Healing Trauma through Relationships

In Mother Hunger, Kelly McDaniel talks at length about the relational trauma you may have experienced if you are the daughter of a mother. When reflecting on your childhood, it’s unlikely that every single one of your needs was met at every given moment. So when is a person’s childhood considered “traumatic”? That likely isn’t a question we can fully answer in a blog post.

Still, just asking that question, and allowing space for an honest answer, can be incredibly validating and healing. But without the guidance of a personal therapist, unpacking it may also be overwhelming. So what can we talk about here? The healing process.  Regardless of whether or not you consider your childhood traumatic, we all carry some childhood wounds.

Humans are creatures of habit. Doing the same thing over and over feels easier than changing. Change is growth, and growth can be painful. Think about it physically: when a child is growing, they often experience literal growing pains. They also need to nourish their bodies in a way that supports that growth.

What about emotional growth? What does it look like to leave behind what once worked, in search of what works better now?

Let’s stick with a physical example before diving deeper into the emotional. When a child goes off to college, they may, for the first time, have full autonomy over their meals. That new freedom might lead to going a little wild in the dessert line or consistently choosing the tastiest option over what’s best for their body. After a few months, they may start to feel the effects of those choices. Maybe then, they course-correct.  The child starts opting for a more balanced approach, finding themselves in the salad line and choosing healthy options that perhaps their parents likely had them eat while they were growing up. What we see here is a huge change to the system, an acclimation period, and a time to come back to what was learned previously as a way to evolve.

Now, how does this relate to trauma?

In the previous example, the child may have come from a home where healthy eating patterns were established and food was never scarce. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if they grew up in a home where food was inconsistent and they had to fend for themselves from an early age?

That same child, when heading off to college, might have a very different experience. Without a secure foundation of healthy habits, they may find themselves trying to play catch-up, overindulging, avoiding food altogether, or relying too heavily on their peers to make choices. ..you get the idea.

Now, if we swap out “healthy eating patterns” for “healthy relationship patterns,” the emotional complexity grows even more.

In Mother Hunger, McDaniel writes: “If your pain emerged from relational trauma, it will only heal with healthy relational experiences.” If you experienced abandonment in the face of adversity time and time again as a child, it makes perfect sense that a trauma response might be triggered in your nervous system when adversity shows up in current relationships.  You are anticipating the departure of the other person based on what you learned.  

But when someone proves to you that they can and will stay with you through adversity, that’s when healing begins to show its beautiful head. That’s when safety in relationships becomes possible. And with safety, comes security.