Parents play a vital role in how you experience the world, particularly as a child. The absence of a parent while you’re growing up, or a parent who is emotionally unavailable, can have a big impact on your life. It’s especially apparent when it comes to the relationships you develop with other people. Below are three ways an absent parent growing up could be affecting your relationships today.

Avoiding relationships

When a parent rejects you or is unresponsive to your needs growing up, this can result in relationship avoidance as an adult. For instance, if your parent was an addict while you were young, you likely had to be very self-reliant and even take care of your parent at times. This setting taught you to rely on yourself, yes, but it also made it seem like you couldn’t trust anyone else to help you. This extreme self-reliance makes it difficult to lean on anyone else for support. 

Your inability to trust people and rely on them makes developing adult relationships really hard, especially romantic relationships. Since you don’t think you can rely on anyone to be there for you, this usually results in relationship avoidance. You may be pushing people away or isolating yourself from others to avoid the possibility of further hurt. 

Choosing destructive relationships

Childhood trauma can follow you into adult relationships by mirroring the abuse you experienced as a child. For instance, someone who grew up with a verbally abusive alcoholic father may find themselves with friendships or a partner that inflicts that same emotional abuse.

You may realize these relationships are bad for you and want to change, however, unconsciously you keep being drawn toward bad choices. Repeating past relationship mistakes can often lead to retraumatization and make breaking old habits seem impossible. In some instances, you may be drawn to these unhealthy relationships because you want to fix the person’s bad behaviors. You couldn’t help your mom or dad, so you keep trying to heal other equally broken people. 

The pattern of abusive, unsupportive relationships is not healthy. A part of you likely recognizes this, but it can still be difficult to break free of the negative loop. 

Struggling to process emotions

Emotions are hard to understand normally, but often men have an even harder time sorting out their feelings. A lot of men have grown up with the “boys don’t cry” mentality. They’re expected to bury their feelings and soldier on like nothing affects them. In abusive situations, this already repressive mentality could go even further by forcing no emotion from a child at all. Any crying, laughing, or otherwise “noisy” behavior may have been severely punished as a child.

As an adult, this can result in emotional numbing. The emotional disconnect can be difficult to manage in a number of ways. First, experiencing a limited range of emotions can make it difficult to connect with other people, especially when the limited emotions are typically negative such as frustration. Second, when you do feel a strong emotion like sadness or anger, it can be incredibly challenging to process those emotions. These unexpected feelings can leave you feeling overwhelmed and unstable. Finally, the inability to process emotions and numbing yourself to the world makes it nearly impossible to develop deep personal relationships. Emotion is required for developing intimacy with others, and if you’re unable to share your emotions with people you’ll have a hard time creating connections.

Using therapy to heal childhood trauma

Parents play a major role in setting your expectations for relationships. Overcoming the misconceptions about emotions and trust because of childhood neglect or abuse is a long process. It’s difficult to address the pain inflicted by your parents, but acknowledging the hurt and abuse is often the best way to heal from it.

Therapy is the perfect place to work through past trauma because it offers a safe space to open up and understand your past. It also gives you an opportunity to gain insight on how past events are affecting you today. It’ll give you the skills needed to start overcoming your emotional trauma and move past it. By creating a trusting environment with your therapist, you can start healing from attachment disorders and begin to understand what it means to have a healthy relationship. 

If you’re ready to overcome childhood trauma and to start developing loving, connected relationships in your life, then contact us to talk about counseling options. See our men’s counseling page for more information.