What The Sims taught me about relationships.

Personal Growth & Self-Discovery • April 17, 2022

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Relational trauma is the emotional injury that arises when the people you depended on for safety and connection—usually early in life—consistently failed to meet your needs in ways that left lasting, invisible wounds. It is not about isolated bad moments or simple misunderstandings, nor does it mean you were abused in an obvious way; it’s about the repeated experiences of neglect, inconsistency, or emotional harm within close relationships that shape how you trust, love, and see yourself today. This matters because relational trauma silently influences your beliefs about worthiness and connection, often keeping you stuck in patterns that don’t reflect your true desires. Naming this trauma is a powerful step toward understanding how your past interferes with your present relationships and toward beginning to heal those patterns with clarity and care.

• You might be treating your own emotional needs less consistently than you manage your Sim’s, revealing how deeply ingrained relational patterns from early attachment quietly run your relationships without your conscious permission.
• Relational trauma is not about one-off hurts but about repeated emotional injuries from key caregivers that shape your automatic beliefs about love, trust, and worthiness, leaving you stuck in cycles that don’t honor your real needs.
• Recognizing your relational patterns through the lens of The Sims allows you to see how trauma-informed therapy can help you rewrite outdated survival strategies into conscious, compassionate ways of caring for yourself and others.

A relational pattern is a repeated way you show up in relationships — the automatic feelings, behaviors, and responses that feel like ‘just how you are’ but are actually learned strategies shaped by your earliest attachments. It’s not about being flawed or broken; it’s about the survival tactics your mind and heart developed to manage what was available to you emotionally as a child. This matters because these patterns often replay without your conscious permission, steering your relationships in ways that feel frustrating, confusing, or stuck. Recognizing your relational patterns is the first step in reclaiming choice and creating new, healthier ways of relating that truly serve you now.

• You might notice that your relational struggles stem from early relational trauma, which silently shapes automatic patterns in how you connect, leaving you feeling stuck in cycles that don’t serve your true needs or desires.
• Understanding relational patterns as repeated, unconscious dynamics formed in childhood helps you see how your real-life attachment strategies mirror the social mechanics you unconsciously play out—just like managing needs in The Sims.
• Recognizing these patterns opens the door to trauma-informed therapy, where you can begin to rewire your relationship blueprints, learning to respond to yourself and others with more consistent care and conscious intention.

1. It’s clear to me now that The Sims taught me a lot about relationships.
2. Relational trauma histories can often lead to maladaptive ideas about relationships.
3. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
4. This can also look like conscious or unconscious maladaptive beliefs.
5. How The Sims challenged my maladaptive relationship ideas.
6. And these are just a few of the rooted-in-reality relationship lessons The Sims taught me.
7. Healing tools and teachable moments can come in many forms.
8. Rewiring Relationship Blueprints Through Trauma-Informed Therapy

It’s clear to me now that The Sims taught me a lot about relationships.

The Sims, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a video game from Electronic Arts which was released in 2000, the same year I became a freshman at Brown University. 

During that first year, to escape from the stress of a double major course load (and the stress of being in almost constant relational contact with others – something that was super hard for me back then), I discovered this game and it quickly became a great nightly stress release, a way to escape when real life felt like too much.

I played the game on my colorful, blue iMac (remember those?!). Inventing people and scenarios that entertained me to no end. Feeling like a master of my pixelated little Universe while cloistered in my Keeney Quad dorm room.

While I played The Sims for entertainment back then, in hindsight and with a clinician’s mind now, I can see that The Sims actually served as a kind of subversive, psychoeducational tool on the very early stages of my healing journey. It helped me to rewire and re-form some maladaptive beliefs I had about relationships. A result of my very dysfunctional upbringing.

Relational trauma histories can often lead to maladaptive ideas about relationships.

I’ve written about this extensively before but, to reiterate, those who come from relational trauma backgrounds may experience a host of complex biopsychosocial impacts that linger long into adulthood as a result of their early childhood.

One example of these impacts can include having maladaptive beliefs about and maladaptive behaviors in relationships.

This is a particularly common impact because relational trauma takes place in relationship. And those relationships in trauma backgrounds are often dysfunctional and extremely abusive.

And if we form our ideas about ourselves, others, and the world in response to our earliest relationships, the less functional and healthy those models were, the less functional and healthy our ideas and patterns of behavior in relationship may ultimately be.

What can examples of maladaptive patterns and beliefs about relationship look like?

For example, this can look like holding maladaptive beliefs about how others perceive you – having a mindset of grandiosity. (“Everyone should want to be my friend, I’m the best.”) …to a mindset of self-loathing (“I’m too broken to have good relationships. No man would ever want to marry me if he knew about my past and my crazy family.”) …and even alternating between these two mindsets on the same day. 

This can also look like conscious or unconscious maladaptive beliefs.

About what it takes to build and maintain relationships (“We’ll be friends instantly!” or “I don’t have to make time for her and invest in that relationship as much anymore, she’ll always be there for me.”).

And these are but a few of the thousands of ways maladaptive beliefs and behaviors might show up if you come from a relational trauma background.

Now, at this point in the essay, some of you may be thinking, “Well, yeah, Annie, that’s really obvious. I *know* relationships don’t work that way.”

And while it may seem obvious for you, for many of those who grow up with mood- and personality-disordered parents (or who experienced relational trauma for other reasons), this may not seem obvious to them.

Certainly, it didn’t feel obvious to me some 20-odd years ago.

But whether this feels obvious to you or not, the good news is that maladaptive beliefs and patterns of behavior can be changed.

And there are many different tools and resources that can help us begin to change these beliefs and patterns.

And yes, The Sims was one of those tools for me.

How The Sims challenged my maladaptive relationship ideas.

The Sims was a Trojan Horse teaching tool.

As I mentioned, I didn’t set out with the intention of using it as a psychoeducational tool (in fact, at that point in college I was still totally oblivious that I came from a trauma history and had healing to do – I didn’t know what I didn’t know).

Back then, I played The Sims purely for entertainment.

But still, subversively, the game still taught me some valuable, rooted-in-reality relationships principles such as:

• Strong, supportive relationships don’t just happen; they need to be initiated and then cultivated consistently (invested in with time, energy, and care) for them to be solid and sources of comfort, joy, and help.
• Not doing this, not actively investing in others, causes relationships to wither, to move into the “Red Zone” and eventually to break and end.
• Having relationships that aren’t being well-tended to can be sources of stress and life depletion to The Sims and can more easily lead to conflict between characters when and if they encounter each other.
• Having low-quality or no relationships will deteriorate the well-being of your Sim (even as you try to counterbalance this with other variables/pursuits in life).
• If you push hard on something else in the game (for instance, advancing your career or hobbies or skill development) it will mean that you have less time for the relationships and you will run the risk of those relationships suffering. These competing priorities are a tricky trade-off.
• Some characters seemed harder to bond with than others (friendship could be forced, but it was far easier with some).
• How I responded to hard-to-maintain relationships mirrored what was then my IRL relational default: dismissing them and walking away versus confronting the challenges and actively working to repair them.

And these are just a few of the rooted-in-reality relationship lessons The Sims taught me.

(Again, in hindsight, and again, subversively.)

Now, like I said before, all of what I shared may seem super obvious to you. But growing up I had literally no models of healthy, functional adult relationships. (Romantic, friendship, professional, etc.) Or what it genuinely took to cultivate and maintain those relationships.

So in a way, The Sims became a psychoeducational tool. With teachable moments for me at that stage in my healing journey. Helping me to reform and rewire some otherwise maladaptive beliefs and behaviors. (Which I built upon with much more intentionality during my Esalen years after college.)

Healing tools and teachable moments can come in many forms.

Now look, this essay isn’t necessarily a love letter to The Sims.

(I actually don’t play video games anymore and haven’t since 2005 or so. I’m at a different stage where I don’t need or want anything other than work screen time these days).

Rather, this essay is a reminder that coming from a relational trauma history might lead to you having maladaptive beliefs and behaviors about certain areas of life that your peers from non-traumatized backgrounds don’t have to deal with.

And this essay is a reminder, too, that healing tools on our recovery journeys can come in many different forms at different points in our life (currently two of my best and most effective non-clinical healing tools are my Peloton Bike and Tread – more on the power of these tools in my life another time.)

I want to drive this point home. Because, as with that old adage – “All roads lead to Rome.” – there’s truly no one single way to do healing. Often healing requires a wide and robust variety of proverbial ingredients to be healing.

The recipe that heals and helps us is as unique as the person who needs and wants the healing.

The reality is that the quality of our lives is dictated by the quality of our relationships. So get the support you need to make having good, healthy, and fulfilling relationships feel more possible. If this is something you struggle with.

Rewiring Relationship Blueprints Through Trauma-Informed Therapy

When you describe to your therapist how The Sims taught you more about relationships than your entire childhood, you’re identifying a profound truth about relational trauma—that early relational trauma damages the foundation of our house, leaving you without blueprints for how healthy connections actually work.

Your therapist helps you recognize that discovering relationship principles through a video game isn’t silly but significant, understanding that when your parents modeled only dysfunction, chaos, or neglect, you had to become an archaeologist of normalcy, excavating lessons about human connection from wherever you could find them. Together, you explore the specific maladaptive beliefs you inherited: that love should be instant and effortless (because conditional love felt so hard), that people will stay regardless of investment (because trauma-bonding seemed permanent), or that difficulty means abandonment is inevitable (because that’s what you learned).

The therapeutic work involves examining your current relationships through this new lens, identifying where you’re still operating from outdated software—perhaps pouring everything into work while relationships wither in the “red zone,” or dismissing connections at the first sign of conflict rather than learning repair.

Your therapist helps you practice what The Sims demonstrated: consistent investment, regular maintenance, tolerating the discomfort of tending to relationships even when other priorities compete for attention. Through role-play, communication exercises, and gradual real-world experiments, you learn to override the default programming that says you’re either too much or not enough, discovering instead the middle ground of being genuinely, imperfectly human in connection with others.

Most powerfully, trauma-informed relationship therapy validates that your unconventional teachers—whether video games, books, or TV shows—were acts of resilience, your psyche finding creative ways to learn what wasn’t taught, proving that healing comes in many forms and that sometimes the most profound lessons arrive disguised as entertainment, teaching you not just how to have relationships but that you deserve to have them at all.

And now, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

Did you play The Sims in the 2000’s (or now)? What’s one relationship lesson you gleaned from the game that helped correct a faulty belief you inherited from childhood? If it wasn’t The Sims, did some other Trojan Horse game, book, or show similarly help you develop healthier, more functional attitudes about relationships?

Please, if you feel so inclined, leave a message in the comments below. Our monthly blog readership of 23,000 plus people can benefit from your wisdom and experience.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Both/And: Attachment and Autonomy Can Coexist

Driven women in relationships often feel caught between two fears: the fear of being swallowed by intimacy and the fear of being alone. They want partnership but struggle to surrender the self-sufficiency that has kept them safe. In clinical work, this tension usually points backward — to an early relational environment where closeness and control, love and loss of self, were dangerously intertwined.

Dani is a management consultant who described her marriage as “wonderful on paper.” She loves her partner, trusts him, and still finds herself pulling away whenever things feel too close. “I pick fights before vacations,” she admitted. “I don’t know why.” In therapy, we traced the pattern to its origin: a childhood where emotional closeness was always followed by unpredictability. Her nervous system learned that intimacy precedes danger, and twenty years of safe relationship haven’t fully overwritten that early code.

Both/And means Dani can love her partner deeply and still feel the pull to withdraw. She can want connection and need space without those being contradictory. She can be working on her attachment patterns and still have moments where the old wiring activates. The goal isn’t to eliminate the tension between closeness and independence — it’s to expand her capacity to hold both without one hijacking the other.

The Systemic Lens: The Invisible Third Party in Every Relationship — Culture

Every intimate relationship contains two people and an entire culture. The expectations you carry about who should initiate, who should sacrifice, who manages the household, who carries the emotional load — these aren’t personal preferences. They’re the residue of decades of gendered socialization, compounded by race, class, and cultural specificity. When driven women struggle in their relationships, the struggle is rarely just interpersonal. It’s structural.

Consider the mental load research pioneered by sociologist Allison Daminger. Even in partnerships that appear egalitarian, women disproportionately carry the cognitive labor of household management — anticipating needs, monitoring, planning, delegating. For driven women, this invisible workload often goes unacknowledged because they’re “so good at it.” Their competence becomes a trap: the more capably they manage, the more management accrues to them, until they’re running a household like a second job while their partner benefits from a life that appears to “run itself.”

In my clinical work, naming these systemic dynamics in couples therapy is essential. When a driven woman feels resentful, exhausted, or taken for granted in her relationship, the answer isn’t always better communication. Sometimes the answer is an honest accounting of who does what, and a reckoning with the cultural systems that made the current imbalance feel inevitable. Your relationship didn’t create these conditions. But it’s operating inside them, and pretending otherwise keeps both partners stuck.

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.

How to Heal Relational Patterns That Started Long Before You Met Your Partner

In my work with clients, one of the most useful reframes I offer is this: the relationship patterns you’re struggling with now weren’t invented in your current relationship. They were rehearsed, maybe for decades, long before you met anyone you’re with today. Understanding that is both humbling and genuinely hopeful — humbling because it means the work is bigger than fixing the current dynamic, and hopeful because it means the pattern isn’t a permanent feature of who you are. It’s something learned. And learned things can change.

What needs to happen in relational healing isn’t primarily behavioral. It’s not about better communication scripts, though those can be useful. It’s about understanding the internal model of relationship — the unconscious map of what love looks like, what’s expected, what’s safe — that you’ve been operating from. That map was drawn early, in your family of origin, in the specific relational dynamics you grew up inside. And until you get a good look at it, it runs in the background, organizing your choices without your awareness.

Attachment-focused therapy is often the most direct path into this work. In an attachment-focused approach, we don’t just analyze your relationship history — we explore what those early experiences felt like in your body, and how those felt senses now activate in current intimacy. That’s where the map lives: not in the facts of your history, but in the felt sense of what relationship means to you. Working with a therapist who understands attachment allows you to begin drawing a new map, one relationship interaction at a time.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is another modality I find invaluable for relational work. Most relational patterns are driven by parts — the part that gets anxious when someone pulls away, the part that puts walls up before anyone can leave first, the part that works overtime to manage a partner’s emotional state. IFS lets you identify those parts, understand what they’re protecting, and begin to bring your more grounded self into relational encounters rather than sending in the parts. That shift — from parts-led to self-led relating — is often the most meaningful change I see in clients doing this work.

Couples therapy is worth considering if you have a partner who’s willing to do this work alongside you. I’d emphasize, though, that couples work lands differently when at least one partner has done individual work first. If you’re coming into couples therapy with significant unprocessed attachment trauma, the pace of couples work may outstrip your nervous system’s capacity to integrate it. Individual therapy first — or alongside — tends to produce better outcomes.

If you’re single and doing this work, that’s actually an excellent time for it. Understanding your relational patterns outside of the urgency of a current relationship allows for a kind of clarity that’s harder to access when you’re actively managing a dynamic. Some of the deepest relational healing I’ve witnessed has happened in people who were between relationships and using the space to really understand themselves.

You don’t have to keep rerunning the same relationship script. The fact that you’re curious about your patterns — curious enough to examine them rather than just endure them — is itself a sign of readiness. If you’re ready to do this work with support, I’d love to be part of that. You can learn more about therapy with me, or if you want to get a sense of where you’re starting from, our short quiz is a good first step. Relationships can feel different. That’s not wishful thinking — it’s what happens when the underlying pattern changes.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer