Falling in Love with a Trauma Survivor

What it takes to love someone who doesn’t realize how lovable they are.

I’m someone who has always been really up front about my past with my partners. That’s because — even before I had a language for it — I understood that the mountain of traumas behind me had a direct effect on some of my reactions and responses to life and the challenges it brings.

My partner now gets it. For nearly a decade, he has stood by me and supported me through an array of horrible ups and downs that would have driven most into the hills.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for everyone.

Not everyone adopts an awareness of self. They don’t communicate about what happened to them, and they don’t seek partners who have the mental, emotional, and physical depth to support them.

It takes a lot to take on a relationship with someone who has a lot of traumas in their background. The demands can be great, and the responses and be confusing at times.

All the same, when you fall for someone who has been traumatized, you can want a life with them. And they can want that same life with you. Making that happen, however, requires that both of you are honest, up front, and understanding of what the challenges can be.

Is your partner, spouse, or new love interest a survivor? Here’s what you need to know about supporting them, and what some of the difficulties can really look like.

There can be a lot of emotional dysfunction that comes with surviving a lifetime (or even a single incident) of trauma.

In childhood, if we aren’t allowed to express and explore our emotions safely, we struggle to control them as adults.

We aren’t led to build on our emotional intelligence, so we spend our lives reacting to things instead of analyzing and making better emotional choices for ourselves.

Worse, many trauma survivors end up with conditions like PTSD and C-PTSD which makes it hard for them to…

Related posts:

I first learned about Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 game-changing book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in my undergrad “History of Science and Technology” class. After reading the book, I see how Kuhn…

And because mental health is a continuum from sickness to health, from disconnection to connection, it can be hard to know when it’s time to seek help. And after you do that, then you need to give…

A couple of months ago I was asked to give a virtual lecture at Edith Cowan University Perth, Australia. The virtual option was a blessing due to the fact that I was at that point in Helsinki…