10 Hidden Barriers to Creating Healthy Relationships

Sep 30

Impact of Childhood Upbringing on Relationships

The Role of Childhood Wounds in Adult Relationships

Do you find yourself stuck in the same frustrating relationship habits, struggles, or cycles, repeating unhealthy patterns, and wondering why nothing ever changes?

The reason could be rooted in the unhealed wounds from your childhood.

Childhood wounds, which are common, shape how you engage with others, influencing how you show up in relationships, handle conflict, communicate, trust, connect with and love others. Childhood wounds also shape the person you become.

Understanding where your unhealthy relationship patterns come from is the first step to breaking free from them.

I was raised with parents who had a hard life and an unhealthy marriage. As a result, I inherited several childhood wounds. These wounds showed up in and impacted the overall health of my relationships.

Over time, as I gained awareness of each wound, I started doing the work to heal them one by one. As I continued to heal, I noticed the clarity, inner peace, and freedom I gained, eventually breaking my unhealthy relationship patterns and learning how to create healthy, thriving relationships.

You As a Child

When you are a baby and then a child, you are 100 percent dependent on your parents for safety, protection, nurturance, guidance, and love. As you continue to grow, you also depend on your parents for healthy relationship modeling.

If these critical childhood needs go unmet, the impact translates into childhood wounds and/or traumas that live within you forever until healed.

How Childhood Wounds Manifest in Relationships

How our parents care for and raise us shapes how we grow into adults and how we show up in the world and in our relationships, especially intimate ones.

Example 1:

If one or both parents neglected you in some way (i.e., was absent, emotionally unavailable, or didn’t show love and affection), childhood wounds that would manifest and carry forward into your adult relationships may look like:

Low self-esteem & self-confidence
Fear of abandonment
Fear of letting others down
Lack of self-acceptance
Self-sacrificing for attention/acceptance
Difficulty expressing yourself, communicating your needs
Inability to be vulnerable and get close, feel/express emotions

Example 2:

If one or both parents were hypercritical (i.e., always criticizing, judging, or putting you down), childhood wounds that would manifest and carry forward into your adult relationships may look like:

Low self-worth & self-confidence
Feeling inadequate, less than, undeserving
Quick to self-sabotage: hypercritical and judging yourself
Fear of attention, more comfortable staying small
Fear of failure or letting people down
People pleasing for approval, acceptance, and love

Carrying these wounds into your adult relationships, you may often feel insecure, anxious, not good enough, unsettled, have trust issues, difficulty getting close/letting people in, and fear of abandonment or being alone. You may then sabotage your relationships with these unhealthy beliefs/patterns/behaviors and false accusations.

Childhood wounds also play a role in the caliber of people you choose to have relationships with—secure and healthy or insecure and unhealthy.

Parenting and Relationship Patterns

Your Parents’ Upbringing

It’s important to note your parents were also once children raised by parents.

Growing up, they were also 100 percent dependent on their parents for safety, protection, nurturance, guidance, love and healthy relationship modeling.

If their critical needs were unmet, they developed childhood wounds that have been living within them since a young age. Without gaining awareness of these wounds, they continue to carry them.

So when they entered parenthood, they carried their childhood wounds forward, unknowingly passing some or all of them onto you during your upbringing (examples I shared above).

Example:

If your mother was raised with emotional neglect─ not allowed to feel and express emotions safely─ she likely developed that childhood wound and learned to suppress her emotions.

As a parent, she would then raise you with emotional neglect because this is all she knows.

This passing down of childhood wounds from parents to children is called intergenerational trauma.

Now that you understand childhood wounds and how they manifest and impact you in adulthood, let’s view the top ten barriers to creating healthy relationships.

As you read, take stock if any of these barriers resonate. The first step to healing barriers is to gain awareness of their existence.

Top 10 Barriers to Creating Healthy Relationships

Barrier 1: Unresolved Childhood Wounds and Traumas

Impact on Relationships: Depending on the wounds or traumas you have, you may struggle with trusting others, trusting yourself, low self-worth, self-doubt, codependency, boundaries, people pleasing, vulnerability, fear of abandonment or neglect, receiving love and affection, and more.

Advice: Get curious about your upbringing. What was it like? Do you feel your parents met your critical needs? Were you raised with unconditional love, approval, stability, and the ability to feel and express your emotions? If not, what do you feel you did not get? By exploring these questions, you may start to uncover some of your childhood wounds and traumas and the related patterns or barriers in your relationships.

My parents unknowingly carried several of their childhood wounds and traumas into raising me, so I naturally inherited many wounds and traumas from them. My list of wounds was lengthy. I’m thankful I eventually gained awareness and healed all my (known) childhood wounds and traumas over time. One step at a time, one wound at a time.

Barrier 2: Insecure Attachment Issues

When you are neglected by your parent(s) in some way, you form an insecure attachment with one or both of them.

Impact on Relationships: An insecure attachment leads to a variety of insecurity issues within you and your adult relationships, i.e., trust and jealousy issues, low self-worth and self-esteem, fear of abandonment or rejection, codependency, people pleasing, feeling not good enough or never approved of, communication challenges, and unhealthy conflict.

Advice: Do you feel your parents neglected you in any way? Was there physical, verbal, or emotional neglect? Were your parents absent in your life? Did you feel unimportant, unprioritized, disapproved of, unloved, or unaccepted?

I had an insecure attachment with both my parents for a variety of reasons. My father was relatively present in my life, but our conversations were always surface, never of any substance; he was unable to get to know me and my life. I never really felt valuable or important to him.

My mother was my primary caregiver and very involved in my life, but she and my father were unable to be emotionally available during my upbringing. They both had emotional wounds. Additionally, both of my parents were people pleasers and had their own insecurities; these parental behaviors naturally led to an insecure attachment with my parents.

Barrier 3: Low Self-Esteem or Self-Worth

Were you raised in an environment where you did not feel important, approved of, supported, understood, or unconditionally loved?

Impact on Relationships: You may have low self-worth and self-esteem in your adult relationships. You may have difficulty trusting in your relationships. You may have self-sabotaging thoughts that are punishing and undeserving. You may have difficulty prioritizing yourself, communicating your needs and desires, thus you shut down or run away in conflict. You may people-please for approval and acceptance and tolerate unhealthy, toxic relationships.

Advice: If you feel you have low self-worth and self-esteem, get curious about what may have created that wound. Did your parents make you feel inadequate, unloved, invisible, or unimportant? Were you not honored and accepted for who you are? Were your parents absent?

I learned late in life, in my early 40’s, that I had low self-worth. I was so surprised because I generally felt very confident. I identified this when I realized I was a heavy people-pleaser, always sacrificing myself for others. The word “no” did not exist in my vocabulary. My whole family were heavy people pleasers; my parents grew up with this pattern and they raised my siblings and me with this pattern (again, intergenerational trauma).

Unless you are people-pleasing for manipulative reasons, it typically means you have low self-worth. I thankfully healed my people pleasing tendencies and am happy to report I no longer self-sacrifice or put others' needs and desires above my own.

Barrier 4: Poor Conflict Resolution Skills

Were you raised in an environment where you did not witness or experience healthy, constructive conflict?

Impact on Relationships: If you never learned how to show up in and handle conflict in a healthy manner, in your adult relationships you may handle it with avoidance, aggression, accusations, playing the victim. This way of responding will continue until you heal that barrier; and, if this continues, over time it can turn into toxic conflict and verbal abuse when extreme.

Advice: Get curious: Did you witness healthy conflict in your environment growing up? Did your parents model healthy, constructive conflict? If the answer is no, you likely struggle in conflict and often walk away with the situation unresolved or worse off.

I witnessed my parents engage in a lot of unhealthy conflict growing up. I never learned how to show up or engage in constructive conflict. In fact, I took on the belief that conflict was bad and ruined relationships and families. So whenever I witnessed conflict as an adult, I would panic inside, then immediately insert myself and shut the conflict down. I didn't want to see people ruin their relationships. Similarly, when I was in my own conflict, I would shut down. I could not be present in conflict, and I had no idea how to navigate conflict. I have since healed this barrier and now feel like an expert when it comes to conflict. Constructive conflict resolution skills are essential for fostering healthy relationships.

Barrier 5: Codependency

Were you raised to believe your worth was dependent on taking care of others and prioritizing their needs at the expense of your own? If yes, you inherited codependency.

Impact on Relationships: Your codependency shows up in adult relationships in which you may over-give, over-sacrifice, or over-do for others at your own expense. You may feel exhausted, unappreciated, taken advantage of, unloved, unsatisfied, always unsettled─ confused and conflicted inside. You do not self-prioritize, likely have poor or no boundaries and you neglect yourself. You may also take on the role of a martyr and tolerate toxic behaviors.

Advice: If the above resonates, take some time to research codependency to see if you have that behavior. Also, do you often sacrifice yourself for others, feel the need to always help others and put yourself last? Is self-prioritization and self-love absent in your life?

I was raised in a codependent environment. I was always quick to insert myself in other people’s lives to rescue them and save the day. This behavior was also compounded by my people pleasing behavior and authentic desire to help people and see people happy. I knew I had a gift in helping people and I absolutely loved it; so it took me a long time to gain awareness of my codependency behavior. And when I gained the awareness, I healed it.

Barrier 6: Absence of Boundaries

Were you raised without any awareness of boundaries, with unclear or weak boundaries, or with boundaries that were inconsistently honored and respected?

Impact on Relationships: In your adult relationships, you tend to mirror what you grew up with as far as boundaries go: no boundaries, weak boundaries, inconsistent boundaries, etc.

With that, a multitude of recurring struggles can arise in your relationships, including:

Having weak boundaries that are repeatedly violated, or allow destructive behaviors (i.e., manipulation or abuse)
Constantly over-extending yourself, enabling or people-pleasing
Feeling used and unappreciated, physically, and emotionally exhausted, resentful, taken advantage of, disrespected, confused about expectations and roles in the relationship, stress, anxiety, loss of identity, and more.

Advice: If you haven’t guessed it, boundaries are a big one in relationships. Look at your relationships. Do any of the situations above resonate? Do you feel respected, have a mutual understanding of roles and expectations, and find boundaries are clear and consistently honored?

Growing up, my family had no boundaries nor any awareness of boundaries. And my parents grew up this same way. My life as far as boundaries go was a big uphill journey. It took me a long time to finally uncover boundaries, what they were, their importance and purpose, how detrimental the absence of them is in relationships and how dire they are to harness in relationships. I now have healthy, clear boundaries in all my relationships.

If you often feel exhausted by constantly facing the same relationship challenges, you are not alone. Many of us carry unresolved wounds and traumas from our childhood into our adult lives, often without realizing it. But, once you take the steps to gain awareness, there is a lot you can do to heal.

Barrier 7: Repeating Dysfunctional Patterns from Upbringing

Did you witness dysfunctional relationship patterns, beliefs, behaviors with your parents or in your environment growing up? If yes, you likely inherited these behaviors and apply them in your adult relationships because they’re familiar, “normal,” what you know?

Impact on Relationships: In your adult relationships, inherited dysfunctional patterns, beliefs and behaviors can include manipulative behaviors, dysfunctional or toxic communication and conflict, narcissism, verbal/physical/emotional abuse, being unfaithful, addictions, playing the victim, controlling behaviors, jealousy, codependency, people pleasing, self-sabotage, sibling rivalry, favoritism, and so on.

Advice: Get curious about your relationships. Do you feel recurring dysfunctional patterns, beliefs and behaviors may be present? If so, what types of beliefs, patterns and behaviors and in what areas… communication, conflict, self-sabotage, lack of boundaries, etc.?

As I shared above, I inherited several dysfunctional behaviors, beliefs and patterns from my parents: codependency, people pleasing, unhealthy communication, unhealthy conflict, emotional suppression, lack of boundaries, and more.

Through my personal development journey, as I gained awareness of the dysfunctional behaviors and patterns, I healed each one─ eventually healing all of them.

Barrier 8: Unhealthy Communication Skills

Growing up, did you witness or experience dysfunctional or toxic communication, such as passive-aggressiveness, criticism, suppression, or stonewalling?

Impact on Relationships: In your adult relationships, you may have no idea what healthy communication looks like or how to engage in it, i.e., how to express yourself, your needs, desires; engage in active listening, handle disagreements and differing opinions, honor yourself and your partner in communication, etc.

Advice: Do you feel you often struggle with communication in your relationships? Do you have a hard time communicating in a healthy way when there are differences or arguments? Do you suppress yourself and your voice in relationships? Do you often times feel things are left unresolved because it's unclear how to move forward or come to an agreement?

Growing up, I witnessed a lot of unhealthy communication with my parents. I was also the youngest of five siblings and never seemed to get my voice heard among the bunch. My siblings also often spoke up for me. So, I grew up not knowing how to speak up for myself, use my voice, and exert my (differing) opinions, beliefs, and boundaries. I have since done the work in this area and am now a very successful communicator. I have no hesitation using my voice, expressing my needs, opinions, desires, and boundaries– with anyone. Healthy communication skills are essential for fostering healthy relationships.

Barrier 9: Emotional Suppression

Growing up, were your emotions dismissed, not allowed, shut down, or seen as a weakness, so you learned to suppress, hide, and mask your feelings?

Impact on Relationships: In your adult relationships, you struggle with emotional expression and intimacy– identifying your feelings, sharing and expressing how you feel, being vulnerable and getting close. You keep your feelings suppressed and relationships at a distance, often creating a wall between you and others. You may also experience emotional turmoil because your emotions are trapped inside of you– with no place to go. You want to identify and express your feelings and emotions, but having no idea how.

Advice: Get curious with these questions: During your upbringing, were you encouraged to identify, feel, and express your emotions? Were your feelings respected and honored? When you were sad, disappointed, hurt, or angry, were you always loved, nurtured, and given compassion? If any answers are no, you were emotionally suppressed and struggle with your emotions in relationships.

Growing up, I wasn’t encouraged to identify, feel, or express my emotions, just as my parents weren't during their upbringing. I also never witnessed modeling of emotional expression just as my parents never witnessed it. As a result, they had no idea how to respond when I was angry, disappointed, sad, or frustrated—they were simply at a loss. I was therefore taught to suppress and ignore my emotions and avoid vulnerability. It took me a long time to realize this pattern. For years, I felt emotionally trapped and conflicted inside, but I didn’t understand why or how to change it. It was painful because I loved to express and share– and I felt the suppression real-time. Over time, I continued to notice this recurring barrier in my relationships: while others felt comfortable and safe being vulnerable with me, I struggled to reciprocate. I eventually uncovered the barrier and have since healed this big wound. Now I love sharing and being vulnerable with others.

Barrier 10: Fear of Abandonment

Growing up, did you lack stability with your parents and in your environment? Were your parents seldom present, unreliable, absent, often letting you down, or abandoning you?

Impact on Relationships: In your adult relationships, you may be extra needy, overly clingy, need constant reassurance and love, and fear abandonment. You may get jealous easily, constantly worry your partner may leave you, and test your relationship (excessive questioning or accusations). You likely fear conflict as it may lead to rejection or abandonment. You may overreact and have anxiety and panic attacks caused by worry. You may have difficulty trusting and stay in toxic relationships out of fear of being alone. Your relationships may resemble an emotional rollercoaster, riding the waves of your emotions and insecurities (i.e., worry, jealousy, lack of trust, conflict, and fear of abandonment).

Advice: Growing up, were your parents reliably present and there when you needed them (most)? Were you always a priority and important? Did you lose a parent during your upbringing or did your parents' divorce? And if your parent(s) remarried, did they both remain actively present in your life? Or did your relationship with your parent(s) change? Your answers will determine whether or not you were abandoned.

Healing Emotional Wounds for Healthier Relationships

So, Where Do You Go from Here?

First off, if any of the ten barriers above resonate, know you are not alone.

Given that 95 percent of us raised in the western world are raised in dysfunctional families, it's safe to guess most of us have barriers and childhood wounds.

And please know, you do not have to continue living with your childhood wounds, traumas, and recurring relationship struggles. I healed them. You can too.

You can break free. It comes down to choosing to take action, so you can finally achieve peace and harmony in your relationships.

Let’s Look at How You Can Start Healing?

Healing childhood wounds and traumas requires self-reflection, self-awareness, commitment, and often, professional guidance.

Step 1: Self-Reflection & Self-Awareness:

In steps 1a-c below, write down everything that comes to mind, do a brain dump.

1. In a quiet space, with all you learned above:

a. Get curious and write down what you believe your recurring relationship barriers are.

b. Get curious about your upbringing and ways you may have been

neglected or negatively impacted, i.e., emotionally suppressed, conditionally loved, absent parents or abandoned, abuse, manipulation, criticism and judging, unhealthy communication, or conflict, etc.

c. Lastly, write down any childhood wounds and traumas you believe you may have.

Step 2: Seek Professional Help

2. Research a Mother-Daughter Relationship Coach or Somatic Therapist you feel comfortable and safe with to guide you on your healing journey. It’s important to find someone you feel a good connection and vibe with. Once you find your coach or therapist, you can start your journey with what you uncovered above in step one and then continue forward.

Step 3: Supplemental Resources

3. If you like to read, there are several books you can find on relationship barriers, recurring relationship struggles and so on, as well as child wounds and traumas. Also research podcasts, articles, YouTube videos and more. There are numerous resources to help you on your journey and complement your work with a coach or therapist.

Conclusion

Your healing journey is an important one.

It's a delicate, compassionate, slow process and unique to you.

Your healing timeline is also unique to you and dependent on several factors, including: your goals, what you would like to heal, your commitment and availability to doing the work, and checking in and honoring how you feel every step of the way. Your coach or therapist will always guide you and check-in.

The process starts with “one” small step and continues with another and then another.

You are essentially chipping away at your wound or trauma, breaking it down bit by bit, one step at a time, until it's healed.

Some wounds can heal quickly and others that are deeper (i.e., bigger traumas), will require more time.

But, just getting started, you will be amazed at how quickly you begin to feel better, a sense of relief, clarity, and empowerment─ often starting with your very first session.

The work is powerful, and you will notice your growth along your journey.

I started my healing journey at age 19 and fell in love with personal development. I continued doing the work throughout my life, healed all my known childhood wounds, traumas, recurring relationship barriers and struggles.

I transformed my life and relationships. And I’ve helped hundreds of people do the same.

Are you ready to take action, and choose you?

Break and heal the barriers that have been impacting you and your relationships for too long?

Complementary Relationship Barrier Assessment Call

I would be honored to help you kickstart your awareness journey.

SCHEDULE A COMPLEMENTARY 30-MINUTE RELATIONSHIP BARRIER ASSESSMENT CALL.

During our call, we will uncover (or confirm) childhood wounds and/or traumas that are causing recurring struggles in your relationships. I will help you gain the awareness needed to better understand how you show up in relationships and steps to start taking to create change and heal your barriers. *Complementary calls are available while supplies last.

Helpful Resources:

Insightful article and books I often recommend to my clients

ARTICLE:

Psychology Today Article: All My Relationships Fail

BOOKS:

Discovering the Inner Mother: A Guide to Healing the Mother Wound and Claiming Your Personal Power

Mother Hunger

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Running on Empty: Overcome your Childhood Emotional Neglect