How do childhood trauma and experience shape our relationships? Let me tell you my own story.
How do childhood trauma and experience shape our relationships?
Let me tell you my own story.
In my childhood, my parents argued a lot on holidays. The reasons could be all sorts of things:
- Sometimes Dad would buy the wrong flowers or the wrong cake
- Sometimes he’d simply forget something or say the wrong thing
- Sometimes Mum had expectations of her own that didn’t pan out, and she’d cry for half the day
- Mum, for her part, was also pretty good at winding Dad up and setting off a fight
So from my earliest childhood, I came to see holidays as potentially difficult days, when the mood could get a lot darker than usual.
We almost never invited guests over, because Mum was embarrassed about the state of our apartment. Or rather, the lack of any renovation.
I often found the New Year’s Eve variety shows on TV boring, so I’d go to my room to read my own books. Mum reacted badly to that and, through guilt, would try to get me back to the table.
Our family lived modestly, so I never got any spectacular gifts on holidays either. I can’t say it bothered me much at the time — a child just takes things as they are.
The one thing I truly loved about holidays was when Mum made her French-style meat dish. For many years, that was my favourite meal.
But overall, I treated any kind of festive gathering very calmly, if not coldly.
When I got married, I quickly realised that for Nastya, holidays carry a very high value. She genuinely loves them and plans for them. Today, on her own blog, she wrote about why and how our first years together felt from her side. Worth a read if you’re curious.
After the wedding, once we started living together, Nastya would often buy me gifts, ask me in June how we’d celebrate New Year, and say we needed to start thinking about who to invite.
I’ll be honest — I was very slow to get moving on this. I didn’t fully realise myself how much my negative childhood experience was affecting me here.
I subconsciously tried to avoid anything related to holidays, even long after childhood was far behind me.
And naturally, my attitude toward holidays led Nastya to feel like all of this mattered only to her. She’d often feel sad, and sometimes cry, during festive days that we could have organised but didn’t, because of me.
And whenever I saw Nastya’s tears, it hit that old childhood wound even harder, and I’d try even more actively to distance myself from anything connected to the subject.
But as we both worked on ourselves, we gradually started to understand what was really going on. Nastya stopped taking my attitude toward holidays so personally. She realised it was my trauma, unrelated to her or my feelings for her.
And I realised that my childhood had a very direct effect on my new relationship.
And gradually, as a couple, we started fixing it together. You can read the whole story from her side on Nastya’s page.
No matter how difficult or traumatic the experience we bring into a relationship, if you work on yourself, you can change the things that keep people from being happy together.
Any relationship can be made happy, given enough work.
Have there been situations in your life where your past experience affected a new relationship? How did you deal with it?