How Past Experiences Affect Relationships

My ability to follow the heat sensations in my stomach warned me that I was feeling some activation of the nervous system. Activation or arousal are words that describe the physiological and psychological state of our sense organs that are stimulated by a point of perception. In a way, it is our amygdala that wakes up to see if there is a threat and to prepare our systems to protect against that threat.

This hazard radar system is an evolutionary and biological response that aims to protect us from dangerous experiences we have had in the past. In our partnerships, the "danger" we experience in the present is often, but not always, associated with hurtful and hurtful experiences from childhood or other previous experiences.

This reflexive response is our nervous system playing out its adaptive response to our earliest caregivers in childhood, those who were inconsistent in practicing attunement and providing our bodies with co-regulated security. As a result, most of our intimate partnerships trigger some kind of danger activation in us. When our system perceives a "break" – i. H. an intrusion or a surrendering movement to or from our somatic and relational boundary – our systems reflexively react to warn us.

Learning about sensations in your body is the fundamental process in many bottom-up forms of therapy such as Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, Sensitometer, Hakomi, and other somatic methods. The more we are able to penetrate our body, feel and follow the patterns of our physiological reactions to different stimuli, the more insight we get into the historical programming that lives in our body.

Our neurophysiology is formed in our earliest environment in biological and relational coordination with our early caregivers, and all of our "states of being," both past and present, reside in our body. Hence, all human beings basically move between present and past states of being all day long. Individuals who have experienced high levels of trauma are likely to have more past states in their physiological system than present consciousness. However, almost all of us have experienced some relationship trauma in our early development, which means that the invisible roots of our physiology formed in the past are triggered by the people we are related to in the present.