This appendix is for readers who need to weave one or more traumatic chapters into the story of their lives in order to move forward and love bravely.
Psychological trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event. There are two main types of traumatic events: one-time traumas and enduring traumas. One-time traumas include surviving a terrible incident, like a crime (being sexually assaulted, robbed, or otherwise attacked) or a natural disaster (tornado, hurricane, or flood). Enduring traumas involve an ongoing relationship and include surviving emotional, physical, or sexual abuse; domestic violence; neglect; kidnapping; bullying; or even growing up in a family dealing with addiction. Traumatic events are those in which someone is exposed to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violation. Traumatic events can leave a variety of scars. Initially following the event, people may suffer from shock or denial. Over the long term, people may experience unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, relationship problems, and even physical symptoms like headaches and nausea. These are signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
When traumas endure over many months or years—as is the case with growing up in an abusive home or being in an abusive intimate relationship—they can result in relationship problems, physical problems, difficulty regulating emotions, dissociation or losing time, struggles with impulse control, cognitive issues (such as attention problems or executive functioning problems), and lack of self-esteem or poor self-concept. Therapists sometimes refer to symptoms such as these as complex trauma.
People who suffer trauma early in their lives (as kids or teens) are particularly at risk of pushing away memories and feelings about the trauma, determined that nobody has to know and believing that it will not affect who they are. While I respect the desire not to be defined by trauma, what I see over and over is that, even if you think that your traumatic memories are stuffed away, something happens to make them sneak out sooner or later. Often that something is falling in love!
An intimate relationship requires you to become vulnerable to another person, sharing stories of the past and hopes for the future. In that sharing, you may begin to feel that you want your partner to know about your trauma. Or, as your partner gets to know more and more about you, it may feel like a glaring omission for her not to know something so significant about you. But that urge to open up might be coupled with a fear that if your partner were to know this about you, she couldn’t possibly still love you.
Knowing when and how to share traumatic chapters of your story rests upon healthy boundary management. One extreme is having diffuse boundaries, which means you may tell someone everything about you as soon as you start dating. Sometimes people rationalize this approach by thinking, “I’d rather know now if you can’t handle all of me, so that I don’t invest needless time and emotion.” The other extreme is rigid boundaries, which means you may wait and wait, perhaps hoping the other person will never find out. Sometimes people who take this route think, “If you were to know this about me, you couldn’t love me.” The desire to keep the past stuffed in the far recesses of our minds is usually motivated by shame, but doing so also perpetuates shame. Healthy boundaries—being both connected and protected—lie in the shades of gray between these extremes. Sharing your story requires people, and sharing your stories builds trust between people. Trust is essential in a healthy intimate relationship.
Trust and trauma unfortunately go hand in hand. Trauma (especially complex trauma) involves a breach of trust in an important relationship (for example, in the case of sexual abuse). Therefore, building an intimate, trusting romantic relationship is, by its very nature, re-traumatizing, as the intimate relationship ends up in some ways replicating the old traumatic relationship. For example, some people notice that in the context of their intimate relationship, sometimes especially during sex, they experience an increase in flashbacks or intrusive thoughts (uninvited thoughts that pop into your head) related to the trauma. If this happens, the best course of action is to do some individual psychotherapy with a therapist who specializes in trauma. Appendix 2 has information about how to find a therapist.
A loving, trusting romantic relationship can be a powerfully healing force in the life of someone who has suffered a trauma. This is the best-case scenario, and it is possible. I have been moved to tears many times in therapy when an intimate partner takes the risk of bravely sharing a painful memory from his or her past. In those moments, courage claims victory over shame. And there is no more powerful way to heal shame than through the power of connection. But self-work and self-care in the form of taking responsibility for the impact that the trauma has had on you lay the foundation. In other words, your romantic partner cannot heal your trauma. Love alone is not enough.