“Why, in our quarrels with my husband, do we often walk in a vicious circle, as if playing out some kind of scenario? And we just can’t find a way out of it … ”- such a question is often heard in the psychologist’s office.
- What is “Childhood Trauma”
- How do childhood traumas affect marriage?
- What to do
“We try to discuss something, we don’t understand each other, we swear, we discuss again … and in the end everything remains as it is.”
This may be a sign that now people are controlled by their childhood traumas, and everyone sees something of their own through their prism, their own painful experience.
Nelly Pikarskaya, psychologist, body-oriented psychotherapist, psychosomatotherapist, told how childhood traumas manifest themselves in marriage.
Hence the impossibility of solving the problem and agreeing with the partner. After all, for this you need to feel yourself in the present moment, and not in that distant and still painful situation from childhood.
What is “Childhood Trauma”
Often, when we hear this phrase, something frightening appears before our eyes that could happen to a child and cripple his life forever. But this is not always the case.
Childhood trauma is not just something extreme. They can be, among other things, developmental traumas, when a child in the process of growing up did not receive important resources and skills from parents or persons replacing them.
So, at the earliest stage, from the moment of conception to about six months, it is very important for the child to have a sense of security that the mother is nearby.
Both bodily contact and eye contact with loving mother’s eyes are of particular importance here. If these elements are absent for some reason, the child feels unnecessary to this world, and the world itself is a place in which he is forced to “survive”.
After all, for a helpless child, the world without a mother is a dangerous place.
If the mother was there, but then something happened: contact was lost, she moved away forever or for a while, the child develops an abandonment trauma. In this case, he will go into his adult life with the fear of losing a loved one again.
There are prerequisites for dependent relationships, when a person is ready for anything, so long as they don’t leave him again.
How do childhood traumas affect marriage?
For a full-fledged relationship in which people are able to negotiate, find solutions that are suitable for each other, and make compromises, two people are needed: an adult man and an adult woman. Moreover, “adulthood” should be not only according to the passport.
If one of the partners or both at once has a painful experience: abandonment, rejection, criticism and rejection, physical or emotional abuse by significant adults, at the moment of aggravation of relations, they will fall into the zone of their emotional “wound”.
They will begin to feel their own helplessness, the need to “survive”, unreasonable fear. There is no time for negotiation here.
The main thing is to “escape”, “survive” or defend yourself, depending on what response scheme was learned in such situations in childhood.
What to do
With baggage of child-parent traumas and stages of development that have not been passed adequately for the age, we are moving on to our future life. Sometimes without even noticing how much these injuries affect our achievements or failures.
There comes a certain moment when it is time to finally sort out your luggage: choose from it what is useful and can be useful further, what can be transformed and taken with you in an updated form. And what is long overdue to be left in the past.
It is extremely difficult to do this on your own, usually there is not enough experience and understanding of where to look, how to change everything. And here psychologists come to the rescue, who can provide professional assistance in this.
It is only important for this path to choose “your” specialist with experience in solving such requests, and simply someone who will inspire your confidence and desire to interact.
