Seeing Trauma's Impact On Relationships It is important to recognize unhealed trauma as a dynamic force in an intimate relationship. It can super-charge emotions, escalate issues, and make it seem impossible to communicate effectively. Issues become complicated by: Heightened reactions to common relationship issues.
Love is one of the most elemental of emotions. It is a building block of some of our deepest relationships and a component in many of our happiest days. Yet the ability to freely give and receive love is a fragile skill, which traumatic experiences can all too easily dent or damage.
Being in a relationship with someone who has a trauma history can be uniquely challenging at times. In many cases, individuals who experience trauma may behave in ways that are hard for their partner to understand. They may experience panic attacks, express distrust, escalate quickly to anger, or become disengaged.
Living through traumatic events may result in expectations of danger, betrayal, or potential harm within new or old relationships. Survivors may feel vulnerable and confused about what is safe, and therefore it may be difficult to trust others, even those whom they trusted in the past.
Trauma dumping refers to sharing a traumatic story without thinking about how it will affect the listener, or oversharing in an inappropriate context.
Traumatic events, on the other hand, can create the most complex and difficult cases of intimacy avoidance. And a few examples of these events include the following: Physical or sexual abuse. Verbal abuse.
Posttraumatic stress disorder after the intense stress is a risk of development enduring personality changes with serious individual and social consequences.
People are afraid of being hurt in the same ways they were hurt as children. When people have been hurt, they feel that if they accepted love into their life, the whole world as they have experienced it would be shattered and they would not know who they were.
Responses to trauma can last for weeks to months before people start to feel normal again. Most people report feeling better within three months after a traumatic event. If the problems become worse or last longer than one month after the event, the person may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Healthy Relationships vs.
One way to determine whether you're in a healthy relationship or a trauma bond is to focus on how your relationship consistently makes you feel. A healthy relationship makes you feel supported, secure, and confident, while a trauma bond makes you feel fearful, anxious, or put down.
Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect. Most responses are normal in that they affect most survivors and are socially acceptable, psychologically effective, and self-limited.
Much like love bombing, trauma bonds can give the resemblance of love. They're often confused for love because of the trying nature, and when you love someone, you do try. Trauma bond relationships are driven by fear, not love, which is the biggest differentiator between trauma bonds and love.
Not wanting to fall in love can sometimes signify a problem with esteem, attachment, anxiety, or another issue. You might feel anxious about becoming attached to someone and potentially losing them. Or you might have low self-esteem and struggle with feeling that you are unloveable.
Feelings of Detachment After Trauma May Signal Worse Mental Health Outcomes. Many people experience dissociation, or a lack of connection between their thoughts, memory, and sense of identity, during or after a traumatic experience.
Someone incapable of love lacks the audacity to accept their wrongdoings. They prefer to blame other people because it helps them feel better and avoid guilt. These people have no idea about the origin of their problem.
People who are aromantic, also known as “aro,” don't develop romantic attractions for other people.
There are absolutely health impacts from unresolved trauma. Unresolved trauma puts people at increased risk for mental health diagnoses, which run the gamut of anxiety, depression and PTSD. There are physical manifestations as well, such as cardiovascular problems like high blood pressure, stroke or heart attacks.
The trauma can come in any form but the development of split personality, better known as dissociative identity disorder, is a result of trying to escape or hide from a trauma. Sometimes trauma is so severe that our brain creates an escape for us so that we can endure it better.
Trauma causes the body to go into survival mode—fight, flight, or freeze—at the time it occurs. These effects may linger, triggering our physiology to disburse stress hormones such as cortisol that have the side effect of making us feel disconnected and withdrawn, decreasing our connection to anyone we love.
Trauma creates barriers to using love languages
Trusting them or using them can feel too risky, without a foundation of safety inside themselves and in the relationship. Any of the love languages — affirmation, physical touch, gifts, etc. — can be memory triggers for times they felt endangered or manipulated.