Your Past Is Wrecking Your Love

I was reminded of an incident during childhood this week. I was twelve years old, sitting at the kitchen table. My mom was upset about something I did, and she started yelling at me.

“Why did you do that? What’s wrong with you? Why are you so stupid!”

I don’t even remember what I’d done. Something small. Something forgettable. Something that a twelve-year-old wouldn’t know.

What I remember is what I did next: nothing. I looked down. I swallowed it. I made myself smaller and quieter and took up less space, the way I’d learned to do.

You didn’t talk back. You didn’t cry. You definitely didn’t say that hurt. You just absorbed it — the shame, the criticism, the sense that who you were wasn’t quite enough — and you kept moving.

I didn’t call it trauma back then. I called it Tuesday.

Most of us don’t know we’ve been traumatized

Here’s what I’ve learned after decades of sitting with people in the most honest moments of their lives: most of us don’t know we’ve been traumatized. We just know something feels off — in our relationships, in our bodies, in how quickly we snap, shut down, or spiral.

There’s a landmark study that helps us understand childhood trauma and its impact on our adult lives.

In the mid-1990s, researchers followed over 17,000 adults and asked them one question: What happened to you as a child?

What they found changed medicine, psychology, and everything we thought we knew about human behaviour.

They measured ten categories of childhood adversity — things like emotional neglect, physical abuse, witnessing domestic violence, having a parent with addiction or mental illness, losing a parent to divorce or incarceration. Each “yes” counted as one point.

They called these Adverse Childhood Experiences — or ACEs.

And here’s something important before we go further: these ten categories don’t capture everything. Racism. Poverty. Community violence. Losing someone you loved too young. Those wounds count too — they just weren’t measured. Which means for many of us, the real picture is even bigger than any score can hold.

The results were staggering

Adults with four or more ACEs (I scored seven) were significantly more likely to develop heart disease, cancer, depression, anxiety, addiction, and autoimmune disorders.

Not because they made bad choices. Because their nervous systems never got the memo that the danger had passed.

And the relationships piece? It was devastating. High ACE scores were linked to difficulty trusting, chronic conflict, emotional shutdown, intimacy problems, and repeating the very dynamics people swore they’d never recreate.

Here’s what it can look like in real life — and you might recognize yourself

1. You explode or go completely numb in conflict. Your partner raises their voice, and something ancient fires up inside you. You’re not just reacting to them. You’re reacting to everyone who ever made you feel unsafe. Your nervous system is protecting you from a threat that happened thirty years ago.

2. You attract the same kind of relationship, over and over. Different face. Same dynamic. The chaos, the emotional unavailability, the need to earn love — it all feels familiar because it is familiar. Familiar isn’t always safe. But it feels like home.

3. Your body is keeping score. Chronic pain. Autoimmune flare-ups. Gut issues. Fatigue that sleep doesn’t fix. Unhealed trauma doesn’t just live in your mind. It lives in your muscles, your immune system, your nervous system. Your body whispers what your mind hasn’t been ready to say.

4. You’re exhausted from holding it all together. High-functioning on the outside. Hollow on the inside. Somewhere along the way, you learned that being “good” kept you safe. So you became the achiever, the fixer, the one who never asks for help. And you’re tired.

5. You love hard but struggle to feel loved. You give endlessly and still feel empty. Because deep down, you don’t fully believe you’re worth staying for. That belief didn’t come from nowhere. It was handed to you — usually by people who loved you, the only way they knew how.

You’re not broken — you survived

None of this means you’re broken.

It means you survived something. And surviving it was the first miracle. Healing from it is the next.

If any of this stirred something in you, I want you to take the ACE questionnaire. It takes less than five minutes, and it might be the most clarifying five minutes of your year.

Your score isn’t a life sentence. It’s a starting point.