Healthy Relationships After Complex Trauma: Episode 5

Hello, and welcome back to the Thriving After Complex Trauma podcast. So far, in the episodes, I’ve really focused on complex trauma and how it develops. But in this episode, I’m going to change the focus a little bit to talking about one of the keys to thriving that can help us to recover from complex trauma, and that’s going to be through good relationships. I have a master’s degree in positive psychology, which is often called the psychology of happiness, and that’s all about how to thrive and flourish in life, which is really important for all of us, especially if we’ve had complex trauma. And satisfying, meaningful, enjoyable relationships really are a key part of this.  

So this one’s for you if you want to start moving forward, making different choices in your life, or shoring up what you already instinctively know, that having great people in our lives and good, healthy relationships really is one of the keys to living a happy, flourishing life. 

How We Feel App 
But just before I start, I wanted to share a great app that a client has shared with me. Thank you very much – you know who you are. Now, you know I’m always going on about feelings and the feelings wheel, but this app takes it to another level and it’s definitely worth a try. It’s completely free. It’s called How We Feel and it’s by Mark Brackett and his team at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, so you know it comes from a good source. It’s also being created by the co-founder of Pinterest, so it’s really aesthetically pleasing. It’s a lovely app to use, but most importantly, it’s backed by a lot of psychology. So it simply helps you to check in and name your emotions, but there’s also some simple emotional regulation tools too. So very similar to a feelings wheel and how we feel is the app.  

Being more emotionally aware, intelligent, and regulated truly is one of the core foundations of good psychological health, and something most of us, especially if you’re British, did not learn growing up. But we can easily learn it in adulthood, and it genuinely is something that you can do in just a few minutes a day to massively help you with your psychological health and with your relationships, both with yourself and with other people. S 

Why we need good, healthy relationships 
So on that note, let’s get going with the topic. of today’s episode. I’ve really been looking forward to this one. The power of positive relationships is one of my favourite topics. So I hope you enjoy it and you can take something really practical, hopeful and very positive from it. So first of all, let’s just recap why relationships and attachment to close others matter. We’ve evolved and survived really as a species because we’re wired to form deep emotional bonds with other people. And that’s usually a small number of very close others. So our close tribe, if you like. And these people give us a safe haven or a secure home base that helps us to navigate the ups and downs of life. And if you think about your own life, hopefully you know that to be true. Because throughout our lives, we turn to others for emotional support. So we attach to a small number of close others.  

So if you’ve been around babies and young children, you know this. They instinctively reach for their caregivers and rely on their key attachment figures for everything. And then as we grow throughout childhood into adulthood, we connect with others. So we form friendships. And then through romantic love, we’re biologically primed to attach to one significant other who becomes our emotional home base and our most essential source of safety, support, security, connection, and belonging. So Safe and responsive relationships where we can rely on each other, we can be emotionally vulnerable, we can feel supported, really are essential for feeling safe in the world. They help to reduce our stress levels. They help to regulate our nervous systems.  

We’re talking about good relationships that support our psychological resilience and well-being. So key people in our lives that help us cope with stress, that help us to bounce back from inevitable knocks and to grow our lives. And good relationships provide us with this psychological secure base. So they encourage us to pursue goals, to take on challenges, and really to thrive, not just survive in our lives. And that leads to better mental health, better stress regulation, more meaningful relationships with other people, and they all contribute to long-term health and flourishing. The research on this is extremely strong. 
 

Relationships after complex trauma
And we’re talking about safe and responsive relationships, so not the kind of relationships I talked about in the last episode. Now, unfortunately, we also know, if we have a history of complex trauma, so if we’ve had a lot of hurt and harm in our close relationships over a sustained period of time, whether that’s through difficult childhood experiences or abusive adult relationships, or quite often for my clients, it would be both of those things, then it’s very understandable that this will impact our relationships as adults.  

Because if we’ve had harmful relationship experiences, essentially our nervous system and our attachment system and our minds have come to associate close relationship with others with threat, not safety. And over time, those traumatic experiences then alter our core beliefs about ourselves and about other people and how safe we can be in relationships and in the world where we have to deal with other people. We are a social species, we are mammals. and we are designed to be in relation with other people.  

But if we’ve experienced complex trauma in our relationships, we are going to usually have some relationship issues, all of which I can assure you are very workoutable. We absolutely can change our relationship patterns and our behaviour. We can understand ourselves and our relationship behaviour more, make different choices, learn and practice new skills and move through the world very differently, all of which can add up in time to us having very different types of relationships, really authentic, secure, deep connection in ways that feel steady, supportive, and genuinely safe.  

And I know for some of my clients, when they start therapy, they really think that’s a fantasy. They’ve sometimes never had safe, good, healthy relationships, but it absolutely can happen, even if that’s the case for you. So please be hopeful. I do hope that you’ve got people in your life, even if it’s just one or two people who you can recognise are safe and kind and supportive and that you can turn to when you need them. But if you haven’t, then do know that that is a possibility. And sometimes the first secure attachment we can have is with a therapist.  

So it may be that you do need to have a look at having therapy if you haven’t already, but hopefully you have at least one person in your life that you have good relationships with, and you can maybe start through this episode to understand a little bit more about what you are looking for in other relationships. Many people come into therapy and really don’t know what good relationships look like. But the thing is, we all learn about relationships in childhood, and many of us didn’t get great modelling or actively had things that harmed us, so we can not quite know what good relationships look like. We can have a sense of it, but sometimes we can feel like that’s something that applies to other people. And we can feel a bit embarrassed about that or even a bit ashamed about that, but we don’t really don’t need to be.  

So by listening to this and even taking the smallest steps in the right direction, you’re hugely helping yourself. And it is really important to take the time to notice that because noticing small steps makes a big difference over time to changing our self-concept and being able to feel proud of ourselves that we’re showing up for ourselves and in the world in a different way, which is also a really essential part of healing from complex trauma. And the change in our relationship behaviour usually happens in small, incremental ways.  

It can be really, really terrifying to start to try and connect with people in new ways, but it’s also pretty essential if we want to keep growing. And the good news is, great news is that we can learn about this as adults. It’s really quite straightforward. It’s quite simple. Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it is quite simple and it can even be fun to learn. And we all have agency over it. So it’s something that we can take ownership of and we can start to move forward with. We are all learning and growing as humans. We can all do better in our relationships. We can all make mistakes and be messy along the way. That is being human. But when we can understand ourselves more. We can learn what to look for in safer, healthier others. We can learn how to do relationships better in time. And with awareness, with learning new skills, then we can change and we can have really good relationships, really strong relationships in our lives. And that really does change everything.  

Key things to look for in healthy relationships after complex trauma
In our closest relationships, there are key elements that we want to look for. It can apply to friendships as well, and they really matter. We want to have a good range of healthy relationships in our lives. But for most of us, that also means having an intimate relationship with a romantic partner, as well as our friends and maybe our family too. And of course, some people choose not to be in a romantic relationship for personal or lifestyle reasons, which is entirely up to them. But it is also important for me to say, because we’re talking about complex trauma, that hyper-independence can sometimes be a trauma response. So if we are really avoidant of relationships and really rejecting of romantic relationships, especially if that reflects a difficulty trusting and depending on others, then that may actually be coming from trauma rather than an actual choice. And most people do want to be in a close romantic relationship that is healthy and is based on love, respect, mutual support and trust. So let’s look at some of those key things.  

Emotional responsiveness
We need people in our closest relationships who are emotionally responsive and that means that we can tune into each other’s emotional needs. So in one-sided relationships that doesn’t happen. One person’s emotional responses become much more important than the other person’s. But in healthy relationships, there’s a balance. We support each other emotionally, not just practically. So if you’re sad, I care and I want to help, and if I’m sad, you care and you want to help. It’s quite simple, really. There’s this reciprocal nature to it. It’s not always easy, though.  

But if we’re emotionally present, we’re attuned to each other and we’re showing up for each other emotionally. We want to know about the other person and how they’re doing because we care about them. So being emotionally steady, responding with empathy helps someone feel seen, respected and secure. So it means that we’re looking for people who show up in those ways. So they’re not blowing hot and cold, they’re not intense and then withdrawing. They’re nice and steady emotionally. So we’re able to show our emotions with them. We’re able to talk about emotions and they are emotionally regulated too. So we’re not seeing a lot of volatility and unpredictability.  

And obviously I’m talking about emotions again. So we do need to be able to know what we are feeling to be able to tune into the emotions of others and speak the language of emotions. So that’s why we keep going on in therapy about things like the feelings wheel, how we feel at, steps that we can all take to work on our emotional intelligence and how we can express our emotions ourselves and how we can feel more comfortable with the emotions of others. So you can think about who shows up in your life for you emotionally, Who wants to know how you feel and cares about how you feel? If you don’t have anyone, that can be really painful, but also something that you can absolutely change, especially if you start as a first step, tuning in and showing up for yourself emotionally.  

Empathy, non-judgement and vulnerability
And this kind of emotional responsiveness requires vulnerability and non-judgment, which are important characteristics too. So people who can listen with empathy and allow us and even encourage us to express our emotions and don’t judge us when we do so. Because vulnerability, especially after complex trauma, can be quite frankly terrifying. But it is what deepens our emotional bonds and connects us with other human beings. It’s how we authentically allow another person to know and see us. We let them into our emotional world and how we actually feel. We can all practice it, we can all get better at it and it gets better with time. And you can start in slow and steady ways. It’s a sign of huge emotional strength and courage to be able to express ourselves emotionally and with vulnerability.  

But if you’ve been told or you have a belief that having emotions is weak, showing vulnerability is weak, then I would encourage you to look at that belief because it is really distorted. and it’s probably being influenced heavily by your past experiences and it is really way off target. So empathy, non-judgmental listening, incredibly important in healthy relationships. Empathy means we can pick up on others’ emotional signals and we can respond sensitively to that. And that’s much easier if we’re in person with someone because we’re picking up a lot of signals from them in a non-verbal way as well as what they’re actually saying. It’s very hard to do that on things like text messages. And non-judgmental listening is really about helping to build a safe place for both people to open up. And that builds emotional safety so we can accept other people, they can accept us. as we get to know each other if there’s acceptance and there’s non-judgment. And that’s going to mean that people show up with empathy, but also with kindness.  

Kindness
So we want to notice how as we open up to people about our emotions in small ways, how do they respond to that? How do they treat us when we are being just a little bit vulnerable or we’re sharing how we feel? And how people treat that is really important to pay attention to, especially as we get to know new people. But over time, we also want to know how people treat other people. So we can notice how people go around in the world and how they behave towards others. And we can often get a sense of actually how kind somebody is by the way they treat people, particularly those people who can’t give them anything, because kindness predicts long-term relationship satisfaction much more than things like intensity and passion.  

And the stuff that we’re talking about here really is essential for trust and true intimacy, because vulnerability, emotional safety, kindness, And this non-judgmental understanding builds trust. So when we know it’s okay to share difficult emotions, the emotional bonds between us and the trust between us starts to grow. So we want somebody who has the capacity for that. And some people simply don’t because of their own stuff. It doesn’t mean they’re bad people, but it does mean that we want to assess whether they are someone that we can be in close relationship with. Because having good skills in this area really makes a huge difference.  

Communicating how we feel
And it means that we can communicate more easily, usually about our emotions. We can communicate how we feel in our relationships. And if we’re both able to do that, that really reduces misunderstandings and conflict. So it means we’re able to navigate inevitable conflict, which will come up much more easily. We’re less likely to react impulsively or destructively during conflict. And that’s how supportive relationships build over time.  

So with mutual care, emotional support and understanding. So I hope you can see why emotional skills are a core part of most therapies. Emotional regulation is strongly tied to well-being, relationships and resilience. So if it’s the one thing that you take from this episode, please take that. Emotions matter. And the great news is that we can all get better at this. If you use the How We Feel app, if you start to notice your own emotions, if you start to get more comfortable with talking about emotions with those people close to you, then that’s going to really take you quite far in the right direction. But let’s also talk about some other things that we want to look for.  

Trust
And so we’ve already mentioned trust, but we want people who are trustworthy, who are reliable, who have integrity. And trust grows over time when we show up reliably and steadily. So we keep promises, we do what we say we’re going to do. We respect other people’s boundaries. So it’s small, consistent acts of care over time. So calling when we say we’re going to call, meeting when we say we’re going to meet, doing what we promised, or speaking up clearly if we can’t do that. So all these things I’ve done. time teach the other person and us that we are safe to be in relationship together.  

So we’re looking for reliable communication and follow through. We’re looking for honesty and big and more importantly, small things, transparency without being asked. So people who are letting you into their world and sharing things about themselves. But trust is built through repeated consistency and acts, not just promises. And consistency is a really important word here. Because being in relationship with people where hurt and harm has been caused to us, it’s very chaotic. It’s very unpredictable. 

Consistency
So consistency helps us to build trust, but also to feel safe. So we do need to notice if someone is predictable and consistent so that we can relax and trust them. Now that can feel extremely unfamiliar at first, especially if all we’ve known in our relationships has been chaos and unpredictability. Safeness can feel boring. It can feel very, very unfamiliar. It can actually provoke some anxiety. But if we are noticing, we can work with it and things can change over time. It’s also important to remember that nobody is perfect. So we do all make mistakes. We do all drop the ball. So we don’t want to be hyper vigilant to every tiny little thing that someone is doing, but we do want to see over time that someone is consistent and reliable and trustworthy. The key message that we want to get, and we also want to give if we want healthy relationships, is I’m safe, I’m steady, you can rely on me, and that makes all the difference.  

And part of that is someone who is able to communicate. So we need to be able to speak openly about feelings, about what we need, about what we expect. And, at first when we try to do that, it can be very, very challenging. It can be really messy and we can worry too much about getting the words right. And that really doesn’t matter. It’s the fact that we are trying. We are trying to communicate how we feel. You don’t need to be perfect, just open and willing to do it. And so that helps us to have difficult conversations in calm, safe ways. It helps us to repair after conflict and it helps us to get this sense that we are respectful of each other, so we treat each other with respect. 

Healthy conflict and repair
 We appreciate the good stuff that we have in our relationship. We are kind, we are caring, and even when things are difficult, we retain those values. So we manage conflict. So instead of being critical and volatile, we’re curious and we want to understand. We manage our emotions and we repair ruptures. And one of the strongest predictors of long-term success in relationships is this willing to repair. So noticing when there’s been a disconnection and being able to repair it. So apologizing, reconnecting, and trying to work through problems. And that really helps us to feel like we’re on the same team, right? So someone who can compromise with us, who wants to collaborate with us rather than compete. Someone who wants to problem solve instead of blaming us and telling us that we’re the problem. It allows us to grow as individuals, but also together.  

Interdependence
And that balance of independence and togetherness is incredibly important. So we want to be with people who encourage our goals, who can be independent and who also want to grow whilst also maintaining connection. So that means that they are people who are respecting your boundaries, respecting any space that you want to have. They’re able to have their own lives too. They’re not trying to control and monitor you all the time. They’re supportive of you in your friendships and your interests, relationships and love should really expand our lives, not shrink it. So there’s room for personal growth, there’s room for autonomy and agency, but there’s also this connection between us that we are nurturing. And in order to nurture that connection, we want to know what our own values are in life.  

Values
And we want to know that our values align with the other person. So we don’t have to have identity identical personalities and identical lifestyles, but we do have to have similar values. So that might be our commitment style, whether we’re looking for a relationship or something casual, it might be our lifestyle choices. If we’re into health and fitness, if someone’s really not, then that’s going to be challenging. Values are also around our approach to money, our priorities.  

So if we want a family, if we prioritize our health again, or if we want to prioritize work and we have a lot of ambition versus someone that’s looking for a different kind of lifestyle, then those things matter. But they can also be worked through again with that open communication.  

Playfulness and touch
And then there are other things like a sense of humour and playfulness. So play strengthens long-term connection. It helps to buffer any conflict. So having a laugh, managing stress and creating a sense of ease and lightness in the relationship is really important. We forget how to play sometimes as an adult and it really does bring a lot of joy to life. And that really feeds into, if it’s an intimate romantic relationship, of course, also physical and sexual connection. So touch is so important to us as humans. We really are wired for it from infancy. And usually romantic touch becomes the primary source of nurture and touch in adulthood. So we can have playful touch, we can have affectionate touch, we can have, of course, sexual touch.  

If we’ve had a history of trauma, if we’ve been hurt by abuse of others, that can take time to work through. So it really is important to be with a kind and careful and caring person. Touch is incredibly healing; it regulates our nervous system and it helps us to engage our parasympathetic nervous system to signal that we are safe and that we are emotionally connected with somebody else.  

So for most of us, if you think about a lovely hug, that really can convey much more than words can. And of course, in an intimate relationship, sex is an important part of that. So not everyone has the same need or desire for touch and sex and intimacy, of course. So we want to be with someone who we can talk about that with and work through any issues with. which of course comes back to good communication, affection, compassion, care, and both people feeling safe and able to express their desires and needs, which of course takes vulnerability. But emotional safety is incredibly important here.  

Loyalty, accountability, kindness and respect
So those are the main things that we want to be looking for in a healthy, positive adult relationship. I definitely also add loyalty and accountability. So loyalty is the consistent choice to prioritize our partner. And it matters in adult romantic relationships because again, it builds trust, emotional safety and stability. So we’re standing by our person. And accountability is when we take responsibility for the mess ups that we inevitably make. And accountability is one of the strongest markers of emotional maturity. And it goes without saying really, that kindness and respect really are the cornerstones. And we can all notice those as baselines for anyone in our lives. life, it really is essential that our closest people consistently treat us with kindness and respect. And if they don’t, then we do need to address that. 

Getting clear on character
There’ll be other things that you would add too. And one thing that I often encourage clients who are looking to meet a romantic partner or to expand their social circles to do, and it’s a really nice exercise, is to think about and write down what qualities you are actively looking for in other people. And often if you think about those that you feel safest and most able to relax and be yourself with, whether that’s in the present or people you’ve known in the past, usually similar characteristics emerge. So once we get clearer about the type of people that we enjoy spending time with, then we can be a lot clearer about the kind of things that we’re looking for.  

Focussing on what matters in healthy relationships after complex trauma
And you’ll notice that really on the theme from the last episode as well, these are not about external things. These are not about how the person looks, how attractive they are, what they’ve got, what they do for a job. We’re back to looking at the character. It’s about who people are and how we work together. And of course that takes time to discover, but we want to do it in a conscious way. And also when we find those things in people, we want to put effort into the relationships over time to build that trust and build that connection. It really is far better from a thriving perspective to have a small number of close people in our lives who will really show up for us when the chips are down rather than lots of shallow acquaintances. We really do want to be focusing on substance over superficiality in our closest relationships to flourish and thrive. We need to know people will be there for us as we are there for them.  

So that means as we meet new people, we need to be conscious of what we’re noticing and what we’re impressed by as well. People can have nice things, people can do well in life. It’s perfectly possible to be successful and to be beautiful inside and out, but we can be encouraged to overvalue the outside and undervalue the insight. So if we are overvaluing or being overly impressed by status, by looks, by materialistic things, that’s going to lead us down a very different path than if we are looking for someone’s character as a priority. 

 Of course, we want to find our partner physically attractive, but we do want to be careful that we’re not prioritising hotness and sexiness over other things. or we’re potentially heading for trouble and superficial relationships that are about this intensity and passion that often fizzles out pretty quickly, or as I talked about in the last episode, can lead us into potentially toxic and abusive relationships rather than deeply satisfying, nurturing relationships that have substance. So we want to prioritize connection, not chemistry, and true intimacy, not just surface intensity. And that often needs to be nurtured and takes time, and we need to keep noticing the things that keep us connected to our partners and that we find attractive about them. And if you’ll find yourself repeatedly not being able to do that, then that’s perhaps more likely to do with attachment and trauma patterns than your partner, which I’ll explore more about in later episodes on attachment.  

And if we’ve been around a lot of narcissism, we do need to be careful because we’ve kind of been trained to look out for and value the wrong things. And of course, much of our Society encourages that increasingly as well. So we need to be cautious and we need to be thinking carefully about what we value in life and looking for the right things. So if we notice and we’re impressed by character, so kindness, by someone’s courage to be emotionally vulnerable, courage to come through challenges in life, someone’s ability to have deep conversations about the things that matter, how someone treats other people, how conscientious they are, how warm, how caring, You get the idea.  

We’re noticing different things and we’re making connections or deepening connections based on very different things that start from a really good foundation of what makes great, healthy, supportive, positive relationships. And that really does change everything. And of course, it’s fine to have a variety of people in our lives. We can still have friends that we just have fun with and that’s what they bring to our lives.  

But if we’re talking about close relationships, then we do need to think about these other things. And of course, we want to be considering how we show up in relationship too and what we’re bringing to the table. So how do we behave when we’re with different people? And another good question is to ask, how do I feel when I’m with this person? Again, obviously, if it’s a new person in our lives, it takes time to work that out.  

So there’s no rush. It’s important to remember as well that at the beginning of relationships, especially romantic ones, There can be a lot of anxiety floating around and there’s a lot of uncertainty. And just because you’re feeling anxious around someone, especially at the beginning, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re bad for you. But over time, we would want that to settle fairly quickly and for us to feel like we enjoy being with this person and there’s a safeness to it.  

So if you notice that you do feel very anxious, though, around people a lot, then it might be that you need some therapy to help you with that. And as we go through this process of noticing more about what happens for us in our relationships, we do sometimes realise that we want to make adjustments in our friendships and in our close relationships, and that’s okay, that’s perfectly appropriate and part of growth. But it can be quite challenging too. We don’t always have to cut people out of our lives. 

 Sometimes we do if people are extremely abusive and toxic. It is absolutely best to step away from that entirely. But for some relationships we can’t do that or we don’t want to do that. But we may notice there are people that are still in our lives who aren’t showing the characteristics that we’re talking about here and who are not that healthy for us to be in very close relationship with. And we can make some readjustments about how much access they have to us, how much time we spend with them. And that comes with really needing to learn usually some new skills, like how to set better boundaries, how to seek up more assertively with them, how to focus more on what we need. And I’ll talk about that more in later episodes too. But if we do have a lot of one sided relationships, which can sometimes happen, many of my clients are prone to giving too much in relationship, and that can take a little bit of adjustment and is a bit of a process.  

Moving forward in small ways
So we want to start in micro ways, but really importantly with the right people who are kind, who are caring, who are thoughtful, who can hold our emotions if we start to share them in small ways with them. So one of the ways that we can do that is just to start to share a little bit of vulnerability with people and just watch and observe how they respond. You’ll get a lot of data from that. So we can practice sharing our feelings in small doses and noticing what feels good about connection. It can start to feel a little bit overwhelming. sometimes and we need to do it in a safe way.  

So give yourself permission to just do it in small doses, take pauses when you need to, and then go again. Parts language is really helpful here. So part of me feels excited and really enjoying this connection. And part of me feels like it’s too much and I’m scared and that’s all okay. Because we’re tuning in more, we’re learning more about ourselves. We really can start to do things differently and we can learn to be in safe relationship again, even if we’ve had very difficult relationships up to this point. Again, if it feels too much to do on your own, you may need some help in therapy, particularly perhaps to process some of the trauma that you have been through in relationship and feel safe again. But with the right kind of support, the right people in our lives, we absolutely can heal and build our capacity for safe, meaningful connection and good, healthy relationships really do help us to heal because in those relationships we are rewiring our brains, our minds, our nervous systems, our attachment systems to feel secure in relationship and to build secure connection. I honestly do see this every single day in my clinic and it is such a privilege to see.  

 So as we come to the end of this episode, I really do hope it’s been helpful for you and you’ve been able to take something from it. So whether that’s confirming what you already know or opening up more understanding of how and why positive, safe, healthy, secure relationships are so powerful for healing from complex trauma. The evidence is really conclusive. They really are one of the best ways that we can repair the harm that has come to us. and they are one of the keys for really thriving in life. I also hope that it’s helped you to think about what to look out for in other people and what to cultivate in ourselves, of course, too. So next time I’ll be continuing the relational theme and starting to look at attachment patterns. So I hope you’ll tune in for that and look after yourself meanwhile.