How Brokenness Manifests in Our Choices

What if your childhood trauma is still choosing your partners—and you don't even know it.

⭐ Take Tife, for example. Her father was a womanizer whose wandering eyes left scars on her mother's heart—and hers. So when love came knocking, Tife had one non-negotiable requirement: fidelity. She wanted a man who would never cheat, period.

Enter Jide. He wasn't affectionate, he was stingy to the bone—five years of dating and not a single gift, not even ₦100 airtime. But she was happy. Why? Because no other woman seemed interested in him. No suspicious messages, no girls hovering around him in school or church. She felt safe. 

She didn’t see the red flags waving in neon light. Her trauma-trained eyes saw only what they were programmed to see: finally, a man she didn't have to fight over.

She was so busy celebrating his lack of female admirers that she missed his stinginess, his selfishness, his emotional unavailability. After marriage, the truth emerged: yes, he wouldn't cheat—but he brought a dozen other problems she could have addressed before walking down the aisle. Her fear had made her blind to everything except the one thing that scared her most. Now, she had pay to rent or they'll live in a slum... She had to quarrel before they ate meat. Beverages? Never. It didn't matter what he earned, their standard of living screamed poverty. He even beat their child up for requesting for a birthday cake!

⭐ Chidera's story was different, but the pattern was the same. She grew up watching her mother stretch ₦500 to feed a family of six, watching her father's empty promises pile up like unpaid bills. Poverty wasn't just about money—it was about dignity lost, dreams deferred, and a mother who aged before her time. She grew up in a home where lack was the soundtrack. Her father never provided, and her mother suffered deeply for it. One day Chidera made a vow: "My husband must provide."

So when Obiara came along with his flashy car and full wallet, Chidera didn't care about his temper. She didn't mind that he exploded at waiters or that his hands moved too quickly when he was angry. All she saw was a man who could provide—food on the table, provisions in the house, security she'd never known.

Her mother's suffering had programmed her to believe that provision was all that mattered... it was worth any price, even brutality. The bruises would heal, she reasoned. Empty stomachs cut deeper. 

Now, after losing 4 teeth in 6months she whispers, "He is brutal and unreasonable... His temper had a hair-trigger. I saw it—oh, I saw it—but I ignored it. Because to me then, provision equaled safety. Everything else? Background noise. But now I see that there can be a more excellent way".

 

 ⭐ Onome's father was a different kind of broken—the kind that sits in corners nursing bottles and nursing grievances against a world that had moved on without him. Her childhood was filled with the sound of opportunity knocking on other doors while her father sat immobile, pickled in regret and alcohol.

When Bio came into her life—always moving, always hustling, always chasing the next big break—Onome thought she'd found her opposite. It didn't matter that he lied about his whereabouts. It didn't matter that "coming at 5 PM" meant 11 PM, if at all. What mattered was that he was 'doing something', anything, unlike the man who had raised her.

She was so busy celebrating his ambition that she never questioned his methods. Until the day the police came knocking, and she learned that his "hustle" involved armed robbery and kidnapping. Her fear of stagnation had blinded her to the difference between movement and progress, between hustle and criminality.

⭐Angela's story cuts deepest because her wounds were carved in flesh. Her father's fists were his vocabulary, his anger the only emotion their home ever knew. She learned to read the weather in his face, to predict storms by the set of his shoulders.

When David entered her life—gentle, soft-spoken David who had never raised his voice, let alone his hand—Angela thought she'd found paradise. It didn't matter that he couldn't hold a job. It didn't matter that he wilted at the first sign of conflict, that he couldn't advocate for himself or anyone else. What mattered was that she would never again duck a flying fist or explain away bruises.

She had traded one extreme for another, choosing emotional abandonment over physical abuse, not realizing that protection without provision is just another form of neglect because lack leaves you at the mercy of others.

Thankfully, his old money meant they never starved because of his weakness. But whenever his mother felt like it, she beat Angela blue and black—and all David did was whisper apologies, never defending her, never creating boundaries. She had escaped her father's fists only to endure her mother-in-law's, with a husband too weak to protect the woman he claimed to love.

⭐But perhaps no story illustrates this tragic irony better than Wilson's. He was the son of Nneoma—the most beautiful woman in their community, the woman every man desired and, tragically, the woman every man could have.

His childhood was a masterclass in humiliation. He remembered his father's tears, the endless quarrels, the fights that shook their house like earthquakes. He remembered coming home to an empty house because his mother was always somewhere else, with someone else. Worst of all, he remembered the whispers—his friends calling his mother "a public toilet," "every man's woman." The shame carved itself into his bones.

In his young mind, he drew a simple equation: Beauty equals betrayal. Beautiful women destroy families. Beautiful women cannot be trusted.

So Wilson made a vow of his own: "I will never marry a beautiful woman."

The cruel irony? His best friend Temilade was stunning—and everything else he could have wanted in a partner. She was the person he trusted with his secrets, his investments, his dreams. She was kind, loyal, constant. For years, she was his safe harbor, the friend he wanted to spend every moment with. 

But her beauty was a wall he couldn't climb. So she was boxed into "just a friend."

Every time he looked at her, he saw his mother's face and heard his father's sobs. He couldn't separate Temilade's character from her appearance, couldn't connect the dots between who she was and what he actually needed. Every time he looked at her he felt a stirring and that scared him more—other men must feel it too. He mused. And they will want her.

Instead, he chose Joanna—plain, overlooked Joanna, whom he believed no other man would want. He didn't examine her character or her values. Her only qualification was her ordinariness, her safety from the curse he believed beauty carried. He never felt any attraction toward Joanna, and that made him feel safe.

The awakening came too late. As he watched Temilade prepare to marry someone else, the truth hit him like a physical blow: she should have been his wife. She had been everything he wanted, everything he needed, standing right beside him for years. His trauma had made him reject his perfect match in favor of his safe choice.

And Joanna? She wasn’t faithful. She wasn’t kind. She wasn’t safe. And guess what? There’s no such thing as a woman that nobody wants. He had chosen her. So could others. His logic was flawed, and his pain had misled him. His equation was wrong on every level...Beauty doesn't determine faithfulness, just like poverty doesn't determine kindness—character does.

You see, trauma doesn't always scream. Sometimes, it whispers in our preferences. It shapes our desires, our deal-breakers, our "non-negotiables." 

We think we've healed because the pain isn't loud anymore. But our choices tell another story. It shows you are running away, blindly.

When you haven't dealt with the root, you build your future around a fear. Your decisions become reactions, not intentions. You don't choose love—you avoid patterns. That's not healing. That's survival.

Trauma unhealed becomes a compass misaligned. And when brokenness chooses for you, it doesn't care about wholeness. It only cares about avoiding what hurt you last time—even if it leads you straight into something worse.

The stories above aren't just cautionary tales—they're windows into how unprocessed trauma shapes our most important decisions. When traumatic episodes aren't properly processed, they create unresolved emotional baggage that follows us into every relationship, every choice, every supposedly "new" beginning.

Without reflection, analysis, and honest discussion about our wounds, we fall into predictable patterns. 

I will post about the Cost of Shallow Processing and How to Break the cycle of Trauma, if we have enough engagements and shares on this post 💕.

Janelle Obieroma 

UnVeilingrace Training and Counselling Centre