The real reason why you feel disconnected from your partner
By Orit Krug | January 7th, 2022
Do you feel disconnected from your partner because the relationship is dying or because your old trauma is making you pull away?
Maybe you have the same revolving thoughts about why you feel disconnected:
“We’ve been together for so long. We lost the spark.”
“I’ve gained too much weight – he’s just not that into me anymore.”
“Maybe there’s someone better out there for me…?”
Ok, stop!
These anxious thoughts are actually making you MORE disconnected from your partner because you’re stuck in your head instead of being more present in your relationship.
Let’s talk about the real reason why you feel disconnected from your partner.
Unresolved trauma makes you feel disconnected even when you’re in a loving, connected relationship.
You’ll know this is true for you when you wake up most mornings feeling disconnected from life itself.
You don’t feel very excited for your day and you feel an overall heaviness or dread in your body.
Even when you wake up next to your partner, and you hear yourself make a gratitude list about how great they are… your body feels nothing.
This is what trauma does to us when it’s been trapped in our bodies for so long. It makes us disconnect from ourselves and our relationships.
Why? Because it’s a self-protective, survival mechanism.
The story repeating in your body and nervous system is that LOVE isn’t safe. LIFE isn’t safe.
The last time you allowed yourself to live and love openly, you got very hurt. So now it’s safer to have your guard up and not feel anything. Hence, the disconnection.
You cannot feel a spark in your relationship if you feel dead and numb on the inside.
If you don’t feel an aliveness within your own body, how could you possibly feel a charge or excitement with anyone else?
Unresolved trauma makes it almost neurophysiologically impossible to truly, deeply FEEL anything. Your nervous system won’t risk feeling on that level, because it could open you up to deep pain and hurt again.
Even if you know logically that your current partner isn’t a threat to your safety, this will still happen. It only takes a tiny, faint trigger of past trauma to set off your inner alarm system. Like when your partner looks at you in a subtly different way, or is checked out after a long day at work.
Your nervous system will automatically read these signs as a risk of abandonment & rejection, and then go into over-protection mode. This is what disconnects you from your body and your relationship over and over again.
Learn the quickest way to feel connected to your partner again.
Past trauma makes you disconnect from your body to numb and dissociate from feeling anything potentially hurtful.
If you’re disconnected from feeling anything inside your body, you certainly won’t feel a spark or connection with your partner.
Can you honestly say that you feel love, compassion, and excitement within yourself? If you don’t, you’re not going to feel that with your partner either.
Now you might be thinking, “I know, I know, Orit, I gotta love myself first to feel love for anyone else. Heard it a million times!”
That’s exactly what my client Kim said too when she was sharing how healing her trauma completely saved her life (you can watch her talk about it here).
Listen, I’m not here to tell you all the cliché sayings you already know. But I will say, you won’t believe any of that b*s until you feel it in your body.
You have to be able to feel all types of sensations come up in your body and not disconnect at the first feeling of discomfort or fear.
If you want to achieve that, this free meditation will show you exactly how to begin doing that.
Once you’re comfortable with feeling all sensations in your body, you can start to feel all the good things too: excitement, love, empathy, connection, and so much more.
You will have the capacity to experience a deep connected love that you never even thought was possible for you, without the drama or crippling fear.
Rewire your nervous system and feel safe to experience deep love and connection.
Remember: it’s not your fault that you’ve learned to disconnect from everyone, including yourself.
Trauma taught you to do this as a life-saving strategy. You may not have emotionally survived if you didn’t disconnect from your body during your traumatic experiences. It was such a smart thing for your body to do.
But now you must let your brain and body know that you don’t need this coping mechanism anymore.
You deserve to find peace in your body & let love in without fear.
The latest trauma research shows that cognitive-based therapies cannot fully access trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body. Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain-Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal trauma from the physical body or nervous system.
This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for many people. They end up feeling stuck, even after spending decades of therapy and gaining so much self-awareness.
If you relate, you might’ve considered giving up on your healing. You might wonder if a fully integrated healing is not possible for you.
Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing deeply & wholly, because we all have neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection to love, joy, and openness.
But even with an effective neuroscience-backed Somatic approach, going to weekly sessions could still require many more months or years until you feel that “click” in your body that finally makes you feel WHOLE.
That’s why I run Somatic Trauma Healing Retreats where many people experience accelerated, integrated, and lasting healing in just a few days.
(Disclaimer: each attendee must go through an application process that ensures this accelerated healing is possible for them).
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d love to invite you to check out my retreats! There are several options from women’s healing, plant-assisted, 1:1, and more.
