IS IT LOVE OR IS IT TRAUMA?
29 MARCH 2022 (14 MIN READ)
On its own, without internal intervention, our manner of loving is a direct reflection of how our parents loved us—no matter how bad they treated us. This means that if your parents abandoned you and only showed you love in small doses, then you will naturally love someone who seems distant but shows you love in small doses—repeating the traumatic pattern in your adult life. On the other hand, if you had amazing parents who cherished you deeply, then chances are that you will be attracted to someone who treats you the same way. Reflecting this sentiment, The Perks of Being a Wallflower has an incredibly beautiful as well as famous quote, which was prompted by a young man being curious as to why his love interest keeps dating assholes: “We accept the love we think we deserve.” However, I think the quote would be more powerful if rephrased in this manner: “We accept the love that our undealt with trauma makes us feel like we deserve.” I made this change because very rarely do we actually think about why we love those who treat us badly; we more so just get enthralled by the emotion and lose ourselves in the process. Funnily enough, the only way out of these patterns is to actually think about why we do not deserve this form of love, and also, why we find ourselves attracting that sort of person. Therefore, the thinking process has little to do with the addiction to broken love because at the root of it is the unconscious control of traumatic experiences from our childhood.
So, to restore a healthy sense of love in ourselves and translate that to the external world, we must dive deep into understanding our trauma and doing whatever we can to overcome it. However, unlike most things, this actually requires the intervention of the real world, meaning that we should use the mirror of our past or current relationships to understand what pain within ourselves needs to be focused on to overcome. And if you are currently in a relationship based on a traumatic form of love, this does not mean that you have to end the relationship; both parties can actually carefully navigate their traumatic paths together with love and support, hopefully coming out on the other side holding hands.
This article will guide you through this process of understanding your romantic trauma as well as how to transcend it. Going deeper, the last section will focus on how to tolerate life after being free of relational trauma, since our egos can become so used to feeding off of drama and pain.
THE THUNDERBOLT
Have you ever had that feeling where you see a love interest for the first time and it feels like something shot out of your chest? In the movie, The Godfather, when the protagonist sees his love interest for the first time, he has the same feeling, to which his friend described as getting hit by the thunderbolt. This categorization is deeply accurate because a thunderbolt has two ends that possess an electrical charge, depending on each other for energy and survival. What if I were to tell you that this thunderbolt has very little to do with genuine, healthy love? In essence, the thunderbolt acts as a trauma bond between two people. This means that each partner has the capacity to trigger the romantic wounding of the other in their own specific manner, such as an avoidant person dating someone who is anxiously attached to them. In other words, in a traumatic bond bred by a thunderbolt, the trauma between two people can feed off each other, making both parties love each other from a deep place of trauma. Unfortunately, most people are unaware of this reality, and therefore stay in toxic, traumatized relationships for way too long. This extended stay occurs because most people only know how to love from a place of trauma, anything healthy is entirely foreign to them. To make things more clear, consider this fictional tale of a trauma bond:
Max and Thelma saw each other at a party one night, where they both locked eyes and felt an intense electrical charge around their solar plexus. After some great conversations and incredible sex, they started seeing each other; however, after a while, although they loved each other, their relationship started to become incredibly toxic and painful. Max grew up with a distant, young mother, who did not feel ready to have a child, so she constantly left him behind to explore herself and make the most out of her youth. This left Max feeling as if he was never enough, doing whatever he could to earn his mother’s love and attention. On the other hand, Thelma grew up with a physically abusive father, who loved her deeply, but would occasionally push her around or smack her. This duality made her fearful of getting too close to her father, leaving her with having to constantly keep her guard up. In summary, Max learned to love through chasing and being needy, while Thelma learned to love through not trusting and keeping a safe distance. Now, combined in adulthood, Thelma’s avoidant style of love, inability to be vulnerable, and hyper-independence triggers Max’s childhood where he had to constantly try to make his mother love him. And Max’s persistence to earn Thelma’s love unconsciously reminds her of moments where her father attempted to redeem himself and earn back her love, forcing her to go back to her old ways of running away since she did not trust him. This is what we call a trauma bond: where both people are in love through the way that each person triggers the other’s traumatic experiences surrounding love.
How can we escape this cycle of retraumatizing ourselves? It’s definitely a long road that requires hard work, but we cannot get anywhere unless we first understand the trauma that is being triggered inside us.
PINPOINTING THE TRAUMA
Allow the mirror of your past or current relationship to reveal the pain inside yourself that requires attention. To do so, analyze your ex or current partner, specifically their patterns surrounding the way they love/d you. Pay attention to how they reacted when tough moments arose in the relationship: did they fight or did they flee? If they were in the "flee" category, then chances are they have an avoidant attachment style, like Thelma in the previous example, which means that by attracting this person, there is a part of you that felt you needed to earn love as a kid in the form of a chase. But even deeper, just try to see the pain inside your partner, which may go outside the rigid categories of anxious or avoidant attachment. I say to do this first because we tend to read people better than we read ourselves, because we often like to see the pain in others since we refuse to look at our own. However, since this ex or current partner’s pain directly reflects your own, you end up having to look inside yourself in the process. Whatever pain your partner is bringing into the relationship is directly feeding off of your pain, creating a double edged sword that requires two to tango. To understand your side of the equation, try and figure out what parts of your partner’s pain or shadow have unconsciously reminded you of either your parents or past, toxic partners. By realizing this trauma, you can start to tackle it head-on.
But don’t be fooled—it takes a lot of time and effort to pinpoint the extent of the trauma, so go as deep as you possibly can. It’s never as simple as, “Oh my father left all the time for work. I now know everything!” Yes, that plays a role, but you have to take a time machine back to how you felt when that happened and why you felt that way—beyond the actions of the other person. What were you expecting from said person? How did you feel when you were let down? How did they make you feel when they redeemed themselves? How did you feel in the moments in between? The answers to our trauma do not necessarily lie in the actions of the person who hurt us emotionally, they more so reside in our awareness of our lingering reactions to the actions, both in the present and past, and our unconscious addiction to that reactive pain we had to live with for so long. Healing our relationship to the reoccurring triggers of the inflicted emotional pain is the secret sauce, or else we just carry through that pain into the present moment, continuously reliving our past in the process. It’s easy to always blame someone else’s actions for our pain, but how sustainable is that? The person does not control our emotions forever; that’s our responsibility. This process is how we take our power back.
By using our understanding of how our partner reminds us of previous traumas we endured, we can fix our relationship with the pain caused by it and stop having it unconsciously control our lives. At times, if the romantic partner is too toxic, it does make complete sense to take a step back and remove the person from your life. However, as the next section explains, often our romantic partners are just as fucked up as us, and we can use this wounding to go through the healing journey together—holding each other’s hands through the pain we will have to endure to break free.
TRANSITIONING FROM PAIN TO AUTHENTIC LOVE
I believe the metric for a successful relationship comes down to how well both parties can navigate their personal traumas, while supporting each other’s at the same time. Elaborating on this, both partners have to be aware of the trauma they bring into the relationship, while not blaming their significant other when triggered; however, if one person is triggered, the other should help them navigate through the pain without feeling responsible. In action, let’s say one person has abandonment issues from their childhood and their partner has to go to a series of parties late at night. Without any awareness of the trauma, the person in pain would try to control their partner into not going, or suffer immensely throughout their absence—waiting at home like an anxious puppy. However, if the traumatized person opens up to their partner and tells them how moments like this transport them back to their painful childhood, then they can take away blame from their partner and own their trauma. This radical ownership makes one’s significant other feel less bad, which reduces their resentment. This lowered level of resentment makes them more likely to take the necessary steps to make their lover feel more comfortable throughout the process, such as texting them to check in or stepping out for a second to call them and say I love you. Holding your partner’s hand like this while they work through their trauma can actually make things a whole lot easier, speeding up the process of healing and increasing the amount of love between both people—in the form of deep gratitude for the assistance in the healing process. In essence, a healthy relationship entails willfully stepping into the dance of whose turn it is to support the other in healing their pain—not fix, but support.
No matter who we enter into a relationship with, and no matter how far both sides are on their healing journey, there will always be trauma or pain that arises in the romantic union. This reality is why it’s so important to constantly check in with yourself to see the places of pain you are acting from, and always being ready to support a partner through dealing with their trauma no matter how deep it is into the relationship. Instead of feeling dreadful or angry about our lover confronting a past pain, we should feel delighted, because this means they are growing deeper into the real version of themselves—away from the pain of the past. And the further we get into our bodies, into the present moment, and away from the egoistic mind, the higher our capacity for love. Just like if you were to hold a rose and run your hand up the stem, you would cut yourself on the thorns before you accessed the delicate, beautiful flower; similarly, we are going to get cut by some past traumas on our journey of healing, but once we reach the top, that’s where pure, unconditional self-love meets us. And our capacity for self-love is reflective of how deeply we can love the external world, especially our romantic partners.
Once the pain and traumatic triggers die down, which they will, then the doors to peace and tranquility open up. Unfortunately, learning to tolerate peace is almost more difficult than navigating one’s pain and trauma, due to our constant egoistic need to be in pain or in a dramatic situation. The next section will explain this concept further and dive into how we can hold space for peace in our hearts.
TOLERATING THE PEACE
Our ego—the “I”—feeds off of drama and pain. Why? Because drama and pain create stories that take us out of the present moment and away from our bodies. For instance, being in the middle of a dramatic conflict creates a massive, emotionally exciting story for us to be enthralled by—instead of just experiencing reality for what it is: us and what’s in front of us—none of the stories in between. Furthermore, stories create escape mechanisms for us to not confront our pain, using the intellect to determine reasons as to why we feel a certain way, instead of just feeling the emotion. This deflection method unconsciously occurs because our egos want us to be stuck inside our comfort zones, which for most, is operating from a deep place of pain because that is what it has known for so long. To break this pattern, first you must dare to feel and process the pain, instead of creating scenarios to escape—but this entails eradicating the ego. Once the feeling is processed and the egoistic need to create dramatic stories in the mind is suppressed, you will meet the feeling of peace. But this does not mean that peace will stay there; you will have to continue battling the egoistic desire to create internal conflict over simple things. This rings especially true in a relationship, where we see a correlation between the amount of time a couple has been together with how dumb their arguments become. This ability to argue over the tiniest of things is direct evidence of how we need to be in constant conflict due to the power of our egos.
Remain vigilant on cultivating a path of peace through learning how to tolerate negative feelings, rather than using them as fuel to create conflict. To further understand how being allergic to peace really does boil down to a refusal to feel or accept our own emotions, look no further than the amount of anxiety constantly being transferred to the news in this day and age. People are on their phones frantically reading news updates all day instead of looking inside and dealing with their emotions. This addiction to the fear-inducing news occurs because people do not want to deal with or accept their anxiety as their own, so they will do whatever it takes to shift it somewhere else—in comes daily COVID news. Again, the only way to obtain peace is to notice the triggering of emotions inside, accepting them as your own, and processing them yourself—refusing to hand any story or drama power in taking away your ownership of the feeling.
In terms of a relationship, if your partner ever triggers you, then you must accept that feeling as your own. Something inside you chose to feel that way and it’s on you to come back to peace. Your partner can never make you feel a certain way and it’s not their problem to fix you. If your partner is toxic and treating you like shit, then fucking leave, because your egoistic need to stay in that relationship is a reflection of your addiction to conflict. (A big, big exception exists for those being physically threatened, assaulted, or manipulated). In terms of actual dialogue with your partner, it should look like this at first, “I’m dealing with X feeling because of how this triggered my past. I will be dealing with this and could use some love.” This is vastly different from using the feeling to get pissed at your partner and create conflict, escaping the processing of the emotion by doing so. This dialogue actually creates peace, because not only are you accepting the feeling as your own, and refusing to blame your partner, but you are also allowing your partner to understand—without judgment—why you may be exhibiting a certain emotion. Once this communication becomes a consistent habit, over time, the dialogue between partners will become fast and nonverbal, in the sense of one person dealing with the feeling quicker and the other intuitively knowing what’s going on, while holding loving space for their partner’s personal journey.
Many male self-help influencers always talk about cultivating and staying on the war path—to constantly challenge yourself and suffer for personal freedom. However, I’m going to relabel that as the path of peace, because maintaining peace in one’s life is the biggest internal war of them all. And 99.99% of people fail at it every day, myself included.
But we will never stop fighting.
You got this.
