When the Past Keeps Showing Up in Your Relationship
Trauma-informed couples counseling for high-conflict relationships, that include anger, big emotional reactions, and difficulties with trust, repairing hurt, and connection.
Many of the couples who come to me do not think of themselves as struggling with trauma. Some describe their childhood as difficult but say, "It is what it is." Others believe those experiences made them stronger, or simply do not think of what they went through as traumatic.
What they do notice is that certain struggles keep showing up in their relationships.
Trust feels fragile. Conflict escalates quickly. Anger feels bigger than they want it to. Closeness can feel uncomfortable. The same arguments happen over and over, despite their best efforts to change them.
Some couples recognize exactly where these reactions come from. They understand how past experiences influence their relationships but still find themselves falling into familiar patterns of defensiveness, withdrawal, anger, or self-protection.
Understanding the pattern doesn't always mean knowing how to change it.
Whether you call it trauma, a difficult family history, or simply painful life experiences, the relationships we grow up around often shape what we expect from love, conflict, trust, vulnerability, and connection.
They teach us whether it is safe to depend on others. Whether vulnerability brings closeness or gets used against us. Whether conflict can be worked through or should be avoided. Whether our needs matter. Whether people are trustworthy.
Those lessons do not disappear when we become adults. They often follow us into our romantic relationships.
Maybe you grew up around chronic conflict, emotional neglect, substance use, emotional distance, unpredictability, or relationships that felt confusing and unsafe.
The strategies that helped you navigate those experiences may have been necessary at the time.
Staying hypervigilant may have helped you avoid getting hurt. Anger may have helped you protect yourself. Self-reliance may have helped you survive when others could not be counted on. Shutting down may have helped you avoid conflict that felt dangerous.
But the same strategies that once protected us can create distance, misunderstanding, and disconnection when they continue to shape how we respond to the people we love most.
Does Any of This Sound Familiar?
Small disagreements quickly become much bigger than either of you intended.
One or both of you struggle with anger, defensiveness, emotional flooding, or shutting down during conflict.
You leave arguments wondering why you reacted so strongly or why simple feedback to your partner got such a huge reaction.
The same arguments keep happening, even when both of you genuinely want things to change.
You find yourself frequently scanning for signs that something is wrong in the relationship, like you have to stay on top of it or it might fall apart.
Trust feels fragile, even when your partner is trying.
Depending on another person feels uncomfortable or unsafe.
You recognize yourself repeating relationship patterns you swore you would never repeat.
You didn’t have many healthy examples growing up for what a relationship could or should look like.
My Approach
I believe trauma-informed couples therapy requires a balance that is easy to miss.
We cannot ignore the influence of past relationships and experiences, but we also cannot assume that every relationship problem is caused by childhood trauma. Sometimes one or both of you are doing something genuinely frustrating in the present moment and, trauma history or not, you are warranted in being frustrated with each other.
Good couples therapy pays attention to both the past and the present.
My work focuses on understanding the relationship happening between you today while also exploring the patterns, expectations, and coping strategies that may have developed long before you met. Our partners cannot independently heal wounds they didn’t create without understanding our history.
I have advanced training in evidence-based trauma treatments and have spent my career working with people affected by domestic violence, sexual assault, emotional neglect, family conflict, substance use, chronic instability, financial and housing insecurity, heterosexism, racism, and other enduring forms of trauma and oppression.
Understanding where a reaction comes from does not mean we have to accept its impact on the relationship.
Trauma can help explain why we become defensive, withdraw, lash out, or struggle to trust. But understanding those reactions does not eliminate our responsibility for how we treat one another.
My approach makes room for both: compassion for the experiences that shaped you and accountability for the ways you show up in your relationship today. I will give you direct feedback on where you may be causing harm and I also will give you tools, whether that be coping skills or referrals to additional support, to address how to regulate your emotions in a way that aids in building the healthy relationship you deserve.
Therapy is not simply about identifying why you fight or validating how much each of you has been hurt. It is also about recognizing what happens between you, taking responsibility for your part in those patterns, and learning how to respond differently.
Insight matters, but insight alone rarely creates change.
Part of our work involves slowing down familiar interactions, making sense of what happens emotionally for each of you, and creating opportunities to practice something different.
Over time, those experiences can challenge old expectations about relationships and help create greater trust, vulnerability, emotional safety, and connection.