Relationships: Can Childhood Trauma Cause Someone To Emotionally Shut Down Around Others?

When someone is in touch with their emotional self around others, it will allow them to feel connected to them and to fully embrace the moment. Being this way will also allow them to develop deeper relationships with others.

So, whether it relates to a friend or an intimate partner, one will be able to feel deeply connected to them and to express how they feel. Expressing their feelings will play an important part in the other person not only feeling close to them but also knowing where they stand.

An Essential Ability

What this illustrates is just how important it is for someone to be in touch with how they feel around others and to express what is going on for them. This will stop them from feeling disconnected from others and to experience the relational depth that they need in order to thrive.

Ultimately, they, along with every other human being on this planet, are not independent; they are an interdependent human being who needs others. Even so, it could be said that the modern-day world obscures this truth.

A Different Experience

However, while having this connection around others is essential, someone may find that this is not something that they can relate to. Instead, what they could typically find is that they lose touch with their emotional self around others.

As a result of this, they won’t feel connected to them and they certainly won’t know how they feel, let alone be able to express how they feel. If they do have close friends, they might not feel very close to these people.

Another Area

The connection that they have with them could primarily be an intellectual connection and/or they could just have known these people for a long time. It is then going to be ideas and/or their history that keeps them together.

If they have an intimate partner, they are unlikely to feel very close to them and this person might wonder where they stand with them. This person won’t have ones emotional expression and feedback with which to form conclusions.

A Strange Scenario

When they are in their own company, they may find that they are able to connect to how they feel. This is not to say that they will necessarily go from one extreme to the other, it could just be that they won’t be completely shut down.

After thinking about what they are like when they are by themselves and what they are generally like around others, they could struggle to understand what is going on. This could appear to be something that just happens and therefore, there is nothing that they can do about it.

Two Levels

What needs to be acknowledged at this point is that one has both a conscious and an unconscious mind. Thus, if they don’t understand why something is taking place, they will need to connect to their second, more powerful mind.

Through doing this, they will be able to understand why they have the tendency to shut down when they are around others. Having said this, thanks to the differences defences and armouring that they are likely to have in place, it is unlikely that they will be able to do this directly.

An Indirect Approach

To understand what is taking place inside them, they will need to look for answers in the external world. The information ‘out there’ will help to shine the light on why their life is the way that it is.

What they may find, by taking this approach, is that the reason they lose touch with their emotional self around others is that they don’t feel safe. Disconnecting from their body and going into their head will be a way for them to protect themselves.

The Imprint

At a conscious level, they might find it strange that this takes place; as far as they are concerned, there could be no need for them to behave in this way. Nonetheless, at a deeper level, getting close to others could be associated as something that is a threat to their very survival.

What this may show is that they were abused and/or neglected on a weekly, if not daily, basis during their early years. This would have been a time when their survival was under threat whenever their parents were around.

The Foundations Were Laid

At this stage of their life, they wouldn’t have been able to fight back or to run away, they would have only been able to disconnect from themselves. This wouldn’t have allowed them to stop what was taking place but it would have allowed them to no longer be aware of what was taking place.

Along with this, they would have come to associate getting close to their caregivers as something that would cause them to be overwhelmed and annihilated. What happened in relation to these people would then have been generalised to every other person.

The Body Remembers

Their mind wouldn’t have been developed enough to see that not everyone was the same and that they could be in their body and connect to how they feel around certain people. Also, due to how much trauma they experienced, it would have been too painful for them to be in their body and connected to how they feel.

The years would have passed and their conscious mind would have forgotten all about what took place. Yet, although this part of them lost touch with what took place, their unconscious mind/body won’t have forgotten.
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Awareness

If one can relate to this, and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can take place with the assistance of a therapist or healer.