How Childhood Trauma Impacts Relational Connectivity

Exploring the impact of Rejection, Injustice, Abandonment and Betrayal Trauma on Adult Relationships

Photo Credit: Dr. Hasuna Malik

Kazikon Therapy Education Center is centered on fostering connections. By providing relevant applicable information, Kazikon's goal is three-fold:

1). Helping others connect with the self

2). Helping others connect with one other person

2). Fostering sustainable multi-party connections (family and larger community)

In the absence of relational rapport, individuals are at immediate risk for long term chronic isolation that increases probability for depression, addiction and suicide ideation. The structure of one's adult functioning is founded by the quality of their childhood experience. Children who experience significant levels of trauma are more likely to struggle with detachment disorders that impede emotional intimacy in adulthood.

By identifying the four main types of trauma, individuals can more effectively reframe their trauma into strength based models for future problem solving.

This article will provide strategies how to overcome the four major types of childhood trauma, Rejection, Injustice, Abandonment and Betrayal trauma by exploring the symptoms of each trauma type, the impacts on adult relationships and ways to overcome each trauma type.

Rejection Trauma - Overcoming Rejection Trauma with Self-Acceptance and Gradual Acceptance of Emotionally Safe Relationships

Individuals with Rejection Trauma, regularly make negative assumptions about what others think about them, feel physically threatened by the prospect of letting others in and find compromising with others to be difficult because compromise involves trust.

During infancy, 0-2 years old, caregivers success or failure to meet physical needs for food and shelter inform our learned baseline for emotional safety or emotional danger. Although adults cannot recall infant memories, the impact of trauma becomes imprinted in our primitive brain development and may physically distorts the brain's hardwired ability to accept emotionally healthy love in later adulthood.

Caregivers, who are our initial passports to the greater world around us, inform or mis-inform our innate expectations for later acceptance and rejection in later friendships and romantic relationships. Early rejection from childhood caregivers leads children to expect rejection as a coping mechanism. Children who experienced rejection at home will often reject themselves in anticipation of expecting to be perpetually rejected by others.

When I was a teenager, I fell in like, with my first boyfriend. I was very excited to have a special peer friend to hang out with and talk to. As our relationship progressed he proudly took me home to meet his mama. His mother, completely rejecting me proclaiming, "expressed disapproval" of my family's social status and neighborhood. Adding insult to injury before speaking she physically turned her body and face completely away from me, as her son pleaded for civility, she refused to afford me the dignity of eye contact. While actively ignoring me, she proceeded to scold her son for bringing me to her home, yelled at him him in real time to dump me immediately and boldly asserted to her son that I would never be anything in life and that he needed to stay far away from me. My boyfriend and I broke up the next day. He dumped me for a young lady from a more favorable family of his mother's choosing. At 14 years old, the rejection from my first boyfriend's mother imprinted my negative sense of self-worth for the next 10+ years. Her rejection fueled my now ultra ambitious professional personality but in my personal life, she destroyed my confidence as a young lady. That traumatic encounter of rejection would obstruct my ability to feel worthy of love and affection for many years afterward.

To overcome rejection trauma from childhood, adults must begin with self-acceptance of body image, core beliefs and values. By having a secure sense of self-acceptance, adults can confidently hold firm to their own identity while juxtaposing the identities of other adults.

The next step is gradually allowing one to experience acceptance from other adults. For chronically isolated adults, attending a weekly hobby with a consistent group of other adults is a great way to experience gradual platonic acceptance in a low stakes environment. Finally, for adults in a committed relationship, consistently showing up for your loved one will role model acceptance through the ongoing demonstration of safe reliable behavior.

For adults with severe trauma, establishing a structure of trust around repeated routines will create patterns of acceptance that overwrite abusive and negligent development. Example, agreeing to weekly ice-cream outings and adhering to the weekly agreement will demonstrate to your partner that they can expect regular acceptance.

Injustice Trauma - Overcoming Injustice Trauma by Facilitating Moral Based, Legal Justice for Others

Individuals with Injustice Trauma suffer from profound feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Feelings of injustice causes ongoing irritability caused by unpredictability in the surrounding world. This results in feelings of unsafeness that impairs ability to trust others in platonic and romantic relationships.

During childhood, children look toward their primary caregivers for safety and protection from violence and instability. When caregivers either inflict children with violence or fail to protect their children from institutional injustice, children are left to assume that the world and the occupants therein are inherently corrupt and thus cannot be trusted.

When I was in second grade, my teacher called my father and teasingly informed him that he needed to urgently report to my school, that same afternoon, for a "critical announcement that the school could only disclose in person - not over the phone." My father, a single parent, was thus forced to call out of work, same day, without full explanation to his employer. Understandably frustrated, my father proceed to interrogate and physically discipline me for my refusal to reveal why the school needed to speak to him in person. After a full day of intermittent interrogation and discipline I was as equally angry as my father when we arrived to the school later that evening. Unbeknownst to my father and I, my school held a "secret special award ceremony" after I won a school wide/regional wide writing contest. Twenty years later, my father still regularly apologizes and grieves this offense. While I have since forgiven my father, I still hold resentment of the school administrators for unprofessionally fabricating an allegation of my misbehavior for the unnecessary elevation of suspense over a "secret surprise student award ceremony." This school experience, allegedly benevolently motivated, exposed me to my first instance of race and class tone deafness. Therein, I learned that institutional harm always asserts to be unintentional and that regardless of the outcome, state actors rarely take accountability for the harm they inflict unto civilians.

Adults with Injustice Trauma likely experienced cruel verbal and physical abuse in their childhood by primary caregivers. This abuse causes adults to later mistrust authority figures including the authority that denotes emotional vulnerability in romantic relationships. For individuals with criminal justice impacted trauma, heightened expectation of injustice can raise stress levels for lengthy time periods and permanently reshape the brain to default expect injustice over safety.

To overcome Injustice Trauma, adults must re-wire their expectations of justice by facilitating in the receipt of morally legal justice for others. This can take shape in many forms including by not limited to pursuing professions of advocacy in the medical, legal, environmental justice fields. Other ways to facilitate justice include regularly volunteering to support justice based causes such as anti-poverty charitable campaigns, civic engagement and or youth mentoring.

Abandonment Trauma - Overcoming Abandonment Trauma by Gradually Increasing Short Term Commitments to Long Term Permanent Commitments

Individuals with Abandonment Trauma have a chronic persistent fear of being left behind by their friends and loved ones. They have a low self esteem and are thus unable to form healthy relationships with others due to a nagging fear that any attempts at relationships are useless because they fear the relationships will ultimately end in abandonment.

When my brother, cousin and I were pre-teens, my grandmother would regularly threaten to drive away and abandon us at the Staten Island mall. On Saturdays, my grandmother would run regular errands and the three of us would routinely take off running to loiter and window shop in various toy stores. Frustrated with our unwillingness to promptly return to the car on time, she would pretend to drive two inches away sending the three of us into a crying frenzy to jump in the backseat. As we got older, we became more rebellious, reporting to the car later and later, descending my patient Grandmother into appropriate frustration and anger. Once we became teenagers my grandmother once gave each of us $10 at the beginning of the Saturday mall trip and threatened that if we did not return to the car on time, we would have to catch the bus home.

Once we began receiving money, that was our last Saturday riding back home with our grandma. We quickly learned that her version of abandonment meant alternative transportation provision. While my grandmother often threatened to abandon us, she never actually followed through on her threat. Due to the extreme emotional safety my grandmother provided us, we trusted that she would never actually abandon us thus we could gradually increase our rebellion against our grandma to ultimately barter for our first rite of passage of teenage freedom, bus fare and lunch money to independently explore Staten Island on Saturdays. Emotional safety increases communication and self esteem whereas emotional danger decreases communication and lowers self esteem.

Childhood abandonment is not always marked by distinct grandiose acts of permanent abandonment such as physically leaving a child alone. Childhood abandonment can take more subtle harmful forms such as repeated failure to show up for a ballet recital or a basketball game. A parent regularly being emotionally unavailable due to work hours or other social (dating) preferences. Finally, failure to emotionally engage with a child's development, learning and cherishing a child's individual likes, dislikes, hobbies, preferences, personality can all be forms of childhood abandonment.

Children with unmet emotional needs were functionally abandoned as children. These children cannot later conceive how an adult peer will learn and meet their emotional needs in adulthood if a primary caregiver ultimately failed to meet those needs in their childhood.

The first step to healing from Abandonment Trauma is by recognizing that you are inherently worthy of love. Love is consistently having a primary (childhood) or secondary (adulthood) caregiver meet, reciprocate and advance our emotional needs.

Abandonment Trauma is difficult to overcome in adulthood because many adults will avoid relationships with the hopes of avoiding the subsequent pain that abandonment may possibly bring. However, failure to risk trust via choosing isolation is an intellectual form of self-abandonment.

Adults in professional careers have more difficulty overcoming Abandonment Trauma because unlike individuals with limited education and fixed incomes they are more likely to attempt to buy their acceptance with increased social status and wealth. Like an insatiable capitalist, there is never enough money to leverage one from the fear of feeling not being good enough. Rather than manipulating the external factors that we believe may increase others perception of our worthiness, individuals with Abandonment Trauma must address the root cause of perceived worthlessness. By befriending those that validate one's inherent self worth indiscriminate of social status or resources, one can begin a slow journey of trust in one's inherent worthiness of love and commitment.

The tangible application of overcoming abandonment begins with short term commitments to one time experiences. For example, interviewing for an intimidating job or auditioning for the community theatre. By practicing examples of showing up for oneself regardless of the outcome, one may prepare themselves for the reward of love and the risk of abandonment in long term relationships.

Betrayal Trauma - Overcoming Betrayal by Making and Keeping Promises First to the Self, Followed by Making and Keeping Promises to Others

Individuals with Betrayal Trauma have trouble expressing themselves or their emotions. For these adults, the expression of any emotions feels like a betrayal of their secretly sworn pledge to protect their heart. Adults with Betrayal Trauma suffer from hidden anxiety as the angst of always secretly fearing betrayal results in hidden depression and other mental health co-morbidities. Secret pain results in secret pleasure providing coping mechanisms such as drug addictions and illicit drugs and sex. Adult survivors of childhood trauma often struggle in silence due to shame of childhood experience and complicated allegiance/appreciation to their parent(s) limited capacity. Though often hidden, when unaddressed these childhood struggles follow children to adulthood and manifest as chronic isolation and dysfunctional relationships.

Children with Betrayal Trauma experienced significant betrayal from their primary caregivers. Children who live with single parents tend to experience higher levels of betrayal due to overworked parents who often are forced to choose their careers over their children. Moreover, the absence or intermittent appearance from the non-live-in parent can result to deep seated feelings of betrayal for the child.

Children with Betrayal Trauma have similar experiences to children with Abandonment Trauma, they regularly experience emotional neglect from their caregiver causing children to feel unworthy of full-time attention and support. For children, the emotion of betrayal is too complex for their cognitive minds to fathom because betrayal requires an expectation that predates disappointment. When primary caregivers deflate or distort a child's expectation of full support, love and joy this relieves the parent from the otherwise disappointment that the child, if aware, would direct toward their caregiver. By perverting the emotional health of a child's experience, parents can divert the emotional energy that should be applied toward their child to themselves. For adults that survive dysfunctional childhoods caused by parental neglect, they often feel great resentment and anger toward their parents once they become acutely aware of their parent(s) failure to provide consistent emotional safety.

Adults must overcome childhood betrayal in several steps:

1). Affirming self worthiness that contradicts the experience of external unworthiness experienced in childhood 2). Processing the anger and resentment from childhood in an effective manner to move forward with other adult relationships 3). Conquering learned experiences of betrayal by a). keeping promises to the self. b). making and keeping promises to others c). allowing others to make and keep promises to oneself.

Conclusion, childhood trauma impedes our ability to maintain emotional safety.

When early caregivers are unsafe, unreliable, or abusive, it can be hard to trust others later on. Childhood trauma leads to trust issues causing adults to expect betrayal or abandonment with inability for an adult to later in life believe that a loved one is genuine and not ill-intentioned. These mistrust issues can cause a partner to over monitor a partner's actions due to intense fear of deception or impending abandonment. Unresolved trauma causes havoc on the nervous system due to overreaction to minor conflicts, shutting down, disassociating as a coping mechanism and stonewalling during emotional conversations.

Fear of rejection, injustice, abandonment and betrayal can warp an adult's sense of self-worth resulting to clinical levels of shame. Clinical shame is "the fear of being unlovable - thus perpetually rejected." Childhood trauma causes an adult to falsely believe they don't deserve love or care thus causing an adult to settle for dysfunctional relationships that are unhealthy and abusive. Adults with unresolved trauma fear intimacy and thus sabotage genuine connections because the prospect of unconditional love feels "too good to be true."

Fear of intimacy reinforces isolation because love requires vulnerability and vulnerability is the antidote to the pseudo power of hyper independence. Hyper-independence can thwart the emotional dependency centered in reciprocal love because childhood trauma causes children to be hypervigiliant to survive the scary world around them without sufficient adult protection. The same strengths that allowed neglected children to survive into adulthood later become weaknesses during their adulthood due to non applicability of independent skills no longer effective to navigate dual-power centered adult relationships.

Children who constantly had to be on guard to ensure their physical safety feel the need to control everything in their adult relationship to feel safe. Refusal to relinquish total control in a peer to peer relationship, places the other adult at the complete control of the controlling partner. This relational power imbalance results to feelings of disregarded domination versus a shared partnership.

Hypervigiliance and control also results to overanalyzing a partner's words, tone or behavior. If pessimism is the baseline belief, the other partner is submitted to an never ending defensive state of proving love and trust over the other partner's persistent paranoia and fear of intimacy. Thus childhood trauma, unresolved, can erode relational rapport by disallowing both partners to relax and enjoy the relationship.

The good news is that childhood trauma is not a death sentence. With the proper love, support and therapy education, adults can embark on an emotional safe path of unconditional love, joy and freedom from past harm. Alongside the unwavering persistence of a loving adult partner, participation in therapy can help child survivors apply changed changed behavior in response to changed thoughts.

While childhood trauma can often make one an inferior partner, on rare occasions childhood trauma can make one a superior spouse and parent! Childhood trauma can make one exceptionally compassionate, self-aware and deeply loving beyond normal capacities.

Childhood trauma grants one deep empathy to be more attuned with your spousal mood swings with deep, non-judgmental understanding of their healing in motion. Extreme levels of child abuse provide heightened relational rapport to provide space for difficult conversations requiring real-time support and validation.

Childhood trauma increases one's motivation to break generational trauma often leading to increased spiritual and financial wealth. Survivors of chaos deeply value peace and treasure the fidelity of a monogamous relationships. Adult survivors of childhood violence avoid drama, value emotional stability and are dedicated to maintaining a loving, appreciative environment for their spouse and their children. For adult survivors who often were exploited due to lack of boundaries, they respect their partner's needs and autonomy by communicating clearly and assertively. These healthy boundaries raise emotionally healthy children who are less likely to succumb to worldly negatively peer pressure over the healthy validation regularly received by their loving parents.

Survivors of childhood trauma are just all around better people. Once these adults learn to love themselves, they are often more aesthetically beautiful, inside and out. Advanced coping skills evolved them to be social chameleons, enabling them to quickly read a room, de-escalate tension, while using humor, creativity, wit, charm and or intuition to effortlessly build connections with others.

Finally, living through trauma forces one to either fall prey to spiritual death or search out a deeply fulfilling faith in Jesus evident with pronounced miracles and supernatural blessings. Successful survivors of childhood trauma tend to be deep conversationalist, extremely loyal mates, thoughtful decision makers who value collective purpose and family legacy.

Successful triumph over childhood trauma is the ultimate life blessing initially disguised as a curse. With consistently applied faith, what appeared to be a long road barrier to love and success can become a quick helicopter flight to indescribable joy, laughter filled fun, emotional safety, unconditional love and overwhelming personal and professional success!

If you are a survivor of childhood trauma, keep learning, keep believing and stay encouraged! You are worthy of unconditional love!