5 Familiar Experiences When You Come From A Relational Trauma Background.

Mental Health & Wellness • May 16, 2021

And this is such a privilege.

It’s a privilege, not only because my clients trust me so much and allow me to be with them in their vulnerability, but also because in the last ten years of this work, I can now see how common certain thoughts and patterns are for individuals who come from relational trauma backgrounds.

Witnessing story after story, hearing thought after thought has shown me how common and natural certain thoughts and experiences are for my clients. 

And with knowledge of how common certain thoughts and patterns are, I can, when appropriate, share what I know to help others feel better.

Of course, what I share is always confidential, spoken of in generalities, and never ever meant to diminish or dismiss the experience of anyone. 

Rather, when I share with my clients how common certain patterns and thoughts are, my hope is to reduce the shame, isolation, and loneliness they may feel for feeling/thinking/and acting certain ways.

You see, folks who come from relational trauma backgrounds already feel a high degree of isolation and otherness. That’s usually how we felt inside our family systems. And so widening the lens on how common certain experiences are can feel normalizing. Validating. And can help my clients feel less alone, less “crazy” for thinking and feeling certain ways.

Knowing how helpful it can be for my clients when I reflect back on certain experiences, today I want to share 5 familiar experiences you may relate to if you yourself come from a relational trauma background.

So if you yourself relate to coming from a relational trauma background, pour yourself a cup of tea. And prepare to feel less alone.

5 familiar experiences when you come from a relational trauma background.

1. When you come from a relational trauma background, you may feel invisible. Like you “pass” and that you straddle two worlds.

You go through the motions of your “functional present-day life”. Going to work, socializing with the parents of your child’s privileged preschool. And yet you may also feel like your phone is a bomb in your pocket. Waiting to explode with texts about your brother needing rent money or your father being paroled. You dread that standard second-grade project your kid will have to complete. The Family Tree. Because how are you going to explain the aunts and uncles they’ve never met and (hopefully) will never meet? 

And, at times, living with this paradox of passing inside of you, you can’t believe that your friends are complaining about the heartache of their kid not getting into their top choice private school, or that closing on a second vacation home in San Diego is their biggest struggle. You “fit in” with these people but also you don’t because they don’t know about your past and even if they did they could never relate to it given how seemingly functional their backgrounds are. This is such a common experience when you come from a relational trauma background.

2. When you come from a relational trauma background, you may find yourself saying things like, “Well, it could have been worse.”

Or, “at least my parents didn’t sexually assault me.” You – like so many – may have been taught/gaslit into believing that your experience “was fine” and that your distress was just you being “overly sensitive.” This self-doubt conditioning combined with the fact that denial and diminishment are common psychological defense mechanisms may result in you frequently diminishing, dismissing, caveating, and excusing your own painful past.

And while your personal recovery and healing work will ultimately involve ceasing your own self-diminishment, it’s important to recognize that this pattern of self-diminishment is a common one for folks who come from relational trauma backgrounds.

3. When you come from a relational trauma background, you may alternate between magical thinking and self-loathing (but you may not call it that).

You may have highly contrasting, quickly shifting thoughts – about your marriage, work, yourself, and more. For example, you may alternate from wishing you were with a different spouse and believing you’re only worthy of a husband like Jamie Fraser in Outlander (no average husband will do for you!) to thinking no one will possibly want you if you end up on the dating market if you do end up divorcing your spouse.

You may, in one hour, believe you’re the best contributor on your team and a shoo-in for promotion, strongly doubting yourself and questioning whether you are even employable in the next hour. This mental vacillation can be exhausting, confusing, and is often a common hallmark of coming from a childhood history that failed to help you integrate a reasonable, sound, and stable self-image.

4. When you come from a relational trauma background, becoming a parent can feel both healing and triggering to you at the same time.

The experience of becoming a parent can feel healing because of the love you feel for your child and the reparative experience of getting to treat someone in the way you wish you had been treated. But also, the experience of becoming a parent can also be triggering because you now have a vivid contrast to how you were treated and this contrast can make you feel even angrier at your caregivers for failing you so egregiously.

And also – and this is important to understand – you may even be triggered with jealousy of “how easy your kid will have it” compared to what you went through. You can want the best for your child and also feel jealousy about it at the same time. When you come from a relational trauma background, these contrasting experiences aren’t mutually exclusive – both things can be true at once when you parent.

5. When you come from a relational trauma background, you may feel like you have to work harder than most to “stay positive” and keep mentally healthy and you can sometimes (or often) resent this.

You have habits and routines – like vigorous exercise, journaling, therapy, your support groups – but unlike for many people, they’re not just “nice to haves”; they’re necessary to help keep you in a window of tolerance, to keep you feeling steady, and when you can’t access them, you feel strongly, negatively impacted. On the one hand, you’re glad that you know what helps keep you “sane and steady.” You’re glad that you know what the proverbial power tools in your mental health toolkit are.

But, on the other hand, you may resent that you feel so dependent on practices and supports to help you feel reasonably good and you imagine that life would be easier if you were “less sensitive” and didn’t require these supports so much.

What happens when you finally say it out loud and someone else says — “me too”?

When you tell your therapist you feel crazy for hiding your brother’s arrest from your book club friends while they discuss vacation homes, wondering if anyone else lives this double life, you’re experiencing exactly why understanding 20 common experiences when you endure relational trauma through group work or shared narratives can be profoundly healing—discovering you’re not uniquely broken but predictably adapted.

Your trauma-informed therapist recognizes that isolation compounds trauma’s impact—believing you’re the only one who minimizes their pain, who needs constant mental health maintenance, who feels jealous of their own child’s stability makes the burden exponentially heavier. They understand that witnessing others share identical thoughts you believed were shameful secrets can be more healing than months of individual validation, proving these patterns aren’t personal failings but common responses.

The therapeutic work might involve group therapy where you hear others describe the exhaustion of code-switching between functional life and family chaos, or your therapist sharing (confidentially and generally) how many clients express the exact thoughts you’re ashamed of. This normalization doesn’t minimize your pain but contextualizes it—you’re not crazy for needing rigid routines to stay stable when that’s what most trauma survivors require.

Your therapist helps you understand that patterns like self-diminishment (“it wasn’t that bad”), emotional vacillation between grandiosity and self-loathing, or feeling triggered by your child’s easier life aren’t random quirks but predictable adaptations to inconsistent caregiving. They’re as common among trauma survivors as limping among those with broken bones—evidence of injury, not character.

Most powerfully, therapy teaches you that finding your tribe—whether in group therapy, online communities, or through books and essays—breaks trauma’s spell of isolation. When you discover thousands of others managing the same invisible struggles, maintaining the same exhausting vigilance, grieving the same losses while building beautiful lives anyway, you realize you’re not alone in this particular kind of heroism.

The Clinical Picture: What the Research Actually Shows

The clinical and research literature on this topic has expanded significantly over the past two decades, and the findings consistently point in the same direction: what happens in early relational environments shapes the nervous system, the self-concept, and the capacity for intimacy in ways that persist into adulthood — and that respond meaningfully to targeted therapeutic work.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University School of Medicine, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has spent decades documenting how relational trauma is stored in the body and processed by the brain differently from ordinary memory. His neuroimaging research has shown that trauma memories are held in subcortical, pre-verbal brain regions — which is why “just talking about it” is often insufficient, and why somatic and body-based modalities are frequently essential components of effective treatment.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma scholar at Harvard Medical School, author of Trauma and Recovery, identifies three stages of trauma recovery that remain the clinical gold standard: establishing safety, processing mourning and grief, and reconnecting with ordinary life. Each stage has its own requirements and its own timeline. Trying to skip stages — going straight to processing without first establishing safety — is one of the most common reasons trauma work stalls or becomes destabilizing.

What I want driven, ambitious women to understand is that the science is on your side. The healing of relational wounds is not a matter of willpower or character. It’s a matter of finding the right approaches, the right relationships, and the right pace — and staying with the process long enough for actual neurological and relational change to occur. That’s not a quick process. But it’s a real one, and it’s available to you. If you’re ready to explore what that support might look like, I’d invite you to connect with me.

Both/And: High Performance and Honest Feeling Can Coexist

The driven women I work with often arrive in therapy with an unspoken fear: if they stop pushing, everything falls apart. If they let themselves feel what they’ve been outrunning, they’ll never get back up. So they frame the choice in binary terms — keep performing or collapse. In my clinical experience, neither option is necessary. (PMID: 9384857)

Nadia is an executive at a major tech company who hadn’t taken a sick day in three years. When she finally came to therapy, it wasn’t because she decided to — it was because her body decided for her. Migraines, insomnia, a jaw so clenched her dentist flagged it. She told me, “I can’t afford to fall apart,” and I told her the truth: she was already falling apart. She just hadn’t given herself permission to notice. What Nadia needed wasn’t to dismantle her drive. It was to stop treating her own pain as an inconvenience to her productivity.

Both/And means this: you can be the person who delivers exceptional results at work and the person who cries in the car afterward. You can be fiercely competent and quietly terrified. You can want more and still appreciate what you have. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the full truth of what it means to be a driven woman navigating a world that rewards your output but not your wholeness.

The Systemic Lens: Culture, Capitalism, and the Burden Placed on Driven Women

Driven women are systematically taught to locate the source of their suffering internally. If you’re burned out, you need better boundaries. If you’re anxious, you need more mindfulness. If your relationships are strained, you need to communicate better. This framing isn’t accidental — it serves a function. It keeps the focus on individual behavior and away from the structural conditions that make individual behavior so costly.

Consider what the typical driven woman manages in a single day: high-stakes professional work, emotional labor in relationships, mental load of household management, caregiving responsibilities, her own physical and mental health, and the performance of equanimity required to be taken seriously in all of these domains. No one designed this workload to be sustainable because no one designed it at all. It accrued — the result of decades of women entering professional spaces without the domestic and structural supports being redesigned to accommodate that shift.

In my clinical work, I’ve found that naming these systemic forces is itself therapeutic. When a driven woman realizes that her struggle isn’t evidence of personal inadequacy but a predictable response to impossible conditions, something shifts. The shame loosens. The self-blame softens. And she can begin to make choices based on what she actually needs rather than what the system tells her she should be able to handle.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer