How Trauma Shapes Our Relationships, Bodies and Sense of Self

There are experiences which affect us, without ever becoming fully available to conscious understanding.

We may know that something is happening within us without knowing quite what it is, or why a particular situation acquired such force. We might be frightened by intimacy, overwhelmed by separation, consumed by shame, unable to trust, or suddenly withdrawn from someone we had intended to be close to.

Maybe we find ourselves responding to an apparently ordinary event with an intensity that seems disproportionate to the circumstances. Sometimes we understand the pattern of our lives remarkably well, and somehow remain unable to understand why we keep on repeating it...

It’s natural and instinctive to regard such experiences as evidence of something defective within us. We may describe ourselves as “too sensitive”, “too dependent”, “too anxious”, “too angry”, “too avoidant”, or simply incapable of having the relationships we want. Yet a response which appears incomprehensible when viewed in isolation, may become intelligible when it is understood in relation to the life in which it developed. What appears irrational from the outside may have a history, and what appears contradictory may represent the coexistence of different experiences which have never been brought together sufficiently to be understood.

The relationships we carry within us

We don’t develop our inner worlds independently of other people. From the beginning, our experience of ourselves is profoundly influenced by our experience of those upon whom we depend. Through our relationships, we develop expectations about whether other people will respond to us, whether our needs will be tolerated, whether closeness is safe, whether dependence is possible and whether we can remain “ourselves”, while still being emotionally connected to someone else.

These experiences don’t remain in the past. They can become part of the way we subsequently experience ourselves and others, so that relationships which belong to the present may sometimes become inhabited by expectations formed much earlier.

In this sense, the people we have known can continue to exist psychologically within us. We may carry an expectation of rejection into a relationship in which there is no present evidence of rejection, or experience another person's independence as abandonment because independence has previously been associated with loss. We may become frightened when somebody comes close because closeness has not always meant safety. We may long intensely for another person while simultaneously feeling compelled to withdraw from them. We may become preoccupied with maintaining a relationship because some part of us remains convinced that, if we stop attending to it, it will disappear.

These experiences can be deeply painful precisely because they often contain opposing movements which are difficult to reconcile. We can want what we fear and fear what we most want. What looks like contradiction may, when understood in the context of a person's history, begin to make a different kind of sense.

When the past enters the present

Trauma can intensify these contradictions. It is not always held as a coherent narrative that can be remembered and described. Sometimes its effects are expressed through emotional states, bodily responses, dreams, relational patterns and ways of anticipating what another person might do.

We can find ourselves reacting before we have had time to think, or feeling something in the body which seems to arrive before there is any conscious understanding of its significance. A present experience may carry an emotional intensity which belongs partly to something that happened before. The difficulty is that, when the connection remains unconscious, the present can feel as though it is the whole story.

A person may experience a partner becoming distant as though abandonment is already taking place. A disagreement may feel like the beginning of rejection. Another person's need may feel threatening rather than simply human. A moment of intimacy may evoke vulnerability or fear rather than safety.

This does not mean that every strong response is a trauma response, nor that every feeling contains a hidden memory. It means that our present experience is influenced by the history through which we have come to understand ourselves and other people. The past can continue to shape the meaning we give to what is happening now.

The body as part of psychological experience

Trauma is also not confined to thought or conscious memory. Psychological experience is embodied, and the body participates in our perception of safety, danger, closeness, distance and choice.

A person may notice a tightening in the chest, a change in breathing, agitation, heaviness, numbness, a feeling of collapse or an impulse to move away before they have found words for what is happening. Sometimes the body seems to respond before the conscious mind has caught up.

This does not mean that every bodily sensation contains a hidden memory or that the body provides a simple record of the past. Rather, paying attention to bodily experience can give us another way of becoming aware of what is happening in the present.

We can become curious about a sensation without immediately needing to make it disappear or explain it. We can notice what happens when we remain with it, when we move away from it, or when we choose to pause. In this way, attention to the body can become connected with a greater sense of agency. For someone whose experience has involved circumstances in which there was little possibility of choice, discovering that there can be choice in the present can itself be significant.

What happens when we cannot think what we feel?

There are experiences which seem difficult to think about at all. Something may be felt without being understood, or understood intellectually without being emotionally bearable. We may know that something has affected us and yet be unable to approach it without becoming overwhelmed, shutting down or finding some other way of protecting ourselves.

When an experience cannot be thought about, it may nevertheless continue to be lived. It can become expressed through a relationship, a bodily state, a defensive pattern or a recurring emotional response. What cannot be spoken may become enacted; what cannot be mourned may become anger; what cannot be tolerated may become avoidance.

The experience has not disappeared simply because it has not become conscious.

This can be one of the more painful aspects of trauma. We can find ourselves living according to meanings that we do not consciously recognise, responding to dangers which belong partly to another time, or protecting ourselves from experiences which are no longer occurring in the same form.

Why relationship matters in therapy

This is one reason the therapeutic relationship matters so deeply. Psychotherapy is not simply a situation in which one person describes their relationships to another person who remains outside them as an observer. Something inevitably happens between two people who meet with sufficient openness and attention.

A person may begin to notice what it is like to trust the therapist, to feel misunderstood, to need something, to disagree, to become emotionally close or to experience distance. Expectations about what another person will do may emerge before they are consciously recognised. Feelings which are familiar in other relationships may begin to appear within the therapeutic relationship itself.

These experiences do not need to be treated as obstacles to the therapy. They can become part of what allows the therapy to understand the person more fully. Instead of simply explaining a pattern after the event, it becomes possible to notice something of it while it is happening. The experience can be observed, thought about and felt within a relationship in which another person is able to remain present with it.

This can create an opportunity for something previously unconscious to become more conscious, not because the therapist has imposed an explanation, but because there is finally enough relationship, attention and safety for the person to begin recognising something within their own experience.

Being understood rather than explained

There is a difference between having someone explain you and having someone try to understand you.

An explanation can arrive too quickly. It can turn a complicated human experience into a category and give the impression that its meaning has already been decided. Understanding is slower. It requires attention to the particular person, their history, their relationships and the meaning that an experience has for them.

Sometimes we need to be able to say that we do not yet know what something means, and to allow meaning to emerge rather than imposing it.

This is particularly important in trauma work. Therapy should not become another situation in which someone else decides what your experience means, pushes you towards a memory or expects you to disclose something before you are ready. There may be things that become clearer over time, but the process of arriving at that understanding belongs to you.

When something begins to make sense

Realisation can therefore be a gradual process. It may not involve the recovery of a forgotten memory or a dramatic moment in which everything suddenly becomes clear. Sometimes something much quieter happens.

A reaction begins to make sense in the context of an earlier relationship. A familiar fear acquires a history. A pattern which has been repeated for years becomes visible as a way of protecting oneself. An emotion which has always seemed inexplicable becomes connected to something which had previously remained outside conscious understanding.

When this happens, the significance lies not simply in having acquired an explanation. Something has changed in the person's relationship to their own experience. What was previously happening to them can begin to become something they can think about.

That difference matters. An experience which remains entirely outside awareness can exert its influence without being questioned, whereas an experience which has become sufficiently conscious can be approached, understood and related to differently.

Discovering that you do not have to know it alone

There can also be something profound about discovering that you do not have to know such a realisation alone. An experience which might have been impossible to tolerate in isolation can become more bearable when another person remains present without attempting to take it away.

The therapist does not possess the answer and cannot repair the past. What the relationship can provide is a different context in which you can encounter your own experience. Something painful can be spoken without immediately becoming overwhelming; something frightening can be approached without having to be conquered; something previously hidden can become visible without you losing your sense of yourself.

Over time, what becomes possible within a relationship can begin to become possible internally. You may become more able to recognise your emotional states, notice what is happening in your body, distinguish between a response belonging to the present and an expectation formed through the past, and recognise familiar relational patterns while they are occurring rather than only afterwards.

The aim is not to become unaffected by history. It is to develop greater freedom in relation to it.

From repetition to recognition

We cannot undo what has happened to us, and we cannot become people who have never been frightened, abandoned, betrayed, loved badly or forced to develop ways of protecting ourselves. But we may gradually become less governed by experiences which once had to remain outside conscious understanding.

What was once repeated can become recognisable. What was once unbearable can become more possible to hold. What was once experienced only through the body or through relationships can begin to acquire language and meaning.

The purpose is not to excavate the past for its own sake, nor to force an explanation upon experience. It is to develop a relationship with ourselves in which more of our experience can be known without having to be immediately rejected, defended against or acted upon.

Sometimes what we most fear discovering about ourselves is not evidence that we are damaged beyond repair, but evidence of the ways in which we have tried to survive what we could not otherwise manage.

There may come a point at which something that has been lived unconsciously begins to be understood consciously, not because someone has told us what it means, but because we have been able to experience it differently. We discover that we can remain present with something that previously required us to disappear from ourselves. We discover that another person can remain present without taking possession of our experience. We discover that vulnerability does not necessarily result in annihilation, that dependence does not necessarily require the loss of autonomy, and that being known does not necessarily mean being controlled.

This does not make the past disappear. It changes our position in relation to it. We are no longer quite so entirely inside the experience. We can begin to see it, think about it and recognise the ways in which it has shaped us. There is then perhaps a little more freedom between what we feel and what we do, between what happened then and what is happening now, and between the person we had to become and the person we may still be capable of becoming.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest possibilities of psychotherapy: that what was once impossible to know can gradually become knowable, what was once impossible to bear can become more bearable, and what once seemed to determine who we were can become part of our history rather than the boundary of our future.

Integrative, relational and embodied psychotherapy

My approach brings together psychodynamic and relational psychotherapy with an embodied, trauma-informed understanding of experience. I am interested not only in what you remember and think about, but in the ways your history may continue to be expressed through your relationships, emotional life and bodily experience in the present.

Therapy is collaborative and paced according to your capacity and choice. There is no requirement to uncover memories, disclose experiences or arrive at an explanation before you are ready. Instead, we can begin with what is present and allow understanding to develop through the relationship, through attention to your experience and through curiosity about the ways in which your history continues to shape your life.