How Unmet Childhood Needs Affect Adult Relationships
We are hardwired as humans to look for connection, safety, and affection from other people. Besides basic needs like food, water, and a place to live, children also need a secure attachment, transparent rules, autonomy, the freedom to express their needs and feelings, and play.
A positive, responsive relationship between a child and their caregivers helps satisfy these needs. Moreover, the relationships we form in childhood set the stage for the rest of our lives, determining our development, health, and general well-being.
4 Ways Unmet Childhood Needs Affect Your Adult Relationships
Working with a therapist can help heal your inner child. Therapy might help you:
Address unmet needs from your childhood
Figure out why unmet needs may stop you from having the relationships you want as an adult
If you know how unmet needs from childhood may be hurting your relationships as an adult, you can break the bad habits you picked up from your parents and start living the life you deserve.
Insecure Attachment
According to experts, there are four main attachment styles:
Secure
Disorganized attachment
Avoidant-insecure attachment
Ambivalent-insecure attachment
A "secure attachment" is when we have a close, loving relationship with our parents or other caregivers who meet our needs as children. People who grew up in families where they felt safe and stable tend to look for relationships that give them the same feeling of safety and stability as adults.
On the other hand, people who grew up in homes where they didn't feel safe or where their parents were either abusive or didn't care about meeting their needs may have difficulty making and keeping meaningful relationships as adults.
Relationships with secure attachments enable both partners to experience vulnerability and the freedom to be their authentic selves while providing a sense of safety. This type of connection is beneficial to your self-esteem, growth, and well-being.
However, if you were raised by parents who were emotionally distant or negligent or by parents who did not provide support and guidance, you may develop an insecure or anxious attachment. As a result, you may struggle with trust issues in your adult relationships, believing that you can't count on people.
A view like this could also make you distant and unapproachable in your relationships, never letting people get too close to you.
Impaired Self-Esteem
Unmet childhood needs can leave you feeling unworthy, unwanted, and unloved. Feeling like this can cause you to develop an impaired sense of self and struggle with low self-esteem, believing you are not good enough.
A low sense of self-worth can lead to many adverse outcomes, such as mental health problems, toxic relationships, eating disorders, drug addiction, and taking risks, among other things.
For example, a child who grows up to be an adult with low self-esteem is more likely to unconsciously choose toxic romantic partners or friends who repeat the same destructive or abusive patterns they experienced in childhood.
Difficulties Setting Boundaries
If you grew up with parents who gave you few or no rules and let you do whatever you wanted, you might feel like you are entitled to do whatever you want in a relationship and think that rules and boundaries don't apply to you.
A perception like that might cause problems in your adult relationships. For example, it may be hard for you to create and maintain healthy romantic relationships because of your issues with commitment and infidelity.
On the other side, if you were raised in a household with many rules and expectations, this may impact your ability to create healthy boundaries now that you are an adult. You could, for example, have a hard time saying "no" and end up being a people-pleaser in your adult relationships.
Poor Communication Skills
No relationship is safe from tension and fights, and that is okay. But if you grew up with parents who didn't know how to keep their feelings in check or solve conflicts healthily, you may have picked up bad communication habits that now affect your relationships.
Your inherited unhealthy communication patterns may affect how you handle uncomfortable emotions like fear, anger, and worry, communicate your feelings, and respond to your partner's emotional reactions.
Psychotherapy could give you a safe place to learn how to communicate, let go of unhelpful communication styles you picked up from your families of origin, and learn how to have better relationships as adults.
To find out more about our services, click here: men’s counseling.
