The Impact of Childhood Abuse on Women’s Adult Relationships - GoodTherapy.org Therapy Blog (2024)

FAQs

What effect does childhood abuse have on adult relationships? ›

Your attachment style, or the way you bond with your partner, is shaped in childhood; abuse survivors often cannot feel secure within a relationship. This insecurity can lead to an unwillingness to engage in even the smallest of conflicts, to avoid intimacy, and to fear being vulnerable.

Childhood Trauma and Relationships. When trauma is unresolved, you will likely experience frequent triggers that can cause an emotional response. Often, these are behaviours of others that unintentionally act as reminders of the original trauma, leading us to experience attacks from partners where none were intended.

Child abuse and neglect can result in a variety of short-term and long-term consequences. In the short term, some of the effects children may experience can include depression, anxiety, altered sleep cycles, regressive behavior, and low self-esteem.

Unhealed trauma can lead to a variety of mental health challenges in adulthood, including depression, anxiety, and addiction.

Major trauma from the past can affect your thoughts, feelings, and actions in your current romantic relationship. Negative beliefs and painful emotions stemming from trauma can get in the way of close connection with your partner. Effective trauma treatment can help to resolve these lingering difficulties.

When an individual experiences higher rates of adverse childhood experiences and stress, they are more likely to develop detrimental health conditions. These mental and physical health conditions overlap with the leading causes of death, such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and depression.

However, research suggests confusion regarding self-identity, dissociation, and relationship problems in adulthood are common for those with unhealed traumas. Other signs include substance use, symptoms of depression, or suicidal ideation.

Problems now concretely linked to child abuse and neglect include behavioral and achievement problems in school; heart, lung and liver disease; obesity and diabetes; depression, anxiety disorders, and increased suicide attempts; increased criminal behaviors, illicit drug use and alcohol abuse; increased risky sexual ...

What are the long term effects of abuse in adults? ›

Adults who have buried their history of child abuse can continue to suffer in ways that can include post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), eating disorders, substance misuse, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, anger, guilt, learning disabilities, physical illness, disturbing memories and dissociation.

What are the effects of emotional or verbal abuse? Staying in an emotionally or verbally abusive relationship can have long-lasting effects on your physical and mental health, including leading to chronic pain, depression, or anxiety.

Seeking therapy, practicing self-care, developing a support system, and considering medication are all effective ways to treat childhood trauma in adults. If you or someone you know is struggling with childhood trauma, we encourage you to seek help.

Try to practice forgiving yourself of any blame, guilt, or shame associated with any trauma or adverse experiences you endured.

Adults who experienced abuse as a child may be at risk for bullying or have externalized behaviors such as physical and verbal aggression towards others. They may also struggle with impulse control, and their decision-making may engage in risky behaviors such as substance use or sexualized behaviors.

Low self-esteem—self doubt, self blame, shame. Self-sabotage—self-destructive or self-mutilating behavior. Sexual problems—sexual inhibition or promiscuity, flashbacks to abusive experiences during sexual contact, inability to achieve org*sm, pain or numbing during intimacy.

She says that some common signs of attachment trauma in adults are as follows: Difficulty trusting others and forming healthy intimate relationships. Emotionally withdrawal, such as an ambivalent attachment style.

Trauma and adversity in childhood raise the risk of numerous health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and mental illness in adulthood.