The most significant triggers from our childhood relationship trauma are adult relationships.

The most significant triggers from our childhood relationship trauma are adult relationships. If our partner, for example, gets angry or neglectful, similar experiences from childhood that we are not consciously aware of may become re-stimulated. We may become hurt or despondent beyond what the current situation merits because unresolved hurt from the past is getting mixed up with hurt in the present and making it feel more unbearable or intense than it might otherwise feel. 

 Because the adult brain always wants an explanation, we all too often look for the one nearest at hand, “my husband / wife is really awful,” or “if only my kid were better behaved I wouldn't be so upset.” We really think that the only thing that is affecting us is what we can see right in front of us. We may remain totally out of touch with what from our own past may be informing the intensity of our emotional reactions. In other words, we don’t know that we don’t know. We project yesterday’s pain, anger, and confusion onto today’s relationships without knowing why, and over time this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, we actually recreate the fear and pain that we experienced as children in our adult interactions. To complicate matters further, we may see the solution to our problems as continually changing the situation we’re in rather than examining what, inside of us, might be contributing to recreating painful relationship dynamics.

“If only I had a better house, spouse, or boss I wouldn't feel so helpless, angry and alone. I better change them so I can feel less lonely and stressed.” But more often than not, the real change that needs to happen is with- in us, we need to change our own history by revisiting it either through hearing someone talking about a scene we identify with, watching a psychodrama that feels all too familiar, or doing a role-play ourselves that allows us to temporarily step into and re-inhabit a moment from our past so that we can change, not the actual incident or relationship dynamic, but how we experience it. When we do some intentional healing process such as this, we are able to see the same situation with new, informed, and adult eyes. We understand that we were not the cause of the problem after all, that our shame and guilt over having been a bad and blamed child was perhaps misplaced, that it was simply an immature child’s attempt at making sense of a scary situation by taking on too much blame. We may also see that our parents were fallible people after all, not bad but perhaps stressed, immature and without resources themselves; that they were in above their heads.



















The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives.