Attachment trauma refers to experiences with our early childhood caregivers that affect a person's sense of safety, trust, connection, or ability to depend on others.

Our early caregivers help us learn, through repeated experiences, whether the world feels safe, whether other people can be trusted, whether our needs matter, and whether we can turn to someone when we are overwhelmed. When those relationships are consistently unsafe, either physically or emotionally, it can affect the way we relate to ourselves and others later in life.

Attachment trauma can result from experiences such as abuse, neglect, inconsistent caregiving, frequent conflict, parental mental health or substance use difficulties, separation, or having to take on responsibilities that were not appropriate for a child. It can also develop when emotions, needs, or experiences are repeatedly dismissed, minimized, or invalidated.

Attachment trauma doesn't necessarily mean that a parent was intentionally harmful; however, the impact is the same.

Relational trauma refers to the lasting effects of painful or unsafe experiences that occur within important relationships. It can include experiences such as betrayal, rejection, chronic criticism, emotional neglect, manipulation, abandonment, abuse, or repeated invalidation.

Relational trauma can happen during childhood or adulthood. It may involve one particularly significant relationship or a pattern that occurs across multiple relationships.

The terms overlap, but they aren't exactly the same.

Attachment trauma generally refers to trauma or significant relational disruption involving the relationships that shape our early attachment and sense of safety, usually with primary caregivers during childhood. It is a form of relational trauma.

Relational trauma is a broader term. It can include painful or traumatic experiences in childhood relationships as well as later relationships with romantic partners, family members, friends, or other important people.

Yes.

Abuse is one possible source of relational trauma, but it isn't the only one.

Relational trauma can develop when important relationships repeatedly involve experiences such as emotional unavailability, rejection, chronic criticism, invalidation, unpredictability, betrayal, abandonment, or having to take care of someone else's emotional needs.

Absolutely.

Many people minimize their childhood experiences because they compare them to more obvious forms of trauma. You may think, “My parents loved me,” “I had food and a roof over my head,” or “Other people had it much worse.”

Certain experiences can leave a lasting impact even if you might not label your childhood as terrible. Recognizing the impact doesn't require blaming your parents or deciding that they were bad people. It simply means making room to understand how your experiences may have shaped you.

Our early relationships can influence the expectations and strategies we bring into relationships later in life.

For example, if you learned that other people's moods could change quickly, you may become highly attentive to signs that someone is upset. If you learned that your needs were inconvenient, you may have difficulty asking for help. If you experienced rejection when you expressed yourself, vulnerability may feel risky.

These patterns can show up in adult relationships as people-pleasing, difficulty setting boundaries, fear of abandonment, lashing out, difficulty trusting, withdrawing during conflict, over-functioning, or becoming highly sensitive to changes in another person's mood.

Children often make sense of their experiences by making conclusions about themselves.

If your needs were consistently dismissed, you might learn, “My needs don't matter.”

If you were frequently criticized, you might learn, “I'm not good enough.”

If you had to take care of everyone else, you might learn, “My value comes from being useful.”

If love or approval felt unpredictable, you might learn, “I have to be good enough, helpful enough, or easy enough to keep people happy.”

These beliefs can become so familiar that they feel like facts rather than conclusions you developed in response to your experiences.

Parentification occurs when a child takes on responsibilities that are developmentally inappropriate or that would typically belong to an adult.

There are different forms of parentification. A child might take on practical responsibilities, such as caring for younger siblings or managing household tasks beyond what would be reasonable for their age. Or they may become responsible for a parent's emotional needs—comforting a parent, managing their emotions, mediating family conflict, or feeling responsible for keeping the family functioning.

Children can certainly have responsibilities and help their families without being parentified. The concern arises when a child consistently carries responsibilities that exceed what is appropriate for their developmental stage or feels responsible for an adult's emotional wellbeing.

People who were parentified often become extremely capable and responsible adults. Those qualities can be strengths, but they can also become exhausting when they feel like the only way to function or maintain relationships.

Parentification can show up in adulthood as:

• Feeling responsible for everyone else's emotions

• Automatically taking care of other people's needs

• Difficulty asking for or accepting help

• Feeling guilty when resting or prioritizing yourself

• Difficulty identifying what you actually want or need

• People-pleasing

• Perfectionism

• Over-functioning in relationships

• Taking responsibility for problems that aren't yours to solve

• Difficulty setting or maintaining boundaries

• Feeling uncomfortable when someone takes care of you

• Feeling like you always have to be the strong one

You may have learned very early that being needed was important for maintaining connection. As an adult, it can take time to learn that relationships don't have to depend on constantly taking care of everyone else.

Childhood emotional neglect occurs when a child's emotional needs are consistently overlooked, dismissed, invalidated or inadequately responded to.

A child may have their physical needs met and still experience emotional neglect. They may have food, clothing, shelter, education, and opportunities while receiving little support in understanding and expressing emotions, seeking comfort, developing a sense of self, or feeling emotionally seen.

Because emotional neglect is often about what was missing rather than what happened, it can be difficult to recognize.

Yes.

A parent can love their child deeply and still have difficulty providing consistent emotional attunement.

Two things can be true at the same time: your caregivers may have loved you, and some of your emotional needs may not have been consistently met.

Sometimes, the person or people who hurt us weren't intentionally trying to cause harm. A parent may have loved their child deeply while still being unable to consistently provide the emotional support, attunement, or stability the child needed.

The absence of intentional harm doesn't necessarily mean there was no impact.

When children don't consistently receive help understanding and responding to their emotions, they may have difficulty developing a clear sense of their own emotional needs.

As adults, this can look like:

• Difficulty identifying or expressing emotions

• Feeling disconnected from your own needs

• Difficulty asking for help

• Feeling uncomfortable depending on others

• Minimizing your own feelings or experiences

• Believing your problems aren't important enough to talk about

• Feeling responsible for other people's emotions

• Challenges with setting and maintaining boundaries

• Feeling emotionally numb or disconnected

• Struggling to know what you want

• Feeling like you should be able to handle everything on your own

These patterns can be confusing, particularly when you don't remember a childhood that seemed obviously traumatic. Therapy can help you explore these experiences without requiring you to label your family or childhood in a particular way.

Emotional dysregulation means having difficulty managing or responding to emotions in ways that feel effective and consistent with your values.

Everyone becomes overwhelmed sometimes. Emotional regulation doesn't mean staying calm all the time or getting rid of difficult emotions. Sometimes it means learning to identify and manage emotions so they don’t feel like they control your life.

For some people, emotional dysregulation can look like emotions that become very intense very quickly. When the emotional intensity becomes too overwhelming, it can be difficult to bring it back down. For others, it may look more like shutting down, becoming numb, disconnecting, or having difficulty identifying what they're feeling in the first place.

You might notice that you:

• Become overwhelmed by emotions

• Have difficulty calming down once upset

• React more strongly than you would like

• Shut down during conflict

• Feel flooded by anxiety, anger, sadness, or shame

• Have difficulty knowing what you're feeling until you're already overwhelmed

• Feel ashamed or critical of yourself after an emotional reaction

Trauma can affect the ways we learn to respond to stress, relationships, and perceived threats.

When a person experiences repeated stress or feels unsafe in important relationships, they may develop ways of responding that helped them cope at the time. Those responses can become automatic over time.

As an adult, the original situation may no longer be happening, but your mind and body may still respond as though the same kind of threat is present.

This doesn't mean that your reactions are irrational or that something is wrong with you. They may be protective patterns that developed for understandable reasons and are now creating problems in situations where they are no longer necessary.

Because insight and change aren't always the same thing. Sometimes you can identify the problem, but you have no idea how to go about fixing it.

You can understand exactly where a pattern came from and still find yourself repeating it. Knowing that you learned to people-please in childhood, for example, doesn't automatically make it feel safe to disappoint someone. Understanding that you shut down during conflict doesn't necessarily make it possible to stay present the next time an argument happens.

Many relational patterns were learned through repeated experiences, not through conscious decisions. They can become automatic ways of protecting yourself, maintaining connection, or managing difficult emotions. The “thinking” or “knowing” parts of the brain are separate from the “feeling” parts of the brain. Awareness and insight is not always enough to change the automatic responses of the feeling parts.

Understanding is important, but sometimes therapy needs to go beyond insight and resolve the way the nervous system responds to certain triggers. 

EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is an evidence-based treatment that treats symptoms of trauma through bilateral stimulation of the brain, such as eye movements or tactile stimulation. EMDR can access parts of the brain that are not always accessible through traditional talk therapy, like the survival centers that influence automatic emotional responses. By activating these systems and reprocessing traumatic memories, our brains and bodies learn that the memory is in the past and can feel safe again in the present. When we feel safe, we can finally let go of old, protective patterns and create new, healthier ones. 

The science of EMDR can be hard to understand, but your clinician will spend time making sure that you understand the procedures and feel comfortable and secure with the process. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have questions or want to learn more!

While standard EMDR is an evidence-based and highly effective treatment, we have found that clients with complex, relational trauma can sometimes become stuck using the standard EMDR procedure. Most clients with complex trauma histories have developed protective mechanisms that can prevent them from accessing particularly painful subject matter. Our clinicians have learned to incorporate other modalities like attachment-focused EMDR and Internal Family Systems into the process to help move through these blocks and resolve trauma responses.