Struggling to Create Healthy Relationships After Childhood Trauma and CPTSD

Childhood Trauma Survivors and Self-Isolation

Scapegoat survivors and those with complex trauma often find themselves asking at some point in their healing journey “Why can’t I seem to find healthy people to connect with?”, “Why do I struggle with feeling as if I don’t belong when I’m with others?”, or “Why do I seem to attract narcissistic/toxic people?”.

Relationships are meant to be inspiring, encouraging, loving, safe, and fun. Yes, there will be hard times, but overall, your relationships should add something to the quality of your life. For the survivor, however, relationships are often experienced as draining, stress-inducing, lonely, unfulfilling, and deeply painful. 

Repeated experiences with painful relationships can lead the survivor to self-isolate and keep others at arm's length, concluding that relationships "aren't for them" or that they "attract toxic people".

This desire to self-isolate as an act of self-preservation is further complicated by the fact that many with complex childhood trauma were cast into the scapegoat role in their family of origin, either on a consistent basis or for a period of time in their childhood. Regardless of their role in the dysfunctional family, children who grow up with dysfunctional parents regularly experience feeling unseen and unheard.
 
For the scapegoated child, this effect is compounded. These children are left feeling as though they have no tribe they belong to, they feel cast out of the family, and emotionally, psychologically, and sometimes even physically, they are rejected and left “out in the cold”. They go through their life experiences with little to no recognition or support, and who they are as an individual is chronically invalidated and rejected by the narcissistic parent.
 
This can lead to a chronic sense of isolation that children from dysfunctional families are constantly reminded of at every major life milestone, when they are reminded that there is no loving parent to fall back on for consistent love and support. They are aware that their experience is different from the close, consistently loving and nurturing family dynamics they witness around them.

Young children internalize this lack of love and consistent nurturing, believing there is something fundamentally lacking within themselves that has caused the dysfunctional parent to hold back their love.
 
This can lead many of these children to set about the mission of “fixing” themselves, a core belief that follows them into adulthood where they set about the task of proving to the internalized toxic parent that they are “enough”.

​When the adult child sets about the task of healing and recovering from their childhood trauma, this internalized belief can morph into a mission to heal and “fix” via self-help, counseling, coaching, and spirituality, in which they set about “fixing” their perceived flaws and issues, with the often unconscious belief that if they can just fix themselves, they will finally achieve being worthy and good enough.
 
Working with a trauma therapist, the survivor can set about learning that they are worthy of love and connection and come to see their own flawed humanity with self-compassion.

Yes, they may make mistakes and have their problems like any other human to walk the earth, but this doesn’t mean that they themselves are a mistake or a problem to solve.

Why do Survivors of Childhood Trauma Find Themselves in Unhealthy Relationships?

Dysfunctional family dynamics allow for little to no healthy role-modeling for the child to develop a framework to understand healthy relationships.

Scapegoated children can struggle to feel they have something to offer others, often severely undervaluing their worth and capabilities, and may fear contributing to discussions and “putting themselves out there” in social settings due to a fear of rejection.
 
Children in dysfunctional families learn they must abandon themselves to receive love and experience belonging within the family system. This chronic self-abandonment can manifest as fawning, where the survivor slips into the role of chameleon in their relationships and falls into the childhood pattern of anticipating the needs and desires of others rather than remaining true to themselves.
 
Having never experienced love and consideration in their upbringing, the survivor may settle for breadcrumbs and be more susceptible to love-bombing from narcissistic individuals. For the survivor, the experience of love-bombing can feel as if their childhood needs will finally be met; at last, someone sees and knows them, loves them, and makes them feel valued.
 
Early in recovery from childhood trauma and CPTSD, the survivor may find themselves gravitating towards relationships that feel familiar and like “home”. Children raised in functional families naturally do this too, although the difference is, they have a healthy relational model to build future relationships from. The survivor, however, may discover they enter into relationships with people who remind them of the dysfunctional parent in an unconscious attempt to resolve the relational trauma of the past.
 
The byproducts of childhood trauma, such as codependency, sensitivity, empathy, over responsibility, self-gaslighting, lowered self-esteem, etc. are attractive to those with traits of narcissism and other dysfunctional qualities. Survivors of childhood trauma are often resilient, compassionate, imaginative, likeable, considerate, and highly motivated individuals.
 
If the survivor has not learned to honor their gut instinct, trust their judgement, and have a set of standards for the relationships they enter into, they may find these positive qualities are exploited, resented, and even attacked in their relationships with dysfunctional people.

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Choosing Safe People and Experiencing Healthy Relationships

​Social support and a sense of community are necessities for anyone’s health and well-being and are especially important for the survivor of childhood trauma’s recovery. Recovery from childhood trauma and abuse can’t happen within a vacuum; it takes a sense of belonging, support, and consistency to begin to challenge the internal narrative that the survivor is unworthy of love and connection, alone in the world, or lacking value.
 
This deep need for belonging can be something that the survivor and even some facets of self-help culture label as “neediness”, leading to a great deal of internalized shame around unmet relational needs. Western society is highly individualized and places a great deal of emphasis on independence. There is healthy independence and autonomy, and then there is isolation and popular psychology’s insistence that we as human beings have “everything we need inside ourselves”.
 
This is completely counter to the way we as humans are designed-we are relational beings. We crave connection because we need it. We all need people and different relationships for different needs that we have. The friend that we can laugh and have fun with, the friend with the good advice and calm soothing presence, the friend who encourages us to go on adventures and try new things, the friend who is down to earth and holds us accountable-all play valuable roles in our lives and meet different needs that we have.
 
No one person can be everything to us, just as we can’t be everything to ourselves.
 
Within healthy relationships, the survivor can deconstruct these childhood narratives and come to create new narratives in which they know they matter and are connected to others, they are lovable, and they have inherent value as a human being.

Through experiencing healthy reciprocal relationships, the survivor comes to learn what authentic vulnerability looks like and discovers that they can be fully themselves and present in their relationships without the fog of trauma narratives holding them back.
 
Finding these healthy constructive relationships involves the survivor practicing taking risks that run counter to the familiar “safety” of their trauma narrative; little by little, they must practice being themselves in front of others.

When they are themselves in front of others, they must realize that any rejection and harsh criticism they receive isn’t personalized-it is in fact about the individual criticizing them, and that individual’s relationship with themselves.
 
Rather than trying to earn outside approval, the survivor who is healing will find that a relationship dynamic in which they must strain for the approval of another person is no longer appealing to them, as they have come to like themselves and no longer feel as though they must abandon themselves to become more pleasing to others. ​

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Creating a New Relational Blueprint

We all grow up with a standard of "normal" for how we think relationships should operate. The relationship dynamics we witness between our parents, our siblings, and the dynamic we experience with our parents sets the precedent for how we learn to relate to others. This is what is called a "relationship blueprint". 

Let's say you build houses, but you only have the blueprint design to build a single-story house. You're being commissioned to build a five-story mansion. You want to build the mansion. After all, how wonderful would it be to experience the satisfaction of seeing all of that work come to fruition and to add that mansion project to your portfolio.

But you don't have the blueprint to build it. Instead, you were given the same blueprint for another single-story house. You try to build the mansion, with the only reference being the blueprint for the single-story house. Not surprisingly, without the blueprint for the mansion, you end up with a sad shadow of your vision. The foundation is cracking, the measurements are all off, you don't know what the materials you need are.

You tried, and you gave it everything you had. You just didn't have the right materials or tools to do the job from the beginning. 

I don't work in the construction industry, my husband does, but you get the point.

It's not uncommon for survivors of childhood trauma to find themselves entering into relationships with the same types of people and reenacting relational patterns from the past.

The ways of relating and coping mechanisms used to achieve love, connectedness, and a sense of safety growing up are no longer working in adulthood; they have become the very things that hinder them in their relationships.

Through no fault of their own, the survivor finds that in adulthood, they simply don't have the relational tools to build satisfying, life-giving relationships. When we notice the absence of these relational tools and recognize that we're operating in our relationships from an old blueprint, we can begin to shift away from them towards new ways of thinking and being.

The survivor benefits greatly from building a connection with their therapist in which they can begin to create a healthy set of standards and "normal" that extends into their other relationships outside the therapeutic setting. 

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How to Know if a Relationship is For You

Journal a list of qualities you're looking for in your friendships and romantic relationships. What are the traits that inspire you and draw you to people? What values, beliefs, and interests are important that you have in common? How do you want to feel when you're with this person?

Now, journal a list of boundaries and standards that you plan to stick to in your relationships going forward.

​How comfortable are you with lending a friend money, or with letting them borrow your things? How do you want to be spoken to? How would you like them to respect your time (ie, showing up half an hour late or canceling plans at the last minute)? What are your boundaries around how much personal space you need, and how much emotional support you're comfortable with extending?

In the moment during a social interaction, it can be difficult for the survivor to be fully present and aware of their own emotional experience, as from a young age, they have had to focus their energy outwards onto monitoring and anticipating the reactions and needs of others.
 
For this reason, socializing can be an overwhelming experience that induces social anxiety, and the survivor may find their brain dissociating in these moments to cope. You may be physically present, agreeable, and in tune with the other person’s emotions, while simultaneously feeling numb, checked out, and anxious inside.

​Being fully present leads to connection. Showing up in your relationships as yourself is the best way to find the people that are meant to be in your life, and to naturally distinguish them from the people who aren’t.
 
Practice reminding yourself to come back to the present moment during interactions with people. Mindfulness meditations like this one can help you practice recentering your awareness on the present moment, as can practicing grounding tools with a licensed trauma therapist.

Tangible reminders, like a scent in an essential oil necklace, a fidget ring/bracelet, or a written reminder on your hand can be helpful. Check in with yourself and ask yourself how you are feeling in that moment.
 
Your body instinctively knows what is good for you and what isn’t. If there isn’t a resounding “YES!” to spending time with that person, boundaries need to be set, and there might be a need to reassess if this relationship is truly one worth keeping.
 
Ask yourself during or after socializing:
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• How does your body feel when you’re with this person?
• Do you notice yourself becoming withdrawn, feeling resentful, quieter than usual, anxious and on-edge, fearful, or tense?
• Are you choosing people who feel like “home” to you? Do they give you a familiar feeling in some way? Do they remind you of someone?
• Do you feel in your gut that it doesn’t feel safe to be 100% yourself around this person?
• Is this someone who you admire and are inspired by, who's life choices motivate you to grow?

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Conclusion

The survivor must learn the language of setting boundaries, having relationship standards, and being themselves in the presence of others. Together with the help of a trauma therapist, they can begin to practice emerging from the role they were cast into as a child and dismantle the trauma narratives that have been keeping them stuck in their relationships. Through present relationships and life experiences, the complex trauma survivor can find healing from the wounds of the past.