How Attachment Trauma Causes Toxic Relationship Cycles

Do you keep attracting unhealthy or toxic relationship dynamics in every romantic relationship you go into? You may have attachment trauma, which is trauma that affects your ability to attach to or bond in romantic relationships. Today I'll explain what attachment trauma is and how it might be the missing link for you to heal so that you can not only attract a healthy, secure relationship, but also show up yourself as a healthy, secure partner. Like my client, Claire, who's been struggling with self-abandoning behaviors in her relationships for years and didn't know that she actually held attachment trauma in her body that was causing her to act in a toxic way in her relationships. Claire learned how to heal her attachment trauma and now embodies a healthy, secure, and confident, stable partner she never thought was possible. And welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm Amy. I help emotionally unavailable women heal their abandonment issues that cause their unhealthy relationship patterns so they can become emotionally available and open to healthy, authentic relationships. If you need help with this, I encourage you to book a call to speak with me about working together inside my program, Heal Your Heart School. There are seven specific ways that attachment trauma causes you to keep attracting toxic relationship cycles, but first let's define attachment trauma. This is not only trauma that comes from your romantic relationships as an adult, but it actually originates in the earliest trauma that occurred in your childhood relationships with your primary caregivers and the kind of environment they created that you grew up in. If you have attachment trauma, you were likely raised by caregivers with dysregulated nervous systems resulting in a chaotic, unpredictable, and unstable environment for you, and your emotional and even physical needs were neglected. Or perhaps you had a mostly loving home, but your parents were emotionally absent or distracted and weren't attuned to you well. You were isolated a lot, sent to your room a lot, to deal with big, heavy emotions. Now the link between attachment trauma and toxic relationship cycles is huge because of the impact that trauma has not only on your brain, but your body and your nervous system, which means you'll tend to replicate those relationship dynamics in adulthood because you don't know any different. Or maybe you do know different, but your body is wired that way and you'll always attract those same dynamics because deep down, you don't know what a healthy relationship feels or looks like. You've never experienced it before. You only love the way you learn to love. So if you grew up used to never having your needs met in a consistent, supportive way, always uncertain of where you stand with your parents or uncertain whether your mom and dad loved you because of the way they seem to be ignoring you or you perceived abandonment, that uncertainty, fear of abandonment, fear of loneliness and deep unworthiness and shame gets embedded in your body from that experience. This means that you develop maladaptive behaviors to deal with that in order to stay safe. And we call that an insecure attachment style and all the nuanced attachment styles that come from that because they all feature significant insecurities when it comes to romantic relationships and even personality traits in the way that you show up for other people or don't show up for them well because of that trauma. So this trauma may affect your friendships as well and even acquaintances, colleagues and other relationships in your life. For example, when you were a child because of the uncertainty, you were always trying to control what you could control and now you're a perfectionist because perfectionism was one of the ways you learn to control your environment as a child and allowed you to on some level self-soothe and feel safe. Now as an adult, you continue to be a perfectionist because it's become embedded in your personality. So think of the effects your parents and caregivers had on you as a thumbprint and you carry the imprint of their thumb. As an adult walking around, you're subconsciously looking for someone that matches perfectly into that same kind of traumatic imprint in the way that they love. So you will naturally attract others with attachment trauma and often you will attract those whose attachment trauma fits perfectly with yours. For example, people with anxious attachment styles or disorganized attachment styles will often attract others with avoidant attachment styles because those two imprints fit perfectly together. Your wounds trigger each other and create a similar dynamic you might have had as a child. For example, if you're a woman with anxious attachment style who had a largely absent father, you'll be attracted to the more avoidant types of men because that dynamic replicates what you shared with your father. So let's go through the seven behaviors that you learned from your attachment trauma that caused you to keep attracting unhealthy relationships. The first behavior is lack of discernment. This is your capacity to identify when someone you're dating has red flags or is it disingenuous or just not right for you. You don't have a red flag filter because of your attachment trauma. Your picker is broken. You might see it or register it on some level, but you don't register that it's bad because you've probably grown up with red flag behaviors in your parents observing it all the time in your childhood. So you're actually accustomed to them, they're normal to you to the extent that you may even be attracted to them because you are so used to being loved in a red flag way as a child. For example, you might have had a mother who has narcissistic tendencies and would be really hot and cold with her attention and affection. You're used to that inconsistent kind of love and your body is actually wired to interpret it as love. So you're drawn even more to partners that are inconsistent and hot and cold in the way that they treat you. Or you may be driven by fears and insecurities that lead you to overlook or excuse those red flags. You may have deep empathy for this person. So when they disrespect you or try to control you, you can see behind it why they're doing it to such a deep degree that you forgive them. So you've got too much empathy, too much compassion, which leads to the second behavior attachment trauma creates that will cause a toxic relationship cycle, self-abandonment, which is where we ignore or suppress our needs, feelings, values, and boundaries in favor of someone else's. Namely, in your childhood, you had parents who took up a lot of space, so much so that there wasn't much space for you and you had to contort yourself to fit in, which meant that you got used to looking outside of yourself for validation, for reassurance, for certainty, for anything that's going to make you feel safe and secure because you didn't learn how to check in with your needs, to check what was right for you in that moment, which would have allowed you to feel safe and secure on your own. You don't have that skill. You've been overriding yourself to such a degree that now as an adult, you're over-attuned to your partner's needs just in the way you over-tuned to your parents' needs as a child and over-attunement to your partner's reality, what their truth is, may be setting the stage for them to gaslight you without you realizing it. It's almost like their reality is the only reality because you're self-abandoning. Your relationship is actually just about the other person. And this leads to the third behavior, a lack of self-worth. You have very little self-worth because self-worth is the act of recognizing your needs and acting in accordance with what's right for you. That's the exact opposite of self-abandonment. So you've been acting from a place of low self-worth, accepting far less than you deserve. Your bar is so low, you're accepting breadcrumbs, and it all comes down to this attachment trauma in you that thinks this is normal, acceptable behavior and that this is all you're worth. The well of your self-worth is effectively empty and dry. The next behavior is how you're attracted to chaotic dynamics. This is an interesting nervous system piece. If you grew up in chaos, your nervous system's capacity grows around that chaos. It actually gets used to operating in a heightened way all the time because it needs to be open and receptive to the next moment of chaos that might happen as a way to anticipate and potentially to be able to deal with it. You grow receptors that expect that kind of chaos when it comes to love. You're not only accustomed to it, it actually represents connection and depth for you. What you think is love is actually deep uncertainty, this feeling of being on a roller coaster. One minute they're loving you, the next minute they're rejecting you. You're effectively addicted to these emotional highs and the withdrawal of lows. That kind of inconsistent reinforcement, maybe today they'll love me or maybe if I do this they'll change and things will go back to the honeymoon period. It's like playing an emotional slot machine every day in your relationship. You're doing it because your body is addicted to these kinds of dynamics from when you experienced them as a child. You might notice other areas of your life where you're attracted to this dynamic, like your job or your friendships that replicate this. This is because your nervous system has become normalized to that chaos. Of course, stable, consistent, healthy love is going to feel boring or non-existent because your nervous system doesn't recognize it as love. The next behavior that comes from attachment trauma that causes toxic relationship cycles is a fear of abandonment. As children, we needed connection to survive and feel safe. If we felt any kind of abandonment, whether it was actual abandonment or perceived abandonment, like needing emotional connection and not receiving it from a parent, we felt abandoned. That can cause a deep level of primal fear and insecurity in the body, a fear that at any moment we could be left on our own. This causes clinging behavior and anxiety and is frequently seen in people with anxious attachment who tend to have this kind of energy or disorganized attachment where you yo-yo from clinging to stepping back and needing space. You fear that the person might leave you at any time, so you attach yourself to them and become hyper-attuned to any signs that abandonment might be impending, or in anticipating that abandonment, you abandon them and reject them from this place. You overanalyze their behavior, their words, the frequency of texts, because you're hyper-attuned to pick up on any sign of change that might signal you're about to be left or abandoned. This fear of abandonment completely overrides any red flags and issues. To the extent that the partner might be even telling you that they don't want to be with you, they might be physically abusing you, the worst could be happening, and you're still clinging to them because you fear abandonment so deeply. It's embedded in your nervous system and body. This behavior leads into the next behavior, which is a complete lack of boundaries. You don't have a sense of self, you're self-abandoning, and you don't have self-esteem, so you aren't setting boundaries to protect what's right for you because you don't know what that is. Any kind of manipulation or disrespect or emotional abuse isn't called out on, and your partner just walks all over you because of that fear of abandonment. You're not setting boundaries, which invites more mistreatment because you don't call them on it and say what's okay and what's not okay. This again comes from the experience in childhood where you didn't have the autonomy to speak up and set boundaries. You needed to go along with whatever behavior was accepted in the family environment, and you would also have observed a lack of boundaries being set between the adults in your environment as well. Boundaries may be a completely new concept to you. This last behavior that comes from attachment trauma that creates toxic relationship cycles is the way you idealize the relationship and your partner. You've placed your partner on a pedestal. Despite all of the toxic things they may be doing, you think that they're the most incredible person. When they're doing the things that aren't healthy or toxic, you believe they'll change, that things will get better because you have an over-inflated sense of who they are, far better than how they're actually showing up to you. You do this because in your earliest experiences in childhood when your parents were letting you down in subtle or significant ways, your child brain couldn't comprehend that the people responsible for you, for your care, were bad. That would disrupt your worldview too much and prevent you from developing in a healthy way. Because in order for your brain and body to develop as a child, you needed to feel a sense of belonging and connection and safety in your family unit. There was a mechanism in your brain that flipped the script to idealize your parent and make the problem about you. The child assumes if something's wrong, it's not because of the parent, it's because of them, the child. This is what protects the child's worldview so they can continue to develop and stay connected and feel safe in the family unit. You self-reference this issue by thinking the problems in your relationship are your fault rather than seeing that the problem is coming from your partner, which you compound by being overly compassionate and just never allowing yourself to see him in a negative light. Making it about you also feeds into your shame, low self-esteem, and feeds the whole toxic internal shame mechanism that occurs simply because you never had your external needs for connection and attachment met when you were young, so you don't know how to expect it in your adult relationships. When you look at these behaviors from an attachment perspective, they are quite brilliant. They kept you safe, they kept you feeling connected to your parents, kept you regulated enough in the family unit, even though this was in a dysregulated way, and you learned maladaptive behaviors to make up for the lack of secure attachment. You were actually self-soothing, even though those behaviors involved self-abandonment. Maybe you have other self-soothing behaviors now, like overeating or addictions, that come from this upbringing, which is really common. And so when you were young, these behaviors were brilliant, but now they're significantly impacting your ability to attract healthy relationships as an adult and to be a healthy secure partner in a relationship. These once brilliant coping mechanisms are now hindering your capacity to have fulfilling secure connections with others. What was once a survival strategy in childhood is now causing you a lot of pain. The attachment trauma that you experienced, these maladaptive behaviors that came from that, are playing out now in your relationships, keeping you stuck in toxic relationship cycles and keeping you emotionally unavailable. The good news is that attachment trauma can be healed. While they're deeply ingrained in your nervous system and your psyche, healing these wounds is possible. It requires doing the work to build awareness of your attachment patterns, understanding where they came from and slowly retraining your nervous system and body to feel safe in healthy, secure relationships. Healing attachment trauma means developing self-worth, learning to set boundaries and recognizing the difference between chaos and true connection. It's about breaking the habit of self-abandonment and learning to trust your own needs so you can form relationships that are balanced, fulfilling and truly loving. As you go through this process, you'll begin to notice red flags more easily and rather than being attracted to the chaos of toxic dynamics, you'll find yourself drawn to the stability and security that healthy love offers. The emotional highs and lows you once mistook for love will start to lose their appeal and you'll crave a deeper, more genuine connection with others and this all starts from the body. The body keeps the score, as you might know from reading the book, which is where the majority of attachment trauma is stored in a non-verbal feeling sense, which is why talk therapy and any top-down therapy like journaling, thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it won't heal it. It's also why you can be super successful in all areas of your life, but when it comes to romantic relationships, you're a completely different person because your attachment trauma is being triggered right down to the way your nervous system regulates and how the energy of your body operates. The core wound at the origin of attachment trauma is your abandonment wound. People might call this the inner child because it is an extremely young part of you, but identifying it as an abandonment wound is key because that is the fear that's driving this wound. Rather than running from your abandonment wound and trying to ignore it, turn around and be open and curious about it. Notice where you feel it in your body. What thoughts and decisions do you make when you are in this younger version of yourself? Healing your relationship to your abandonment wound is the way to move forward so you can open up to experiencing relationships where you are valued, seen, and loved for who you are rather than always being motivated by this fear of abandonment. You'll learn that love doesn't have to be painful or chaotic and that healthy, stable love is something you are fully worthy of. Now, if you want to learn more about how to do this, this is the work that I teach in my program, Heal Your Heart School. So I encourage you to book a call with me in the link below so we can have a chat about how I can best help you. In the meantime, here are some next step videos for you to watch so you can move one step closer to being emotionally available and having healthy, peaceful, and secure relationships. And for now, I'll see you in the next video.