By Rosabel Zohfeld | Rosabel Unscripted | Companion article to the conversation with Dr. Christopher Barker
You finally have a quiet evening, and your body still will not let you sit down. From the outside you are the reliable one, the high achiever, the person who holds it together. On the inside, rest feels unsafe and a mistake feels like danger. That split is what clinical psychologist Dr. Christopher Barker calls a disruption of relational time, and it is one of the clearest explanations for why capable people stay tired while doing everything right.
On Rosabel Unscripted, neurology nurse practitioner Rosabel Zohfeld sat down with Dr. Barker, a New Jersey psychologist who has spent about thirty years with complex trauma. His book, Now and Then: Complex Trauma and the Disruption of Relational Time, argues that early relationships do not only shape emotion and memory. They change how time feels between people. A childhood moment can still feel like it is happening now. An unanswered text can close the future before the other person has even seen the phone.
This is not a verdict that something is wrong with you. Barker’s core claim, and the through-line of the conversation, is simpler. You are not broken. Your mind and body adapted to survive. The work is repair, not a personality overhaul. If that language is new, the free tools on rosabelzohfeld.com are a useful companion, especially the caregiver and nervous-system resources in the Rosabelievers hub.
What Relational Time Actually Means
Relational time is time between us. Barker defines it as the sense of relating to time as it is, and of relating to other people inside that time. A relationship has a past, a present, and a possible future. When that continuity is intact, a bad mood is a bad mood. When it is not, a bad mood becomes “she does not like me,” “what did I do,” or “this is already over.”
Complex trauma, he argues, does not only affect emotions or memories. It changes how we experience time within relationships. Hypervigilance produces a feeling of already knowing the future. The scary email closes time. The missing reply means they do not love you anymore. The answer does not come from the present. It comes from the place that learned, early, “I do not think I am okay, and I do not think they are going to take care of me.”
That is also why the brain does not always file these memories as past. Zohfeld noted, from a neuroscience angle, that traumatic memory can feel like it is happening right now. Barker agreed. In a marriage, an affair, a stretch of anger, or the loss of a child can return whole: sights, sounds, even a song. He practices EMDR in part because the memory arrives intact, and the body needs a way to locate it in the present. A related conversation on this site, Your Body Is Not Broken, makes the same point about chronic pain: adaptation is not the same thing as damage.
How Relational Time Starts as a Survival Strategy
Barker is careful about the word trauma. People picture a plane crash or a death. Complex trauma is often about what did not happen: a connection that was never made, feedback about worth that never arrived, a caregiver who was absent or who lacked the emotional range to name what a child was feeling. Children want agency. When love is inconsistent, they ask what they did. They cannot control what someone does not give them.
His own story sits inside that frame. His father, a Korean War veteran, lived with what was then called shell shock and spent long stretches in psychiatric hospitals. Barker had little contact with him from age three. His mother, raising an only child in southern Virginia, was sometimes too depleted to say the sentence he later realized he had needed: you are going to be okay. He was parentified, the little adult other children brought their problems to. Years later, under anesthesia for a routine procedure, he heard, or believed he heard, a doctor say, “We are going to take good care of you.” The line sent him looking for what had been missing.
Evolutionarily, a little vigilance paid. A crack outside the cave might be a predator. We do not have saber-toothed tigers. We have bosses, coworkers, and lovers. The nervous system still activates. Barker dislikes the word triggered, because it implies the response has already left the gun. He prefers activated. You can notice activation. You cannot negotiate with a metaphor that says you have no control.
Anxiety, people-pleasing, and emotional overwhelm often began as smart strategies. Prove you are worth it. Ask, do you love me now? How about now? The original crack does not close because the resume got longer. People see the effort and hand over more work. Burnout follows. High functioning and psychological health are not synonyms. You can be excellent at your job because you are trying to outrun shame, and still be exhausted by the question, am I good enough now?
Relational Time and the 7 Powerful Patterns That Are Not a Verdict
These seven patterns are the ones Barker and Zohfeld kept returning to. None of them means you are broken. Each one is a place where relational time collapsed, and where repair can start.
1. Rest feels unsafe. If early life never delivered “you are going to be okay,” stillness can feel like the moment before something bad. The high achiever stays in motion because motion used to earn safety.
2. A missing reply closes the future. Watchers wait for the next shoe. Responders have to answer immediately. Barker’s free relational time quiz, on his site, sorts people toward those styles without labeling them as defective. An unanswered text is data about the past nervous system, not proof about the present relationship.
3. Perfectionism wears the costume of ambition. Ambition is something you want. Perfectionism is what you believe you must do in order to be adequate. Perfect is impossible, so the target moves, and someone eventually says, this person does everything, give them more.
4. Burnout is an overloaded circuit, not a time-management failure. Working too hard is part of it. So is skipped food, skipped rest, and a nervous system that never stands down. First responders and clinicians know this. Zohfeld described jumping into seizure care years after leaving the emergency department, because the body still stores the procedure. Barker, after hearing a horrific on-duty story, took fifteen minutes before the next session. The memory does not leave. It needs a place to land.
5. Attachment styles keep casting the same play. Barker pointed to the Strange Situation research with young children: some barely registered a parent’s return, some attached more readily to a stranger. Mixed early signals become adult doubt. Anxious and avoidant partners often find each other. They have something to give. They also have to be able to receive it.
6. Trauma and ADHD can look alike and are not the same. Barker describes ADHD as a switching problem: interest holds attention, boredom does not, which is why four hours of video games does not rule it out. Trauma scans the door. A child called a liar may be filling gaps, having heard every third word, or may have cleaned the room in intention and not in action. Both deserve a real assessment, not a slogan.
7. The body keeps the bill. The CDC and Kaiser Permanente adverse childhood experiences research followed more than 17,000 adults and linked a higher ACE score with later heart disease, lung disease, depression, and substance use. The CDC’s overview of adverse childhood experiences treats that pattern as biology, not weakness. Chronic stress teaches the amygdala and the cortisol system that the world is unpredictable. Sleep, inflammation, blood pressure, headaches, and, in Zohfeld’s neurology clinic, seizure threshold can all carry the cost. For families also navigating cognitive change, the Understanding Dementia guide is the clinical companion from the same host.
Repair That Restores Relational Time This Week
Barker prefers repair to the word healing, because repair is something you can point to. A repair is an experience that goes differently from the prediction. You expected the relationship to end because the text did not come. It comes. They were busy. You believe them. You say, out loud, that you were doing the old thing again, and the other person stays. Safety accumulates from repetitions like that, including the repetition of a therapist who is there, listening, the next week.
Parents listening with a knot in the stomach get the same answer he gives seventy- and eighty-year-olds. It is not too late. Be accessible. Explain what is happening. Do not dismiss a child’s point of view. When you meet a hyper-productive adult, the better question is not only what drove the achievement. It is what happened that made acceptance feel like something that had to be earned. Intergenerational patterns, including temperament Dan Siegel has described as partly wired early, can be mitigated. Cranky babies can become fussy adults who learn to channel it. Therapy and repair experiences do not erase history. They change what the history is allowed to predict.
The tools he offered are small enough for this week, drawn from dialectical behavior therapy and basic nervous-system resets.
Cold water. Run it over your hands and splash your face. You turned it on. You changed a sensation on purpose. That is a vote for agency.
Grounding. Name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can smell. The point is the present room, not a perfect meditation.
A longer exhale. Inhale through the nose for a count of four. Exhale through the mouth for seven or eight. Three rounds. Barker also noticed, in his own stress-related heart-rhythm scare, that he sometimes simply stopped breathing, braced for the next thing. A cardiologist cleared him. The remaining work was noticing when the brace arrived.
A written catalog of safety. Journal the moments that went fine, because activation will erase them by tomorrow. Talk, even if the listener cannot fully understand. Everybody’s worst thing is their worst thing. Unacknowledged experience sits like poison. Writing counts. So does someone saying, I hear you, and you are going to be okay.
One breath for yourself first. The airplane mask is not a cliche in a helping profession. If you are not conscious, you cannot care for the child, the patient, or the next client. Zohfeld’s version is leading by example: do not prescribe sleep, food, and bathroom breaks you refuse yourself. Barker’s version was a waiting client who asked, after a loud session, “Do you need a minute?” We have to ask ourselves that question first.
Connect With Dr. Christopher Barker
If the perfectionism, the exhaustion, or the sense of always being on felt familiar, take Barker’s closing claim with you. Nothing is wrong with you. The brain did what it had to do to get here. You get to respond to it now, through understanding rather than shame.
His book is Now and Then: Complex Trauma and the Disruption of Relational Time. A workbook of safety-building exercises is in progress. The free relational time quiz sits on his site if you scroll down.
Website and quiz: drchristopherbarker.com
Podcast, Holding Space with Dr. Christopher Barker: Spotify and Apple Podcasts
Substack: substack.com/@christopherbarkerphd
Questions, speaking on trauma, burnout, and professional wellness, or clinical contact: BarkerHoldingSpace@gmail.com, or the contact path on his website. He hosts Holding Space on YouTube and TikTok as well, and he invites comments and questions there.
Give yourself some grace today. If this episode helped, share it with the person who is still trying to earn a rest they already deserve. More conversations on the brain, caregiving, and the nervous system live at Rosabel Unscripted.
This article is educational and reflects a podcast conversation. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it does not create a provider-patient relationship. Talk with your own clinician about your health.
