... This is a post about how childhood trauma affects trust and relationships. I’ve touched on this issue before in How Childhood Trauma Affects Adult Mental Health: 1 Problem We Fail to Mention so if you haven’t seen that post, check it out.
The simple answer is that childhood trauma breaks trust in people and in society as a whole. This is something that we work on with my clients – processing the impact of their early childhood experiences on their ability to form and maintain relationships with others, both romantic and platonic.
Rarely do people come to therapy intending to work on improving their relationships and their ability to trust. When they do, it’s usually after years and years of struggle dating and finding a partner, who makes them happy. Instead, most of us come to therapy complaining from feelings of depression, mood swings, self-injurious behavior, anxiety, substance abuse and sometimes hallucinatory experiences or chronic illnesses. As we often discover in the therapeutic process, underlying many of these complaints is the experience of childhood trauma, often repeated and prolonged.
[To read the rest of this article by Mihaela Bernard, click here.]
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