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A traumatic event is an overwhelming or uncontrollable experience that can happen to anyone at any age. This can include child abuse, domestic violence/partner violence, combat violence, sudden/unexpected loss of a loved one, car accident, sexual abuse/violence, and natural disasters (e.g., hurricane). Trauma can impact your sense of self, your memory and perception, your sense of meaning, relationships, and your physical and emotional well-being. Childhood trauma has a different impact because it occurs during key points of social, emotional, cognitive, and physical growth. When trauma occurs in childhood, the impacts can be more severe and long-lasting because of the impact on your overall development, leading to complex trauma. It often happens in the context of a relationship, when the person who hurts you is also someone who is supposed to take care of you. This type of trauma can affect your ability to trust and get close to others, to regulate your emotions and understand others' emotions, and can lead to long-lasting feelings of shame, self-doubt, insecurity, and high levels of self-criticism. 

The term “attachment” relates to the relationships we have with significant others in our lives, in particular, the relationship between an infant and their primary caregiver and the relationship between romantic partners. There are different ways of being attached: people with mostly positive experiences are securely attached and generally believe that people will be there for them in their distress and that they are worthy of care and comfort; those who experienced relationships with their primary caregivers that caused them to feel insecure about whether they are worthy of care and whether people would be there for them likely become insecurely attached. Childhood trauma may have a significant impact on attachment. The earlier in your life the trauma happens and the closer the relationship with your abuser, the more significant the impact of the trauma is on your attachment security- potentially leading to experiences of insecurity in future relationships

Emotions serve an important purpose: they give us information about situations, ourselves, and others, and they help us decide what to do in our lives and our relationships. For survivors of childhood trauma, feelings can sometimes feel dangerous, out of control, or confusing. Survivors can have difficulty naming, understanding and tolerating their feelings, and can feel overwhelmed and frightened, which can impact their relationships. Emotion regulation involves developing ways to be aware of emotions and what they are trying to tell us, to express emotions in positive ways, to increase the ability to tolerate unpleasant emotions, to cope with stress effectively and in positive ways, and to behave effectively to match our values and reach our goals in stressful situations. Finding ways to manage those feelings allows us to feel strong, capable, and safe.

Mentalizing is the mental activity involved in how we perceive and understand others and ourselves. It is the process of making sense of others and ourselves through understanding the states and mental processes that can be seen and heard, and those that are more hidden or subtle. It is a skill developed throughout infancy and childhood through relationships with primary and close caregivers, but can also be developed in adulthood with practice. Caregivers who are responsive and make an effort to understand your needs and distress will help you develop the capacity to mentalize. In these early caring relationships, caregivers show you through their responses to your needs that you are important and understandable; and, in turn, you learn to understand the caregiver through their vocal tone, facial expressions, ways of communicating with you, and how they help you to regulate your emotions.  Through this, the child learns that their feelings, thoughts, and even they themselves are okay and understandable. When you learn how to mentalize well, you can then think about, reflect on, hold, and explore emotions, thoughts, and mental states. Strong mentalizing capacities are fundamental to a person’s ability to have positive relationships and manage in social environments.

Many couples who come to couple therapy say that they have the same argument over and over again and continuously get stuck in a pattern or negative cycle. When partners are feeling angry, discouraged, and hurt, they can often turn to “secondary emotions” as a way of protecting themselves from further hurt. For example, instead of showing our partner how hurt and sad we feel, we may lash out in anger (in this case, anger=secondary emotion and hurt and sadness= primary emotions). In response, our partner may simply withdraw from our angry or critical approach, and these types of interactions lead the couple into a repetitive cycle of hide-and-seek, where one partner is longing for connection and the other is running. In couples where there is a history of trauma, shame and fear about connection can be a big factor in this negative interaction cycle. Often, how one partner responds to a distressing interaction results in an almost opposite response from their partner, such as: I seek you out and you move away from me. Frequently, the response is exactly the opposite to what we feel we need at that moment and, often, we end up feeling more hurt and alone than we did before the interaction.

The dyadic traumatic reenactment helps to externalize the trauma as a force that you and your partner are fighting together, a force that makes it very difficult to shift out of repetitive patterns/ negative cycles. It is very difficult to make the shift from insight and understanding to real change when the thing we are trying to change is not something we are even aware of. For many couples, this powerful pull of unprocessed trauma happens because the trauma has not been “symbolized”, or made conscious and put into words. Being able to think and know our traumas, not just the details, but the feelings and sensations of those deeply embedded experiences, allows someone to talk about their traumas as a part of their life story and to really “get” how these traumas have impacted their relationships. We have to find ways to bring those stuck traumas into our minds and bodies so they can be talked about and explored. This can be a real challenge because it involves paying attention to the ways in which we “find” the trauma being relived in our couple relationship; these can be hard and painful. However, your therapist will help you learn to pay attention to these parts of the cycle so you can start to really pull those stuck traumatic relivings out of your cycle and begin to build a new relationship where your interactions with your partner are not based on reliving traumas from the past.