Stress, quarrels, conflicts
3 relationship problems that have their roots in childhood
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There are four people involved in every love relationship: two adults and two inner children. Why we must learn to heal childhood wounds if we are to be happy together.
You manipulate your loved ones with passive-aggressive behavior, you scold or nag about trivial little things, are often dissatisfied, but cannot clearly state what is actually missing in the relationship? Or do you experience a similar behavior with your partner? Then there’s a pretty good chance that the unmet needs of your respective childhoods will start destroying your relationship.
When your wounds don’t heal, you bleed on people who never hurt you. (anonymous)
The most common relationship problems are caused by hurt parts of our personality that have their roots in childhood. How well a relationship works therefore depends heavily on how well we are able to accept, comfort and heal our inner children. Because when the hurt inner child that has been longing in vain to be seen starts screaming in adult life, the relationship is damaged.
Unfortunately, children’s injuries unleash their destructive power in ways that the adult self often fails to understand. Nevertheless, it is our responsibility as adults to heal our inner child, no matter what we have experienced and been through. Because when we enter a relationship from a place of pain, lack, and anguish, we harm ourselves and our counterpart.
Therefore, we must learn to understand what hurts us and why. We need to know what it takes to heal. And we need to be able to see people for who they are so we can choose those who can join us on our journey to healing.
The childhood
We all have emotional, physical and spiritual needs. If they are nursed in childhood, we grow up as secure beings who are in touch with our feelings and can also communicate them; we are also able to regulate our emotions. When our needs aren’t met, we become insecure, dependent, and anxious people who have little knowledge, communication, and emotion regulation of our desires.
Three typical behaviors of people in relationships who haven’t healed their inner child:
- Binding Issues: People with attachment issues are so insecure that they need the constant presence and dependable attention of their partner to feel secure. Others prefer to avoid intimacy because they find the demands of a relationship overwhelming. Both ways of dealing with it are problematic – and the poles of the same spectrum.
- Communication problems: We criticize, blame or block – all we want is that our needs are met. With such behaviors, the hurt inner child is crying out for the love and care it has been craving in vain. It also shows our inability to say clearly what we want because we never learned how to do it.
- Emotional regulation disorders: A child doesn’t know how to comfort themselves and needs someone to do it for them. When this person is absent from childhood, the child grows up insecure and frightened because the emotions are too big for the child to regulate themselves. This experience later makes it difficult for adults to regulate their own emotions. Therefore, when we find ourselves in threatening or overwhelming situations, we fall back into childish patterns: we become demanding and loud, or we act passive-aggressively to get our needs met. But with that we push our counterpart away from us – and we are alone again with our difficult emotions. A vicious circle.
Only when we heal our inner child by showing love and tenderness to them can we allow someone else to do the same. Then our relationship has a realistic chance of becoming fulfilling and happy.