Are Your Childhood Experiences Affecting Your Current Relationship?
Do you relate to the following? You start a new relationship and everything is perfect. However, over time you feel disrespected, mistrustful and taken for granted. There's anger, trauma and maybe even abuse. Despite your efforts to resolve things, you find yourself going around in circles. You recognise you've had these same relationship issues before.
We Bring Our Past Relationships Into Our Current Ones
So why do we face these repeated patterns? It's because we bring our experience of previous relationships into our current ones, especially those earliest relationships in childhood. Parents and other caregivers were the first people to teach us about relationships, and their words, tone of voice, moods, body language, and behaviour shaped our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us.
While some of these messages were positive, others may have been less helpful. As a result, we develop negative beliefs and incorrect notions about what to expect from relationships.
How To Tell If Your childhood experiences Are Affecting Your current relationship.
Some signs that your early childhood relationships are influencing your adult relationships include finding it hard to trust, feeling insecure, trying too hard to please, being taken for granted and disrespected, and not being able to ask for your needs to be met.
It can be tough to break out of patterns that have been ingrained since childhood, but with the help of a therapist, it's possible to identify and work through these issues. By taking the time to explore and understand your beliefs and expectations about relationships, you can begin to let go of those relationships that don't serve you and attract the kind of healthy relationships you deserve.
A helpful way to begin noticing your belief patterns
Take a pen and paper and jot down the following questions and your answers.
When this person does, or doesn’t ……… it makes me feel ……….
A much earlier time in my life I can recall this feeling was ………..
And I was scared / worried that ……………….
Now I often expect that .............
Most people will see a pattern between what they experienced as a child and what they now expect from their adult relationships.
Do you want to break free from the influence of the past and build happier and more secure relationships today?
Take the people-pleasing quiz.
We all have people-pleasing habits that make it hard to speak up and set boundaries.
We may overgive, step in to rescue, or feel we have to take responsibility for others. Other times we may not speak up about our needs, and instead go along with other people's expectations.
When you get clear on which of these habits show up most for you, you can use the right approach to overcome them.
Start by taking the quiz to discover your score for each people-pleasing habit.
Plus, I’ll send you guidance on how to let go of these habits so that you can set boundaries with confidence and have relationships where you’re seen, heard and valued.
