How Trauma Affects Relationships
Unfortunately, almost all people experience trauma at one point or another. Sometimes it happens before you and your partner meet, sometimes it happens to you while you’re together. Other times, it happens to one partner and not the other. Examples can range from childhood abuse and neglect, sexual abuse and assault, bad parenting, and natural disasters, to injury, infidelity, miscarriage, loss of job, death in the family and more.
Every example is unique, and we each respond differently. Our brains create new neural pathways associated with such events to keep us functioning in our daily lives. Over time, these coping mechanisms can become a big problem – the trauma becomes not the incidents themselves, but how we carry that baggage forward through the rest of our lives. The effects can ripple throughout our lifetime if not processed and dealt with in a healthy manner. Learning to process trauma together can take communication and other skills that we haven’t fully developed or have too much baggage to tackle unobjectively.
