How Unhealed Childhood Wounds Sabotage Romantic Relationships

by Jessica Anne Pressler LCSW

Don’t judge me — I’ve been married four times. Three of those four marriages were deeply painful. And when I finally got honest with myself, I had to look at the one thing that showed up in every single one of them: me. More specifically, the part of me I now call the Traitor Within.

My Traitor Within was forged in childhood, shaped by a mother whose love felt conditional and whose presence felt forced. Combined with the messaging and modeling of my childhood, I learned early — in my body, long before I had words for it — that love meant longing and pain, and that the people I needed most would pull toward me and then pull away, over and over again. My nervous system memorized that dance. And then I spent decades choosing partners who would let me keep dancing it.

I want to be clear about something, because it matters: I was never afraid of being alone. I actually loved my alone time — between relationships, I thrived. The fear didn’t live there. It lived inside the relationship, once I was invested, once I had opened my heart. That’s when it would begin. A pulling back. A withdrawal. A subtle shift in the temperature of the connection. And something deep inside me — something that had learned this rhythm long before I met any of these men — would recognize it. My body knew before my mind did. It had been here before. This was the dance with my mother: come close, pull back, pull back, pull back, show me a sparkle of hope, then pull away. I spent most of my relationship with my mother trying to earn her love and feel worthy of her time. With the men I married and some I dated, it always started off looking very healthy. But then, once I was invested — once my heart was fully committed — they would change. I would respond to their change, sometimes becoming frantic, the more they would pull back, the more they would be cruel, instead of leaving — I never saw leaving as a choice — I would twist myself into a pretzel trying to make it work, always failing. I realize now there was nothing I could do to make it work by myself. But once I was committed, my Traitor Within went into full force — not to protect me from the cycle, but to keep me inside it, driven by my terror of abandonment.

My Traitor Within kept me in relationships that were abusive far longer than any version of safety should have allowed. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel the harm — I did, but my Traitor either helped me forget it or helped me stay by blaming myself. My Traitor wasn’t focused on my safety. It was focused on the relationship itself, on not losing what I had already given my heart to. So I stayed. And stayed. And stayed.

For someone else, that same wound plays out on the other side — they walk away from relationships, or never fully let one begin, and it’s often from the ones that might actually have been good for them. Their Traitor didn’t trust. When someone showed up consistently, without the familiar push and pull, something in them decided it wouldn’t last. That eventually, this person too would pull away and abandon them. And since their body had never learned what safe love felt like, calm didn’t feel like love. It just felt like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

What happens when that pattern follows us into a committed relationship that could otherwise be healthy — and what we can do about it.

What is the “Traitor Within?”

The “Traitor Within” is a misguided yet well intentional aspect of self that repeatedly leads us down self-destructive pathways. The Traitor is primarily formed in childhood, as adaptive responses to trauma and dysfunction, in order to feel safe. The Traitor Within is shaped by messaging and modeling of those around, originally serving as protective function, these patterns resurface in adulthood as the inner monologue or state of being that drives repetitive self-defeating behavior, transforming what was one survival into self-sabotage.

The problem is that it doesn’t always know when the danger has passed. It keeps using yesterday’s survival tools in today’s relationships — and that’s where the damage is done.

How the “Traitor Within” sabotages the love you deserve

Even in relationships with genuinely good people, the Traitor Within finds ways to create the familiar. Here’s what that can look like:

The people-pleaser who resents in silence

You grew up learning that speaking up meant rejection. So in your relationship, you say what your partner wants to hear. You agree, you accommodate, you shrink. But your real feelings don’t disappear — they simmer. And when your needs go unmet, resentment builds quietly until it poisons everything. Your partner doesn’t know what went wrong. You never told them the truth.

The abandonment wound that runs before it can be left

Things are going well. You’re getting close. And then — a slight, a misread moment, a fear that you’ve said something wrong — and you’re pulling away, creating distance, ending things before they can end you. You don’t even realize you’re doing it. The Traitor does it for you, convinced it’s keeping you safe.

The good person who doesn’t feel like enough

You finally meet someone kind. Patient. Consistent. And your nervous system doesn’t know what to do with it. There’s no chase, no drama — and so your Traitor Within whispers: they’re not that interested. They’ll leave eventually. Why bother? You walk away from the healthiest relationship you’ve ever been offered because calm doesn’t feel like love. It just feels unfamiliar.

When two Traitors commit to each other

Here’s what most couples don’t realize: you are never in a relationship alone. Every person who enters a committed relationship brings their history with them — their childhood wounds, their coping strategies, their unconscious fears. All of it shows up alongside them. And when two unhealed Traitor Withins find each other, the results can be devastating — even when the love is real.

Let me paint you a picture I’ve seen in my therapy office more times than I can count.

She grew up with a mother whose emotional state was impossible to predict — one moment warm, the next explosive. She learned early to hide her feelings, to stay small, to manage her distress quietly and alone. As an adult, when someone else’s emotion enters the room, she feels flooded. Overwhelmed. Her instinct is to go silent, to withdraw, to create space so she can breathe again.

He grew up with a deep fear of abandonment. Once he’s invested in someone, once he’s opened his heart, any withdrawal feels like the beginning of the end. His Traitor taught him to hold on, to monitor the emotional temperature of everyone around him, to treat even the smallest pulling back as a warning sign that he is about to lose someone he loves.

Now put them together.

The moment she feels overwhelmed, she goes quiet and pulls back. His wound ignites. He reaches for her — he needs reassurance, he needs to know they’re okay. But that reaching floods her further. So she retreats more. Which makes him reach harder. Which makes her disappear completely.

Neither of them is being cruel. Neither of them wants this. But their two Traitors have found each other and are doing exactly what they were built to do — protecting their human the only way they know how, while slowly destroying the very relationship those humans are trying to save.

This is how two people who genuinely love each other end up feeling completely alone in the same room. It’s not a love problem. It’s a wound problem.

What healing actually looks like

When I work with couples and partners, I don’t start with communication scripts or conflict resolution techniques. I start with the individual — with each person’s story. Where did your Traitor Within come from? What did it learn? What is it still trying to protect you from, even though the threat is long gone?

And then comes the most powerful part: I ask each person to teach their partner about their childhood wound. Not to explain or justify their behavior, but to help their partner truly understand what they’re working with — what it felt like to be that child, and why the adult they became learned to respond the way they do.

When she understands that his reaching isn’t manipulation — it’s a terrified child panicking at the first sign of abandonment — something shifts. When he understands that her silence is self-protection and not rejection — something shifts. The argument about “why don’t you ever talk to me” becomes a conversation about two people doing their best with tools that were never built for love.

That’s when real intimacy becomes possible. Not because the wounds disappear — they don’t — but because you’re no longer fighting each other. You’re fighting the wounds together, with compassion as your common language.

It took me four marriages and decades of my own healing work to understand what my Traitor Within had cost me. I know I’m not alone. And if my story helps even one person pause before their Traitor Within does more damage, then every one of those hard years meant something.

Your Traitor Within was never your enemy. But it doesn’t have to run your relationship anymore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW, is a psychotherapist with nearly four decades of clinical experience and the creator of the Traitor Within framework. She is the author of Traitor Within: How My Fear of Abandonment Led Me to Abandon Myself and host of the Your Traitor Within podcast and Your Traitor Within Journal. Learn more at jessicaannepressler.com

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