Stop Rejecting Love Because of Your Bad Childhood

It’s one of the most basic laws of psychology and it deserves repetition and constant re-examination, because it doesn’t reach those who most need to hear it. When people have a bad childhood, they grow up to reject love as adults. This is one of the central, painful truths about childhood trauma and adult relationships.

At a societal level, we continue to believe, in uncomplicated ways, that what everyone wants is love. This is desperately untrue. Anyone who has not enjoyed love in childhood, who has not been the recipient of cosy, comforting and supportive treatment as a small person, will not feel comfortable at all when love comes along in later life. They will do their utmost to sabotage love – and to hide from themselves that this is what they are up to.

They will be utterly convinced that they are interested in love; they will swear on a first date that all they want is a happy relationship and marriage quite soon. And then they will make resolutely sure that no happiness is possible and that misery is the only option for them.

Childhood Trauma and Adult Relationships

They will do this in two main ways: by choosing people who are not interested in giving love. People who are so damaged that they are violent, abusive, cold-hearted, cynical, obsessive or, in some other way, unavailable. This person will become an object of fixation. Despite awful treatment, the lover will return again and again to grief and unfulfilment. They won’t be able to understand why they are compelled; they will keep being so anyway.

The other method for refusing love will be to turn on people who are kind, good and interested in them. They may tolerate the beginning of a relationship; they might even last a few years. But gradually they will be unable to sustain warmth. Their entire emotional system was built to cope with coldness and hardship. It is impossible for them to feel at home with safety. Therefore, as soon as a relationship reaches a certain level of comfort (exceeding anything they ever knew in childhood), the sabotage will begin. There will be an affair or arguments. The lover will start to feel (for no reason, but with total sincerity) that their very good partner is ‘too controlling’ or has ‘no room for their needs’. They will genuinely believe that the kind lover is out to get them and undermine them – all so that they can exit the relationship at speed and with a clear conscience, and their nervous system can return to a baseline governed by a sense of isolation and self-contempt to which they are attuned.

Why It Takes So Long to See the Pattern

It normally takes an adult between 10 and 30 years (or never) to work out that this is at play. They need to read books, go to therapy, but most of all they need to have so many bad experiences that eventually, after the fourth marriage or nineteenth relationship, they start to see that they are involved in a pattern of self-destruction that has no inevitable cause in the outside world. They may be very old when the penny drops.

Despite this theoretical knowledge, despite essays like this and books that go into it all at even greater depth, right now, in streets in Lincolnshire and Bordeaux, Nevada and Tahiti, young people who had deprived childhoods are just starting these cycles all over again. A nice-seeming girl is just preparing to leave a kindly, reliable boyfriend she met at high school on the grounds that he is ‘too weak’. A polite young man is just refusing a second date with a lovely person who is warm-hearted and wants to know their story – because they are ‘too nice’. There are dynamics here that will keep lawyers busy late into the 21st century. 

As societies, we think we’re making progress, but in the central area of our emotional lives, we keep repeating the same miserable stories like blind donkeys. Let’s repeat the point again. If you’ve suffered from an awful childhood, you’re going to sabotage love and guarantee yourself an awful series of relationships unless you take emergency measures. Now. Therefore, take the nauseous feeling that you’re having at the prospect of a sweet person and sit with it. Explore it. Imagine the feeling is wrong. Imagine the feeling is a legacy of trauma. Don’t sack the nice person who has been trying to marry you and offer you a good life. And don’t keep going back to the violent horror who has been hurting you or turning down all your offers of cuddles for years. To understand childhood trauma and adult relationships is to give yourself a chance to break the cycle.

If this rings bells with you, or anyone you know, send them this article. Seek professional help. Break the pattern.