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.