of our conditioning occurs when we’re young children and dependent on our relationships with our parent-figures. The term parent-figures that you’ll see throughout this book refers to the people who were primarily responsible for meeting our physical and emotional needs as young children. For most of us, our parent-figures were our biological mother, father, or both, although the term can include grandparents, stepparents, foster parents, siblings, nurses, professional caregivers, or any other primary caretakers in childhood.
As children, no matter who our parent-figures were or whether we think we had a “good” or “bad” relationship with them, we instinctively looked to them for guidance, absorbing information about ourselves and our world. From them, we learned how to express (or suppress) our emotions, how to feel about and treat our body, how to fit in or be socially accepted (i.e., what behaviors were right and wrong), and how to relate to and interact with others. We learned those habits and beliefs by observing those around us, as well as by mirroring what they did.
All young children imitate their parent-figures. You’ve likely seen this if you’ve ever watched an infant smile or stick out their tongue in response to their mother or father doing the same. Similarly, young children copy most of what they see their parent-figures do. If our parent-figures shamed or stifled their own emotions, we may have learned to do the same thing. If they criticized their bodies or the physical features of others, we may have learned to criticize or shame these aspects of ourselves. If they reacted to a stressful or upsetting situation by yelling and screaming, we may do the same. If they coped with stressful or upsetting experiences by shutting down and ignoring others, we may have learned to similarly emotionally detach.
To learn how to navigate our emotional world, we first need to feel safe and secure enough to express what we’re really thinking and feeling to those around us. Our ability to do this as adults is highly influenced by how we regularly felt in our earliest relationships. The concept of attachment theory, which was first developed by the psychoanalyst John Bowlby in 1952, explains that the safety and security of our relationship with our parent-figures influences what kind of relationship we look for and create with others for the rest of our lives.2 If our attachment to our parent-figures was predominantly safe and secure as young children and our physical and emotional needs were consistently met, we are more likely to prioritize and meet our own needs as adults. Those with secure attachments are more likely to trust themselves and others and have emotional resilience, or are able to tolerate and quickly rebound from uncomfortable emotions. This emotional self-trust is built over time through our consistent, reliable, and predictable actions. In a relationship, trust is the feeling that you can count on someone to behave in a certain way.
Many of us didn’t grow up with safe and secure attachments because our parent-figures were impacted by their own earliest relational environments in which many of their needs were not met. As a result, our physical and /or emotional needs weren’t consistently identified or tended to in early childhood. Today, we may be unable to identify or tend to our needs as adults because no one helped us learn how to do so as children. We may not trust ourselves or others, often reacting impulsively because we lack the emotional resilience to deal with uncomfortable emotions, whether specific ones like stress, sadness, or anger, or all of our unpleasant feelings in general. We may continue to abandon or betray ourselves, overcommitting our time, energy, or emotional resources in an attempt to get another to care for us, or we may close ourselves off from the support of others entirely.
Whether our earliest attachments were secure or insecure, our habitual patterns of relating were wired into our subconscious mind, where they remain. It’s these patterns that automatically and instinctively continue to pull us toward similar relationship dynamics well into adulthood.
YOU ARE DRIVEN BY YOUR UNMET CHILDHOOD NEEDS
Before we can identify our attachment patterns, it’s important to first understand what unmet childhood needs are. Unmet childhood needs can be physical or emotional; the former is generally easier to understand.
Physiologically, our body functions the same way. Our lungs oxygenate our blood with the air around us, our cells helps us function by converting nutrients in our food, and our muscles move us around and help us lift and carry heavy things. These structural similarities are universal to all humans, and as a result, we share the same basic physical needs: water, oxygen, nutrients, a balance of rest/restorative sleep and movement.
If your physical needs weren’t met in childhood, you may not have had enough food to eat, appropriate clothing to wear, enough space for physical movement, or quiet to rest. Or you may have not felt physically safe in your environment for a number of other reasons, including financial insecurity and racial discrimination. Unmet physical needs in childhood can include more subtle inadequacies, like not being physically touched or soothed because you were often left alone or were raised by others who were uncomfortable themselves with physical contact, or not getting enough sleep because your childhood home was too loud or chaotic. Many of us continue to struggle with unmet physical needs as adults because we don’t have access to the stable financial resources necessary to consistently care for our body or are unable to feel safe and secure in our own skin. Regardless of the cause, when our physical needs aren’t consistently met, our body activates a nervous system response that shifts us into survival mode, pushing our emotional needs to the back burner.
What’s even more common than unmet physical needs is unmet emotional needs. Nearly everyone I know, even those who had well-intentioned parent-figures, grew up with unmet emotional needs. This is to be expected, given the number of hours and jobs many of them had to work in order to provide for us financially. How can anyone who is working overtime, and not sleeping, eating, or tolerating their own stress well, emotionally care for another? They can’t.
Despite these societal inequities and realities, we all have core emotional needs that need to be tended to. The deepest need we all have in all our relationships—whether as children or now as adults—is to feel safe and secure enough to be ourselves without losing the connection to and support of others. Feeling safe and secure enough to honestly express our perspectives and experiences helps us create emotional intimacy. When we’re able to be emotionally vulnerable and honest regardless of what we’re feeling, we allow more of ourselves to be witnessed and known. Look at the questions below and spend some time exploring how emotionally safe and secure you feel in your different relationships:
Do I feel safely and securely connected to you physically and emotionally?
Do I feel that I am/our relationship is important to you?
Do I feel I am loved and cared for by you, even in moments of physical or emotional distance?
When we feel emotionally safe and secure, we are able to trust that another person sees, accepts, and appreciates who we are, can give us the space to change or evolve, and has our best interests at heart. If we have this safety and security in our earliest attachments, we develop the ability to trust our physical connection with our body and its ability to cope with stress and other upsetting emotions. When we feel this safely and securely connected to our emotional world, we’re able to authentically share ourselves with those around us and trust our relationships knowing we can reconnect or repair after moments of conflict or disconnection.
For a parent-figure to help a child feel safe, valued (or seen, heard, and appreciated), and loved on a consistent basis, they themselves have to be able to feel these ways consistently, too. But most of our parent-figures did not feel those ways because they weren’t able to regulate their emotions due to their own childhood trauma (and consequential nervous system dysregulation, which we’ll explore below). As a result, most of us didn’t grow up feeling the emotional safety or security we needed to be able to authentically express ourselves, causing us to feel deeply unworthy and emotionally alone.
If our parent-figures weren’t able to feel emotionally safe and secure themselves, they weren’t able to create the environment we needed to explore and express our authentic Self. As a result, we ended up feeling emotionally abandoned or overwhelmed by them, left alone to figure out how to navigate our own stressful or upsetting emotions and experiences. The feelings associated with childhood emotional neglect (CEN) or abandonment actually activate the same pathways in our brain as physical pain does, sending our mind and body into a continuous stress response that causes trauma.
A lack of emotional safety and security in childhood can look like being regularly ignored, criticized, or yelled at for expressing different emotions, instilling deep-rooted beliefs that you’re “too much” and continued difficulty expressing yourself. Or it can look like being discouraged or prevented from pursuing a passion or interest that now causes you to feel unsure about what you like as an adult.
While there are many more than are listed, below are some other indicators that you may have had unmet emotional needs in childhood.
Your parent-figures didn’t or couldn’t see you as a separate or unique individual, often treating you as an extension of themselves who needed to follow in their footsteps or adopt their beliefs, emotions, appearance, and even careers. In adulthood, you may never feel truly safe or secure to be who you are, or you may not be sure what you believe, how you feel, or what you’re interested in.
Your parent-figures didn’t or couldn’t pay attention to you on a consistent basis because they were distracted by their work, relationship issues, financial demands, or unresolved trauma. In adulthood, you may self-isolate or be hyperindependent, walling yourself off from any type of connection to or support from others.
Your parent-figures often took things personally and quickly became defensive or emotionally reactive, externalizing or blaming others, including you, for various issues or conflicts. In adulthood, you may often worry about “being in trouble,” look to others to make you feel better, and often find yourself placating or pleasing others to avoid conflict.
