Speaker Connor Beaton explains how past trauma—both major (big-T) and smaller repeated hurts (small-t)—shapes present-day relationship responses. He links childhood experiences (verbal, emotional, physical, sexual abuse, neglect, abandonment) to nervous-system driven behaviors (fight/flight/withdrawal) that aim to protect from being rewounded.
A lot of what people experience in their relationships and where they really. Where they really struggle is that at some point, trauma in their past has informed how they're responding in the present moment with their partner.
So if you were, you know, verbally abused as a kid, you know, somebody who was constantly overly criticizing you or telling that you weren't good enough, or if you were sexually abused as a kid or physically abused or emotionally abused, whether that's in your family environment or maybe in a past relationship or at school, etc. That will inform how you respond to your partner in the present moment. Because anything that comes near to that, that core wound, that childhood wound, is going to produce a response that is meant to protect you from being rewounded, right? So having that constant really harsh criticism, you know, from mom. And so anytime that criticism happens in the, in the relationship, the nervous system within you, right? The sympathetic nervous system, that's sort of like the gas pedal gets going on hyperdrive and it's like, get me the fuck out of here, right? I don't want to be anywhere around this criticism. So I'm going to leave, I'm going to run, I'm going to peace out. And a lot of us, even if we don't label it as a big capital T trauma, right, where it's like, you know, physical sexual abuse, a lot of us have experienced some form of small T trauma, right? Verbal abuse, being overly criticized, being emotionally abused, right? So those types of pieces, they still produce a trauma, informed response in our relationship. So starting to really uncover what that response is and what it thinks it's protecting you from is incredibly important, right? Because it's usually trying to protect you from the harm or the pain or the hurt that you were dealt as a kid, whether it was abuse, whether it was abandonment or rejection or neglect or constant criticism, right? So just notice the correlation between the two. It doesn't have to be this like, big, massive trauma. It might just be a smaller trauma that happened maybe once or twice or consistently throughout your childhood that is producing this way of responding in your relationship today.
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