Why Love Feels Hidden: How Childhood Wounds Shape Intimacy in Relationships

As Tu B’Av approaches, it's the perfect time to look at the many faces of partnership and love. Many couples experience love as something hidden, and the challenges of a relationship often make it difficult to feel that love consistently.

Childhood Wounds Beneath the Surface

Being in a deep and long term relationship inevitably requires exposure to the deeper layers of our soul, which we are not always aware of.

A childhood wound is formed in a moment of genuine distress when we did not receive an adequate response. The distress was experienced as an existential threat, and we chose repression as a way to meet our immediate survival needs.

Intimacy and the Encounter With Pain

The desire for intimacy inevitably brings an encounter with pain, which is an encounter with the painful places within us; the childhood wounds that never received healing and were instead pushed aside through repression.

Rather than a problem that must be eliminated as quickly as possible, this pain is an opportunity for self healing,

Ironically, viewing pain as something that should not exist, as a sign that something is wrong and that the relationship is failing, and therefore suppressing or rejecting it, is precisely what prevents this powerful opportunity for healing from emerging, and also blocks true love from being revealed within the relationship.

Lowering Defenses for Love

The desire to be in a relationship, or if you will, the desire for love and partnership, requires us to lower our defenses and reveal ourselves to another and to ourselves.

This exposure allows our partner to touch, often unintentionally, sensitive points within our soul, which we are not always aware of. Only after our partner touches them, do we awaken to their existence. When these childhood wounds are triggered, we become aware of the pain and its intensity.

The relational challenge begins when we automatically attribute the pain to our partner. After all, if they had not touched those points, we would not be feeling this pain right now. Due to our lack of awareness of the true source of the pain, our automatic response is to blame our partner and hold them responsible for the overwhelming pain we are experiencing.

In reality, our partner is not the source of the pain. They merely triggered the childhood pain already present within us.

Taking Responsibility for Our Pain

Internalizing the idea that my partner is not responsible for my pain, but innocently triggers it through their actions, allows us to take responsibility for our pain. This releases us from emotional dependence on our partner and frees them from carrying that burden for us.

This understanding helps improve the quality of the relationship, deepen it, and expand it. For those who go further, it even allows the development of empathy toward the partner’s actions and an understanding of their inner world. This is the shift from a judgmental stance to one that is containing and compassionate.

When we place responsibility for our pain on our partner, we become emotionally dependent, believing that only if they change, only if they behave differently, will our pain be relieved. This dependency creates unnecessary friction, because we are not addressing the real issue. From there, escalation in the relationship is never far away.

How Do We Know a Childhood Wound Was Triggered?

A disproportionate reaction to an event, is a strong indication that this is not a response to a single situation. It is not the event itself that caused the reaction, but its connection to a childhood wound that has existed within us all along.

When our awareness is low, our responses are automatic. Even if we want to respond differently, the mental mechanism is already trained, and the reaction seems to come on its own. However, when a childhood wound is activated, bringing significant emotional pain, it is not merely an automatic reaction. It is an emotional storm, and a deep sense of vulnerability that carries with it an entire layer of our life story.

Why We Hide Our Childhood Wounds

If we were aware of the existence of these childhood wounds within us, and of how they manage us and complicate our relationships, we would likely share them with our partner. Unfortunately, we are not always at that level of awareness.

Another reason we hide them is that we need a certain emotional space that allows such exposure without being harmed by it. Only when we feel genuine interest and empathy do we dare to reveal them.

The Integrative Nature of the Soul

Despite, and because of childhood wounds and the challenges they present in relationships, the soul desires their exposure. The soul thrives on integration, on the completion and unification of all its layers, so that a person can direct their energies from a healthier and more wholesome place.

Because the soul seeks to connect all its parts, the conscious and the less conscious, the loved and the less loved, into one unified whole, it continually brings to awareness those parts that require healing, in order to allow dialogue and repair.

We, however, who are very attached to our comfort zone, tend to do the opposite. We repress and avoid looking at these parts, leaving the pain intact, the wound open, communication impaired, and healing nowhere in sight.

Ego Versus the True Self

Our ego, which protects us from vulnerability, does not want exposure and continually pushes these parts away. In contrast, the deeper and truer layers of the soul push for these parts to be revealed, so that healing can occur.

If the ego wins this quiet inner struggle, we are destined to experience ongoing pain without healing. This prevents true closeness and love with our partner, creating only enough emotional quiet to survive, but nothing beyond that.

If however we take responsibility for the pain that arises, and attribute it to the parts within us that we have carried since childhood, and that can only be healed through interaction with a partner, we are rewarded with closeness, love, and security in the relationship. Above all, we build a new layer in the structure of our own personality.

Adapted from a lecture by Inbar Bar Kama, an expert in relationships and unhealthy relational patterns.

Inbal Elhayani, M.A., is a certified therapist in NLP, mindfulness, and guided imagery, and a writer and lecturer in the field.