How to keep your childhood trauma from sabotaging your relationship

Think your childhood was "normal." Think again.

Here’s another “Advice from a therapist” post! If you’re a paid subscriber ($5/month), you’ll get one most weeks (when I’m not too busy with therapy clients).

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This week’s question from a subscriber is...

“I keep seeing people talk about how trauma causes stuff like anxiety and relationship issues, which I’m dealing with, but I feel like my parents were good to me and my childhood was normal.”

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I get a little activated when I hear stuff like this. A part of me gets frustrated that so many people think they don’t deserve to feel better and have better relationships, which is how this sounds to me.

Before I started going to therapy, I thought the same thing—that my childhood was fine. But I’ve come to think that everyone has experienced trauma.

You may not have gone through what you think of when you hear the word “trauma”: a serious car crash, war, a mass shooting, abuse. But being a human being means you’ve experienced relational trauma.

No parent or caregiver can be perfect all of the time. Perfectly available. Perfectly present. Perfectly attuned to their kid’s emotional needs.

My parents took care of my every physical need. They were (and continue to be) reliable and present in my life. They had money to provide me and my sister a well-stocked kitchen, a safe house, and the ability to take us to travel sports games and eventually pay for college. But like many parents in a capitalist society, they were always busy.

I grew up in a suburban neighborhood where we knew some of our neighbors but mostly kept to ourselves. My parents worked full-time and then cut the grass and cleaned the house on the weekends. There wasn’t a ton of time for slow, deep connection on an emotional level.

Once I got to fifth grade, I spent most afternoons after school by myself, waiting for my parents to get home from work. And even when they got home, there was food to cook, dishes to clean, checkbooks to balance, and plenty more “adulting” to do.

“You can have childhoods were no overt trauma occurs,” says the physician and trauma expert Gabor Maté. “But when parents are just too distracted, too stressed to provide the necessary responsiveness, that can also traumatize the child.”

Like many kids with two parents working full time and few other adults around, I learned how to take care of many of my own emotional needs. When I was lonely, I microwaved some comfort food—a pepperoni pizza Hot Pocket—and vegged out watching Britney Spears and Blink 182 on Total Request Live. When I was angry, I played video games and drank Mountain Dew until my hands went numb.

I think being a boy magnified this need to take care of myself. In this society, boys aren’t supposed to have emotional needs. We’re supposed to be tough and suck it up, which I learned to do early on when I hurt my knee playing soccer or got scared of a baseball flying at my head.

I’m not blaming my parents. My point is we can’t get out of childhood without some sort of relational wounding. It’s how our personalities are developed. We come up with ways to make it through, and if we’re lucky, those ways work to some degree.

But then at some point in our life, they stop working. We realize they’re holding us back from who we really want to be or the life we really want. They start sabotaging our adult relationships, leaving us feeling like something is missing.

I had to learn the hard way that my tendency to keep my emotions to myself is a recipe for unfulfilling relationships.