Childhood Traumas - Mirrors Of Our Adult Romantic Relationships

steemityourway (68)in #psychology • 3 years ago

Children need to be mirrored. When they come to you, you want to be that clear mirror. So, the most important work you do is with yourself.
-Gabor Mate

Toxicity Is Our Normality

We’re on a mission – on a mission to find someone who we can reprocess our unhealed childhood traumas with. We crave someone with whom we can recreate our childhood dynamics with. Someone that has similar unmet childhood needs as ours. Someone who reminds us of what love felt like in our household as a child. But that love was not the one of a healthy parental love. It was conditional. Inconsistent. Withheld from us. It made us cry. Or it may have made us withdraw. It made us deny our own emotional realities. It made us mistrust adults. It made us doubt our worth. It made us broken at too much of a young age. It took away our chance at growing up in a healthy and loving home.

Consequently, as adults, we seek to rebuild that broken home in the arms of others broken beings. Two broken halves don’t make a whole. You can’t build a loving and healthy home on a broken foundation. We need the help of a professional third party in order to ensure that our home will be built on safe proof foundations. Our childhood traumas need to be healed.

What Is Love?

We idealize our partners just like we idealize our parents, no matter how toxic they are. Idealization makes complete sense from a survival standpoint – as children, we are helpless and rely entirely on our parents to survive. In that sense, no matter how much they may harm us – we will always look up to them and love them because our survival depends on it. Coping mechanism 101. This may lead us as adults to seek unhealthy partners who will make us suffer as a way to relive our childhood traumas. And just as we did as children, we may idealize our partners to no end in spite of the pain they are inflicting upon us.

Love is supposed to hurt - that distorted belief has been embedded in our psyche for too long. Ironically, when love feels loving and safe, we run away like our safety depends on it. That’s not the kind of love we remember receiving as children. It doesn’t feel right to us because toxicity is our normality.