Understanding where your fear of being trapped in a relationship comes from

By Orit Krug  |  July 15th, 2020

Is your fear of being trapped in a relationship getting in the way of enjoying your partner’s love?

It’s common to have a fear of being trapped in a relationship and want to get OUT when we have old trauma stored inside of our bodies. 

Maybe your body is screaming, “I JUST WANT TO BE FREE!”

Is it a sign that you’re in the wrong relationship? Or is it past trauma tricking you into thinking you need to escape the situation? 

This happens to many people even with the most loving, supportive partners.

Let’s break down why this happens and why you might want to wait before thinking about leaving the relationship.

You’ve been trapped in an unhealthy, negative relationship before.

Maybe it was the family you grew up with or a past romantic relationship that was very unsafe. You were trapped in these relationships and couldn’t get out when you wanted to. 

Even though the relationship you’re in right now is nothing like those ones from the past, this feeling of being trapped still takes over your entire body and it feels like you NEED to act on it. 

This is your flight response getting triggered whenever things aren’t “perfect” or at the first sign of conflict in your relationship. Or maybe it’s always there in the background as a result of not speaking up to your partner, so you feel that the only way to get your needs met is to leave the relationship.

Maybe you tell yourself to stop over exaggerating, but convincing the mind rarely works. Your flight response feels potent and real because it’s a primal survival response that serves to save our lives if we need to run away from a beastly predator.

Old trauma can make us feel trapped in a relationship that is healthy, loving, and perfect for us. How do we know what’s real or imagined?

I’m going to be 100% honest with you. When Aaron and I used to go through rough patches, I sometimes imagined leaving our marriage or fantasized about how I would cope with us being apart. 

The reality is that I would NEVER want any of that to happen as I know he is my love for life. Even when I was in those thoughts, I recognized that it’s my past trauma trying to sneak its way back in. I never acted on it or verbalized it because I know they had no legitimate meaning.

However, before I released the trauma from my body, I had an unhealthy habit of prematurely dumping my partners and making threats to break up in all of my relationships.

Does this sound familiar to you? 

Whenever there’s a little bit of conflict or disharmony, your primal body immediately reacts as if something terrible is going to happen again, like it did in the past. 

Rationally, you know it’s normal to fight with your partner, but based on traumatic experiences from your past, your nervous system immediately kicks into survival mode, because the story trapped inside of you is that this disagreement will only lead to hurt, pain, and even life-threatening danger.

This is why the old trauma stored inside your body makes it almost impossible to distinguish between healthy, normal conflict vs. a disagreement that’s going to end in some form of neglect or abuse. You cannot talk your nervous system out of impulsively protecting you until you release the old memories that still feel very real and likely to happen again today.

Our physical bodies hold onto old trauma that literally makes us feel trapped inside our bodies.

It’s not just our nervous systems reacting in these moments of conflict with our partners. 

When we hold onto trauma for so long, we actually become prisoners inside our own bodies, where the trauma is trapped within. You might feel this as chronic stiffness or tension in your body. For many of our clients, they feel this most in their jaw, neck and shoulders, but it can happen anywhere.

Our client Jodi recently shared that as soon as she started releasing the trauma from her body, she realized how much fear she’d been holding inside that made her so guarded and closed off to her partner and all of her other relationships. 

When you’re that trapped inside your OWN body, you’re going to feel trapped no matter where you go. 

This is one of the reasons why many people with unresolved trauma will feel trapped and leave one relationship, only to find themselves feeling the exact same way in the next healthy relationship. It’s not their fault. But this feeling isn’t going to go away until they release their old trauma.

Release the trauma that’s driving the fear of being trapped in a relationship.

Because unresolved trauma makes it impossible to distinguish real fear from perceived fear, we can’t REALLY know if our fear of being trapped is an accurate reflection of the state of our relationship until the old trauma is gone.

Perhaps you’ve been in therapy or couples counseling for years and this feeling still hasn’t gone away. You may be on the brink of separation because you figure it must be the relationship since all these years of therapy hasn’t worked (or you just assume you’re damaged goods and better off single).

Please don’t give up on yourself or your relationship if there’s at least a part of you that knows it’s the right one for you. I almost pushed away my husband forever, even after 3 years of talk therapy. It wasn’t until I truly released my old trauma from my body and nervous system that I could finally let his love IN without blaming him and sabotaging our amazing relationship.

It’s not your fault that those other forms of therapy didn’t work. It’s just that they only address the thoughts in your mind, while the trauma trapped in your body desperately wants a way out.

This deep primal feeling will not SHIFT just by talking, “sitting with your thoughts” or spending hours reflecting through journaling.

In order to release unresolved trauma, you need to rewire your nervous system so you can break the old patterns of reacting in flight and end the constant anxiety of second-guessing your relationship.

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.