How Childhood Trauma Rewrites Adult Relationships

Contact Amy; amywatsonauthor@gmail.com 

Some of the most “normal” habits in adulthood are actually old survival skills. When childhood trauma or adverse childhood experiences shape the brain, kids learn protective behaviors that secure connection with caregivers, even if the connection is unsafe. Years later, those same patterns can show up as people pleasing, perfectionism, overgiving, or sabotaging closeness and they can quietly erode marriages, friendships, and family bonds.

We respond to a listener who is living with someone with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (complex PTSD or CPTSD) and feels worn down and out of options. We break down why education matters for both survivors and the people who love them, using a clear definition of trauma rooted in compromised safety and lost choice. We also talk through the ACEs framework and how the adverse childhood experiences quiz can help survivors finally name their pain, reduce shame, and build self-compassion without dodging responsibility.

From there, we get practical. We dig into people pleasing as a fear of separation, why “yes” can be automatic, and how honest conversations and a safe inner circle make it possible to say no without panic. We also unpack perfectionism, why it often brings external success, and how it can damage intimacy by turning love into a performance review. The bottom line is hard but hopeful: your trauma may not be your fault, but healing is your choice and real change is possible with support.

If this resonates, share it with someone you love, subscribe so you do not miss the next conversation, and leave a review to help more survivors and loved ones find hope and help.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Hey everybody, and welcome back to the Wednesdays with Watson podcast. My name is Dr. Amy Watson, and I am your host. It is May of 2026, and it is Mental Health Awareness Month. We are coming off of Child Abuse Awareness Month. And so today's episode is one that I just got behind the microphone and chatted with you about the protective behaviors that children learn to protect themselves in the presence of childhood trauma, how that carries into adulthood and has the potential to fracture relationships. This episode was kind of inspired by a listener who reached out to me who said that he was living with someone with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and was pretty much at the end of their rope trying to figure out living life with someone who had experienced a fair amount of trauma in childhood. You are saints if you live with us. You are the hands and feet of Jesus if you love us. And so I hope this episode will help you understand a few of the protective behaviors that serve to disconnect us in adulthood, that those of us with a history of childhood trauma learned connected us to those who are supposed to protect us. And so this episode is filled with information, hope, and help, and I hope that you find it something that you can take away and help someone you love, or if it's you, you already know that we're here for it. We're here to help. And so you can reach me by clicking on the link in the contact notes, and I will reach out. Uh, let's drop into this episode about protective childhood behaviors. Recently, I received a message from a podcast listener requesting a special episode addressed to people who live with or love somebody with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. His message highlighted the importance of education related to complex trauma for both survivors and for those who love us. Not all people living with CPTSD have a history of childhood trauma, but those who do may struggle relationally because of learn coping mechanisms that serve to connect caregivers in childhood. For example, maybe you needed to be perfect to connect with your caregiver. Maybe if you appeased at all times, people pleasing, maybe if you overgave, those are those kinds of behaviors that attach us to our caregivers. We learn, our brain adapts and learns, and those are sometimes things that play out later in life. And perfectionism is one of those for me because I got my mom's attention when I did really, really well in school. And so unfortunately, that is a protective factor that I have taken on in life, and maybe you have too. People pleasing is the other, overgiving, sabotaging, and there are many more. Because you see, our very first venture in life is connecting to our caregivers. So it's important for us to understand that children are going to adopt and repeat behaviors that they perceive connects them to those caregivers. And so I did well in school. I got attention from my mom when I was perfect, and so it was kind of a rinse and repeat thing. Such behaviors can and often do cause relational issues in adulthood, as many survivors of childhood trauma do not recognize their behaviors as really abnormal. They know that it worked for them in childhood. They don't even have the conscious thought that this behavior connected me to my caregiver. Therefore, I'm gonna keep acting like that or I'm not gonna act like that. Unless it's pointed out, many people don't know that they have these protective behaviors that are connected to trauma and loss in childhood. And remember, our working definition of trauma is that your safety was compromised, or somebody you love's safety was compromised, and choice was taken, as Judith Herman calls trauma the affliction of the powerless. Many times these relational issues that we're talking about are explained by attachment styles to include the three different types, which are secure attachment, insecure attachment, and anxious attachment. But rarely are relational issues in adulthood connected to these learned behaviors that are related to trauma in childhood. Those of us with a history of childhood trauma may lose adult relationships because those behaviors that connected us to caregivers in childhood are ineffective in adult relationships. My friend Lauren Starnes explained it like this Behaviors that serve to connect you in childhood serve to disconnect you in adulthood. Perhaps this is the saddest part of childhood trauma, is that its potential to affect people across their lifespan. Suffering often continues into adulthood, and it gets played out in these fractured and these lost relationships, right? Nobody is at fault really when you kind of drill it down. Usually loved ones, especially a spouse, are operating with a knowledge deficit as it pertains to how childhood trauma affects us in adulthood. And so knowledge is powerful in understanding how those of us with childhood trauma are affected. And when we understand it, we have the potential for those of us, those people that have uh people with a history of childhood trauma in their lives, we have the potential to help them, right? We have the potential to help them understand some of these behaviors that connected them to their caregivers that are not working for them in adulthood. Trauma survivors, though, here is the kind of nugget here is trauma survivors are not without responsibility. Your trauma may not be your fault, but healing is your choice. And that is a hard, hard truth. And I'm and it's not coming from somebody who doesn't know the pain of healing from childhood trauma. But one of the things I think that has helped me in my healing journey is that I've tried to really understand what having my safety and my choice taken from me over and over in childhood, trying to understand that it literally changed my brain and that I'm not a less than person because of it, but that I've got some work to do because it did in fact change the physical nature of my brain, how it works, and those behaviors that serve to connect me to my caregiver in childhood are now still hurting me. So as an adult survivor, I can, you can choose to learn and then alter that in a ineffective coping. We can choose power, we can choose change. We have a choice now. We didn't before, we do now. The work is hard, but it is worth it. It is so worth it. One of my favorite quotes is by Maya Angelou who said, When you know better, you do better. And so I'm trying to help you know better. Perhaps one of the most liberating experiences as a survivor of an abusive childhood came when I began to understand, like I mentioned a minute ago, childhood trauma. It wasn't until I began advocating for survivors that I learned about something called adverse childhood experiences. And Laura and I have mentioned this in a couple episodes prior to this, and I will put it in the show notes as well. I felt validated when I understood those, and suddenly I was able to extend an important thing for healing here. I want to say, is I was able to extend grace and compassion for myself and for my behaviors that served to hurt the people that I loved. I understood that given my experiences with abuse and neglect, I was simply doing the best I could with these behaviors that I had created in childhood to survive and to connect. These are parts of me, there were parts of me that wasn't convinced even that I had an abusive childhood, believe it or not. That's insane to me when I think about that. But but learning about adverse childhood experiences altered my life and it gave my name a pain. And so I want to help you understand it too. And I will put the link to the adverse childhood experiences quiz in the show notes. But adverse childhood experiences is measured by a questionnaire, 10 questions, that probes for abuse, and that abuse being emotional, sexual, or physical, and or neglect, emotional neglect, physical neglect. Also included are separation factors where the child is separated from the parent. So if there's a mental illness in the home that resulted in hospitalization or complete suicide, that is one, substance abuse in the home, family members going to prison. All of those, these 10 questions, probes for these adverse childhood experiences, called adverse because they don't affect children in a good way, right? And so the ACE questionnaire was actually developed by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control in the 1990s. It's interesting because it started by uh it was a study on patients that dropped out of the weight loss study, and they were trying to figure out why they these people were dropping out of the weight loss study. And as they investigated more, they found the connection between childhood trauma and physical manifestations that caused the participants to drop out of the study. And so that's how it started, and it turned into this whole study on adverse childhood experiences. Many survivors of childhood trauma are also high utilizers of the healthcare system. That's a study published by Hargraves and others in 2019, because these adverse childhood experiences do adversely affect health, right? And because of that, because we know that this adverse childhood experience study can help you understand and name your pain as well as your behavior, but it does give us a foundational understanding of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. In the meantime, though, an understanding of maladaptive behaviors that present to survivors of childhood trauma could support us and could support you. Those that have a history of adverse childhood experiences need social support, but unfortunately, as I've mentioned a couple times now, that these behaviors that we have that we created in childhood to connect us to our childhood or our caregivers disconnect us from people now. And until survivors recognize these behaviors, they cannot address them. And so that's what I'm hoping to do today. After many fractured relationships in my own life, I realized I had some work to do, including learning to change the ways that I connected to people. For me, two prominent behaviors cause irreparable fractures in important relationships. Those are people pleasing and perfectionism. And let me tell you how that looks for me practically. When somebody asked me, hey, do you want to go to dinner? Sure, I want to go to dinner because it always sounds like a good idea at the time. But instead of saying to them, Oh, I don't know that I can do that, I oftentimes, for about the first 25 years of this, just canceled on people. And that hurt a lot of people. And it turned a lot of people, they created boundaries and they're no longer friends with me because I could have this inability to say no to them. I had this, I was steeped in people pleasing. And so I've learned now, though, that what really connects me to people, and I said this to my best friend yesterday, I said, I don't cancel on you anymore because you make it safe to do so, right? And so I still struggle with keeping plans because by the time something happens, I've got physical issues and all kinds of things that sometimes I need to cancel. And so what I did was I had some candid conversations with people I love, and I explained this to them. And the people that are still in my life got that, and they're like, okay. And so I don't cancel on most people now because they make it safe to do so, but I they also make it safe to say no. And the second one is perfectionism for me, and that has played itself out in success that the world gives me, right? If you're a perfectionist, it means you work hard, means you're probably pretty successful. And so the problem with perfectionism is yes, it connected me to caregivers, but the other thing is it I still hold myself to a perfect standard now, and I hold other people to a perfect standard, and a perfect standard doesn't exist. And so people pleasing and perfectionism are the two that I brought from childhood because those are the things that connected me to my caregiver. People pleasing can manifest itself in many ways, but like I mentioned it to you, the most, maybe the most prominent is the inability to say no to people. Because you see, the other part of that is when you're amenable, you're easy to be around as a child, that kept me safe and it connected me with my caregivers. And I learned early to always agree to anything if I was being asked and to never provide resistance. While this did connect me to my mom in childhood and adulthood, it is sort of to separate me from people, as I just mentioned to you. And so now my standard is let me get back to you because I know that I almost always do not want to go with that said plan. And so taking a moment to think allows me to choose to respect the time and energy of my friends and family while also giving me the choice to make the decision based on my inner personal personal factors like time and energy and even wanting to go. Both can be true, I have learned. I can respect their time and energy and I can choose to say no without fear of separation from them. Because you see, that's what taught me to not to say no is that I had the fear of separation. The key to recovering from people pleasing is to choose wisely who you allow in that inner circle. Who you allow in that inner circle needs to be a safe place for you to say no. I'm gonna say that again. Who you allow in that inner circle needs to be a safe place for you to say no. Like I said to my best friend yesterday, I don't cancel on you anymore because you make it safe to do so. You need to be careful as an adult survivor of childhood abuse, about anyone whose presence in your life depends on how many times your will is bent to theirs. Be careful about anyone whose presence in your life depends on how many times your will is bent to theirs. For those living with a spouse, it is important to invite them along on your healing journey. And if people pleasing is a behavior that you use to connect to others, consider having honest conversations with those in your circle like I did. Recruit them to help you. Tell them that you need them to stay connected to you, even if you don't accept their dinner plans. For those of you who love the people pleasers, don't hesitate to go deeper when making plans or submitting a request to them. Their default, my default, may always be to make myself amenable to you. But when the people pleaser behavior is present, gently guide them back to connection with you and that that connection is not based on whether you are pleased with them. It's what we call unconditional love. Give it to those of us who never had it. For me, I still struggle with people pleasing, but I have a solid core of people that remind me that their connection to me has nothing to do with my performance, but who I am as a human being. Those relationships have served to heal me more than anything I have learned in a classroom or a counselor's office. These people that I'm talking about exist, I promise you. The opposite is true, though. Be careful about keeping people in your life where their connection to you is dependent on your performance. Sometimes this means separating from family members, and that is brutal. But sometimes necessary for your healing. Ask me how I know that. It's not my favorite. I do not advocate separating from family members, but sometimes it just happens. The second one that I mentioned to you that I struggled with is perfectionism as a common maladaptive coping mechanism that is a result of childhood trauma. We saw that in the study of Smith and others in 2019. This maladaptive coping mechanism, often adopted in childhood, is particularly difficult because perfectionism can equate to vocational and economic successes, as I mentioned. However, perfectionism can also cause issues in adult relationships because the perfectionist, me, also holds other people to perfect standards. The perfectionist can be judgmental of others, particularly when others don't meet perfect standards. I learned that perfect grades connected me to my mom, as I mentioned. Something that I deeply desired was that connection. And as long as I can remember, I never accepted less than a hundred percent in my academic pursuits. This became painfully clear to me when I submitted my dissertation to my chair. I recorded a whole podcast episode on that. When she provided a minor, and guys, it was minor revision request. I was unable to accept the revisions as minor and deemed the entire document 245 pages a complete failure. During a subsequent counseling session, I realized that it was never about being perfect. It was about being securely attached to my dissertation chair, who I highly respected. It was a valuable lesson for me and one that I am still learning. I am learning that I am not perfect, and I am learning that my friends and family are not perfect. I am learning that we grow together and that life is messy and the mistakes will be made. But those imperfections have nothing to do with my value as a human at all. Perfectionism may have served its purpose in childhood for me, but it will destroy your and my ability to maintain strong relationships in adulthood. Learning to accept imperfections may always be a struggle, but I am grateful for supportive people around me who remind me that I am valuable even if I never accomplished a single thing in my life. Did you know that when Jesus got baptized and the father said, This is my beloved son, and whom I am well pleased, had not done a single miracle. And the father said he was pleased. You are valuable, but you are not connected to what you do. You do not need to be perfect to be loved. You just need you to be loved. For those of you who love survivors of adverse childhood experiences, we need you to extend care and compassion, and maybe even congratulations when we stop trying to be perfect for you to accept us. Keep reminding us that you love us because we are imperfectly a human being. So, survivor, you can rest now. You are accepted. Loved ones, it is important that you help us too. Don't give up. Keep fighting for us. Remember, nobody did that for us when we were at our most vulnerable. What is the best news? The best news, as always, on this podcast is there is hope, there is help, there are armies of people who want to stand in the gap for you. I am honored to be one of them. I will put in the show notes how you can reach me if you would like to do some one-on-one work with me because I would love to help you step into who you are as a human being and not be defined by your trauma. If you are listening to this podcast because somebody you love has been through adverse childhood experiences or childhood trauma, I have only mentioned two things in this podcast that can be a result, adult behavior of adverse childhood experiences. I've shared with you my two. They are perfectionism and people pleasing. But it is likely if you are married, you live with, you love, you're related to, you're friends with, somebody has been through childhood trauma, there is a behavior that serves to disrupt relationship with you that is connected to what they learned to be for their caregivers, the people that were supposed to take care of them. And so there are definitely people out there, and I am one of them, and again, I'll put a link in the show notes of how you can get a hold of me that can help you work through this as somebody who loves a survivor of childhood trauma. Here's the hard truth though. Sometimes, if the survivor is unable to find a way to navigating some of these behaviors and doing the work that is necessary to even understand, then unfortunately there may be fractures in relationships, and that perhaps is the saddest part of childhood trauma. But it is our reality, it has been my reality, and I am grateful that somebody got to me and helped me understand that my inability to say no and that my perfectionist self was serving to. To hurt people. And once I realized that, and I think this will be true about the survivor that you live with too, they don't want that. And so I strongly encourage you to reach out to a professional that can help you navigate living and loving somebody with a history of childhood trauma and who have who may have a complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I hope this episode was helpful to you. We will be back here in two weeks. And as always, you know what I'm gonna say, that you are seen, that you are known, that you are heard, that you are loved, and you are so so valued. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

You have a voice. Don't let them shut you down. Don't let them shut you down. Do you feel the ache inside your soul? You know you'll never make it on your own. Sorrow is too great for you to hold it, you're gonna break.