Trauma Bond Couples Therapist Katie Ziskind. Complex PTSD in Marriage Counseling

Описание: Hi, I’m Katie Ziskind. The owner of Wisdom Within Counseling here in Niantic, Connecticut. You can learn more about how we help anxious children, depressed teenagers and fighting couples at WisdomWithinCT.com, that's WisdomWithinCT.com. In this video, I wanted to talk with you about a trauma bond and what that looks like for couples, and how you can help yourself if you're in one.
So a lot of times when couples end up in a trauma bond, you're experiencing a high conflict cycle of communication, name calling, door slamming, really intense very frustrating anger. After fights you might feel hopeless, upset distressed and overall, I just wonder if there's a future for you and your partner.
Trauma bonds can be so distressing because both people are completely dis-regulated. And dysregulation is when you're not grounded, you're like not centered at all, you are just like filled with intense emotion. Your blood is boiling, you're not feeling heard, right? There are a lot of needs not being met. So in a trauma bond, as counselors, we help you feel restored, so you can feel creative, you can develop a sense of groundedness.
You can feel calm and articulate your words more effectively, and you can also know when you need to pull back and do what we call self-soothing and practice some self-care. So if you are in a trauma bond, you may be really struggling with feeling connected and close. Also, so what happens is that the moment, whatever the trigger is, the fight, it could be laundry on the floor, it could be money, it could be parenting or infertility, whatever that is, it triggers an emotion that is really a wound from childhood.
So the inner child part of you is still needing love and still needing affection, or needing to feel reassured or needing to feel safe in some way. And this fight that you're having with your romantic partner actually triggers the wounds of your inner child that are actually unresolved. So the unresolved trauma that you're carrying, actually impacts your romantic relationship.
So if there is any sort of issues that you had growing up, so you were a child and you had parents who were alcoholics or parents who had severe mental health issues like depression or bipolar. Or you had a parent and you were a little child and your parent had borderline personality disorder, and is incredibly unstable and unreliable, or moody. If your parents had anger issues and, in your childhood, you had to take care of your parent emotionally, for whatever reason, you missed out on being a child, and you had to be a parent at a very young age. And therefore, develop some childhood trauma from that experience.
And you push through, now here you are as an adult, you're in a relationship and now some of these younger wounds, these unhealed bones are getting re-triggered by the arrows your partner is throwing at you. So what happens in a trauma bond is both people have childhood trauma, and both people as adults in this romantic relationship are triggering each other's childhood trauma, and they know how to do it super well and that's also one of the attack mechanisms in a trauma bond, is hitting that other person's childhood trauma wounds.
It might be using things against them in a fight, kind of really damaging what we call trusting intimacy. Trauma bonds are a cycle that they can be broken, there is hope, especially from working with a trauma bond specialist in couples therapy such as myself, or one of our members team members here at Wisdom Within Counseling. But if you're in a trauma bond, there is hope.
The first step is working with a couple therapists who understands trauma bonds and complex trauma. The second thing is understanding when you need to pull back, when it's not effective to keep talking or keep the fight going, because it always takes two to fight. So really being able to say hey, I’m not my best self, what I’m about to say is going to hurt your feelings and that is not who I want to be.

To begin, goto www.WisdomWithinCt.com to book your phone consult.

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