Human Contact: Can Developmental Trauma Cause Someone To Fear Human Contact?

Although there are those who are able to be by themselves and to be with others, there are also those who are unable to relate to this. As a result of this, they are likely to feel uncomfortable around others and they can feel uncomfortable being by themselves.

For that reason, their life is going to be far harder than it needs to be as whatever option they go for, they are not going to be happy and at ease. At the same time, there is likely to be at least one thing that they can do in each of these experiences to deal with their discomfort.

The First Experience

So, when they are around others they can feel conformable or they can end up disconnecting from how they feel. By losing touch with how they feel they might not even realise that they are uncomfortable.

They will then be able to play the part of someone who is sociable without fully showing up. The trouble is that by disconnecting from themselves, they won’t be able to fully connect with anyone.

The Second Experience

When they are by themselves they can feel uncomfortable or they can also end up disconnecting from how they feel. By doing this, and this can automatically take place, they won’t need to feel lonely.

What may help with this is if they were to consume something or to engage in a certain activity. Their attention will be in their head and what is taking place in their body will be a mystery, if only for a short while.

A Frustrating Existence

Now, even if they are not consciously aware of what is going on, living in this way is going to have a negative impact on their life. Without this awareness, they could often feel helpless and powerless and deeply depressed.

This could just be seen as what their life is like, with there being very little that they can do. For their life to change, it will be essential for them to be able to step back and reflect on their life.

Confusion

If they were to do this, they could struggle to understand why they don’t feel comfortable around others or by themselves. They may see that they have been this way for as long as they can remember, too.

At this point, they could come to the conclusion that they were simply born this way. If they do, they will just have to tolerate how they experience life and do their best to handle the life that they have been given.

Hidden

However, there is the chance that they were not born this way and how they experience life is due to what took place during the beginning of their life. But, thanks to how traumatic this stage was, their brain ended up blocking out what took place.

This is then why how they experience life as an adult doesn’t make sense to their conscious mind and why they, perhaps, believe that they were just born this way. The information that would shed light on what is going on will be outside of their conscious awareness.

A Key Stage

Practically from the moment they were born, they may have often been neglected and the care that they did receive might have been in sync with what they actually needed. This could show that they were brought up by caregivers who believed that a baby needed to adapt to their needs.

This view is not only old fashioned, it will also cause an infant to be deprived of what they need in order to grow and develop. Yet, when an adult is projecting their level of development onto a baby, this won’t be understood.

A brutal Time

Being left and having at least one caregiver who was unable to attune to their needs, would have caused them to be deeply wounded. What would have made this even worse is that this would have taken place at a stage of their development when their brain and nervous system were in an undeveloped state and not equipped to handle so much pain and stress.

When they were left, they are likely to have felt terrified, enraged, rejected, abandoned, helpless and deeply alone; whereas when they were given attention, they are likely to have felt enraged, trapped, smothered, fearful and terrified. To handle both of these experiences, they would have automatically repressed how they felt, disconnected from themselves and gone into shut down, frozen state.

No Connection

A time in their life when they needed to bond with their primary caregiver would have been a time when they were unable to do so. This caregiver as well as others would have been seen as a threat to their survival.

Thus, instead of feeling comfortable with their fellow human beings; they would have come to fear them. They were incredibly vulnerable during this time and their heart, along with other organs, would have been put under a lot of pressure.

Moving Forward

As this trauma was preverbal and therefore, took place before their thinking brain was online, it is unlikely that they will be able to change their life by simply thinking differently, changing their beliefs and their behaviour. What they will need to do is to work through their repressed pain and to settle their nervous system down.

Naturally, this is not something that will take place overnight; it will take endless patience and persistence. But, as long as this might take, what’s the alternative? The alternative is how one has lived up until this point.
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Awareness

If someone can relate to this and they are ready to change their life, they may need to reach out for external support. This is something that can be provided with the assistance of a therapist or healer.