It’s a strange thing, memory. Some people can recall the exact shade of blue on our childhood bedroom walls, the way our mother’s voice softened when she read bedtime stories, or the feeling of summer grass between our toes. But ask someone about their emotional history—the way they learned to love, to trust, to feel safe—and you might be met with a shrug. “I had a normal childhood,” they’ll say. And maybe they did.

Sure, we know trauma exists, but usually, we picture it in extremes—something violent, catastrophic, or impossible to ignore. We rarely think of the more insidious wounds—a father who was physically present but emotionally absent, a mother who loved you but made affection feel like something to be earned. Maybe the house was filled with tense silences rather than outright shouting, with small, daily reinforcements that your needs were too much. Not headline-worthy trauma—just a slow, subtle shaping of how you came to understand love.

A 2014 research led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, reported that nearly half of all children in the United States are exposed to at least one social or family experience that can lead to traumatic stress and “lifelong impacts that begin early in life,” says study leader Christina D.

What so many of us don’t realize is that childhood isn’t a phase we leave behind. It’s a blueprint. We take what we learned—about love, safety, and self-worth—into every relationship we build. And sometimes, what we learned doesn’t serve us.

Beneath What We Don’t See

In the kind of romantic drama that grabs your attention, the couple on screen are locked in an argument, not just about missed phone calls, but the real fight is happening beneath the words, in the pauses, (sometimes, in what isn’t being said). You might see one person pulling away, shutting down, unwilling to engage. The other is fighting harder, raising their voice, desperate to be heard. We’ve seen this dynamic before. Maybe we even lived it.

What we don’t always see is what’s beneath it. The one pulling away might have grown up in a home where emotions were dismissed—crying was “dramatic” and vulnerability was met with silence. The one pushing forward might have learned, early on, that love was something you had to fight for—that if you weren’t loud enough, persistent enough, you might be forgotten.

These patterns don’t develop overnight. They are shaped by years of experiences, by what we saw in our families, by what we didn’t receive when we needed it most.

Acknowledge Trauma

The sad truth is that people who were supposed to love you most may have failed you. And you might not admit or acknowledge your experience as traumatic because it doesn’t “measure up” to someone else’s suffering.

I had it better than they did, why should I complain?

You might think.

But healing isn’t a competition. It’s not about who had it worse, it’s recognizing how your experiences shaped you and whether they are still steering your life in ways you don’t intend.

Maybe you grew up believing that love had to be earned. Maybe you’re in a relationship that feels like your worth depends on your ability to perform, please, or sacrifice. Maybe you absorbed the idea that your needs were too much, that vulnerability would only lead to rejection. Or maybe you were taught that survival meant suppressing emotions rather than expressing them.

And now, years later, you’re in relationship where your needs are consistently ignored, where you apologize for things that aren’t your fault. You’re the one who gives and gives, hoping that if you’re accommodating enough, patient enough, good enough, someone will finally stay.

Or maybe you took the opposite path. Maybe you built an armor so strong that no one—not even the people who truly care for you—can get through, afraid that if you let someone in too deeply, they’ll see something unlovable in you. So you leave first. And you choose partners who can never truly meet you where you are, because deep down, that kind of intimacy terrifies you.

So you became fiercely self-sufficient. You excel in work, in structure, in the things you can control. But relationships get complicated.

Why, because real love requires vulnerability. It requires trust, emotional attunement, the willingness to let someone see you. But if you grew up believing that feelings equal weakness, or reliance on others leads to pain, how do you begin to unlearn that?

This closely mirrors the quote by philosopher George Santayana:

What you don’t heal will repeat itself. 

And isn’t that what we see, over and over again? The woman who keeps dating emotionally unavailable men because it feels like home. The man who sabotages relationships the moment they get too close. The person who stays in an unhappy partnership because the alternative—being alone—is unthinkable.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that you’ve asked to be prioritized over and over again, deep down the problem is you don’t feel worthy enough to be prioritized, that’s why you stay in with someone who does the bare minimum. You need to know that how people treat you is a reflection of them, but how you allow them to treat you is a reflection of you.

Trauma can also be quiet. It can be the absence of what you needed, the years of emotional hunger that you learned to normalize. And if we never examine these wounds, they don’t just disappear. They find their way into our relationships, our fears, our coping mechanisms. According to psychology today, “it influences how we parent, how we relate to our partner, how we feel, think, and operate in the world.”

Healing Is a Choice

If this resonates with you and you’re feeling a familiar kind of shame—the kind that whispers, See? You’re broken. This is why your relationships never work.

This isn’t to say you should blame yourself, or hold people who have hurt you responsible.

That’s not the message here. The message is this: You are not broken. But you are shaped by your past. And while you had no control over the lessons you were taught as a child, you do have control over what you do with them now. Self awareness and healing calls for asking,

“how did my past affect me? Did my parents model love and selflessness, and empathy for me? Or did they ingrain something else in me from a young age?”

Note that healing doesn’t mean you have to wait until you’re “fixed” before you enter a relationship. It doesn’t mean blaming your parents, or your ex, or yourself. It means growing in awareness and making different choices so that the past doesn’t affect the future. It means challenging the old scripts:

• If love always feels conditional, you remind yourself—daily—that you are worthy of love without having to perform for it.

• If you’ve spent years avoiding vulnerability, you practice letting someone see you, one small step at a time.

• If you have a habit of self-sacrificing to keep the peace, you learn to take up space, to voice your needs without apology.

Doing The Work

You probably already know by now that you can’t have a healthy relationship with someone else if you don’t have one with yourself first. If your trauma goes unexamined, it won’t just manifest in unhealthy relationship patterns—it will shape the way you see yourself. It will make you believe that love is something you must earn, rather than something you inherently deserve. It will make you hyper-aware of threats that aren’t there, it will make you suspicious of a partner’s loyalty, or unable to fully trust even when trust has been given. And fear—no matter how justified—does not build connection.

But here’s what I need you to know, you are not doomed to repeat the past. You are not stuck. You deserve love that is secure, selfless, and kind—not love that feels like a test you must pass. But for that to happen, you have to be willing to do the work, schedule that counseling appointment, to examine the patterns and how hurt you might still be even if that was a long time ago, to question the beliefs, to unlearn the lessons that taught you love was conditional.

The National Center for PTSD, suggests most of us may experience at least one traumatic event in our lifetime. So if you struggle with unresolved trauma in your relationship, you are far from being alone. But while most will continue repeating cycles or staying stuck in unhealthy dynamics, you have the choice to do something different. At the end of the day, relationships aren’t only about choosing the right person. They’re about becoming the kind of person who can sustain love in a healthy way.

And hopefully you do. Because you are worthy of healing. You are worthy of love that doesn’t demand you shrink yourself, that doesn’t require you to earn your place. And the sooner you believe that, the sooner you’ll stop settling for anything less.