How trauma sabotages your love life
This awareness will transform all your relationships
Hi, I’m Katherine and I write about love and life and as a subscriber, you can choose which posts you receive. To read my posts on life and switch off love, dating and relationship posts, or vice versa, go to your settings: your.substack.com/account. Thanks for being here 🩷
“I lose myself in relationships.”
“I struggle to express my needs in relationships.”
“I haven’t got time to date. I’m too busy.”
“I like him/her/them but I’m not sure they’re good enough for me.”
“I keep falling for emotionally unavailable people.”
“Should I stay or should I go? I can’t decide. I’m stuck in analysis-paralysis.”
When I was dating in my thirties and forties, I said all of the above, numerous times.
I was baffled by my relationship behaviours and had no idea what was going on.
I kept repeating the same mistakes, scratching my head and then hitting it against the same brick wall. I was confused and bemused.
Now that I understand developmental trauma, my dysfunctional dating behaviours make perfect sense.
Trauma is a big word and it’s quite normal to think it doesn’t apply to us.
“I didn’t have it so bad. Others had far worse childhoods. I had food, clothes and a roof over my head. I went to a good school …”
I thought like this too, until I understood that developmental trauma encompasses emotional neglect, which includes not being seen or soothed and, therefore, not feeling safe.
When we’re not seen, soothed or supported to feel safe, we live in fear and we reach for dysfunctional coping strategies to survive, because we’re clever like that and we’re wired for survival.
These coping strategies fall into four categories - fight, flight, freeze and fawn - and these trauma responses show up in all our relationships, especially our romantic ones, hijacking our happiness.
Because of my trauma responses, I did the following, on repeat:
I found fault with the good guys, rejected the kind men, chased after the edgy, unavailable ones and fell head over heels for the commitment-phobes
I lost myself in relationships, failed to speak my truth, showed up inauthentically, failed to set boundaries and put up with poor behaviour
I kept myself so busy with work that I had no time or energy left for my romantic life
Fortunately, I got the right psychological support to understand what was going on, change my unhealthy patterns, overcome my fear of intimacy and commitment and find, form and maintain a healthy and loving relationship with an emotionally available man.
I got married at 48 (a late bloomer) and we’re still going strong, six years on.
Over those years, I’ve also deepened my understanding of how trauma impacts our relationships and I’m passionate about bringing this awareness to others.
Explore my summer workshop series, Healthy Dating & Relating in Midlife.
What’s going on?
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” - Carl Jung
I love this quote and it informs all the work I do.
For years, Michael Bublé’s song, ‘I just haven’t met you yet,’ was my mantra. I clung to those lyrics like a life raft, waiting for my person to appear, until I realised that my subconscious was in the driving seat of my dating life, repeatedly steering me in dodgy directions, sometimes off a steep cliff, into an abyss.
I understand now that the primary aim of my subconscious was to keep me out of an intimate relationship because I held a core belief, rooted in my childhood experiences, that relationships weren’t safe and that they would bring me unbearable pain.
So, while on the surface it looked like I was open to finding a long-lasting romantic relationship, deep down I was doing everything I could to avoid one, from staying busy to choosing unavailable men, over and over again.
I was flailing around, swinging from flight to fight to freeze to fawn like a giant wrecking ball, smashing my chances of finding love.
Here is a whistle stop tour of my four trauma responses and how they showed up in my love life and might be showing up in yours, or in your non-romantic relationships too:
Flight
Flight is my primary trauma response. My flight keeps me in headless chicken mode, dashing around, spinning a million plates, working too hard, doing too much, avoiding my feelings and never pausing to be present, because when I was a child, being present to my feelings and to what was going on around me felt too painful.
This is why I never made time to answer messages on dating apps or to do the hobbies that would make my heart sing and bring me into contact with like-minded people and potential partners.
My flight response also showed up in obsessive over-thinking. As soon as I started dating someone, my brain would go into overdrive, trying to figure out if he was the ‘right’ guy, weighing up the pros and cons, writing lists in my head or on paper, asking everyone around me for their advice and looking over his shoulder for someone who’d be a better fit.
I can see now how fear and control drove my flight response - stay busy, stay safe, stay in your head, stay away from your feelings and keep fantasising about the perfect relationship rather than making a decision about the one you’re in, because what if you make the wrong choice?
Fight
There are two ways the fight response showed up for me: I would fight myself and I would fight the person I was trying to date.
When I say ‘fight myself’, I’m referring to any form of self-harming behaviour, from the binge eating I used to do, to the over-exercising, to the over-working to the point of exhaustion and burnout, to the obsessive thinking I describe above.
My fight response also showed up as a fierce inner critic, condemning the way I looked and every choice I made.
Then, as soon as I started dating someone, my ferocious critic turned on them. I found fault with them. I judged and dismissed them. Sometimes I did this in my head, talking myself out of a relationship. Sometimes I did it out loud, criticising them to their face.
Ouch.
I did this because I was scared and I didn’t want to get close. I did this because I was afraid and I didn’t want to have to make a choice. So I pushed the guy away and created distance between us.
Phew, I could breathe again.
I feel sad as I write this because I judged and criticised my dear husband, as I describe in my book, How to Fall in Love. I dismissed him as not good enough. I left him in search of someone else, in search of the fantasy of Mr Right.
Fortunately, I saw the light just in time and came back.
Freeze
While the fight and flight responses are more active behaviours, the freeze and fawn responses are more passive, but they are equally as damaging to our relationships.
When I freeze, I shut down. I withdraw emotionally. I go numb. I go silent. I avoid conflict. I don’t speak my truth. I don’t make a choice. I sit on the fence, frozen in a state of analysis-paralysis.
In my binge eating days, I’d turn to sugar and carbs to numb out and shut down. I’d turn to alcohol too. I could numb out with compulsive work as well - anything to avoid feeling my feelings, speaking my truth or engaging in any form of confrontation.
Imagine trying to date a frozen person, an emotionally numb person, a withdrawn person. You can’t get close. The relationship can’t progress. You can’t move forwards. There is no chance of real connection, no space for intimacy.
Relationships can survive for a while like this, but they’re not fulfilling or authentic ones and, ultimately, they will break.
Fawn
“Whatever you say.”
“Whatever you prefer.”
“You choose. I don’t mind.”
“I forgive you.” (Even though you’ve treated me terribly.)
The more we say these words, the more we lose ourselves in relationships. We people-please. We bend over backwards. We are overly nice. We accept poor behaviour without standing up for ourselves. We struggle to set boundaries or we set them and then break them or allow them to be violated. We are addicted to the other person’s love and approval and we’ll do anything to hold onto it, and we’re afraid of the other person’s anger or rejection and will do anything to avoid it.
I fawned when the man I was dating said he wanted to stay home with me and smoke dope even though I was desperate to go out and weed has never agreed with me.
I fawned when the man I was dating got off-his-face drunk and went clubbing with his mate on what I thought was our romantic weekend getaway to a hotel that I had booked.
I fawned when I said ‘Yes’ when everything inside me was screaming ‘No’.
I fawned when I said, ‘That’s OK’ when it really wasn’t.
If we compulsively keep the peace and don’t rock the boat when it needs to be rocked, our relationships can go on for years too, only they won’t be healthy and they won’t be built on authenticity or intimacy.
They’ll be built on us suppressing our true self, showing up as our false self and morphing into someone we think the other person wants us to be. We won’t be happy and, ultimately, these false relationships will crumble, but only after we’ve wasted a whole lot of our precious time.
There is, of course, a good deal of overlap between these four trauma responses.
Our subconscious is smart.
It asks, ‘What do I need to do around here to stay safe?’ and adapts accordingly.
Breaking Free
How do we overcome our ingrained trauma responses, walk through our fear, show up authentically as our true selves and open our hearts to true intimacy and connection?
Awareness is the first step to change, the bedrock of transformation, so if this article has got you thinking about your own relationship behaviours, I encourage you to create space in your life to think some more. Reflect deeply, journal, share your truth with safe people, read my book, come to my workshops or reach out to me if you’d like my support.
With this awareness, start to pay attention to your responses.
Ask yourself, at any given moment, am I in flight, fight, freeze or fawn? Then ask yourself why you’re triggered. What’s going on here? What button has been pressed?
I’ll share more on how to manage and overcome your trauma responses in future posts so please do subscribe if you haven’t already, or if you’re a paid subscriber, read on as I’ve recorded an audio message with further tools just for you and also provided a discount code to my summer workshop series.
Healthy Dating & Relating in Midlife - A 3-Part Summer Workshop Series
Extra Love 🩷
Tools for Healthy Dating & Relating
If you are a paid subscriber, read on to hear a 9-min audio message that will support you to manage your trauma responses and overcome unhealthy relationship patterns. You’ll also find your 30 percent discount code for the dating and relating workshops below.