What do you think is the most important relationship skill? What skills do couples need to develop in order to have a satisfying, long-lasting relationship?
Communication.
Listening.
Emotional understanding.
Although all the above skills are important factors for a happy relationship, there’s one overlooked, rarely talked about skill that, once developed, can take your relationships to a whole other level.
What is that, you ask? Studying your childhood.
Because, when it comes to relationships, everything is connected and can be traced back to our childhood. Our childhood experiences, and especially our childhood trauma lay the groundwork for our love lives as adults.
Let’s take a closer look at how studying your childhood can benefit your relationships.
#1. You’ll Identify Your Attachment Style
If you’ve been following my work, you probably have read before about the attachment theory and how attachment styles impact our relationships.
For those who don’t, the attachment theory, developed by British psychologist and psychiatrist John Bowlby, supports that we all have a specific attachment style (formed through the way our parents — or caregivers — cared for us), and it subconsciously affects our love life, the way we approach our relationships and the partners we choose.
Children who grow up in happy, healthy, and stable environments with emotionally available parents/caregivers usually develop a healthy, secure attachment style.
Those who grow up in unhealthy environments and are traumatized by their caregivers, develop one of the three unhealthy attachment styles, which means that it is highly likely they’ll form destructive relationships throughout their adult lives.
As psychiatrist Grant Hilary Brenner explains in his article in Psychology Today:
They may end up being around emotionally unavailable people, abusive or narcissistic people, or end up trying to rescue and fix people they date. Consciously, they want to find someone who can provide what they intellectually know they need and want, yet unconscious influences lead them down unwanted, familiar paths.
Overall, identifying your attachment style is beneficial for your relationships because it can help you:
- Identify any toxic dating patterns you might have (e.g. keep falling for emotionally unavailable people).
- Understand why you feel, behave, and react in a specific way within your relationships.
- Choose a more healthy and appropriate response to certain situations/your partner’s actions.
- Develop a healthier, more secure style.
#2. You’ll Understand Your Communication Patterns
Every family communicates, argues, and deals with conflict differently.
And, whether you realize it or not, your family’s communication style (the one you witnessed as a child), has laid the groundwork for the way you approach and communicate with others as an adult.
As philosopher, author, and founder of School of Life Alain de Botton, states:
We will spend some 25,000 hours in the company of our parents by the age of eighteen, a span which ends up determining how we think of relationships and of sex, how we approach work, ambition and success, what we think of ourselves (especially whether we can like or must abhor who we are), what we should assume of strangers and friends and how much happiness we believe we deserve and could plausibly attain.
Developmental psychologists have long discovered that children learn by imitating their parents or primal caregivers. They “study” their environment and model their behavior after the adults they have seen.
By looking back to your family’s communication style — that has significantly influenced your own — you’ll identify your communication patterns and recognize them in other people as well.
Overall, understanding your communication patterns is beneficial for your relationships because it can help you:
- Assess your relationships and work on improving them.
- Explain your behavior more easily to your partners (e.g. where your emotional outbursts stem from, or why you’re sometimes rude or struggle with conflict resolution).
- Establish healthier communication norms for your relationships.
#3. Recognize Emotional Trauma
Recognizing the emotional trauma that stems from your childhood is necessary not only for your emotional well-being but also for improving your relationships.
Past — undealt — emotional trauma equals present struggle and pain. If you’ve dealt with traumatic experiences in your childhood, the latter are bound to affect unconsciously the way you navigate your relationships.
As psychologist Lisa Firestone explains:
No matter how often we try to tell ourselves that the past is in the past or to write off the ways we were hurt as “no big deal,” our history continues to affect us in countless, unconscious ways. Research shows that when we fail to face and process the large and small traumas of our past, we can become stuck in our pain. We may struggle in our relationships and recreate our past in our present.
Overall, recognizing (and healing) your emotional trauma is beneficial for your relationships because it can help you:
- Discover hidden parts of yourself and dive deeper into your emotional world.
- Be more honest with yourself (and consequently, your partners) about your emotional needs.
- Become more comfortable with emotional openness and intimacy.
- Become more comfortable with exploring dating and taking emotional risks.
- Increase your self-esteem and emotional regulation.
Final Thoughts
Your childhood is the most important subject you’ll ever have to study. Learning from your childhood experiences is one of the most important, yet most overlooked relationship skills.
Taking a deeper look back at your childhood experiences can help you understand:
- yourself
- what drives your reactions
- the way you filter your emotions
- the way you approach your relationships
- why you choose to communicate the way you do
- how your emotional trauma affects your love life
Overall, identifying your attachment style, understanding your communication patterns, and recognizing your emotional trauma can bring to the surface some extremely important information about yourself.
If you use that information wisely, you can significantly improve your love life as well as your emotional well-being.
I know that taking a trip down memory lane can be scary at first. However, the lessons that the trip will teach you are definitely worth it.
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Previously Published on medium
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