Healing Relational Trauma & Embracing Wholeness

The Short Version: Everywhere you go, you take yourself with you, and that includes relationships. We talked to Daniel Boscaljon, PhD, about how working through unhealed childhood traumas can lead you to meaningful relationships with yourself and others.

“Baggage” is probably my least favorite term in the dating world. Sure, it points to the reality that everybody has a complicated story. The experiences that people refer to as “baggage” can be heavy, but they can also hold important lessons and a bit of wisdom.

Not everybody has the same definition of what baggage is in romance. A 20-something might think a divorce is baggage, but a more mature adult might want someone who knows what it’s like to commit and want to be married.

The definitional discrepancies aren’t what riles me up the most.

Can’t we come up with a better word to describe our experiences? Our beliefs? Those difficult things that shape how we show up in relationships? Everybody has baggage, so we should choose a better word to talk about it. 

We need to reframe how we speak and think about the stories we carry– especially the ones that may be negatively impacting our relationships. If we keep on calling these stories “baggage” and leaving it at that, we’re missing out on everything they have to teach us.

We talked to Daniel Boscaljon, PhD, to help us explore and understand how our experiences, specifically the traumatic ones, influence our relationships. 

Daniel and his wife, Angela Amias, LCSW, are the voices behind Alchemy for Love. Alchemy for Love is an online platform offering quizzes, programs, free resources, and coaching to help you build meaningful and lasting relationships.

Daniel and Angela specialize in helping people heal from childhood traumas. Their trauma-informed approach marries elements of psychology, spirituality, and coaching to cultivate a holistic path toward more fulfilling and self-realized relationships.

Relational traumas in childhood shape how a person engages in their relationships as an adult, and especially in the romantic ones. Neglect, abuse, and dysfunction in childhood can leave lasting marks on the way you communicate and connect with others.

“What happens when your needs weren’t met as a child?” Daniel asked. “What happens when you encounter what we call a core wound, which makes you believe that you can’t have a sense of belonging and self simultaneously?”

Daniel got his start in executive coaching. He helped CEOs, executives, and professionals work through personal and professional challenges, set goals, and then achieve them. When COVID-19 put everybody on lockdown, Daniel and Angela began working from home.

Angela was working as a couples therapist at the time. When Angela and Daniel chatted about work, they realized their clients had a lot in common. 

“A lot of the problems we were seeing were the same,” Daniel said. “Angela and I realized the root of a lot of different troubles is childhood trauma.”

Daniel told us there’s a difference between single event trauma and relational trauma. Single event trauma stems from one traumatic event. It could be a death in the family, sexual or physical assault, or a severe injury.

“We realized a lot of people, research, and studies talked about single event trauma and PTSD that comes from a single event,” Daniel said. “But very little support was being offered in terms of helping people recognize relational trauma.”

Relational trauma happens when your needs go consistently unmet when you’re a child. Daniel told us that prolonged emotional neglect in childhood can create a core wound. 

This core wound is going to impact how you see yourself, who you’re romantically drawn to, and how you show up once you’re in a relationship.

Daniel said he and Angela had one goal: to support people through the disconnect of the pandemic.

“We wanted to educate people about that kind of relational trauma and make a really clear way for people to understand how it affected them, how it affects their current relationships, and how to move forward from that,” Daniel said.

Alchemy of Love takes elements from couples counseling, psychotherapy, and depth psychology (more on that in a second) to create trauma-informed materials.

Daniel said depth psychology is the field of study that explores the human unconscious. “I’ve done a lot of research into identity, the stories we tell ourselves, the way language affects us, the way we internalize language, and the way culture shapes our stories.”

I’m into personality tests. I like that they give an easily understandable model for our personalities, habits, and emotional needs. I think anything that helps you understand yourself and gives you self-awareness is a step in the right direction.

Much like personality tests, depth psychology explores the underlying patterns of our behavior. “Research into depth psychology looks at underlying patterns as kind of blueprints for how people respond to situations,” Daniel explained. “The word archetype is a different word for blueprint.”

It was with this understanding that Daniel and Angela crafted the Five Relationship Archetypes. “Those five patterns, or archetypes, are things that made sense coming out of childhood with different kinds of personalities and different kinds of home environments,” Daniel said.

He continued, “And they made sense in terms of what people were facing in their intimate relationships as adults.”

To find out your Relationship Archetype, you’ll answer a few questions about your experiences and feelings in childhood and adulthood. The quiz asks about your desires for a long-term relationship, what you look for in a partner, and what you see as your skills in a relationship.

“There are certain kinds of survival strategies that children would need in order to move through childhood and survive psychologically and physically,” Daniel said. “It becomes normal and real, and they bring those survival mechanisms into their relationships.”

Healing childhood traumas restores the foundation on which you build your relationships. It attends to the wounds that deeply influence the way you behave and instills you with the belief that you are deserving of meaningful, safe, and fulfilling connections. 

“When you know what your archetype is, and what your partner’s is, then you can start to understand the bigger picture,” Daniel told us.

Mental health has been pushed to the cultural forefront in recent years. Gen Z experiences mental health challenges at staggering rates and living through the COVID-19 pandemic has left its mark on each of us. 

As we’ve attended to these issues, childhood trauma has become more widely recognized.

“Part of the gap we found is that there is a lot more attention being drawn to childhood trauma, and I think a lot of people are looking to things written for therapists,” Daniel said. “People are really hungry to figure out what’s going on.”

Alchemy of Love gives you the language you need to understand your childhood experiences. It could even help you see your experiences in a new light and recognize relational trauma that may have gone unnoticed because it was all you knew. “When things happen to you when you’re young, they become part of what you think is normal,” Daniel said.

Daniel said the platform’s main goal is to illuminate the healing potential that lies within the intersection of childhood trauma work, individual therapy, and couples therapy. Alchemy of Love gives individuals, couples, and therapists tools and techniques to treat relationship conflict and childhood wounds at the same time.

“Angela is so helpful in this area, because she worked as an attachment specialist at an adoption clinic, and also as a couples therapist,” Daniel told us. “She was able to make that connection intuitively.” 

People who have experienced trauma need informed and sensitive support. Daniel said one of the most valuable things anyone who has experienced trauma can do is radically embrace self-understanding and self-compassion.

“Healing from childhood trauma is about learning how to listen to yourself and learning about what you feel,” Daniel said. “Then you learn to trust yourself. We need to rebuild their ability to hear and trust themselves.”