Why Relationships and Connection Feel So Hard After Complex Trauma

And you might resonate with some of these statements because this is what the questions were kind of speaking to.

You want someone to actually understand you, and the second that they get close enough to kind of try, there are parts of you that start to build an exit strategy.

You want support so badly that it hurts sometimes, and when someone finally asks if you're okay, the words that come out so fast are, "I'm fine," before you've even decided to say them out loud.

You want closeness, and it's like the moment someone gives you exactly that, you feel yourself pull back before you even know why.

Maybe you're still waiting for the people who hurt you to finally get it, to turn around and say, "You know what? I see what I did.

I'm sorry.

I get it." You've been waiting for a long, long time.

So why does connection, the very thing that we're wired for, the thing that we say we want more than almost anything else, feel so complicated? I'm gonna try to give you an overview today because I think that we could do, like, 100 episodes on this.

[chuckles] So just sit with that question for a minute.

I think we often rush past that and move straight towards trying to fix ourselves in relationships or trying to fix our relationships in general, but you want the thing, and that thing also scares you.

Both are true.

So let's just start with what relationships teach the nervous system.

Before we get into all of it, the receiving, the conflict, the way that you pull back when someone else gets kind of close to you, I wanna talk a little bit about something that's underneath all of that 'cause I don't think that anything really makes sense without this first piece.

Why does any of this happen in the first place? And the answer to that is attachment.

And I know that that word is kind of thrown out a lot on social media, online, in the trauma space.

You've probably heard it, like, 100 times at this point, and you probably have seen quizzes about whether you're anxious or avoidant, and that's actually not where we're gonna go today.

I will talk about attachment really quickly.

It is not like some box that you get sorted into one time, and then you, like, carry this thing around for the rest of your life.

What attachment is is a term for something that's a whole lot bigger.

It's the study of how your earliest relationships taught your nervous system what to expect from closeness itself.

Things like, is it okay to have needs? What happens when I'm upset? Can I count on someone showing up? Does conflict mean this is the end? Can I fully be myself and still belong here? Attachment, it gets built moment by moment in exchanges that you were probably even too young to even remember before you had language to make sense of any of this with your caregivers.

That's attachment.

It's not a label.

It's not a fixed way of being in your life or in your relationships.

It's a prediction that your body built out of real evidence before you had any say in really anything, and then it's reinforced over time.