Difficulty trusting others. Feeling unsafe. Using drugs, alcohol or behaviors to numb anxiety or distress. Avoiding friends, loved ones or activities you used to enjoy.
Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. Belittling, insulting, or bullying behaviors. Threatening to harm a partner or loved ones. Emotionally and physically isolating a partner from their support system.
These include, but are not limited to, anger, grief, depression, anxiety, bargaining, avoidance, and confusion. There can be extreme mood swings from intense anger to severe depression/numbness/confusion.
People who experience childhood abuse are vulnerable to developing mental health disorders that compromise emotional and behavioral stability, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and borderline personality disorder. These illnesses can present additional challenges to engaging in healthy interpersonal relationships.
Living through traumatic events may result in expectations of danger, betrayal, or potential harm within new or old relationships. Survivors may feel vulnerable and confused about what is safe, and therefore it may be difficult to trust others, even those whom they trusted in the past.
Other manifestations of childhood trauma in adulthood include difficulties with social interaction, multiple health problems, low self-esteem and a lack of direction. Adults with unresolved childhood trauma are more prone to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicide and self-harm.
Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect. Most responses are normal in that they affect most survivors and are socially acceptable, psychologically effective, and self-limited.
Challenging feelings & beliefs
Your partner may experience bouts of intense sadness, guilt, anger, or shame related to a past traumatic event. They may believe that there's nowhere safe for them to be, even when there's no direct or real threat in front of them.
Acting clingy
An individual might hold on to a relationship even though it consistently makes them feel frightened or unloved. Moreover, relational trauma can also lead people to feel and act clingy even when they're in a loving, stable relationship. This may occur with no obvious reasons for being insecure.
Traumatic reactions can include a variety of responses, such as intense and ongoing emotional upset, depressive symptoms or anxiety, behavioral changes, difficulties with self-regulation, problems relating to others or forming attachments, regression or loss of previously acquired skills, attention and academic ...
Much like love bombing, trauma bonds can give the resemblance of love. They're often confused for love because of the trying nature, and when you love someone, you do try. Trauma bond relationships are driven by fear, not love, which is the biggest differentiator between trauma bonds and love.
Trauma can make it extremely difficult to maintain relationships as it forces us to constantly remain in 'fight or flight' mode. Feeling constantly on edge and that you need to be on high alert at all times makes it extremely difficult to trust another person.
Trauma causes the body to go into survival mode (fight, flight, freeze) at the time it occurs and these effects may linger, triggering our physiology to disburse stress hormones such as cortisol that have the side effect of making us feel disconnected and withdrawn, decreasing our heart connection to anyone we love.
The symptoms of PTSD can cause problems with trust, closeness, communication, and problem solving. These problems may affect the way the survivor acts with others. In turn, the way a loved one responds to him or her affects the trauma survivor. A circular pattern can develop that may sometimes harm relationships.
hared pain brings people together. Known to sociologists as “social glue,” trauma behaves like a binding agent in social settings, forging connections between survivors known as trauma bonds.
Some unpleasant experiences produce permanent changes in the brain and corresponding shifts in intelligence, emotional reactivity, happiness, sociability, and other traits that used to be thought of as set for life.
Trauma dumping refers to sharing a traumatic story without thinking about how it will affect the listener, or oversharing in an inappropriate context.
A trigger might make you feel helpless, panicked, unsafe, and overwhelmed with emotion. You might feel the same things that you felt at the time of the trauma, as though you were reliving the event. The mind perceives triggers as a threat and causes a reaction like fear, panic, or agitation.