In recent years the word “trauma” has entered our everyday language. We talk about traumatic experiences, traumatised people and traumatic childhoods, both among ourselves and on social media. When we hear such terms, our minds usually go automatically to a loss, some form of abuse, or an accident.
Trauma, however, is far more common than we imagine. People often think “my parents didn’t hit me, so I don’t have trauma”, or “they gave me everything and I lacked for nothing”, referring mainly to material things. But where does the truth lie? Beyond the more recognisable forms of trauma that involve a specific event — an accident, an assault, a loss — or a prolonged traumatic condition such as abuse and neglect, there is a different, more imperceptible story: relational trauma.
In relational trauma there may be no clearly defined event that we can narrate as “that day when…”. It is formed silently, imperceptibly, gradually and daily within a relationship and in the way that relationship was repeatedly experienced — above all in the first years of life, when the brain and nervous system are still forming and maturing.
It concerns both what happened when it should not have, and what did not happen when it needed to. The comfort and the embraces that were not given, the emotional presence and recognition that were missing, or the safety that was not offered to the child steadily and consistently. The non-meeting of needs that are essential to human development falls just as much within the field of trauma as abuse and violence do. Contemporary psychotraumatology shows that the chronic absence of basic developmental needs can deeply affect the organisation of the self and of the nervous system, even where there is no evident abuse or violence. A child gradually learns not only what the world is, but also what they believe they are entitled to be within relationships. This may have happened deliberately or through neglect, because of parents’ incapacity owing to mental illness, physical illness or other cognitive impairment.
Very often, people find it hard to recognise this form of trauma because they think “my parents didn’t hit me”, or “there are people who had it far worse”. And indeed, parents may have done everything they could within their own limits, their own difficulties or their own traumas. But this does not necessarily cancel out the existence of emotional deprivation. In psychotherapy we need to learn to bear two truths that can hold at the same time: that our parents may have loved us and at the same time were unable to care for us emotionally in the way we needed.
One of the hardest patterns of relational trauma to recognise is parentification. This is a process in which a child prematurely takes on caregiving roles, both emotional and practical, that exceed their developmental capacities. Instead of being able to lean on an adult, the child becomes the one who supports.
So the child begins to learn that other people’s needs are more important than their own. They develop heightened sensitivity to the emotional state of those around them, responsibility beyond their years, difficulty resting, perfectionism and intense anxiety about not being a burden to others.
I think of the experience of a client who, as a child, would go and calm her mother down after an argument and restore the relationship. In this way she gradually learned to take on the burden of emotional repair — a function that belongs to the parent.
As an adult, in therapy, she showed excessive care not to tire me or burden me. She apologised often, made sure never to go a minute over the session time, and struggled to allow herself to have needs. She had learned very early that love and acceptance come through adapting and caring for the other person.
Many people with relational trauma appear outwardly to be highly functioning. They are responsible, reliable, productive. They rarely ask for help. Often their very high functioning becomes the obstacle that prevents them from recognising their pain.
They come to therapy saying “I don’t have a real reason to be here”, “Other people have been through much worse”, or “I should be able to manage on my own”.
Beneath this constant adequacy, however, there is often a nervous system that never really learned to rest, or a child who was not allowed enough to be a child. And so they grew into an adult who struggles to feel safe when not doing something productive, who feels guilty when they need care, and who experiences a deep loneliness within relationships, as though no one really knows them.
Difficulty resting, the sense that you must constantly be over-functioning, the anxiety that arises when doing nothing — these are often not simply personality traits. They may be the imprint of a childhood in which there was not enough room for spontaneity, play, dependence, carefreeness and emotional safety.
Often, what we experience today as “our own voice” was not really born inside us. It is the internalised experience of how the significant people in our lives looked at us, spoke to us, or made us feel. Research shows that early relational trauma can deeply affect the way the sense of self is organised and the beliefs we carry about ourselves (Chiu et al., 2019).
A young child’s brain cannot yet fully separate “what I am” from “what someone else tells me I am”. So the repeated messages of the environment are gradually inscribed as personal truths about the self.
“I don’t deserve care”, “If I show need, they will move away”, or “I have to manage on my own” are often not innate truths. They are relational lessons that once helped a child adapt to their environment.
And perhaps one of the most therapeutic points in psychotherapy is precisely that moment of recognition: when a person begins to perceive that the harsh inner voice inside them is not necessarily the voice of their truth, but messages from old relationships that were internalised.
Relational trauma is often hard to recognise because it is not always stored as a narrative or as a “memory”. Its foundations are frequently laid before the capacity for verbal memory has even developed. A child may not remember in words, but may remember bodily the tension, the absence of safety, the need for constant adaptation, or the dread of rejection.
Some of the most common features of relational trauma are: the absence of emotional responsiveness and mirroring; the non-validation of the child’s feelings; the parents’ difficulty in bearing the child’s sadness, anger or vulnerability; the lack of secure connection and of repair after conflict; the sense of having had to grow up too quickly; and the experience that love is tied to adapting rather than to authentic existence.
Very often, at the beginning of therapy, people say: “My parents were good people.” “I lacked for nothing.” “All families are like that.”
And these statements may be true. At the same time, there may also be a person who learned not to express themselves, not to trust, not to need, to be always braced for the worst.
Recognising relational trauma is not about demonising parents or cancelling out the love that existed. It is about allowing a person to see their own history with more truth and more compassion. To understand that many of their difficulties today are not “character flaws”, but adaptations of a nervous system that once tried to survive within relationships.
And perhaps, in the end, this is one of the deepest meanings of therapy: that someone can exist, for the first time, within a relationship where they do not have to hide their needs in order to be loved or accepted. To discover that they can be whole — not only functional, useful or strong.
References:
Chiu, C.-D., Ho, H. L., Tollenaar, M. S., Elzinga, B. M., & Zhang, T. (2019). Early relational trauma and self representations: Misattributing externally derived representations as internally generated. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 11(1), 64–72. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000369
