What to do when my past trauma is affecting my relationship
By Orit Krug | August 27th, 2021
Let’s talk about what to do when past trauma is affecting your relationship with your partner today.
It’s the worst feeling when you’re finally with the healthiest, most loving partner, but past trauma is affecting your relationship.
You may be sabotaging your connection or constantly worried that they’re going to leave at any moment. If you’re at all the way I was, you can’t stop imagining that they’ll turn into a monster like your abusers were to you.
It’s ironic. Your fear of abandonment and rejection is actually making you abandon and reject your partner.
When you’re constantly absorbed in your fears and thoughts of “what-if,” you’re not present in your relationship for your partner.
You’re either stuck in the past or constantly worrying about what might happen in the future. This makes you emotionally absent and neglect your partner. The very same thing you’re afraid of them doing to you.
Recognize that your fear of being hurt is making you hurt your partner.
If past trauma is affecting your relationship by rejecting your partner’s acts of love (because you don’t believe it), questioning your ability to trust them, and creating stories about how they’re going to hurt you… then you’re hurting them in almost the same way you fear them hurting you.
My client Lavinia used to constantly reject her husband’s acts of love and intimacy. She pushed him away when he wanted to be physically closer and she dissociated during sexual intimacy.
Deep down she wanted to feel unconditionally loved and wanted, but her fear of intimacy and abandonment made her communicate to her husband that she didn’t want him (which is not actually the case).
When your fear of abandonment or intimacy is making you reject your partner, then past trauma is affecting your relationship because you cannot let in the love that’s right in front of you. Yet, all you want to do is FEEL and be loved.
Release the trauma through your body to free yourself of self-sabotaging fears.
When you experience trauma, you store those memories in your body and nervous system.
This rewires your brain and nervous system to be on constant high alert and make a whole lot of problems out of nothing.
It makes you hypervigilant to see the tiniest things as huge red flags or warning signs that your partner is going to hurt you.
Because all of this is occurring in your BODY and primal nervous system, you cannot talk yourself into behaving a different way. You cannot repeat affirmations or journal about it, and expect it to be resolved.
This is also because the higher-functioning part of your brain, that uses verbal language and cognitive planning, goes offline during trauma and any time you get triggered.
Hence, you did not store the majority of your trauma in words, so you cannot access those memories in words. Which means you also cannot use words or conscious thought to release trauma.
In order to release body-stored trauma, you must access the memories through the body. You must speak the language of the body, which is movement.
Through a specialized process where you connect to your body through movement, you CAN heal your trauma and rewire your nervous system for healthy, lasting love.
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.
