Dealing with trauma for better relationships

Recognizing a true sense of security from a false sense of security is essential for making the right choices and building healthy relationships

What is the common factor that helps rule healthy relationships from unhealthy relationships? The common factor that helps us rule healthy relationships from unhealthy relationships is ‘a sense of autonomy’ which also encompasses a sense of accountability, responsibility, and integrity we demonstrate towards ourselves and the person on the receiving end of the relationship.

Your identity is shaped by the meaning, and therefore the value you give to intimacy and sex. And this is shaped by your early childhood experiences. Yet in adulthood, your experiences around sex and intimacy do not define who you are (your worth and value), on the contrary, it is you who defines the meaning to these and you set your boundaries accordingly. This also implies that partners in a relationship who depend on each other for acceptance, motivation and taking initiatives to grow the relationship are forming a false sense of security. They are jeopardising themselves and putting their relationship at risk.  To develop an interdependent, confident personality, you need to become aware of emotions being transferred to your partner and vice versa. As this psychological phenomenon comes with a set of beliefs and judgment (biases) already made about your value and your potential. To prevent this from occurring you need to develop your identity further through effective communication and through practicing a set of skills that can help you connect with your inner self.

The biggest obstacle to building a healthy relationship

One of the biggest obstacles to building healthy relationships is ‘transference’. Transference is a psychological term applied to the phenomenon of responding with fight, flee or freeze to incidents or people who remind us of unpleasant or traumatic experiences. It entails transferring a set of emotions, thoughts and beliefs to someone else based on who these people represent to us rather than who they truly are. Thus, transference is the phenomenon of experiencing a heightened forms of arousal in the limbic system after associating certain events, places, behaviors and personality traits with a negative experience we have encountered in the past. Therefore, to rule out traumatic responses (unreal threat) from real threat, it is crucial to change the responses of the limbic system triggered by such events by engaging the cognitive centers of the brain responsible to making a distinction between a real threat from an unreal threat.

What else we need to know for building healthy relationships

As humans we choose connections with people who display familiar behaviors and have similar personalities as our caregivers. And this can be critical in domestic violence (DV) situations as it puts individuals at risk of replicating unhealthy patterns of relationships -relationships centered on anger, guilt, shame and blame. Any relationship that lacks recognition of significant others’ worth, thrives on attention-seeking, recognition and approval by others. Any such barriers for connection and for building healthy relationships, can be detrimental for your health and sense of wellbeing. If you are finding it difficult to connect with others, it is worth noting that lack of connection stems from feelings of worthlessness or feelings of “not good enough”, rooted in feelings of grief and early childhood trauma. Also, if you have been impacted by DV, whether directly or as a form of transgenerational trauma, the only way to break through control beliefs that bring a sense of lack of control over certain situations in your life is to genuinely address insecure mother-child attachment style and seek reconciliation with the mother, who is the child-bearer-  because the root issue that lead to forming unhealthy relationship dynamics was an ‘insecure attachment style’.

How to reframe your relationship for more connection and for a better relationship dynamic.

One crucial factor that contributes immensely to the success of any relationship, is what we believe about ourselves and about the person on the receiving end of the relationship. It is crucial then to become aware of any negative beliefs that have shaped your pattern of thoughts due to traumatic incidents you have encountered in the past. Consequently, you need to restructure these patterns of thoughts to develop a new belief system that reflects a true understanding to your worth and your self-value.

Another important factor to building a healthy relationship is your social context/ your environment. Your social contexts play an important role in shaping and developing your relationship. Do you have a shared perspective on things? And do you value each other’s’ perspectives to the degree that you are willing to implement the things that mean to you in social contexts collaboratively? The social contexts you invest in may impact the relationship positively or negatively. It is worth noting then that an inability to find a suitable environment to grow the relationship in may be a sign of childhood ‘trauma’. In this case, you and your partner need to work through the trauma to build a deep connection with each other, and to strengthen your connection to society. You need to retain the valuable aspects of your life that were negatively impacted by unpleasant experiences and create new positive experiences to help restructure your relationship dynamics and work through feelings of depression and anxiety associated with a lack of a sense of self-worth. Throughout the recovery stages it is essential to use a non-judgmental approach to dealing with traumatic incidents, to reverse your negative experiences into positive experiences and to develop a strong sense of trust, connection, and autonomy.

Log In