Most of us view relationships as happening to us rather than with or even because of us. We “fall in love,” getting swept up in another person’s passion or power. We pick the wrong people over and over again, missing the “red flags” repeatedly, even if we think we know better. When a relationship falls apart or ends, we often blame the other person, believing that they were unwilling or incapable of making us happy.
It’s often difficult to recognize the active role we play in our relationships, including the fact that we may instinctively choose certain people for specific reasons. Many of us “fall in love” with someone not because they’ve awakened our heart’s desire, but rather because that person satisfies unconscious needs we’re not even aware we have. And most of us unconsciously choose to surround ourselves with people who enable us to reenact familiar interpersonal habits and patterns from our earliest relationships.
We often feel powerless in our relationships because we spend most of our time and energy focusing on the things we can’t control: other people. Though you may currently feel helpless or hopeless to change your relationships, it’s empowering to realize that you can, in fact, have agency. We all can. We can all find and create healthy and happy relationships. We can all be the love we seek, regardless of what others are doing or what’s happening around us.
Until my early thirties, I often felt powerless and passive in my romantic relationships. I jumped from partner to partner, blaming each one for the dissatisfaction I inevitably felt and believing that I could remedy the situation by finding someone who was a “better match” for me. That pattern started when I was sixteen years old and started dating Billy. He was my first romantic relationship, and I was in love—or so I thought.
As in any typical teen romance, we spent most of our time together on the weekends watching TV, hanging out with friends, and going to movies. My family knew about Billy and were supportive of us spending time together. Even so, I never talked about him with my family, only grumbling a short response if my mom or sister happened to ask about him or complaining if he had recently done something to upset me. I didn’t talk about our relationship in detail with my friends, either, not because I didn’t like him or have strong feelings for him; quite the opposite, I thought I was in love with him. But in my family, we didn’t share our feelings unless we were upset or worried about something. And I continued that pattern, feeling comfortable talking (or really complaining) about Billy only if he’d hurt or bothered me.
A year and a half into our relationship, Billy and I broke up. I was devastated. One reason was that we were going to go to different colleges the following fall, two universities that were separated by thirteen hours of interstate highway. But another reason was that I was, in Billy’s words, “emotionally unavailable,” a description that has stuck with me to this day. At the time, I was shocked: I didn’t feel emotionally unavailable. I felt very loving toward Billy. From a young age, I had always prided myself on worrying about others and being a good, caring person.
A year into college, I was surprised to find myself attracted to the possibility of dating women. Suddenly I saw the whole Billy incident in a completely different light. Of course I was emotionally unavailable! I thought. I’m gay! I met my first girlfriend, Katie, while playing sports. We had the same friends and the same interests, and we spent a lot of time together at practice, traveling to games, and going out with our teammates. That was the basis of our connection: proximity and similarity. We spent most of our time together doing various activities, but I had the nagging feeling that something was missing. Though I desired a deeper connection, I shared very little of my emotional world with her—or anyone else. The truth was, I wasn’t actually open or available for emotional connection. Unaware of how I was contributing to our disconnection and without feeling the spark I was looking for, we broke up after a year and a half together, and I started seeing Sofia.
Sofia and I dated on and off for the rest of college, eventually both choosing to move to the same city after graduation. She was different from Katie in many ways, but our co-created dynamic would still allow me to keep myself emotionally distant in order to avoid any deep or authentic emotional connection. I knew it, too. Or rather, my subconscious mind—the part of our brain that drives all our instinctual, automatic thoughts, feelings, and reactions—knew it. This deeply embedded part of our psyche is where we store all our memories, even those we can’t explicitly recall, along with our suppressed feelings, childhood pain, and core beliefs.
Sofia had been raised by an emotionally reactive mother who had frequently exploded at her when she was young, yelling and screaming or criticizing and cutting her down. Soon into my relationship with her, Sofia started treating me the same way, yelling when she didn’t agree with what I said or did and calling me names or judging me when she disliked aspects of my appearance. Knowing some of what had happened during her childhood, I justified her behavior by telling myself that she didn’t mean what she said or how she treated me, that she was just acting out old childhood wounds. And though that was true, I found it incredibly difficult to set boundaries or limits around what I would tolerate with her. Unable to stand my ground or communicate my hurt and upset feelings, I began to notice a growing sense of resentment toward her.
I continued to blame Sofia for my unhappiness without realizing what was really wrong—that I was deeply upset with myself for explaining away my pain and making excuses for her hurtful behavior.
After Sofia and I broke up for the final time, I met a woman named Sara, whom I dated for the next four years. Sara was a happy-go-lucky person who liked to party and have a good time, subconsciously drawing me to her: with Sara, there were always so many events and experiences to distract attention away from any negative feelings. Since she always seemed so carefree, I felt ashamed when I felt anything other than easygoing and untroubled. I started partying with her and joining her in her calendar of near-constant social outings. Attempting to soothe the growing pain and emptiness I felt in absence of a deeper emotional connection, my subconscious continued to rely on its old, ingrained habits as I stayed busy and used substances to distract myself. Though Sara never expressed displeasure with our relationship, she was frequently mean when she drank, which was often. Just as I had done with Sofia, though, I rationalized Sara’s behavior by telling myself that she had just had too much to drink or didn’t really mean what she was saying or doing. In those moments, I continued to suppress my emotions to try to calm or please her, putting her feelings before my own. As the months turned into years together, I began to feel the same resentment that I had felt with Sofia. Once again, I blamed Sara for not giving me enough attention and not caring about my feelings. Eventually the relationship ended.
After Sara and I broke up, I moved into a three-bedroom apartment with a roommate named Vivienne, who was older than me. Immediately, Vivienne seemed more mature than the other women I had known, and we quickly became friends and then lovers. I was attracted to her independence and emotional self-sufficiency, and we quickly bonded over similar tastes and common interests. Over time, we started sharing our worries and fears with each other deepening our connection.
Like Sofia, Vivienne had grown up in a stressful and unstable home, and she had moved out on her own when she was still a teenager. Priding herself on never needing anyone she insisted from the onset of our relationship that she wasn’t the “marrying type.” So, when she started talking about marrying me a few years later, I felt extremely special: She doesn’t want to marry, but she wants to marry me! I gushed privately. We hopped a flight to Connecticut, where our same-sex partnership was legal at the time, and within a year, we moved back to my hometown as a married couple.
Shortly after we moved, my perspective on romantic relationships began to shift. Having just graduated with a doctorate in psychology from the New School for Social Research, I started to work toward my licensing hours, the hands-on training all psychologists need to complete before they can practice privately. The training was full-time and intense. For two years, I attended individual and group sessions in psychoanalysis, a branch of psychology that examines the different ways our unconscious mind drives our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and relationship dynamics.
Suddenly I found myself immersed in a percolator of self-analysis and evaluation. During individual sessions, I began to explore my subconscious thoughts and feelings—something I had never done before—and spent group sessions evaluating how I interacted with the other students in the class. Within weeks, I realized that there was an immense emotional rift between Vivienne and me; we never talked about our deeper feelings or actual relationship dynamics, but now there I was, discussing both with total strangers. I started to think that I wasn’t happy in the marriage and that the relationship didn’t provide the emotional connection I so deeply craved.
In our new city, we didn’t have as big a circle of friends as we’d had before, which narrowed our world to just the two of us. Without the distractions of social outings, the dynamics of our relationship became more evident, coming to the surface like air bubbles escaping from someone underwater who’s held their breath far too long.
I started to regularly complain to Vivienne that I didn’t feel connected and didn’t think our relationship had the emotional depth I wanted and needed. I blamed her for being too independent and told her that she was the reason we couldn’t connect on a deeper level, which sent us into cycles of heated conflict. Looking back on it all now, I cringe. Just as in my prior relationships, I failed to recognize the role I was playing in keeping our relationship on an unsatisfyingly superficial level. Because I was so largely detached from my emotions, I couldn’t honor my emotions. I didn’t even know what my emotions were.
As I became unhappier, Vivienne began to fight harder for our marriage. Her determination frightened me, and when I realized that I wanted a divorce, I was petrified: for the first time in my life, I felt a strong desire that directly opposed the wishes of someone I deeply cared for. I struggled for months to find a way to ask her for a divorce, trying instead to push her away with my actions. When I finally voiced my true feelings, I felt terrified and empowered at the same time: it was the first time in any relationship that I had prioritized my own desires over someone else’s.
My divorce marked the first time I began to see the active role I was playing in creating the relationship dynamics that didn’t serve me or those around me. On the surface, my subconscious habits of ignoring my needs, suppressing my feelings, and putting others’ wants or needs before my own had led me to believe that I was a “good” and “selfless” person. But those habits weren’t making me or anyone else happy. In reality, because I hardly ever expressed my true feelings, many of which I didn’t even allow myself to have, I only increased my emotional distance from others. Putting others before myself wasn’t selfless; it was self-abandonment. Deeply unsatisfied, I often felt agitated or upset, and I began to pick fights and cause arguments about daily issues, which had increased the feelings of resentment between Vivienne and me.
At the time, I couldn’t see my own role in these repeated conflicts because my relationship habits had been ingrained in my subconscious since childhood; they were part of my instinctual way of relating to or interacting and connecting with others. I had developed and relied on those habits in my very first relationships: the ones I’d had with my family.
From the outside looking in, you might think I had grown up in a happy and close family. I would have told you the same when I was a child, as well as for most of my adult life. I always had enough to eat; I was encouraged to excel in school and sports; and I didn’t experience any physical or sexual abuse. But as I’ve since learned, the absence of obvious abuse doesn’t negate the possibility of emotional neglect and related attachment trauma.
As a child, I was surrounded by stress and illness. My older sister experienced life-threatening health crises in her childhood, and for years my mom suffered her own chronic health and pain issues, which were never openly acknowledged in my family. Similarly, we didn’t talk about our feelings, whether we were happy or sad, or directly confront one another if we felt hurt or angry. We were relatively happy after all, right? Why would we ever need to discuss or confront anything?
Instead of connecting on an emotional level, I bonded with my parents and sister through stress and anxiety. Over and over again, when another health crisis or daily stress arose, our focus as a family would align in shared worry until the issue resolved. Everyone would run to care for the “urgent” needs of the stressed, sick, or otherwise upset family member, regularly neglecting their own needs in the process.
Exposed to the consistent repetition of those patterns, I learned over time that my needs and feelings weren’t as important as the needs and feelings of those around me. While I knew my family loved and cared for me, I never truly felt that love or consideration in an emotional sense. When I got upset, as all children do, I needed to be listened to and emotionally soothed or comforted. Since my parents’ attention was usually unavailable and consumed by the current crisis, I began to limit how much I shared with them, fearing that I would add to the family’s already overwhelming stress level. Eventually, I learned not to acknowledge having needs at all—or at least, I tried not to show my vulnerability in order to avoid the possibility of feeling disappointed if no one was there to support me. To keep myself safe, I became detached, suppressing my feelings and walling myself off from my emotional world. Those coping strategies became my defensive shield, which I instinctively used to try to protect myself from feeling hurt in relationships for years to come.
My story is, of course, my own, and yours will be different. Regardless of our unique individual journeys, our earliest attachments impact the habits we bring into our adult relationships, especially our romantic ones. Although these habits rarely serve our best interests today, they feel familiar, comfortable, and therefore safe. Because these habits are stored in our subconscious mind and repeated automatically on a daily basis, they are often difficult for us to observe, and we often struggle to consciously see the active role we play in our relationships.
We can learn, however, how to witness our conditioning and create new habits that will better meet the needs we have today. As we come to see and understand that our conditioning is a remnant of our past experiences, we can relieve ourselves of the shame we may feel as a result of our often dysfunctional relational habits. When we recognize and accept the active role we play, we can harness our ability and power to change our relationship dynamics. Because, ultimately, we will need to change the way we show up in our relationships if we want those relationships to change.
After I realized that the common thread in all my dysfunctional relationship patterns was me, I empowered myself to begin to shift my dynamics with others. I started to see how I only felt comfortable when I sacrificed my needs in order to avoid the discomfort I felt when disappointing others. I didn’t have or set clear boundaries—or any boundaries at all. Disconnected from my authentic needs and desires and constantly overstepping my limits, I ended up feeling emotionally distant and resentful while I continued to hold others responsible, always leaving relationships in search of a more “perfect” partner. Unaware of my own subconscious habits, I blamed others for our relational issues and expected them to change without addressing my own role in creating my continued circumstances.
Only when I started to more honestly witness myself did my relationships begin to evolve. I realized that finding or maintaining healthy relationships would mean making myself emotionally healthy, too. I’d have to do something that felt very uncomfortable at first. I’d have to learn how to honor my own needs and desires by creating new boundaries with others and learning how to be patient and compassionate with myself along the way.
The truth is, when it comes to our relationships, we repeat what we experienced or learned. So if we grew up in a stressful or chaotic environment, didn’t witness healthy habits, or were emotionally neglected or ignored, we repeat the same dynamic as adults in our relationships with others. Even though we may not be aware of it, our past, especially our attachments with our parent-figures, is wired into our mind and body, where it drives us to instinctively seek out and re-create the same kind of relationships as adults. These are our trauma bonds, our conditioned patterns of relating to others in a way that mirrors or reenacts our earliest attachments with parent-figures.
Before we dive deeper, it’ll be helpful to define a few concepts that we’ll explore throughout this book.
Let’s start with the term trauma. When most people hear the word, they often immediately think of the suffering an individual might experience in the wake of a catastrophic or violent event, like a natural disaster, war, rape, incest, or abuse.
Though trauma is certainly caused by all these incidents, it also results from any stress that exceeds our ability to emotionally process the experience causing continued dysregulation to our body’s nervous system. This includes the overwhelming stress that occurs when we don’t have the things we need to feel safe and secure, including emotional support. When we don’t consistently feel safe and secure or when we fear that those whom we rely on for our survival won’t consistently be available to us, we experience a lack of certainty and control. This activates our body’s stress circuit, otherwise known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (we’ll talk more about that here)1, which impacts our body’s ability to cope with our current circumstances.
Continual shaming of our emotions, denial of our experiences or reality, or emotional abandonment or neglect can all activate our body’s stress circuit and create traumatic emotional overwhelm. This impact can occur in a single moment (which is often the case in some of the events listed above), or it can accumulate slowly over time, building up inside us, often without our conscious knowledge. When we aren’t able to process our emotional responses, they become imprinted in our mind and body, staying with us and ultimately influencing our thoughts, feelings, and reactions for years to come.
In addition to the stress we experience within our homes, the environmental stress of systemic, cultural, or collective trauma affects a large majority of us keeping us disconnected from the supportive relationships we need for emotional safety and security. Collective trauma occurs when a single event or series of events—such as a natural disaster, financial insecurity, war, colonization/systemic inequities, gender/cultural oppression, or pandemics—create a lack of safety for a group of people, a community, a country, or the greater world. Collective trauma impacts the way people relate to themselves and others, affecting everyone differently, based on our conditioning and intergenerationally modeled coping skills.
Just as we all have unique emotional experiences, we all have different reactive patterns and learned coping strategies based on our specific childhood conditioning, even if we can’t consciously recall what happened to us as children. If you’ve ever participated in traditional therapy or read about behavioral science, you’re likely familiar with the concept of conditioning, the process by which the beliefs, behaviors, and habits that we learn through a repetition of experiences are stored in our subconscious mind, where they drive our automatic reactions, impulses, and motivations.
Though we can certainly create new habits by making new choices and having new experiences as adults, most of our conditioning occurs when we’re young children and dependent on our relationships with our parent-figures. The term parent-figures that you’ll see throughout this book refers to the people who were primarily responsible for meeting our physical and emotional needs as young children. For most of us, our parent-figures were our biological mother, father, or both, although the term can include grandparents, stepparents, foster parents, siblings, nurses, professional caregivers, or any other primary caretakers in childhood.
As children, no matter who our parent-figures were or whether we think we had a “good” or “bad” relationship with them, we instinctively looked to them for guidance, absorbing information about ourselves and our world. From them, we learned how to express (or suppress) our emotions, how to feel about and treat our body, how to fit in or be socially accepted (i.e., what behaviors were right and wrong), and how to relate to and interact with others. We learned those habits and beliefs by observing those around us, as well as by mirroring what they did.
All young children imitate their parent-figures. You’ve likely seen this if you’ve ever watched an infant smile or stick out their tongue in response to their mother or father doing the same. Similarly, young children copy most of what they see their parent-figures do. If our parent-figures shamed or stifled their own emotions, we may have learned to do the same thing. If they criticized their bodies or the physical features of others, we may have learned to criticize or shame these aspects of ourselves. If they reacted to a stressful or upsetting situation by yelling and screaming, we may do the same. If they coped with stressful or upsetting experiences by shutting down and ignoring others, we may have learned to similarly emotionally detach.
To learn how to navigate our emotional world, we first need to feel safe and secure enough to express what we’re really thinking and feeling to those around us. Our ability to do this as adults is highly influenced by how we regularly felt in our earliest relationships. The concept of attachment theory, which was first developed by the psychoanalyst John Bowlby in 1952, explains that the safety and security of our relationship with our parent-figures influences what kind of relationship we look for and create with others for the rest of our lives.2 If our attachment to our parent-figures was predominantly safe and secure as young children and our physical and emotional needs were consistently met, we are more likely to prioritize and meet our own needs as adults. Those with secure attachments are more likely to trust themselves and others and have emotional resilience, or are able to tolerate and quickly rebound from uncomfortable emotions. This emotional self-trust is built over time through our consistent, reliable, and predictable actions. In a relationship, trust is the feeling that you can count on someone to behave in a certain way.
Many of us didn’t grow up with safe and secure attachments because our parent-figures were impacted by their own earliest relational environments in which many of their needs were not met. As a result, our physical and /or emotional needs weren’t consistently identified or tended to in early childhood. Today, we may be unable to identify or tend to our needs as adults because no one helped us learn how to do so as children. We may not trust ourselves or others, often reacting impulsively because we lack the emotional resilience to deal with uncomfortable emotions, whether specific ones like stress, sadness, or anger, or all of our unpleasant feelings in general. We may continue to abandon or betray ourselves, overcommitting our time, energy, or emotional resources in an attempt to get another to care for us, or we may close ourselves off from the support of others entirely.
Whether our earliest attachments were secure or insecure, our habitual patterns of relating were wired into our subconscious mind, where they remain. It’s these patterns that automatically and instinctively continue to pull us toward similar relationship dynamics well into adulthood.
Before we can identify our attachment patterns, it’s important to first understand what unmet childhood needs are. Unmet childhood needs can be physical or emotional; the former is generally easier to understand.
Physiologically, our body functions the same way. Our lungs oxygenate our blood with the air around us, our cells helps us function by converting nutrients in our food, and our muscles move us around and help us lift and carry heavy things. These structural similarities are universal to all humans, and as a result, we share the same basic physical needs: water, oxygen, nutrients, a balance of rest/restorative sleep and movement.
If your physical needs weren’t met in childhood, you may not have had enough food to eat, appropriate clothing to wear, enough space for physical movement, or quiet to rest. Or you may have not felt physically safe in your environment for a number of other reasons, including financial insecurity and racial discrimination. Unmet physical needs in childhood can include more subtle inadequacies, like not being physically touched or soothed because you were often left alone or were raised by others who were uncomfortable themselves with physical contact, or not getting enough sleep because your childhood home was too loud or chaotic. Many of us continue to struggle with unmet physical needs as adults because we don’t have access to the stable financial resources necessary to consistently care for our body or are unable to feel safe and secure in our own skin. Regardless of the cause, when our physical needs aren’t consistently met, our body activates a nervous system response that shifts us into survival mode, pushing our emotional needs to the back burner.
What’s even more common than unmet physical needs is unmet emotional needs. Nearly everyone I know, even those who had well-intentioned parent-figures, grew up with unmet emotional needs. This is to be expected, given the number of hours and jobs many of them had to work in order to provide for us financially. How can anyone who is working overtime, and not sleeping, eating, or tolerating their own stress well, emotionally care for another? They can’t.
Despite these societal inequities and realities, we all have core emotional needs that need to be tended to. The deepest need we all have in all our relationships—whether as children or now as adults—is to feel safe and secure enough to be ourselves without losing the connection to and support of others. Feeling safe and secure enough to honestly express our perspectives and experiences helps us create emotional intimacy. When we’re able to be emotionally vulnerable and honest regardless of what we’re feeling, we allow more of ourselves to be witnessed and known. Look at the questions below and spend some time exploring how emotionally safe and secure you feel in your different relationships:
When we feel emotionally safe and secure, we are able to trust that another person sees, accepts, and appreciates who we are, can give us the space to change or evolve, and has our best interests at heart. If we have this safety and security in our earliest attachments, we develop the ability to trust our physical connection with our body and its ability to cope with stress and other upsetting emotions. When we feel this safely and securely connected to our emotional world, we’re able to authentically share ourselves with those around us and trust our relationships knowing we can reconnect or repair after moments of conflict or disconnection.
For a parent-figure to help a child feel safe, valued (or seen, heard, and appreciated), and loved on a consistent basis, they themselves have to be able to feel these ways consistently, too. But most of our parent-figures did not feel those ways because they weren’t able to regulate their emotions due to their own childhood trauma (and consequential nervous system dysregulation, which we’ll explore below). As a result, most of us didn’t grow up feeling the emotional safety or security we needed to be able to authentically express ourselves, causing us to feel deeply unworthy and emotionally alone.
If our parent-figures weren’t able to feel emotionally safe and secure themselves, they weren’t able to create the environment we needed to explore and express our authentic Self. As a result, we ended up feeling emotionally abandoned or overwhelmed by them, left alone to figure out how to navigate our own stressful or upsetting emotions and experiences. The feelings associated with childhood emotional neglect (CEN) or abandonment actually activate the same pathways in our brain as physical pain does, sending our mind and body into a continuous stress response that causes trauma.
A lack of emotional safety and security in childhood can look like being regularly ignored, criticized, or yelled at for expressing different emotions, instilling deep-rooted beliefs that you’re “too much” and continued difficulty expressing yourself. Or it can look like being discouraged or prevented from pursuing a passion or interest that now causes you to feel unsure about what you like as an adult.
While there are many more than are listed, below are some other indicators that you may have had unmet emotional needs in childhood.
Although I didn’t realize it until I began my own inner work, my childhood environment hadn’t allowed me to feel consistently safe, valued, and loved for just being myself. When I was very young—as well as throughout my childhood, teenage, and adult years—my mom remained emotionally distant, her attention consumed by the chronic pain she felt in her physical body. Constantly distracted and locked in survival mode, she was unable to express little emotion outside of worry about my well-being or validation around my latest accomplishment. As I was later told, she treated me and my two other siblings as if she were a “medic,” feeding and caring for us without attuning to or emotionally connecting with us. My dad was an active physical presence in my life, playing with me and entertaining my restless nature, but he too remained emotionally distant, hardly ever sharing feelings outside of his daily stress or annoyances with others. My sister, who is fifteen years older than me, similarly took an active role in raising and spending time with me, especially when my mom was physically unable. But she, too, was emotionally closed off, having developed the habit in her own relationship with both of our parents.
All children have an active inner world, both mentally and emotionally—and as a young child, I was no different. But whenever I tried to share experiences with my mom, she often expressed worry, trying to quickly solve or dismiss whatever issue was causing us both to experience uncomfortable feelings. Other times, she’d try to control my behavior to relieve her own hurt, anger, sadness, or disappointment by saying things like “Oh, please don’t say or do [insert undesired expression/action], or I’ll get sad” or “Oh, won’t you [insert desired request] for me so I don’t have to worry?”
Fearful of losing my connection to my family, I regularly chose to honor their needs or desires over my own. Learning these codependent dynamics and feeling no separation between my emotions or perspective and others’ feelings or perspectives, I learned to take responsibility for their emotional experiences. Caught in an internalized cycle of self-blame, I developed the habit of explaining away others’ behaviors, as I later went on to do with Sofia and in many of my other relationships.
My home largely lacked emotional boundaries, adding more stress to an already overwhelmed environment. Anytime I shared intimate information with one family member, it was quickly relayed to all the others without my permission, request, or notice, in the belief that it was supportive to do so. Those violations of trust caused me to become even more self-protective, further limiting the personal details I shared. Over time, I learned that it was easier to ignore and stifle my feelings altogether. Eventually, I convinced myself that I didn’t have any feelings at all because it felt safer than acknowledging those that I wasn’t comfortable expressing.
This absence of boundaries in my family helped create my belief that relationships weren’t emotionally safe. Because I felt distant from the people I was supposed to be closest with—my family—I feared that something was wrong with me, a fear that my mom exacerbated by continuously commenting on my “secretive” nature. I didn’t feel comfortable sharing personal details of my life with my mom, though, because she wasn’t able to create the emotional safety, security, or connection that I needed to authentically express myself to her. As a result, she ended up knowing little about my life, not because I was private by nature, as she told me, but because I never felt safe enough to share with her what was really going on with me.
As I got older, I instinctually began to look for and maintain the same emotional distance in my adult relationships that I had experienced as a child. Largely disconnected from my own wants and needs, I focused more on how I showed up for others, avoiding issues and conflicts, constantly fearful of disconnection or abandonment. Sometimes, I even felt ashamed of myself for having a desire or feeling that might disappoint or upset another person. I carried all these dysfunctional habits into my adulthood, continuing to rely on the same subconscious coping strategies I had adopted and used as a child to protect myself from my overwhelming and undersupported emotions.
Though other early childhood relationships, including those we have with our siblings, grandparents, caregivers, friends, and teachers, can create trauma bonds, nothing has a greater impact on our current relationships than our earliest attachments with our parent-figures. Why? The answer to this question is key to understanding and unlocking the work we can do to change our relationships today—effectively and sustainably.
Our attachments to our parent-figures didn’t just condition our behavior; our earliest relationships also physically programmed our nervous system, determining how we think, feel, and act. That’s because our nervous system drives our thoughts, feelings, and reactions, in addition to influencing our other physiological functions.
Our nervous system is “profoundly social,” according to UCLA neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Siegel, who helped pioneer the field of interpersonal neurobiology, an emerging area of science that explores the fascinating interaction that exists between our brain and our relationships. As Siegel has shown us, our brain needs other people to function.3 Since the dawn of humankind, we’ve depended on the safety that families and groups provide. And when we’re unable to feel safely connected with others, the resulting feelings of aloneness can negatively impact both our well-being and our physical safety.4
Today, our body and brain are still programmed to need other people. We instinctively seek out relationships, both romantic and platonic, whether we consciously think we want them or not. Though modern Western culture may promote a more rugged individualism offering an idea of the “solo self,” no one is or can be an island unto themselves; having relationships throughout life is necessary for us not only to survive but to thrive. We all exist in a relationship with someone and something at all times, including with the environment around us and the earth on which we live (more on this in chapter 10).
Not only does our brain need relationships to physically survive and function, our relationships with others impact how our nervous system operates. As Siegel explained, “human connections create neuronal connections,” meaning that our relationships with others determine how our neurons, or brain cells, connect or communicate with one another.5 These neural connections or communications, when repeated by our brain over and over again, become the basis of our inner world, driving our daily thoughts, feelings, and reactions.
While any relationship can create new neural connections, it’s our earliest attachments with our parent-figures that built our brain’s basic architecture. Human infants are born with a largely underdeveloped nervous system—which is why we’re so dependent on our parent-figures for the first few years of life compared to the days, weeks, or months that other mammals need before they can survive on their own. During our early years, our nervous system grows and develops rapidly, firing and forming a million new neural connections every second.6 Although these neural pathways undergo pruning later in childhood, we create most of our neural infrastructure as infants and young children.
It’s the people with whom we first connect—that is, our parent-figures—who cause our nervous system to fire and wire in certain ways. It’s what they do (or don’t do) when they interact with us and how we respond (child development experts call this the “serve and return”) that becomes patterned in our brain. These patterns drive our brain’s operating system, activating and controlling our automatic or instinctual thoughts, feelings, and reactions for life—or until we harness our brain’s neuroplasticity, or its power to change.
Our nervous system plays a foundational role in our existence. It connects with and controls our biological organs and physiological functions. It drives our automatic thoughts, feelings, and habitual behaviors. And it determines our level of physical, mental, and emotional safety, not only with ourselves but also with others by activating a stress response when we encounter a threat, causing us to move toward or away from connection.
You likely already know something about the body’s “fight-or-flight” response that’s controlled by our nervous system. Fight-or-flight occurs when our nervous system initiates physiological reactions like dilated pupils and an increased heart rate and breathing rate in response to a threat, giving us energy to face danger head-on (fight) or run away from it (flight). Our nervous system can also activate a “freeze” or “shutdown” response, which slows or shuts down our body’s physiological functions, usually when a threat is overwhelming or consistent. And, although it’s not as well known, we’ve even evolved to adapt a “fawn” response to stress, with our nervous system remaining on high alert as we continuously scan our environment to identify, eliminate, or deescalate possible threats as they become apparent to us.
These nervous system responses happen automatically, most times outside our awareness. They are normal, natural, and even healthy; we need them to confront a threat (fight), run away from one (flight), play dead or conserve our physical resources (freeze or shutdown), or maintain bonds in certain communal crises (fawn). If our nervous system never activated stress responses, we wouldn’t learn how to regulate our emotions or develop the resilience we need to deal with stress and return quickly to a state of calm and physiological and emotional wellness.
The problem for many of us though is that our nervous system doesn’t return to a state of relaxed calm. Instead, our body gets stuck in a stress response, though not necessarily because we face stress all day long. Though many of us have stressful, busy lives, if our nervous system is regulated, we can toggle back and forth between a stress response and calm, everyday function. But many of us can’t toggle back and forth because our body didn’t develop the ability to do so when we were children.
If we grew up in a consistently stressful environment or with parent-figures who couldn’t regularly meet our physical or emotional needs, our nervous system may have continued to signal that there was a fire around us long after the embers had cooled. Since our brain was still developing, those stress responses got programmed into our nervous system’s standard operating mode.
Today, our nervous system is likely still wired as it was in childhood, possibly even stuck in a stress response even when there’s no active threat around us. These conditioned stress responses are familiar and comfortable to our brain, as an old baby blanket is to a grown child, both biologically and emotionally. Biologically, our nervous system may struggle to physiologically downshift from a stress response, even though living in a constant state of stress isn’t optimal for our body. Emotionally, we may find ourselves feeling uncomfortable, agitated, uneasy, or bored when we’re not experiencing a familiar stress cycle. For some of us, if all we ever knew as children was stress, chaos, or abandonment, we may never be able to experience feelings of peace and connection unless we make the conscious choice to rewire our neurobiology.
Conditioned stress responses keep us stuck in our trauma bonds with others on a physiological level, even when we’re adults. When our nervous system gets wired for stress in certain ways as children, it drives us to feel instinctually attracted to certain people only to become trapped in reactivity cycles with them (we’ll talk more about these later). Our dysregulated nervous system causes us to see or re-create situations with others that fire our predictable stress states, giving us a physiological feeling of safety and control when, in reality, neither exists. Whether we gain a sense of false safety when we’re picking fights (fight), distracting ourselves (flight), walling ourselves off (freeze or shutdown), or putting others’ needs before our own (fawn), we are driven to repeat these habits, even if they’re not helpful within our relationships or aren’t aligned with our conscious intentions or desires. In other words, we can’t help it: our brain is wired for stress when we’re alone or around other people. In chapter 3, we’ll talk more about how to identify when we’re in a stress response and what we can do to shift out of it.
While our relational habits are wired into our brains, we can change them. Though there are still things we don’t know about the human body, science has more recently discovered that our brain is incredibly malleable. It can change over time, no matter how old we are or how much stress or trauma we experienced.
The term neuroplasticity refers to our brain’s ability to form new neural connections throughout our lifetime. Whenever we form new neural connections, we give our nervous system the opportunity to create new instinctual or automatic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; in short, we can change our brain’s standard operating mode. Each new experience we have and every new person we meet has the potential to create new neural connections. But newness in itself isn’t the answer; if we approach new experiences and new people with the same conditioned thoughts, feelings, and habits we’ve had since childhood, our nervous system will fire the same neural connections it always has, producing the same relational patterns and dynamics. If we truly want to change our relationships, we have to change our subconscious, which means shifting how we instinctively think, feel, and act, regardless of whether it’s with new people or those we already know.
Changing our instinctual habits isn’t easy; it will feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable at first. But it is possible. The first step is to learn to become conscious of or to witness the conditioned habits that live in our subconscious mind, creating and maintaining our trauma bonds with others. After we begin to witness our trauma bond patterns, we can begin to do the work to develop more adaptive and resilient ways of dealing with stress and relating to others that will better serve ourselves and relationships.
As I hope you’re starting to see, you are not a passive bystander in any of your relationships. Asking others to change who they are or what they do to make us feel better doesn’t often actually solve our relationship issues. By harnessing the new advances in science that we’ll explore here together, it is you who has the power to change your relationships, no matter what someone else does or doesn’t do. You can finally stop waiting or relying on anyone else. You can and will the change. And that change can begin now.
To change how we interact with others (and by association how they interact with us), we will need to extend our awareness beyond our brain to include our whole, embodied Self. Our embodied Self is the interconnection between our body, mind, and soul that we’ll explore in detail in the next chapter.