Everyday Canvas

Adversity

Prompt: What can be the source of relationship adversities and do you believe that relationship adversities (any kind of relationship: parent-child, lovers, husband-wife, teacher-student, etc.) can often spring from other earlier adversities or do they just happen on their own?

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Surely, many traumas and adversities can happen in an adult’s life. Take fighting in a war, for example, or being kidnapped or wrongly accused or seeing others suffer or illnesses of the self or loved ones. Then, there are social microaggressions that wound people deeply like racism, prejudice, poverty, etc.

But basically, most kinds of troubles do spring from childhood hurts and traumas. Then, with the help of the coping mechanisms of our minds, they take different forms and show up in all kinds of relationships.

When something goes wrong or unexpected, even a tiny thing like a smirk on someone’s face or the car not starting, like an underlying disease, the childhood trauma shows up wearing a different mask. The way our brains process, shapeshift and spew out the hurts and traumas is unique, inventive, and creative. To figure what to do and how to deal with what our brains supply us with, we need to be hyper-vigilant and watch our hair-trigger responses so we don’t add on to the negativity of a present situation. The questions “Why did I respond this way” or “Why did this situation or words hurt me this much?” that we need to ask ourselves can be the starting points of such vigilance.

Any adversity can turn to be devastating, to lead to addictions, helplessness, suicide, unnecessary aggression, touchiness, and other misfortunes, and the more the time passes, the more the results of adversities become part of our DNA to show up as reactions.

Yet, adaptive responses and positive reactions do exist, and they can be learned and re-learned, sometimes over and over. Finding out and facing the initial adversity usually eases its later effects. Therapists, once they discover the root cause of an exaggerated reaction, recreate the situation that the initial trauma occurred but under controlled conditions. And those who do overcome an adversity, even if partially, begin to grow from it. As they say, what doesn’t kill us can make us stronger.