How Relationships Hurt, and How We Heal

Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.” – Peter Levine.

Getting hurt as we walk on the path of life is natural. But stumbling on the rocky, uneven path that difficult life circumstances create is one kind of pain. The other kind of pain, often a much more bitter and complex one, results when we’re wounded in the relationships with the people we meet along the way and come to trust. These deep wounds are marked by feelings of hurt, betrayal, abandonment, humiliation and feeling uncared for, exploited, disrespected, and controlled. These experiences are referred to as relational trauma or complex trauma because they occur within relationships that we are supposed to be able to trust and rely on, and often occur repeatedly in the same relationships or across multiple relationships. 

The Impact of Childhood Wounds

The earlier in our lives that we suffer these relational injuries, the stronger the impact it can have on our lives, because the immunity that our emotional, cognitive and nervous systems provide is only developing in childhood. Hence, in the face of continuous injuries, our capacity to make meaning of our experiences is limited and escape from these situations is difficult because we are dependent on our primary caregivers emotionally and practically while growing up. Therefore, we develop protective measures to survive in such environments, which may involve walking on eggshells, taking care of others’ emotions and needs and hiding your own, isolating and shutting down so that pain can be numbed, among others.

More about Protective Measures  

Making meaning of painful experiences in relationships is hard, even as adults, especially when a lot of our questions go unanswered. For instance, we may feel uncertain about the intent the other person had behind inflicting the wound, whether it had something to do with our approach towards the relationship, and whether we even mattered enough to them. Moreover, what we’ve gone through can often feel like an exclusive experience, given the general picture of healthy relationships we see around us. 

All of this can make us very cautious as we pick ourselves up and continue treading on the path of life. After being deeply wounded, we, of course, want to take good measures to keep ourselves safe from getting hurt in the same way. This is when protective mechanisms, often driven by fear, regret, shame, and a yearning for safety and predictability, take charge. These can manifest in the form of avoidance of conflict, fear of abandonment, keeping others’ needs before yours, overthinking trust and emotional vulnerability in relationships and hyperindependence. While these measures make us feel safe, they can feel suffocating and restricting at the same time; given that these often keep us from fulfilling our attachment needs of connection, trust and attunement in an attempt to stay safe. Also, not only can these measures be emotionally and mentally exhausting, but they also serve as reminders of how some relationships completely changed the way we travel on the path of life. Which can leave us feeling broken.

Why is Healing Relational Wounds Hard?

Healing these wounds can be a long and challenging process because trust on a lot of levels is broken here- trust in the genuineness of people, relationships and love, trust in our ability to discern danger in relationships, and on an ideological level, trust in the world being a fair place. Being able to process emotions and put things into perspective can be difficult in the time after we’ve been wounded, and long after that too, because we may feel broken, vulnerable and lost at such times, while also grieving the losses we incur as a result of the injuries. Holding on to hope that relationships can look different in the future can also become difficult when the multiple emotional injuries we’ve sustained create around us a web so dense that it blocks out the light. 

Treating the Wounds- Broad Areas to Work On

• Cleaning the wound

  • Identifying the dirt that needs to be cleaned away, i.e. reflecting on the unhelpful ideas about self and relationships that may have developed after the injury. 

  • Identifying the emotions and needs that weren’t validated in the relationship. 

  • Working with guilt and shame associated with these painful relationships through acceptance that any situation results from a chain of events, not just through the choices of one person.  

• Learning to take care of your emotional health

  • Learning to listen to and soothe emotions. Childhood injuries might mean that we never had the chance to learn that emotional attunement, expression, and vulnerability are important and not to be neglected and dismissed as a sign of weakness, as primary attachment figures might do. 

  • Building a survival toolkit of coping skills that you can always access to create safety on an emotional and bodily level that you can always return back to, even as you explore newer relationships, which can feel potentially risky.

• Validating the pain

  • Containing space for natural emotions like shock, anger, hurt and grief and expressing them in a safe space through journaling, art and/or therapy.

• Identifying how your immunity has developed

  • Reviewing how your journey after being wounded has been like, because you will have grown in some ways despite the wounds, be it in terms of your resilience, or your ability to understand emotional and ideological grey areas. The protective mechanisms that developed for survival can also be powerful resources when used in moderation. 

• Creating space for newer skin to develop 

  • After you’ve fairly stabilised from the injury, opening up the doors for relationships where you can practice newer ways of connecting, with more emotional attunement, open and honest communication and reasonable boundary setting. 

  • Honouring the parts of your personality that lie in darkness because the protective parts couldn’t let them out when the goal was to survive. 

Emotional injuries are quite like physical injuries when it comes to healing- it is a slow process, but as you move through it by balancing action and rest, the rigidity and hypersensitivity in the initial stage give way to flexibility and self-assured movements. Working with a counsellor can provide not just a safe therapeutic relationship to start out with, but also the guidance for accessing the tools you’d need along the healing process. 

References

Cloitre M, et al. (2011). Treatment of complex PTSD: Results of the ISTSS expert clinician survey on best practices. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 24(6), 615–627. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.20697 

Courtois, C. A., & Ford, J. D. (2013). Treatment of complex trauma: A sequenced, relationship-based approach. Guilford Press.

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

Hannush, M. J. (2021). Trust: The Capacity to Trust Self and Others. In Markers of Psychosocial Maturation: A Dialectically-Informed Approach (pp. 323-331). Springer International Publishing.

Disclaimer: This blog post is meant for awareness/entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice, and one must refrain from self-diagnosing. It is in no way a substitute for therapy with a mental health professional, and it is not meant to be clinical. To consult with a psychotherapist on our team, you can contact us at fettle.counselling@gmail.com.