5 Ways Your Childhood Affects Your Romantic Relationships
Whether we like it or not, our upbringing influences our romantic relationships, how we develop and function in romantic relationships, and give and receive love. So, the more we can become aware of these influences, the more we can understand how to use them to benefit, rather than harm, our relationships.
This article explores the five ways your childhood affects your romantic relationships.
During our childhood, we learn ways to exist in the world and relate to others. Yet the challenges don’t have to be permanent — with some support, healing is possible.
We live what we learn, until we decide not to, and then make necessary changes.
How Childhood Trauma Affects Your Relationships
Our early developmental years during our childhood have a significant and lasting effect on the way we interact with our partners. For example, if you experienced childhood trauma, it often impacts your adult romantic relationships.
The first step toward understanding the role of childhood in your romantic relationships is to examine the role that your parents or caretakers played in shaping you.
This relationship is our first exposure on how to communicate and interact in a romantic relationship. As a child, you are a sponge, constantly watching and absorbing all the interactions between your parents or caretakers.
So, it would reason that you would accept the ways things are because of what you are seeing - even if it’s not great or unhealthy. Because you don’t know what you don’t know.
How Childhood Emotional Neglect Affects Romantic Relationships
Warm and nurturing parents. Research shows that when parents are warm and nurturing, their children are more likely to have high self-esteem and healthy romantic relationships later in life. They will feel more secure in their ability to navigate the ups and downs in life and in relationships.
And because they may feel more secure in themselves, they often will choose people who are often secure as well.
Unaffectionate parents. When parents are not affectionate or rarely show affection towards their partner or you, or are avoidant or anxious in relationships, their children are more anxious or avoidant as adults.
And if parents or caretakers expressed anger towards one another and their relationship was conflictual, depending on how they managed this, will also affect how you communicate and manage conflict in your relationships.
Despite there being many ways that parents and caretakers influence a child’s upbringing, the result is the same - your upbringing, those early years are significant in how you learn to relate to yourself and others, communicate, manage the ups and downs of life, and interact within a romantic relationship.
And yet despite the impact of your upbringing, change is always possible.
If you would like to discuss how your childhood has impacted your personal relationship and how we can work together so you can start to move forward, just click the button below to book a free 15 -minute consultation!
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5 Ways Your Childhood Affects Your Romantic Relationships as an Adult:
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1. Your Relationship Values and Lifestyle
Your childhood is a vital part of who you are as an adult. It shapes your values and lifestyle, and the way you relate to others. Values are the beliefs that motivate you to act in one way or another. They serve as a guide and a foundation for your behavior.
Values are what we regard that is important and has worth or usefulness. It’s the principles or standards of behavior that we stand by. Often people are predisposed to adopt the values they were raised with and come to believe those values are right.
Your values influence your decisions and provide the building blocks for your character and how you want to live. You should ask yourself:
What are some of the values you were raised with?
Do you like those values?
How have they shaped you in ways that continue in your adult life?
Understanding your values is important especially when you are dating and choosing a person to be in a relationship with. The values that you grew up with can and often do have a huge impact on how you interact with your partner in a relationship and what you are seeking in a partner.
Defining your core values provides the compass in how you lead your life and affects your actions and decisions, allowing you to further your life goals.
Values you learn as a child that can affect your relationships can be such things as:
Showing courage through difficult times,
The importance of integrity,
Respect,
Forgiveness,
Being authentic,
Demonstrating patience,
Honesty
Responsibility,
Importance of community
Showing gratitude
Religion or spirituality
The importance of education
Your work ethic
Love.
All of these values influence us in different ways. They lead us to and away from people. We are seeking people who have the same values and lifestyle as we do. When these don’t align, we often feel something is off.
Your lifestyle choices and how you experience these growing up are what is modeled in the way of personal and conscious decisions to live life in certain ways.
Some of these include whether you are raised with a healthy lifestyle (exercise, wellness), the influence of sleep, whether your parents were socially active, drank alcohol or smoked, were active in the community or with church, gave back, how they spent their time away from work, hobbies, and approach to life.
Depending on the values you were raised with and the lifestyle your parents provided, has a significance on the ways in which you want to live your life.
2. How You Manage Emotions and Communicate
How you manage your emotions and communicate is modeled by your parents or caretakers and as you watch them manage their emotions, you internalize these same behaviors - because why wouldn’t you? You don’t know anything else at this time.
For example, you may observe that feelings should be ignored or that is ok to express your feelings in ways that make someone else feel uncomfortable. Or you may have been taught that it was wrong or inappropriate to feel certain ways and that you should be ashamed of those feelings.
Some parents yell and scream at one another and for the child - you - this becomes very unsettling.
Maybe your parents and siblings talk over one another. Maybe you can’t get a word in at all. Or maybe your parents were different individually - one talked all the time, and the other fell silent. Remember your parents came from somewhere too.
Some people say that ‘my parents didn’t argue’ though this doesn’t necessarily mean this was good. Silence can indicate a feeling of hopelessness, giving up and not caring, acquiescing or possibly not having a reason to fight and argue. It just depends.
However, sometimes kids grow up with parents who set a good example when it comes to relationships. The way parents model good communication or interact with one another, influences how we feel we should interact in our relationship.
You watched your parents communicate in ways that were healthy. There was a give and take. Maybe they fought, but they fought fair. You watched them speak to one another in kind ways. Maybe there wasn’t a lot of arguing. Some parents just get along better.
I have found that many - most - people have not learned healthy ways to communicate in relationships, so they come to therapy to learn how to do this better. There is no positive outcome to blame parents, but to understand where they came from and what was modeled for them.
As you become an adult and have relationships of your own, you might find yourself in these same types of situations and feel somewhat comfortable - even though you know this isn’t healthy.
We grow and change through self-examination, introspection, and a willingness to change.
3. Your Views on Marriage
Your views on marriage can play a significant role in your current and future relationships. Here are a few ways that gets played out.
If you grew up in a loving household with parents who stayed together and have healthy communication methods, you’re more likely to have a positive view of relationships. This might be reflective of your view of marriage.
Your parents demonstrated positive interactions and overall you got the feeling or sense that relationships and marriage were positive.
If your parents argued a lot yet stayed together, you might feel that this is how couples interact and even though they are not happy. Maybe your parents were fearful of divorcing or for their own reason didn’t want to lose them even though they were unhappy.
This can set up a negative codependency in relationships. Your view on marriage might be to stay together even if you are miserable, unhappy, and/or argue a lot and go by the motto ‘you need to stay together at all costs.’
As an adult in a relationship, you may carry this viewpoint as well and believe you must stay in your relationship because this is what couples do. Or have the opposite effect - you might be a bit resistant or hesitant to pursue or be interested in marriage.
Sometimes without realizing it, you can have a fear of commitment or marriage, because of what you observed. For you, marriage takes on a negative tone and so you shy away from it.
If you are a child of divorce, you might think if things don't work out or I am unhappy, I can just get divorced. Maybe it was hard to go between 2 different homes and that had a negative impact or maybe your parents were happier in the end.
Regardless, this experience has many different outcomes. All these different situations ultimately affect each person differently. Every situation is different.
4. Your Relationship with Money
Money is often a very emotional topic and has a significant impact on your relationships. For example, how much money you grew up with, and what values and attitudes your parents had around money, you may be carrying negative or positive outlooks into your relationship.
Did you have money growing up?
Could your parents pay the bills?
Did you have food insecurity?
Did they live paycheck to paycheck?
Did they argue about money?
Did you get everything you wanted or needed?
Here are a few different financial situations
If you grew up in a low-income household, you might be cautious about how you spend your money. You may overspend on unimportant items to make yourself feel better and feel you have some form of control.
Maybe you are always looking for the best deal or trying to save money at all costs, regardless of how much money you make. If you didn't have a lot of money growing up and maybe now you do, you might still carry those cautious ways with you.
If your parents saved a lot of money and didn’t spend money on you or the family with travel or fun experiences, then you may become a person who saves a lot because this is what you learned or the opposite - you want to make money and live.
If your parents lived with a lot of debt, you may feel that this is ok and that having a lot of debt is ok even if you don’t have the money at the time to buy something.
Maybe you were always taken care of in varying ways - never went without, or had everything given to you.
If your parents worked all the time and just saved money, you may view work and money in the same way. You are apprehensive or cautious about spending any money and want to save it.
There are many different scenarios around money. Money is often a complicated subject that follows you in relationships - both good and bad. The most important aspects are to understand your relationship with money, how it influences your decisions, and if you have a different view than your partner and how significant is the difference.
5. Your Attachment Style
Attachment theory suggests that we create an internal working model of our parents that we later internalize as our own sense of self. Your attachment style affects how you experience yourself and how you exist, and communicate and interact in your relationship.
Your childhood experiences with your parents or caretakers provide a model for adult relationships. Your attachment style is the way we attach to others in romantic relationships, as well as other close relationships.
Attachment styles are formed in childhood and can have a profound effect on how we approach relationships throughout our lives.
There are four basic types of attachment styles:
Secure
Anxious/Preoccupied
Dismissive/Avoidant
Fearful/Avoidant
Secure attachment is when you feel comfortable with your partner, but also feel secure enough to separate from them when necessary. If your parents showed love, responded to our needs, and validated our feelings, we were more likely to develop a secure attachment style. We then seek out and desire that same attachment style as an adult.
The other three types create an insecure attachment. The anxious/preoccupied attachment is what happens when people are dependent on their partner and fear losing them. This can create co-dependency.
The dismissive/avoidant attachment is when people avoid closeness with others because they fear rejection or intimacy.
The Fearful/avoidant attachment is a combination of anxious/preoccupied and dismissive/avoidant attachment styles meaning you want closeness with your partner but also fear being rejected or abandoned by them.
If you developed an insecure attachment with your parents or caretakers this may lead to having low self-esteem, anxiety in relationships or feeling overly needy, doubt that you can trust others, and sometimes being more apt to seek out relationships that mimic this same attachment—not because it feels good but because it is familiar to us.
Some Questions to Ask Yourself Regarding Your Relationships
If you're looking to improve your relationships, it's important to understand how childhood trauma can affect relationships. These are some questions you’ll want to ask yourself.
What do you want to take from your upbringing?
One of the first things to consider is what you want to take from your childhood and incorporate into your romantic relationships. There may be things you want to keep and value. Good. And there are those things that you want to discard or adjust. Think about how you learned to communicate, your relationship with money, your view on marriage, and your values and lifestyle choices.
What patterns are you repeating from childhood, but you want to change?
Think about what patterns are repeating themselves in your current relationship and which ones you'd like to change. Look at your communication patterns.
Do you like how you communicate?
Are you struggling?
Do you have circular conversations?
What is your communication style?
What do you see in yourself that mimics your upbringing?
What model do you want to use for your relationships?
If you have a good role model in your life, that can serve as a guide on how to conduct yourself in a strong relationship. If you don't have good role models, it's important to understand what kind of model you'd like to use instead.
Ask yourself, what would a model of happiness look like? When you decide on what to keep and leave behind as well as the patterns you don’t want to repeat how does that create your own model of happiness that you can create, maintain, and sustain?
Everyone brings his or her own unique set of experiences into a relationship, and those experiences influence how they relate to other people.
How to Break the Cycle you Learned in Childhood
There are several things you can do to break the cycle if you find that change needs to take place.
You can ALWAYS change through awareness of your past and how it influences your present, a commitment to change, and holding yourself accountable to taking small changes in your life to create healthier relationships.
Take a closer look at your childhood and possibly talk to your parents or siblings to gain perspective even if your memories are different from what they share (which is common).
Start journaling which increases your self-awareness and sheds light on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in relationships.
Do a relationship inventory to help you connect the dots. When you observe your parents or caretakers as an adult, pay attention to what is coming up for you and ask yourself if these are the same things that are showing up in your relationships.
Read. Read. Read. There are copious articles and blogs on the internet filled with suggestions, advice, and ways in which you can overcome your upbringing legacy and make necessary changes!
Final Thoughts
Your upbringing doesn’t have to continue to define you in significant ways. You can always change in the ways and areas that you want to. Awareness is always the first step but you have to be willing to make changes - ever so small - to create a different second chapter …and so on. It takes more than just an awareness but a commitment to change.
Has your childhood impacted your relationship choices? Let’s chat
Looking to live more intentionally? Check out my new interactive workbook here!
Embark on a transformative journey with our workbook featuring 40 thought-provoking questions designed to guide you toward a more intentional and purposeful life. Explore your values, clarify your goals, and cultivate greater self-awareness through engaging exercises that empower you to make mindful choices and create a life aligned with your deepest aspirations.
