Relationships – relating to other human beings in a close and connected way. The most natural thing – an easy, normal and every-day occurrence. Maybe, for most – but if you have early life trauma like adoption, relationships can be anything but.  

In this piece, I my experience with relationships in some of the ways people do that - friendships and partnerships, but first – a little bit of neuroscience.

We used to think that the human brain came fully formed and we now know that’s not the case. The human brain starts working before it’s built and experience is the architect of the brain (which kind of explains our vast array of differing reactions to some similar events). Our response to trauma is well documented and understood - trauma changes the way we operate. We’ve all heard of the fight, flight, freeze responses and have likely all experienced these to some extent or other. 

So let’s say you have a trauma experience at the age of 40. You get mugged and your mobile phone is stolen by two big lads whilst walking down the village High Street. The next time you go to the High Street you would likely notice a level of anxiety, some hyper-vigilance with a system on red alert – particularly for sets of two big lads. BUT you have what’s known as a pre-trauma personality. You have 40 years’ worth of safe High Street walking in the memory bank, you can remember feeling safe, you know that you were OK before. So for a while there’s huge anxiety, maybe you have some therapy, maybe you shop online for a while – but eventually the system settles itself somewhat. The reactions reduce and fade with time - because you were safe on the High Street thousands of times before and have patterned OK-ness about the scenario.

But what if your trauma was your first or one of your very early experiences – with no patterned OK-ness in the system? With a brand-new brain, with billions of neurons waiting to be fired and wired together by experiences? What if that trauma was of life-threatening proportions? 

And what if that trauma wasn’t about a High Street incident – what if it were about bonding, a fractured connection to the survival system we call Mother? With a first / early experience of abandonment trauma, there is no pre-trauma memory, no stash of OK-ness in the system. So, the system stores the trauma in the limbic system and the brain is shaped by this early trauma – we are literally wired up to link bonding with fear.

The brain is a reflective organ – it links back constantly, seeking its files for ‘When have I experienced this before – how do I respond? So with a brain that was formed around ‘bonding = dangerous’ or ‘I was my whole self and I was abandoned’ as the original wiring – and no previous experience to say otherwise – the system is set for a combination of an overwhelming need for attachment (to find again that which was lost) AND an inbuilt terror of doing so running alongside.

Combined with this are the early childhood messages we receive – what he heard, what we didn’t hear and the interpretations we stored from these communications. I was told that “Your Mummy did want you very much, but she couldn’t keep you and had to give you away – so we are your Mummy and Daddy now.” What I did NOT hear was “And we will never give you away – you are safe.” Consequently, I spent my life in mortal dread of being given away again – and with strict parents who constantly told me to “be a good girl” – I did ‘good girl’. I squashed my feelings, held my tongue and was never any trouble – and this pattern became embedded. This is why, being my authentic self in adult relationships can and does still feel scary and used to feel impossible, until I put the therapy work in. 

Prior to tackling my adoption issues’ while I was ‘in the fog’ as we say (when relationships were getting too hard and the common denominator in the difficulties was me!) I genuinely did not know that other people had a different experience to mine – I thought I was ‘normal’ (as you probably do too). I thought that everyone found relationships traumatic-but-necessary, that relating was like going into battle with an unknown enemy, that you were at risk of serious harm – so you’d better put up your shield and draw you sword, Oh……. and marshal your troops –‘coz we’re going in! 

I know now, that for most, relationships are not felt to be quite as threatening. Sure, there have been heartbreaks, disappointments and let-downs but with a solid sense-of-self, a sturdy box of tissues and some tea and biscuits difficulties can be worked through and managed. 

For me relationships of all types carried anxiety, an under-pinning sense of threat, a guardedness and an overwhelming need to attach that meant I couldn’t just ignore the whole damn business and settle for a dog instead.

The intense feelings weren’t confined soley to love relationships either. Friendships too were riddled with insecurities, neediness and a regular need to check-in for reassurance that all was OK and I wasn’t being dropped. All this of course covered up under piles of pseudo-confidence, agreeing to stuff I didn’t want to do, earning the right to be cared about, being a fixing of problems and being downright demanding. I learned to be an enthusiastic entertainer, a favour doer, a wealth of stories and knowledge and a happy, jolly bubbly girl who was ‘perfectly fine thank you’. Except I wasn’t really. I was surface-level happy and on a deeper level I was filled with fear.

I felt threatened if my friends made new friends (I understand now it was the old fear of rejection rearing its head). I felt panicked if I didn’t hear from friends for a while – surely I’d been found out as being completely rubbish and not worth bothering with after all? I felt left out if friends had happy times with other people, clearly I wasn’t needed really. I felt possessive of friends for fear of losing them and got very hurt very easily. And in all this, continuous turmoil, catastrophising, over-analysing situations, stomach churning, tension-making anxiety. It was exhausting.

I spent most of my time managing friendships to keep them all going - like the old cabaret magician, spinning plates on sticks by running round and tending to them all. A coffee at ten, a visit at 12, a walk with him at 3, a night out with her, five telephone calls in between – all on one Saturday was a typical coping strategy. And I cared about them all too (and still do by the way dear friends). I treat my friendships very seriously, remembering all the birthdays, the arrangements and the current events feels very important. Nowadays I’m learning to be more relaxed and can genuinely feel happy for the good times friends have without me.

My favourite, most relaxed and open-hearted relationships were with animals. With animals I could love unconditionally, give my whole heart and allow myself to let go. Animals won’t abandon you, unless they die. Animals don’t reject or judge, have affairs or go off with a younger model – so you can let rip, adore and allow yourself to be besotted – just buy the right cat / dog food and it’s plain sailing! The freedom to love a person like that was never mine to have.

Love relationships have been a life-long trial. Adrenaline inducing, in a constant state of high alert, confusing as hell – both for me and the men in my life, as the mix of compelled and repelled ran in equal measure. Pull-in and push-away may seem to be opposing positions, but for many with childhood trauma it is perfectly possible to do both at once. The need to feel deeply connected was very powerful, I couldn’t feel ‘close enough’ because the close I was searching for – was the ‘close’ I lost at 8 weeks old. 

Often when we lose something of huge significance we search and search in all the wrong places. If we lose a passport say, just 3 days to go before we go on holiday – we tip out all the drawers, raid the cupboards and shake out all pockets and then we search all these places again, thinking…’I didn’t look properly’….and then we go through them all again….so it was with my seeking for the big bonded connection. I looked and looked in all the wrong places. Some were very wrong and some were very dark. 

I told myself I was unlucky in love. He was weird, this one was too that, that one was too this and all to some extent or other, emotionally unavailable. Who could be available for an adult-to-adult relationship with someone so guarded and looking for a bond that another adult can’t supply? I didn’t understand projection or see that the emotionally unavailable label I applied to others was actually a mirror of what I was putting out into the world. It took many years of getting it wrong for me to see finally, that I was the common denominator in it all. 

It’s much easier to blame everyone else. I didn’t want to see the truth of my relationship failures, because I didn’t want it to be THAT. That adoption thing. I didn’t want to turn my head in that direction. That was too scary. So I tried some more. Tried a couple of years being single, reading and attending workshops and identifying patterns and habits… but never the root cause. Some more relationships – confusion, hurt and painful break-ups that cut me to the quick and feeling the trauma wound being triggered again and again. 

The new relationship intensity and falling-in-love highs were the level I thought I was searching for, because it was here – that a powerful feeling could be experienced. Naturally, these strong feelings subside and settle into something less dramatic – but my sub-conscious, hyper-vigilant interpretation of this would be ‘Oh, here we go: he’s going off me, I’m going to be rejected’ and I would start to withdraw internally. Actions that I could interpret as a potential sign of him thinking I wasn’t enough, that I wasn’t wanted or was being deceived had me pulling up the drawbridge and planning my escape. It was easier to run than risk abandonment and it didn’t take much for me to get my running shoes out of the cupboard.

It was exhausting trying to relate well as an adoptee. Thank heavens those days are over and I’m in a new place thanks to all the hard work I put in…….and that’s a whole other story!

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Huge thanks to Gilli for sharing this. I can really relate, and wrote about my relationship experiences and being adopted in What does it take to love an adoptee?

Gilli has also written for How To Be Adopted before in Finding the pieces: an adoptee’s journey to feeling whole

If you want to find out more about the science behind attachment and childhood trauma, check out Paul Sunderland’s lecture on adoption and addiction

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash