How can trauma from a past relationship affect you and how to be treated in you current relationship

Trauma of any sort can resonate down through our lives with many effects both obvious and subtle. Traumatic experiences tend to have a 3 components for triggering a response, Time, Place and Situation. Traumatic experiences in a relationship will naturally show up in many cases as a lack of trust, or a reluctance to get close or a fear of loss, speaking up etc. in case the trauma is repeated in the present (we flinch away from anything that might cause us hurt). Since relationships tend to have similar Situations, occur in familiar Places and have similar Time components, we are primed to re-experience a trauma from the past as soon as we start to approach any of those elements, an argument over a familiar topic, a decision to be made which might have lead to a row in the past etc. The mind and body are trying to protect the individual from a past threat because of a familiar pattern of circumstances (which are often unavoidable).

Physically, this is tied into the primitive areas of the mind where the Fight or Flight responses lives which is why it can be so powerful, these areas are primed to react quickly to a perceived threat and it can easily take you by surprise to the extent that you might (without knowing it) attempt to avoid getting into the situations in the first place. Hence, the fear of speaking up and asking for what you want and need. We prejudge the outcome well in advance of the conversation and "jump to the end" without going through the intervening steps.

Talking to a counsellor about the trauma and your situation will be a very useful exercise in helping to work through the past trauma and to defuse its ability to affect your present. The typical methods used by counsellors in working through this are the Rewind Technique where the client is encouraged to deeply relax and watch themselves as they react to watching the events in the "cinema of their own mind" as if rewinding and fast forwarding through the event like an outside observer. The client doesn't actually discuss the events with the counsellor but how they are reacting. This leads to an understanding that the events which happened in the past aren't able to affect the present through removing and replacing the emotional components of the feelings about the event from the present day. It can be likened to refiling the events from an emotionally charged trauma to a set of events which occurred. Other techniques might include: Creative therapies to bring the trauma into a representational physical space in order to create a closure or techniques from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or Mindfulness practices such as Cognitive Diffusion which helps to detach from unhelpful thoughts by examining the thoughts and looking at them as a thought rather than seeing the world through the thought.