Attachment trauma can make it difficult to feel love or trust that we are loveable.
Attachment trauma refers to emotional wounds that occur when a child doesn’t form a secure bond with their primary caregiver, typically during early childhood. This can happen if the caregiver is unavailable, neglectful, or inconsistent in providing love, safety, and emotional support. As a result, the child may grow up feeling insecure, anxious, or unable to trust others. This will inevitably affect our ability to form long term relationships and feel a sense of emotional well being later in life.
A person with attachment trauma often carries a persistent sense of anxiety or shame, lingering in the background of their mind. Mental health professionals often refer to childhood trauma as attachment trauma, which means that, during our formative years, we learned to see the world as unsafe and untrustworthy through repeated painful or frightening experiences. These experiences may include emotional abuse or neglect; meaning being constantly ignored or even abandoned. Other more extreme examples are growing up and experiencing sexual abuse, physical abuse, witnessing domestic violence, religious abuse, or simply living in a constant state of vigilance, always bracing for the next distressing or confusing event. In Complex trauma, traumatic experiences are chronic, and often form a pattern starting early in childhood and will deeply affect how we will respond to others emotionally as we become adults.
Complex psychological trauma also develops from enduring multiple and repeated psychological stressors. Many adults with complex trauma report that the harm they experienced came from those they should have been able to trust the most; such as parents, grandparents, or other caregivers. Years of chronic neglect or abuse often result in feeling disconnected from life, struggling to trust or connect with others, and finding it difficult to set boundaries in a way that keeps us feeling safe or respected. In some cases, it can also lead to a pattern of seeking out relationships with those who continue to misuse or abuse us.
