Do You See Yourself in This Definition of Relational Trauma?

A psychoeducational essay on do you see yourself in this definition of relational trauma?, drawn from more than a decade of practice with driven women in relational-trauma recovery.

Bethany, 44, sat down in my office on a gray Thursday, set her car keys on the arm of the couch, and told me she’d spent the drive over rehearsing how to say that nothing bad had actually happened to her. Her parents stayed married. Nobody hit anyone. There was food on the table and a Christmas tree every December. And yet she’d found herself crying in the school parking lot that week because her nine-year-old daughter asked for help with a science project and Bethany’s first, automatic feeling was dread. In my practice, I hear some version of this almost every week: a woman who can’t point to a single event and still knows, in her body, that something in how she was raised left a mark she can’t name.

I’ve noticed that the women who struggle most to claim the word trauma are often the ones who grew up in homes that looked fine from the sidewalk. What I’ve come to think of as relational trauma is the climate you grew up inside, not one catastrophic moment. It’s what happens when the people who were supposed to attune to you, protect you, and repair with you when they got it wrong did so inconsistently, rarely, or not at all, over years, during the exact window when your nervous system was learning what to expect from other humans. Judith Lewis Herman, MD, gave us language for the effects of prolonged, repeated harm in her 1992 paper on complex PTSD in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, and I think of her every time a client apologizes for a story that ‘wasn’t that bad.’

I want to offer a definition wide enough to hold Bethany, and maybe you, without flattening anyone’s story into a checklist. If you’ve been circling this word for a while, unsure whether you’re allowed to use it, I want to hand you what I wish someone had handed Bethany twenty years earlier: a clear picture of what relational trauma is, and what it looks like once it grows up and starts raising children of its own.

Relational trauma is a wound that happened between people, not just inside one.

When I use the phrase relational trauma in my office, I’m not talking about one terrible afternoon. The clinical shorthand, if you want it, is complex or developmental trauma: the cumulative effect of growing up in relationships where your needs were chronically missed, dismissed, or treated as too expensive. The analogy I reach for is the one I’ve built a whole framework around, the proverbial House of Life™. Trauma from a single event is a tree through the roof; awful, obvious, insurable. Relational trauma is a foundation poured slightly off level, years before you were old enough to notice, so that every room you build on top of it tilts the same direction and you spend your adult life shimming furniture and wondering why the doors won’t close.

“Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously.”

Source: Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst, Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and Its Interruption (2013)

And what it feels like on a Tuesday afternoon is almost never dramatic. It feels like hesitating over a doctor’s appointment. It feels like reading a kind text from your partner three times, looking for the catch. It feels like being competent everywhere except in the small private moment where you might need something from someone, and then something in your chest goes quiet and closes.

The person who gave me language for this was Judith Lewis Herman, MD, the Harvard psychiatrist who in 1992 argued that survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma developed a distinct syndrome that the existing PTSD diagnosis couldn’t hold. She called it complex PTSD. What struck me when I first read her wasn’t the symptom list. It was her emphasis on captivity: that the defining feature was being unable to leave. A child cannot leave. A nine-year-old in a house where there isn’t enough can’t hand in her notice and find a family with a bigger margin. She adapts to the ground she’s given, and she does it so thoroughly that the adaptation looks like personality.

This is why so many of the women I work with don’t recognize themselves in the word trauma at all. They’re waiting for a story with a villain. What they have instead is an atmosphere: parents who were tired, or frightened, or too busy surviving to notice a small person’s inner weather. No one hit anybody. No one drank. The house was clean and the lights stayed on, mostly. And yet here they are in their forties, unable to let a good partner pay for something without a private, tightening calculation they can’t switch off.

If you’re reading this and feeling a little defensive on behalf of your own parents, I want you to know I’m not going to ask you to indict them. Naming a pattern isn’t the same as assigning blame; it’s closer to finally putting a level on the foundation and understanding why the doors stick. The woman I want to introduce you to would’ve laughed at the word trauma the first time she sat down. She’d have told you, correctly, that plenty of people had it worse. She came anyway, in the dead hour between airport runs, and she told me what the appointment cost her in miles.

Bethany comes at eleven in the morning, because eleven is the dead hour between the early airport runs and the lunch rush. She’s 44, married, no kids, and five years into driving for the apps after the bookkeeping job she’d held for over a decade quietly stopped existing. Her car is a Corolla with a phone mount that holds two phones, and there’s a cooler on the passenger-side floor with the same lunch in it every day. She calculates in miles now, not hours, and in our first session she told me, matter-of-factly, what the fifty minutes was costing her in miles.

“I’m not going to sit here and blame my parents,” she said, before I’d asked anything about them. “They had nothing. They worked. But my mother’s line was always we don’t have the luxury. That was the whole answer to everything. And I’m forty-four in a Corolla and I catch myself thinking it about a doctor’s appointment. About this. My husband says go, we can cover it, and I still do the math. I know that’s not rational at this point. I do it anyway.”

When she named the mileage I felt something tighten in my own throat, and I sat with it rather than handing it to her. What I heard underneath the arithmetic wasn’t stinginess or even anxiety, exactly. It was a nine-year-old’s accuracy. Bethany grew up on ground where there genuinely wasn’t the luxury, and a child on that ground learns that her own needs are the line item you cut first. That was true. It was the correct read of her house in 1991. She’s been running those numbers ever since, and nobody has ever formally told her body that the ground moved.

Nothing resolved that day. But near the end she said the mileage figure a second time, slower, and then she laughed, a short surprised sound, and said, “That’s a weird thing to know off the top of your head, isn’t it.” It was the first time she’d heard the math from the outside.

Bethany is not a real client. This is a composite drawn from recurring clinical patterns, with identifying details changed. The case is offered to protect confidentiality while making the work concrete.

The connection template: why your first relationships became the pattern your body brings into every room.

Here’s the clinical term, and then I’ll translate it. Attachment theory calls the thing Bethany is running an internal working model: the set of expectations a child builds, out of thousands of ordinary exchanges with her caregivers, about what happens when she has a need and turns toward someone with it. Will they come? Will they sigh? Will they tell her there isn’t the luxury? Whatever the pattern of answers was, it gets stored, and it becomes the default she carries into every later relationship, long after the original people have left the room.

Because Bethany kept books for years, the analogy I offered her was a spreadsheet template. You don’t build a new spreadsheet from a blank grid every time; you open the template, and the formulas are already sitting in the cells. You type in this month’s numbers and the columns calculate themselves. The formula for what my needs cost was written into Bethany’s template when she was small, by parents who were themselves working from a template written in an even leaner house. Now she opens a new marriage, a new friendship, a new doctor’s appointment, and the cell auto-fills before she’s consciously done anything at all.

On a Tuesday afternoon, an internal working model doesn’t feel like a model. It feels like reality. It feels like simply knowing, the way you know the stove is hot, that asking is expensive and that a person who says we can cover it hasn’t really looked at the numbers. You don’t experience yourself as running a template. You experience yourself as being sensible.

A clinician who writes about attachment across the whole lifespan describes this in a way I’ve never improved on, and I want you to have it in her words rather than mine, because the word she lands on is the one that matters most for the rest of this piece.

Template. Not a verdict, not a personality, not a moral fact about you. A template is a starting document. It shaped how Bethany read her husband’s offer, and it shaped how she read me, sitting across from her in a room that costs miles. But a template can be edited. The formulas can be examined, one cell at a time, and rewritten. That’s slow work, and it’s the work.

What made this real for me, rather than a tidy metaphor, was reading Allan N. Schore, PhD, the researcher who traced how the right hemisphere of the infant brain is organized by the emotional back-and-forth with a caregiver. His 2000 paper on attachment and right-brain regulation, in Attachment & Human Development, showed me that the template isn’t a set of beliefs a child decides on. It’s wiring, laid down in the first years by faces and tones and how quickly comfort arrived, or didn’t. Bethany never concluded that her needs were expensive. Her nervous system was shaped in a house where that was the ambient temperature.

Which raises the obvious question: if the template lives that deep, why hasn’t thirty years of new data overwritten it? Her husband has said go hundreds of times. The spreadsheet should’ve updated by now. It hasn’t, and the reason is where we go next.

Here’s a piece of attachment theory I come back to in my work, because it explains so much about why relational trauma lingers. Attachment researchers use the term internal working model to describe the blueprint a child builds from their earliest bonds with caregivers. It’s a connection template: an unconscious set of expectations about how closeness works, what you can count on from other people, and what you have to do to stay safe and loved. You don’t sit down and choose this template. It gets assembled quietly, out of thousands of small moments, long before you have words for any of it. Christina Reese, puts it this way in her book on trauma-informed attachment work:

“These primary attachment relationships develop into patterns of attachment that the child will use as a connection template- referred to as an ‘internal working model’ , in future interactions.”

Source: Christina Reese, PhD, LCPC, Attachment: 60 Trauma-Informed Assessment and Treatment Interventions Across the Lifespan (2018)

So when I talk about relational trauma, this is a big part of what I mean. If the people who were supposed to keep you safe were also the people who frightened, shamed, or ignored you, your template got built around that. Your body learned that closeness and danger arrive together, and it carries that lesson into every room you walk into as an adult: the first date, the friend who takes a day to text back. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s an old map, drawn by a child doing their best, and maps can be redrawn.

Here’s where the template starts to matter in your adult life. Jessica Fern, a psychotherapist and trauma-informed relationship coach, writes in her 2020 book Polysecure about what happens when a relationship with a partner becomes the pathway to secure attachment rather than something you have to earn or defend. Her central idea is that the urgency softens. You might still want commitment, labels, shared plans, and the milestones most people hope for, but the frantic need to lock them down loosens its grip, and those things start to unfold at a pace your nervous system can actually tolerate.

If you grew up in a home where love felt conditional or unpredictable, you probably recognize that urgency in yourself. It’s the part of you that needs to know where things stand by the third date, that reads a slow text reply as a verdict, that can’t rest until the relationship is defined. That isn’t a character flaw. It’s your body running the old template, bracing for the loss it learned to expect. And the point here is hopeful: templates can be revised, and safe relationships are often where that revision happens.

The arithmetic lives in the body, and the body hasn’t read the new numbers.

The reason new information doesn’t overwrite an old template is that the template was never stored as information in the first place. The clinical term here is implicit memory: memory held not as a story you can recite but as a readiness in the body, a set of responses that fire before the thinking part of you is consulted. The analogy I use is a thermostat. Somebody set Bethany’s to a 1991 house, drafty and tight, every degree of heat a cost, and then she moved into a warmer house and no one told the thermostat. It keeps kicking on the scarcity response every time the temperature drops a fraction, because that’s the number it was given.

On a Tuesday afternoon, implicit memory feels like a clench in the gut when your partner says go, we can cover it. It’s the tightening in the throat before the thought we can’t afford this has finished forming. It’s the fact that the thought arrives feeling like a conclusion when it’s actually a symptom. By the time you’re doing the math consciously, the body did its own math a half-second earlier, and the conscious version is mostly a justification written after the fact.

Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, the psychiatrist whose 1994 paper in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry gave us the phrase the body keeps the score, was the one who made this land for me clinically. He was writing about how traumatic experience gets encoded in sensation and physiology rather than in narrative memory, which is exactly why you can know something is over and still respond as though it isn’t. Knowing is cortical. The scarcity math is subcortical. They’re not even in the same building.

I’ll add one more layer, because it matters for how gently this work has to go. The scarcity response isn’t a malfunction. It’s a protective system doing precisely the job it was built for, in the conditions it was built in. When Bethany’s stomach drops at the word go, that’s a nine-year-old’s survival intelligence, still on duty, still loyal to a house that no longer exists. You don’t fire a guard like that. You thank her, and you slowly, credibly, show her the new floor plan.

This is also why I don’t spend much time arguing with clients about whether their fear is rational. Bethany already knows it isn’t. She told me so in the first ten minutes. Telling a thermostat it’s wrong has never once changed the temperature in a room. What changes it is going to the device itself, patiently, and adjusting the setting from inside the sensation rather than from above it. So in our work together, we started paying attention to the half-second before the math. Not the thought. The clench.

She’d started parking a block away so she could walk in rather than pulling up to the door, and she noticed that herself, which I took as a good sign. The cooler stayed in the car. She sat down and said she’d tried the thing I’d asked, which was simply to notice what happened in her body the next time her husband said the word go.

“It’s my stomach,” she said. “Before I even think anything. He said it about new tires, which, fine, they’re a business expense, I can justify tires. And my stomach did this thing anyway, like I’d stepped off a curb I didn’t see. Then the math showed up after. I always thought the math came first.”

I asked her to let the stomach thing be there for a moment, without fixing it, and to tell me how old it felt. She was quiet for a while. She said nine, and then she said, “That’s the year Dad’s hours got cut.” Nobody in her family had ever named that year as anything. It was just when the line about luxury started.

What shifted wasn’t the clench. It still came. What shifted was that she’d caught it arriving before the story, and once you’ve seen the order of operations, you can’t fully unsee it. She drove her afternoon shift, she told me later, with one hand on her sternum at red lights, not to change anything, just to check who was doing the math.

The Systemic Lens: What the world is doing: the scarcity was accurate in 1991, and the apps keep sending the same signal.

Before I ask anyone to update an old template, I want to know what the ground was doing then and what it’s doing now. That’s what I mean by a systemic lens. The clinical way to say it is that symptoms have to be read in context; the analogy is a building inspector who checks the soil before blaming the framing. On a Tuesday afternoon, it’s the difference between what’s wrong with me that I can’t relax about money and what has my environment been telling me about money, and is it still telling me that.

The thing about Bethany’s mother’s line is that it was true. We don’t have the luxury wasn’t a distortion; it was a correct read of a house with cut hours and no margin. A child on that ground who learned to make her needs small wasn’t being neurotic. She was being accurate, and accuracy is exactly what makes a template so hard to revise. You can talk someone out of a belief that was always false. It’s much harder to talk someone out of one that kept the lights on.

And here’s the part I think gets skipped in a lot of trauma writing: the ground under Bethany didn’t simply move once and stay put. A bookkeeping job she’d held for over a decade was made redundant, and the replacement the economy offered her was five years of driving for a company that pays by the mile, sets her rates by algorithm, and offers no sick days, no benefits, and no guarantee that tomorrow’s dead hour won’t be deader. She isn’t poor the way she was at nine. Her husband’s income is steady. But her own working life is structured to keep her doing arithmetic all day long, and it’s asking a great deal of a nervous system to hold we’re safe now while the phone in the mount recalculates her worth every seven minutes.

I think about this in light of work by Frank Pega and colleagues, whose 2021 systematic analysis for the WHO/ILO Joint Estimates, published in Environment International, traced the burden of heart disease and stroke attributable to long working hours across nearly two hundred countries. What stayed with me wasn’t the scale so much as the plain fact that they were measuring it at all: the body’s response to chronic overwork treated as a global health exposure, the way we treat air quality. The gig economy runs on people extending their hours to close the gap the algorithm opened. Bethany’s body is on the receiving end of that structure, and no amount of individual insight changes the payout per mile.

So when she does the math on a doctor’s appointment, I don’t hear only a nine-year-old. I also hear a forty-four-year-old whose current job trains the same reflex every single shift. Both are real. Which is the tension I want to sit inside next, because the temptation is to pick one story, and it’s the picking that keeps people stuck.

Both/And: your parents did the only arithmetic they had, and the template still needs rewriting.

Here is the both/and I hold most often in my office, and I hold it with Bethany more than most. Her parents were doing the only math available to them. And the template that math wrote into her body is now costing her, in mileage and in doctor’s appointments and in the small daily refusals of a good marriage. Both are true. Neither cancels the other.

The clinical frame for this is intergenerational trauma, which sounds heavier than it usually looks. The analogy is a recipe copied by hand, generation to generation, with the original cook’s substitutions still in it: no butter, because there was no butter that year. On a Tuesday afternoon, it’s making the recipe exactly that way in a kitchen with a full refrigerator and not understanding why everything tastes of shortage.

Mariel Buqué, PhD, a psychologist who writes about breaking intergenerational cycles, framed this for me in a way that finally got me out of the blame trap. Her 2024 book Break the Cycle treats inherited trauma not as an accusation against the previous generation but as a set of adaptations that made sense once and got handed down intact. Reading her, I stopped thinking of Bethany’s mother as the problem and started thinking of the line about luxury as a family heirloom: precious, protective, and no longer fitting the house.

The women who come to me with children of their own often feel this most sharply. They hear their mother’s line come out of their own mouth in the cereal aisle, in the same tone, and they’re horrified and tender at the same time. That double feeling is the both/and arriving in real time. You can’t hate the voice without hating someone you love, and you can’t obey it without passing it on.

What makes the both/and so hard is that it asks you to grieve without a villain. Vindication is easier with someone to be vindicated against. But Bethany’s mother wasn’t cruel. She was forty and tired and correct. There’s a specific loneliness in realizing the person who shaped your scarcity would’ve given you the luxury if she’d had it, and didn’t, and can’t be argued with in retrospect because she was right.

Holding both means you get to keep loving your parents at full volume and still decide that the math ends with you. It also means not overcorrecting into a story where your childhood was fine, because fine is how the template stays locked. I’ve watched women swing between those two poles for years: it was terrible, it was nothing, it was terrible. The steadier place is in the middle, and it’s less satisfying, which is how you know it’s the real one.

She came in with the cooler this time, which she’d never done, and set it on the floor by her chair like it belonged in the room. She’d gone to the doctor. Routine, overdue by three years, nothing found. She wanted me to know it wasn’t a big deal, and then she cried for most of the first ten minutes, which surprised both of us.

“I kept thinking about my mom in the waiting room,” she said. “Not mad at her. The opposite. I kept thinking she never once sat in a waiting room for herself, not one time that I remember. And I’m sitting there for a physical my husband paid for and I felt so guilty I almost left. Like I was spending her money. Like I was showing off.”

I said the guilt made complete sense to me, and that I thought it might be grief wearing a disguise. She looked at me for a long moment. I told her that a child who watched her mother go without learns two things at once: that needs are expensive, and that the person she loves most was never allowed to have any. You don’t get to update one of those without touching the other.

Nothing was tidy about the rest of the hour. But she said, near the end, that she’d like to call her mother that week and just ask about 1991. Not to confront her. Just to ask what it had actually been like. She’d never once asked.

A steady partner can become the route, and the urgency starts to relax on its own.

I want to end with the part of Bethany’s story that didn’t happen in my office, because most healing doesn’t. It happened in a Corolla and a kitchen, in the accumulated weight of a husband who kept saying go, we can cover it without punishing her for hesitating. The clinical term for what he was offering is earned secure attachment: security you didn’t receive as a child but build later, through a relationship that answers differently, over and over, until the template starts to believe it. The analogy is a footbridge you test with one foot for a very long time before you walk across without looking down. On a Tuesday afternoon, it feels like noticing you didn’t do the math this time, and not knowing exactly when you stopped.

Sue Johnson, the clinical psychologist who developed Emotionally Focused Therapy, wrote in Hold Me Tight (2008) that adult love is an attachment bond in the same way a child’s is, and that a responsive partner can reorganize how safe the world feels. I’d read that years before I met Bethany, and I’d underlined it. But watching it happen in slow motion, watching a man’s patience do work that no insight of mine could do, made me understand it differently. He wasn’t fixing her. He was giving the thermostat new data, every day, in a form the body could actually take in.

A trauma-informed relationship coach describes what changes when the relationship itself becomes the pathway to security, and she’s precise about the specific thing that softens. It isn’t that you stop wanting structure, or reassurance, or milestones. It’s something subtler about the pace at which you need them settled.

Urgency. That’s the word. Bethany’s arithmetic was always urgent, a calculation that had to be done immediately and done right because the cost of error, in her original house, was real. What her husband’s steadiness gave her wasn’t the answer to the math; it was permission to do it slower, or later, or not at all. When you no longer need to nail down whether you’re allowed to have the thing, the having can happen more organically. It arrives instead of being extracted.

This is the same work I walk people through in my self-paced course, Fixing the Foundations, across 7 phases and 48 lessons with a 200-page workbook: not convincing the body it’s safe, but building enough repeated experience of safety that the body updates itself. It can’t be rushed, which is, I’ve come to think, the entire point. The template doesn’t rewrite because you argued with it well. It rewrites because someone kept showing up with the same answer until the cell finally auto-filled differently.

She texted to move her session because she’d taken a Tuesday off. Not for a medical reason. She and her husband drove to the coast, and she wanted me to know she’d calculated the miles out of habit, and then, she said, she’d let the number go by without doing anything with it, the way you let a car pass you on the highway.

“I still think it,” she told me when she came in. “We don’t have the luxury. It’s still in there. But it’s quieter, and it doesn’t feel like it’s telling me the truth anymore. It feels like my mom’s voice, and I love her, and she was talking about a different house.”

I asked what she’d bought with the day. She looked embarrassed and then said, “Lunch. From a place. Not from the cooler.” And we both sat with how large that was and how small it would sound to anyone else.

The math isn’t gone. I don’t expect it to be. But somewhere in the past year it stopped being the whole answer to everything, and Bethany’s started to take her husband at his word about the numbers, which, she pointed out, is the first time in her life anyone’s told her the ground moved and she’s actually believed them. She still parks a block away. She likes the walk now.