Discovering the "Adapted Child" within each of us

During 2 sessions of Peer Counseling where I live at a church which was a men's group with a leader, I learned about "The Adapted Child" (which basically means something bad happens to you as a child and gives you some slight form (or larger form of trauma) and it is the psychological reaction of the child not understanding what is happening to it. This often translates into various kinds of bad behavior as adults from the traumas inflicted on all of us from the womb to adulthood and often not abuse from our parents but instead from other relatives, or friends or enemies along the way.

The reason this is important in peer counseling is because in order to "Be psychologically healthy" you have to erect "Good Boundaries" and what causes Adapted Child behavior creates all kinds of boundary failures as an adult.

Where it can be the worst is in important relationship with a lover or spouse where we project our "Awful stuff" from our childhood on our partner and cause a breakup because we don't recognize the problem as our own and not our partners.

So, since my wife and I in the early 2000s both attended two sessions (I think they were 6 weeks of 1 or two nights a week each (hers was all girl or woman and mine was all boy or man). So, in my groups there were between 30 and 50 of us learning how to deal with our "Adapted child" and how not to  project our childhood stuff on our significant others which almost always causes either abuse or a breakup and when kids are involved in all this this just makes it 10 or 100 times worse when people break up that don't need to really if they just psychologically can understand the problem(s) in the first place.

So, after about 12 weeks for each my wife and I we started saying, "Oh. That's not your stuff that's my stuff."

And most of the things that might have broken us up eventually went away because of us successfully erecting healthy boundaries in our relationship.

Once you can stop projecting childhood traumas and blaming your spouse or lover for them and if your spouse or lover can do the same you have likely a 50% chance more of making your relationship successful if you both are honest straightforward adults and are honest with each other about important things in your lives.