Children are the purest form of humankind. Childhood personality and experiences indeed give shape to adulthood. Character is a factor that is not inherited, but it develops certain traits from childhood. Traumatic experiences in childhood adversely affect the behavior and personality of the human being.
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How Does Your Childhood Affect Your Relationships?
If your childhood was full of fears and insecurities, you might feel the world as an unsafe place. Relationships will get worst because of such instabilities. Children grasp a lot of knowledge, learn them, and mold themselves according to their learnings. If they face bad experiences at their early stage, there is a high chance of having stress in relationships.
Mental and emotional development occurs from childhood experiences. These experiences can be caused by various factors like overprotective parents, physical and emotional abuse, and many more. All such trauma creates anxiety and depression within the child. Sometimes, you may lose self-worth and have problems to deal with intense emotions. The incapability of handling emotions creates frustration in relationships.
Everyone does not face the same situations, and it may not apply to all. But some have to go through this steep path. Your experiences in childhood reflect your style of attachment with another person. It also shows your behavior after any separation from another person. The relationship also depends on how the other person treats you or gets attached to you.
Here are the five ways that show your childhood impact your relationship
- Insecurities in Bonding
Insecure bonding is the result of fear attached to any link. In childhood, parents or family attachment and love provides security to the child. But if it was missing in your childhood, then you may feel neglected. It starts creating dependence and fear of rejection.
Trust and believe ensures a healthy relationship. But it is opposite to you. You will expect the opposite and always feel that any relationship will harm you. You do not think anyone will help or support you.
- Self-Sacrifice for Others
Childhood does not still affect adversely. It may create a nature of selflessness inside you. The person who cares for you, you get close to them. You start caring and nurturing the other person; otherwise, you start feeling guilty. You begin to keep their needs on top of your needs.
If any sacrifice comes your way to help the other person, you do it without even thinking. Extreme care and sacrifice may lead you to lose your own identity in the relationship.
- Severity in Maintaining Standards
During childhood getting nothing, you wanted may create a harsh psychological effect. To get things after growing up, you will push yourself to the extreme. There will always be pressure to achieve better and to get things done. Due to this extremity, the relationship suffers a lot.
- Fear of Abandonment in the Relationship
It is a type of anxiety to lose your nears ones. The anxiety of abandonment may happen in childhood. A child needs care from others; if it fails to get, so creates fear inside. In a relationship, they start panicking when they get separated. If you feel the same, you may get stressed even with little detachment. You will not get attached to another person to save yourself from getting abandoned. This fear also tends to make a person lonely.
- Feeling Unworthy
You may create a feeling of being defective and do not value yourself in the relationship. The defectiveness or low self-worth often comes from mean family surroundings. These factors heavily affect the self-esteem of a child and grow into fear in adulthood.
You may cope out with relationships feeling unworthy of being cared for and may not feel good about yourself. It creates distance between relationships and lacks communication to grow well.
Childhood impacts a person in both a positive and negative way. A positive childhood helps to maintain a healthy relationship, whereas a negative impact can adversely affect a relationship. However, it depends on the severity of the impact on you and whether you took it positively or negatively.
Having traumatic or bad experiences in childhood does not always have an adverse effect. You can learn from it and make yourself a better person.