5 Ways Trauma Impacts Your Relationship

Let's talk about the five areas of your relationship that trauma impacts the most. The first area that trauma impacts in your relationship is the area of trust. This one is so important because in many ways trust undergirds, the other four areas we're going to talk about as well. Trust is absolutely foundational to being able to have any kind of relationship, let alone a relationship with someone that is our attachment partner, someone that we're building a life with, that we've known for many, many years. When trauma comes in, it really disrupts that ability to feel safe and secure in our relationship. And instead, what we do is we have a little voice in the back of our head that says, "I'm here to protect you, and so I'm going to build up walls. I'm going to keep a little bit of distance so that we can really observe our partner to see if we can understand and feel safe with their motives and their intentions. Are they doing what they're doing because they want or need something from us? Are we going to get retraumatized or are they going to be a safe person?" And the more that voice sort of speaks to us, the more than we begin to pull away at times and the more it erodes that factor of trust in our relationship. The other thing that I think it really does is it disrupts our ability to attune to our partner. Part of how trust is really created is through attunement, being able to be emotionally connected and in tune with our partner's emotional life. And if we're not able to do that, then what we do is we sort of view our partner through skepticism. And we challenge what they're doing and why they're doing it, rather than just feeling safe and secure in those interactions that we have with our partner. So one of the more severe areas of our relationship that trauma impacts is in the area of trust. And as I said, without being able to build a trusting relationship, then we lack the sense of safety and security in that relationship to put our body in our mind at ease and just sort of be in the flow of the interactions with our partner. Instead, we're always sort of hanging back, always observing, always being a little bit cynical or skeptical so that we don't get retraumatized again. The second area is in the area of closeness. So one of the ways that trauma disrupts closeness is that blocks our ability to really feel connected to another person. This falls closely on the area of trust that we talked about just a second ago. And closeness, not to be sure, all couples have to be able to negotiate how much closeness versus separateness they need. So this is a foundational issue that usually has worked out early on in the relationship. After I say the attachment bond has really set in 18 to 24 months to continuously seeing somebody or dating somebody, then they have to begin to work out, okay, what's the acceptable limits of space and distance that we allow each other, a sense of of separateness, and what is the acceptable amount of closeness. So they're always kind of negotiating that. And that's not something that's static that somehow is worked out in the very beginning of a relationship and then persists and maintains throughout the entirety of the relationship. It has to be renegotiated over time. Trauma comes in and disrupts that balance. So whatever the couple had negotiated previously, then becomes really disrupted. So the individual that suffered through trauma, they might need more distance. They might really struggle with closeness. Before the opposite could be that they really find that they're clingy and needy to their partner. So it really disrupts this balance that had been negotiated. And by negotiation, I don't mean that they're sitting down and literally drawing up contracts and signing them. That's not kind of negotiation. I mean, it's much more implicit. It's much more what is the homeostasis of the couple? What's the balance that they've settled into that seems to be agreeable to both partners? Well, trauma comes in and disrupts that balance. And so now you've got a partner or perhaps both partners if they both have trauma, then having to figure out what how to renegotiate that. If the partner that has trauma is very needy, how does the partner then attend to that need for the traumatized partner versus being able to then have their own space if they need it as well? How does the couple create that balance together so that they find some agreeableness in the area of closeness or the area of distance? So you take something that's normal, very normal for couples to be able to work out and figure out early in their relationship and then continue to assess and align and negotiate throughout their time together. And then you throw a bomb like trauma into it or past trauma that was brought into it can make it that much more difficult to figure out and negotiate through that. So the second area is the area of closeness. And that means how much does trauma disrupt the ability for the couple to feel close and connected versus their ability to feel it's okay to have separateness, to have different activities, to be able to have some time alone when they need it and not feel like there's rejection or band-a-mint that sets in. Trauma can really play a tremendous, or have a tremendous impact. Now the third area that can be so impacted by trauma in your relationship is the area of sexuality. Now this is an area that's often difficult even without trauma. I see and have seen so many couples that have difficulty being able to talk about their sexual activity, talk about their sense of sexuality, talk about their sexual needs in the relationship. So this is already a sensitive subject for so many people. Oftentimes their sense of their sexuality, their values around sexuality was shaped in the family they grew up in. Some people grew up in a very free and embracing of their sexuality type of value in their family. Other folks were much more restrictive. Maybe they came from a religious background, whatever that might be. And so their sense of sexuality really doesn't always mesh with their partners. So this is already a very difficult subject. And then of course if you throw any kind of traumatic experience either from the past or a current experience that happened either within the relationship or prior to the couple getting together, that can really then disrupt how the couple is able to come together and bond in a sexual way with one another. Sex is obviously very important in an adult and especially in adult relationships. It is a way for the couple to share something that's very special and very unique to them. Something that by large they don't share with anybody else for the vast majority of couples that are together. They have that exclusivity on their relationship. And so trauma comes in and really begins to disrupt their ability to be able to talk and compromise to ask for their sexual needs to be able to be met. A lot of times what I find is difficult to even bring up the subject for so many couples. Now if there had been sexual trauma in the past, a rape, molestation, whatever that might be, that brings an extra sensitivity to it for the partner to then be able to feel safe and secure within that relationship to be able to express what their sexual needs might be. It puts a lot of onus on the other partner to be able to hear that and listen and be able to receive that in a way that is not shaming or that in any way might feel violating or coercive to the partner that has had past sexual trauma. So this is just one of those areas that can be very, very tricky for the couple to begin to deal with and work through, especially if there's been any kind of sexual trauma in their history. Okay, the fourth area of your relationship that trauma really impacts is the area of emotion regulation and empathy. So one of the things that trauma does is it disrupts our ability to be able to regulate our emotion and it does this a couple of different ways. Is it overstimulates the area of our brain called the amygdala, which is our emotional and threat center of our brain. It's kind of, if you put your fingers on each side of your head, it's sort of right there in the center about about equal with your, in the middle of your head. And so that area is so important in us being able to regulate our emotions as we take in information from outside ourselves. And so it also is the area of our brain that's been able to assess threat. And what trauma does is it disrupts our ability to be able to then use the prefrontal cortex, which is the area just behind your forehead that allows us to say, oh, that's not a threat. That's from the past. But instead what we do is we experience it as a crime. threat and we're constantly scanning. So it's not uncommon at all to be triggered by something, could be a sound, could be a smell, could be a look on your partner's face, it could be a tone of voice and what that does is it sends a signal to the emotional center of your brain, the amygdala, and it says, "Oh my gosh, here we go again. We're beginning to re-experience what was so difficult on traumatizing for us." And so being able to create a balance between the executive centers, the prefrontal cortex, and the emotional center, the amygdala of our brain, is part of how we work through trauma. First of all, we need to be able to then create a better balance between those two because what trauma does is it disrupts that balance. Now when we are working out of the emotional center of our brain, one of the things that is quickest to leave us is any sense of empathy. Empathy is the ability to step into somebody else's shoes, see something through their eyes, and to be able to sort of experience what they're experiencing, not from our perspective, but from within their perspective. And when we're in a place where we've been triggered and we're working out of the emotional center of our brain, that ability is the first thing to leave us. That ability is gone because we're in our protection. We're saying, "Oh my gosh, this is possible that we could re-experience something that was horrifying for us, and we're not going through that again." Part of what our brain is doing is it's trying to protect us. It's actually trying to help us. But as time goes on, and we get further and further away from the traumatizing event itself, what it tends to do is it tends to then extrapolate or widen its area of protection. So, it used to be that I was scared of going to this particular restaurant because this is where the trauma happened. Now, what I do is I avoid all types of this food because this food reminds me of that restaurant. Now I'm starting to extrapolate, expand that circle even wider in an effort to protect myself. So fears generalize. Trauma tends to generalize and it comes from that part of our brain that's trying to protect us. And so, part of working through trauma and part of being able to heal and get back to a place where we can create a balance between our thinking brain and our emotional brain is to reestablish that kind of balance. But until that happens, it creates a big disruption in our relationship. And as I said earlier, it's not common at all to have what we call a trauma cycle. And we'll talk about this in another video because that's a subject that is vast and deserves its own video and its own podcast. But what will happen is a couple will get triggered. Maybe one person uses a tone of voice or has a facial expression that triggers the other partner's trauma. Well, then their protection or defenses will show up, which then in turn triggers partner, the other partner's trauma again. And so what you have is a vicious cycle that they get locked in where neither partner is able to regulate their emotion. Both of them have been caught in fight or flight. And neither of them have the ability to regain empathy for one another. And the reason is because empathy resides in our prefrontal cortex. It resides and is primarily located in the part of our brain that allows us to then be able to listen openly, take in information, empathize with other people, be able to plan and execute our goals, so on and so forth. And all that's in that prefrontal cortex area right behind your forehead that I talked about that's that we call the executive functioning. So when trauma comes in and impacts the relationship, it does so by dysregulating one or both partners. And the first thing to leave one or both partners is any sense of empathy. I talk a lot about empathy with my couples. I talk about it in my social media posts and everywhere else because it is so foundational in being able to create safety in a relationship. It's so foundational being able to create a sense of security within that relationship so that both partners then are able to work primarily out of their prefrontal cortex have empathy for one another and learn to deescalate those cycles that might occur when they get triggered. So the fourth area that can be so disruptive to a relationship is in the area of being able to regulate your emotions and being able to have empathy for your partner. The fifth and final area of your relationship that trauma really disrupts is in the area of communication. And there's a couple of reasons for this. The first reason is because trauma is primarily a body-based event. Trauma by its very nature cuts off our ability to be able to use our words to communicate what happened. So much of what we've learned through neurobiology, neuroscience, especially the decade of the brain in the 1990s where we were able to put test subjects under functional MRI machines and literally watch in real time what their brains were doing as we put them through a variety of tests is that we've learned that trauma tends to reside in the right hemisphere which is the non-verbal part of the brain. Your verbal abilities lie primarily in the left hemisphere of your brain especially in the broca's area of your brain which is our ability to be able to talk, use words to communicate with others. So the first reason that trauma disrupts communication is because oftentimes we literally lack the words to be able to describe what has happened to us. The second reason is oftentimes what trauma does is it teaches us to disown the very needs that were behind the trauma. So if we think about it from a developmental standpoint as a child our need is to be loved and cared for our need is to be nurtured and attuned to and protected emotionally as well as physically by an adult. If that does not happen growing up, if the child grows up in a household where there is not that sense of safety and protection there is no emotional attunement for that child. We're not helping put that child's experiences into words and make sense and help them tell a story about their experiences then they literally lack the ability to then own and accept that there's needs behind there that are legitimate. So communication gets disrupted in couples in a couple of different ways that I really see with those brave couples that have set with me for years which is they lack the words oftentimes to be able to put the trauma into context and to be able to tell a coherent beginning, middle and an end and to be able to verbalize that and also to be able to own and accept that there were legitimate needs behind whatever that trauma was. And so a lot of times couples come in and one of the first things they'll say to us is they will say well we lack communication we're not on the same page. And couples aren't wrong they do struggle with that communication but it's usually not because they lack words flowing back and forth it's used because there is not an emotional connection and emotional attunement behind what's going on in the relationship and often it is because trauma has disrupted that often it is explicitly because trauma has profanely impacted their ability to communicate their needs especially if they feel like they don't have a right to those needs if those needs were never met then oftentimes they can disassociate those and they can esque those from any part of their their desire for their relationships. And second arily because they lack the words oftentimes to be able to communicate those needs. So that is the five fifth and final area of the impact that trauma can have on your relationship. Okay so at this point we've talked about the five areas of your relationship that trauma tends to disrupt the most. We've talked about trust we've talked about closeness we've talked about sexuality emotion regulation and empathy as well as communication. So of course trauma can disrupt other areas but when we talk about relationship these are some of the primary areas that it really breaks down. So here's what I want you to do. We've got an assessment that we're offering that you can find down below that is completely free and if you take this assessment it will give you an idea of where across these five different areas that that trauma might have disrupted your your relationship the most. Now what I don't want to happen is I don't want anybody to be triggered by this. what if at any time as you're reading through these questions, you start to feel any sense of panic or you start to feel yourself go numb and have any kind of an emotional reaction of what you're reading, please stop. Please don't continue. This channel is to help people to help build them up, to help them resolve their traumas, not to hurt them in any way. So I wanna put that disclaimer out there. But there is an absolutely free assessment that you can take online, just click the link below. We also offer tips and a score so that you can see across these five different areas where trauma might have impacted your relationship the most. Don't be surprised if you have multiple areas that would be very common to have more than one where trauma may be playing a larger role in your relationship than you would wish it to. So with that being said, thanks for listening and stay tuned for our next episode.