Anxiety and Relational Trauma

Written by: Kally Doyle

If you’ve stumbled across my website, you’ve likely read that my speciality is anxiety and relational trauma. For many of us with therapy experience and/or high levels of self-awareness, we likely have already recognized the relationship between our anxious feelings and the quality of our childhood and parental care growing up. For those of us who have not been to therapy, we may not recognize that the two are directly related, or we may not understand exactly how they are related. In today’s post, I want to discuss this relationship and why it exists.

Relational trauma is trauma that begins in childhood when a parent is unwilling or unable to meet the physical and/or emotional needs of their child. Most people recognize physical abuse can lead to the trauma, but are just beginning to learn that emotional neglect and abuse also cause trauma. Emotional neglect and abuse can be harder to detect because it is often carried out more covertly, and because the child or the victim is repeatedly taught to question their own reality and their own feelings in favor of what the parent tells them is true. This results in the child internalizing these negative messages about themselves, and growing up they then struggle to form healthy relationships with others, which can lead to enduring further relational trauma.

Before I touch on anxiety, I’d like to highlight the four recognized responses to trauma: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.

Fight

This can present itself as physical aggression, verbal aggression, defensive posture or tone, being excessively confrontational, or taking action in some way.

Flight

Flight can manifest as fidgeting, looking around or searching for the exits, restlessness in the legs, or physically leaving a situation.

Freeze

Commonly known as “dissociation”, feeling disconnected from the self, the environment, others, and/or the situation. It can feel incredibly difficult or near impossible to make a decision in the freeze response. “Zoning out”, feeling unable to speak, having your mind go blank, and missing chunks of time can also be indicative of the freeze response.

Fawn

The Fawn response is characterized by excessive, pervasive people-pleasing and submissive tendencies. The motivation behind this response is “if the other person is happy, then I will be safe”. Individuals functioning from the fawn response are constantly working to pick up social cues from others.

Now that I have given a brief description of each of these trauma responses, let’s look at anxiety.

Anxiety can manifest in different ways and situations for different people. Some individuals experience social anxiety, in which situations that place them within crowds or around other people can become debilitating for them and they often avoid them altogether or leave quickly. Others experience performance anxiety, a type of anxiety often associated with test taking or other events that put pressure on them to perform (i.e. athletic competitions). There is also generalized anxiety, in which individuals experience kind of a “blanket” of anxiety over their entire lives that affects how they think, how they relate to others, and overall how they are able to function. There is also relationship anxiety, which is a type of anxiety individuals experience in their relationships, especially their romantic relationships. This can manifest as constantly questioning the validity of the relationship, their partner, and/or their role in it.

What all of these forms of anxiety have in common is this: they have been reinforced by one or more relationships in our lives, most often beginning with our very first relationships in life- our parents.

If you struggle with anxiety, I would venture to guess you’ve lived with it for many years. It may occur in waves, sometimes being very minimal, and other times flooding your thoughts and behaviors. Furthermore, most of us who have lived with anxiety can recall times in our childhood where feeling anxious was directly or indirectly reinforced. For example, if you often forgot your homework in elementary school, did your parent work with you to help you remember it in the future, or did they get angry, withhold love or support, or belittle you? If you expressed feelings of sadness as a child, were you met with understanding and comfort, or was the received response more along the lines of annoyance for feeling anything but happy, dismissal or disapproval, or even anger?

I’m sure you can identify other times in your childhood or even your early adulthood where similar situations occurred and the responses you received from the other person were repeatedly not empathetic, understanding, comforting, or supportive.

The thing is, if this type of unsupportive response was very infrequent, and more of a “fluke” when it happened (i.e. your parent or your partner was feeling stressed and missed your cues for needing emotional support in that moment), most of us would not have anxiety. We would learn to trust in ourselves because others have trusted in us and taught us to trust in them.

The issue here is that for many of us, these responses were repetitive. We learned to doubt ourselves, our feelings, our internal experiences more frequently than we learned to listen to them and trust in them. It is because of this that anxiety is actually a symptom of a trauma response. Let me say that again- anxiety is a symptom.

If you look back at the trauma responses listed, try to identify how your anxiety fits in there. Consider when you experience anxiety and how it manifests in you. For example, if you tend to feel easily overwhelmed and stressed out, and find yourself yelling at your partner, employees, or children more often then you’d like, this is likely indicative that you’re in a fight response. If you experience intense discomfort when someone asks you direct questions in a group or a crowd, and you find yourself wishing to disappear or escape, you’re likely experiencing a flight response.

The bottom line is that anxiety is not in itself the disorder. It is a symptom of the relational trauma one has experienced. It would not have developed (at least, not to the same extent- I recognize our genetics play a role) unless others in your life repeatedly reinforced it. This does not mean they did so intentionally and are automatically terrible people; many parents struggle with mental health issues, financial stressors, their own trauma, etc. that can contribute to them struggling to be present emotionally for their children. This is, of course, not an excuse. It is mentioned with the intention of offering reasons why a parent or person may be oblivious to the emotional neglect or damage they have caused. In other cases, parents or other individuals may have reinforced your anxiety on purpose. Overall, anxiety should be seen as a cue that our nervous system is experiencing a trauma response. Therapy can help us learn more about this relationship between anxiety and relational trauma, and can also provide us with a foundation for learning how to have a healthy relationship with another human being that can ultimately lead to the development of deeper self-trust and less anxiety.