How Your Childhood Is Affecting Your Relationships
Content warning: brief definitions of childhood abuse and trauma
We are made to believe relationships are tough. And they can be—we watch our parents bicker, we fight with our siblings, and we dump our S/O as soon as we see something we don’t like. It’s possible we do this because in childhood, we’re taught what love should look like and we copy those patterns. In particular, we subconsciously take tough experiences with others in childhood and make them part of who we are as partners and friends. By assessing past experiences, whether good or bad, we can make our bonds with others more stable, more meaningful, and be happier with ourselves and in our relationships.
What were the different ways we were shown love as children?
The five love languages are a place we can start. We categorize how we’re shown love as either physical touch, acts of service, words of affirmation, giving gifts, and/or spending quality time with others. As children though, we might not obviously see love as they fit into those categories.
For example, it can be more specific. In some cultures, it’s slicing/peeling fruit and having it ready for loved ones after a long day at work or school. In other cultures, showing respect for elders is crucial as a sign of love, and serving them first at the dinner table is common.
In childhood, our brains were still developing. We leaned on our parents (or adult caregivers) to tell us what love is and what love is not. They were the first people to nurture us, for better or for worse. Today, parents care for their children by taking parenting classes or Googling their concerns. However, before, love and discipline was more based on parents’ intuitions and cultures. Parents, even if we acknowledge they’re doing the best they can, don’t always nurture appropriate to what their child needs. The lines between “tough love” and abuse can start to look thin. For the people who want to discover the difference between the two, where do we even start?
What are ACEs?
Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, are traumatic experiences that people have before they turn 18. They’re categorized into physical, sexual, psychological, and other types of abuse, with the top ten questions by researchers being used in a survey that’s accessible to anyone.
How do the ACEs and love we were shown as kids affect us today?
The original ACEs study tells us a couple things. First, over half of the population studied experienced at least one ACE in their childhood/adolescence. This means that they’re more common than we think. Prevalent experiences, which have especially spiked in occurrence over the past couple of decades, were watching parents separate/divorce, or experiencing economic hardship in immediate families before turning 18.
Second, if a person’s experienced more than one ACE (and the more ACEs an individual has experienced), their susceptibility to future health problems (mentally, as well as physically and socially) increases exponentially. These potential health/social problems include substance dependencies, intimate partner violence, mental illnesses, and even organ diseases.
As we get older and continually reflect on our childhoods, we may even realize that we weren’t given enough of a certain type of love as a child that we originally needed. This can lead to different attachment styles, which are the ways we relate to others, particularly romantic partners.
The 3 Different Attachment Styles
Attachment style theories say we can be anxious, avoidant, or secure.
Anxious lovers are those who cling onto their partner. They need frequent validation from their partner to feel secure, and if they don’t get that, they may feel unease throughout their relationship. The reason someone may be anxious in their adult attachments is that, in childhood, they were not given enough time or validation with their parents to feel secure, so they search for that in their romantic relationships.
Oppositely, avoidant lovers may appear “aloof” in their relationships. These partners can be harder to crack or create intimacy with. Avoidant adults may manifest from childhoods filled with constant lies or adults who broke trust in their life. So, in adulthood, they avoid building strong bonds so there’s no trust to break later on.
We all aim to be secure in love to our partners, our friends, and family. Being secure can mean a lot of different things to different people, but based on anxious and avoidant attachment styles, we can say that being secure means that while we occasionally get a little worried, we generally trust and love others without worrying if they’ll love us back (and in doing so, we are able to live and function independently of another person’s love).
How can we become more secure in our relationships?
Ask ourselves how we want love from others.
Reflect on the past relationships that most affected you—former friends or lovers, your parents’ relationship with each other and with you, even the couples you watch on television or read about in fictional stories. What did you like about those certain relationships? What did you learn from them about yourself or about what it means to be with a partner? Have you been conditioned to believe that all relationships end in tragedy, or do you have expectations of your current/future partner?
Recognizing your patterns of habits/beliefs and gaining awareness is the first step to transforming from an anxious/avoidant partner into a more secure one. It makes us realize how we see love and what kind of love we attract, because, oftentimes, the way we look at love can tell us a lot about what kind of relationships we have with others.
Before asking others for the love we crave, find ways we can express self-love based on love languages.
Self Care
The term “self-care” can sometimes be too broad. Social media reminds us to take baths, read a book, watch shows, and go for walks to “do self-care,” but by taking conscious time to reflect on what self-care really means to us, we teach ourselves to love ourselves first, so we can go on to accept and give love to others (without feeling like we’re wasting our own mental resources and feeling burnt out from caring for others). Love yourself in your own love language.
If you appreciate gifts, retail therapy (within reason!) might be for you. If your love language is words of affirmation, journal goals, a gratitude list, or any prompt that speaks to you. If your love language is touch, try a warm bath or self-massage (or self-hugging which seems silly, but can work in certain contexts!). If you appreciate acts of service, be consistent in your routines. Try meal prepping, and tidying your thinking spaces. That can feel like a treat in and of itself.
By teaching ourselves how we want to be loved, not only are we able to communicate how we want to receive love from others, but we can become more secure because we aren’t dependent on another person showing us love to feel secure. We create that feeling for ourselves.
Healing
Remember that an ACE or a childhood wound does not mean doom for your future.
While this doesn’t directly make us more secure people, realizing we are not set up for failure gives us hope that we will one day find security.
Taking everything into account, reflecting on childhood love and trauma is not an overnight process. Some people go their whole lives without reflecting on or considering that parts of their childhood, whether an actual ACE or not, may contribute to how they treat others, how they handle stressful situations, or any negative habits or health inconveniences they experience. For those of us committed to the journey though, there are an abundance of ways we can self-soothe, heal and recognize our best selves and the strengths we’ve shown through adversity.
Written by Nhatalya Pagtakhan
