Trauma recovery is a challenging life endeavor. These distressing events leave lasting impacts on people, causing long-term issues like anxiety, depression, nightmares, flashbacks, and more.
These uncontrollable trauma factors sneak into everyday lives and relationships. As a result, it can affect your relationships and even your attachment style.
But how?
1. Trauma Often Impacts Identity Formation
Part of our adult experience is figuring out our identity and purpose. Developmental trauma makes that much harder.
Developmental trauma is known to result in substance abuse, depression, eating disorders, personality struggles, sometimes violence, a higher risk for health problems, and general professional development delays. This is where the adult identity often gets stuck.
When this happens, it can be harder to connect with people and let them break down your walls. It’s hard to feel comfortable with yourself, which makes it hard to be comfortable in relationships.
A lack of identity prevents us from moving forward and can result in a disorganized (a.k.a., fearful-avoidant) attachment style. This essentially means that a person struggles to find solid ground in relationships. They waffle between wanting closeness and trust and pushing away any emotional connection. As you can imagine, an unstable sense of identity plays into this.
2. There’s an Appeal to Destructive Relationships
Individuals often find themselves in toxic friendships, relationships, and even work settings. They may logically know that these situations are not suitable for them, but the setting is too familiar. And it’s often easier to stick with what you know, even if dysfunctional than stepping outside of it.
An individual might try to make better choices and go down different paths, but they may find themselves repeating the past, anyway. This often results in emotional unavailability or numbing. Being emotionally unavailable can land people in abusive or narcissistic relationships.
Continually being a part of destructive relationships can be confusing and frustrating. This leads one to undermine themselves and what they’re worth altogether. This may lead to an anxious attachment style. This style centers around a constant need for approval, comfort, and reassurance. People with this attachment style often seek these things from partners, even if it’s clear the partner cannot give it.
When they don’t get this validation, those with an anxious attachment style experience, well, anxiety. It creates a vicious cycle in toxic relationships, since there is often no validation, or validation can be used as a manipulation tool.
3. Trauma Results in Isolation
This feeling can be hard to deal with. Trauma can leave someone feeling like they can’t fit in with people, so they end up isolating from everyone. This makes it hard to grow individually and even harder to grow with someone else.
Trauma may cause limited emotions and social awkwardness. This limits advancement in career and self. These advancements are essential experiences to grow and learn as a person, as well as growing and learning with others.
This could also result in an avoidant attachment style. This means the person avoids emotional connection altogether. They find it uncomfortable to connect emotionally with others, as well as difficult to place their trust in others.
4. Consequences of Trauma are Lengthy
Unfortunately, the battle isn’t just recovering from the trauma and trying to rise above it. The battle comes from the relapses.
Relapses can mean anything from breaking an alcoholic recovery to finding yourself in a toxic environment again. The shadow of the trauma always seems to be lurking. These issues make it hard to trust others and trust yourself, resulting in isolation and the feeling of anger and hopelessness.
These two extreme emotions can rapidly lead to dangerous addiction and unstable emotions. It can result in any of the attachment styles mentioned above, which makes it harder to connect with others (and oneself) in a healthy way.
How Can You Deal with These Difficulties?
Recovery is possible. Regaining your identity is possible. Working towards long-term and sustainable goals to help restore who you are is critical. It may feel impossible and not even worth the effort. But the beginning is what counts.
Being patient and good to yourself is the first step in recovery. As well as being patient with yourself, being patient with people in your life is also important. Chances are, they care for you and are hoping to support your journey. It can be hard when other caregivers have broken your trust, but allowing yourself to trust someone will go a lot further than you think.
Trauma does not have to define you. It can reshape you and leave you for the better, for the stronger. You’re worthy of that, too. You have a lot of time to make yourself whoever you want to be, and in time, it’ll happen. If you’re ready to start your recovery journey, reach out to me today.
Charla Lineman, MEd, LPC, LMFT Associate will walk with you as you work through your trauma. Whether you are seeking individual counseling or couples therapy, we can help. Submit a Scheduling Form or call the Relationship Counseling Center of Austin at (512) 270-4883 to get started today.