In this video, we explore how Complex PTSD (CPTSD) and attachment injuries from childhood trauma disrupt the ability to form safe, secure relationships as an adult. You’ll learn the 7 most common ways CPTSD shows up in love and friendship—like fear of abandonment, people-pleasing, emotional dysregulation, or repeating toxic patterns. We’ll also dive into attachment styles—anxious, avoidant, disorganized—and how they develop from early relational wounds.
Why Love Feels Unsafe After Complex PTSD
Do you catch yourself spiraling after a text is left as read with no response?
Do you divulge all sorts of intimate details about yourself on a first date?
Or maybe you pull away when closeness begins to develop in a friendship?
If any of this feels familiar, you probably know deep down why relationships are so difficult to navigate. It’s because love can hurt. And if you have Complex PTSD, when love first arrived in your life, it came with fear, control, silence—or worse. When the people who were supposed to protect you caused the most harm, love and fear were inseparably linked.
And now you either cling too tightly or push people away before they get the chance.
Broken relationships are truly one of the most harmful, long-lasting results of childhood trauma.
But it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can learn how to build healthy relationships and heal the broken parts of you. I’m serious about this. Attachment styles can change and evolve as you become healthier. You really can learn how to do this.
This post walks you through five clear stages to rebuild secure attachment — even if your early relationships taught you to expect pain.
So you can stop settling for the wrong partners or friends, start setting boundaries, and finally feel safe being loved.
When Childhood Trauma Teaches You Love = Pain
Esther Perel said, “Tell me how you were loved and I’ll tell you how you love.” Your early relationships strongly influence your love maps, how you give and receive love, what feels normal, comfortable or loving to you.
The most damaging aspect of childhood trauma is how it harms your ability to have safe and healthy relationships as an adult.
- Toxic families teach through example that love and abuse are usually connected.
- They teach that you don’t deserve to be treated well or that you’ll be punished for speaking up for yourself.
- They send the message that you’ll never feel safe or loved, so you might as well settle.
- Hurtful behavior often gets normalized by our sweet child minds. You might think, “This is just what families do,” or “I probably made them act this way.”
- Because things are unpredictable, your brain gets wired to expect danger, and your nervous system gets primed to get stuck in anxiety.
But this doesn’t have to be permanent. You can learn how to build healthy relationships and heal the broken parts of you. I’m serious about this. Attachment styles can change and evolve as you become healthier. You really can learn how to do this.
And every relationship interaction is your teacher here. You will get millions of chances to practice this throughout your life.
Let’s first look at how trauma harms our ability to have healthy relationships and then we’ll talk about 5 stages to rebuild secure attachment and find truly healthy relationships.
Attachment Wounds: How CPTSD Shapes Adult Relationships
In complex PTSD, childhood trauma disrupts healthy attachment, here’s 7 common ways it shows up in relationships.
Difficulty trusting others
Growing up in an unpredictable or unsafe environment can make it hard to trust that people will keep their word or have your best interests at heart. As an adult, this might look like suspicion of partners, expecting betrayal, or needing constant reassurance.
Fear of abandonment or rejection
If a child experienced neglect, loss, or inconsistent caregiving, they may internalize the fear that loved ones will leave. Later, this can lead to clinginess, jealousy, or panicking when someone pulls away—even briefly.
People-pleasing and over-functioning
Children who learned to survive by anticipating others’ moods may grow into adults who ignore their own needs to keep peace. They might chronically overextend themselves, struggle to say no, or feel guilty for having boundaries.
Emotional dysregulation
Trauma disrupts the nervous system. In adulthood, stress can trigger outsized reactions—anger outbursts, withdrawal, or shutting down. This can make it difficult to resolve conflict calmly, which then creates cycles of chaos in relationships.
Shame and low self-worth
If a child grew up feeling unwanted, criticized, or invisible, they may internalize beliefs like I’m not lovable. As adults, they may tolerate mistreatment, settle for unhealthy relationships, struggle to believe compliments, or sabotage relationships when things feel “too good.”
Re-creating familiar patterns
Unresolved trauma often pulls people back into dynamics that feel familiar, even if they’re unhealthy. For example, someone with a controlling parent may end up with a controlling partner, because it feels “normal”.
Overcompensating for family patterns
If you hated the home you grew up in, you might try to do the opposite, but this can lead to overcompensating. If your family was run by alcoholics, you might become rigidly controlling with your healthy routines or work. If they were extremely religious and shame-based, you might pendulum to an extreme openness to drugs or sex—a “no shame” approach to life that also isn’t healthy. Overcompensating is an attempt to not repeat the past, but it’s usually done from a reaction to unhealed emotions, and can lead to new wounds.
There are so many ways that repeated trauma in childhood damages our relationships as adults. But when you can see the patterns, you can do something about them.
I’m excited to share how to do that, but first let’s spend just a minute on attachment styles.
How Childhood Trauma Shapes Your Attachment Style
Childhood abuse can make it very difficult to find healthy relationships as an adult. We often see unhealthy patterns show up as 3 attachment styles.
- Anxious Attachment – you crave closeness but often worry about being rejected or abandoned. This can look like trying to change others, trying to change yourself to be loved, trying to be perfect so the other person doesn’t get upset, constantly pursuing them to get them to show you love, or excessive reassurance seeking. Sometimes this is called codependency, and often people get stuck in unhealthy relationships that continue to mistreat or abuse.
- Avoidant Attachment, Withdrawal – closeness feels scary because vulnerability once led to pain. This can result in keeping relationships surface-level, pushing partners away, or shutting down when deeper emotions come up. You rarely share emotion. You don’t let people see your joys or pains, and you end up feeling lonely and distant.
- People with Disorganized Attachment may desperately want closeness but also fear it, leading to push-pull dynamics in relationships. As a result, they often feel conflicted, mistrustful, and unsure how to get their needs met safely. It’s common to see a pattern of diving quickly and intensely into a relationship, without knowing if they’re safe or not, only for it to blow up later.
By the way…
People with a Secure Attachment style are comfortable with closeness and independence, trusting that others will be supportive. They can both give and receive love in healthy, balanced ways. Secure attachment doesn’t mean that you always feel safe and happy and never fight. Secure attachment means that you’re able to work through fights or differences in a healthy way.
Healing Attachment Trauma: Using Relationships to Rewire the Brain
So how can you rebuild healthy, secure attachment even if it wasn’t modeled for you?
This is a slow and gradual process, there are no quick fixes—but there are fixes.
Relationships are always there to be your teacher and they provide some of the most powerful settings for neuroplasticity to happen. In everyday moments—through hugs, eye contact, laughter, or play—our brains release oxytocin, the bonding chemical that supports connection and regulation.
As children, we were meant to co-regulate with a parent. Their touch, gaze, heartbeat, and breath should have calmed us, teaching our nervous system how to self-soothe. But if no one helped us settle when we were upset, we may not have developed strong emotional regulation skills.
The good news is that every experience of safety helps rewire the brain. Consistent signals like a gentle tone, kind eyes, and predictable behavior activate the parasympathetic system, shifting us out of stress and into calm. This downregulation creates the conditions for neuroplasticity, teaching the brain, “I’m safe now.”
In adulthood, caring partners or friends can model calmness, offer comfort, and stay present when we’re dysregulated. Over time, our nervous system “borrows” their regulation until those patterns become internalized—literally rewiring the brain to self-soothe.
5 Practical Steps to Heal CPTSD and Strengthen Attachment
So how do you do it?
Like on a practical level, if most of your relationships have blown up, or you just don’t feel safe, or you’re just not connected to anyone beyond the surface level, how do you start to build healthy attachment?
First: Build Relationship Slowly
Don’t dive headfirst into a deep emotional or physical relationship. You won’t find healthy people that way. Instead, go slow, carefully choose safe, emotionally available people, and practice testing relationships slowly over time rather than rushing in or shutting down. Healthy relationships take time to build trust and deepen closeness. Take your time to build a quality relationship.
“But where?” you may ask.
Second: The Therapeutic Relationship
Working with a therapist can help you practice building secure attachments outside of therapy. A therapist will treat you with compassion, understanding and firm boundaries. They’ll give feedback with care, and help you learn how to stay connected through a conflict or while expressing emotional pain. This can lead to the realization that one’s feelings and experiences are acceptable and worthwhile. This therapeutic connection can become a transitional earned secure attachment, paving the way for similar relationships beyond therapy.
In the description I’ll link where you can find a good therapist for you.
Group therapy is another good place to build healthier relationships, combat shame and get to know people within the safe boundaries of a therapy group. You’ll want to look for one that has clear rules and a wise leader who’s experienced in group trauma therapy. Therapy can teach you how to open up and how to treat yourself with compassion, to set boundaries with others, and help you differentiate between healthy, trustworthy people and those who are unsafe.
Third: Reparenting for Healthy Attachment
Practice healthy relationships by changing how you treat yourself. Self-reparenting is learning to give yourself the love, validation, protection, and guidance you didn’t get in childhood.
Imagine you grew up with parents who dismissed your feelings whenever you were upset, saying things like, “Stop crying, it’s not a big deal.” As an adult, when you feel sad or overwhelmed, you might still hear that inner critical voice telling you to “Get over it.”
Reparenting would mean noticing and pausing that critical voice, and instead offering yourself the kind of response a nurturing parent would give. You could say to yourself something like, “It makes sense that you’re sad right now. I’m here for you, and it’s okay to take a moment to feel this.”
We often relate to others the way we relate to ourselves, whether that’s with fear and disdain or compassion and hope. Every time you practice treating yourself with compassion, or you set firm boundaries for yourself and you discipline yourself in a safe and kind way, you’re practicing having healthy relationships.
Fourth: Get a Pet to Heal CPTSD?
For many people with childhood trauma, the process of rebuilding healthy relationships seems so far away that a pet is a really great way to start. Not only is it good practice at being consistent and loving, but a pet often gives unconditional love. It’s excited to see you, which triggers that release of oxytocin, the love hormone that helps build attachment and makes you feel safe and wanted. A pet isn’t right for everyone, but might be a good stepping stone for some people.
Fifth: Earned Secure Attachment
An earned secure attachment is a true friend or partner, someone who isn’t paid to spend time with you, but truly likes you and you each support each other. It’s a healthy attachment that you develop after doing some healing work. This could be a friend, a coworker, or partner.
Not all earned secure attachments need to be at the deepest level of intimacy. You can have a true friend at work, but she might not need to know the deepest details of your life. Sometimes it’s great to have a couple of good friends who you connect with on sports or music, but you only show them parts of yourself. Boundaries are a healthy thing here. That means you get to decide how much of yourself you share with them, and how close you are to them.
Healthy Disagreement: The Mark of Secure Attachment
With good relationships you’ll also get to practice with healthy disagreement.
Trauma often wires us to avoid conflict or explode in it. In healthy relationships, we get to practice repair—disagreeing, calming down, reconnecting. Each repair experience lays new neural tracks. It teaches our brain that conflict doesn’t mean abandonment, and it can end in closeness.
We’re all a work in progress when it comes to relationships. Friendships, marriages, working together—these are all wonderful opportunities to keep learning and growing.
Keep a Growth Mindset to Heal Relationship Attachment
My last bit of advice as you build healthy attachment is to keep a growth mindset. You’re not going to do it perfectly. Not all relationships will last. Other people will make mistakes, and you might hurt others sometimes. Learn to apologize and make repairs. Use these opportunities as a chance to grow. Don’t believe the voices that tell you you’re broken, unlovable, or defective. These are skills that can be learned, not just on a cognitive level, but on a nervous system level. And you’ll get dozens of chances every day to interact with people and heal.
Complex PTSD Recovery Happen in Relationships
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, deep healing happens in relationships. If you’ve been through trauma, I’m going to encourage you to take small, safe risks in forming connections, and learn to tolerate the vulnerability that comes with closeness.
As you do the work, you’ll start to connect with healthier people, and you’ll gradually notice that you’re building longer-lasting, high-quality relationships. And you’ll start to learn from experience that you are loveable, and that some people really are trustworthy and safe.
If you want to dive deeper, I’ve created several courses that can really help you learn these skills little by little. In my FREE Grounding Skills course you’ll learn to regulate your nervous system. In the How to Process Emotions course you’ll learn how to work through feelings and thoughts without being so reactive. And in the How to Process Trauma course you’ll learn the fundamentals of working through shame and rebuilding your internal sense of safety. All 10 of my courses are included in the membership for just $27 a month, and you can unsubscribe whenever you feel done.
I hope you found this post helpful.
~Emma
