How to Break the Spell of Trauma Bond Relationships

is it possible to be addicted to a person toxic relationships are not technically a substance but the behaviors they can drive you toward look very much like a substance addiction when it's happening to you it's almost like you're under a spell and you know you should get away from the person and forget about them but one little bit of contact with them can start the whole destructive cycle over again so this is another form of what is called limerence and that's the name for an infatuation or an obsession for someone who's not actually with you or not entirely anyway and a lot of people have asked if you can have limerence for someone who you actually do have some kind of relationship with and so i wanted to share the story here of someone i'll call martin and here's what he says about a year ago i met a woman i'll call angela we entered into a relationship pretty quickly and it was very intense by my standards we've been broken up now for several months and i'm still suffering the relationship was only good for about three months but i think i'm experiencing a trauma bond and the relationship has the markings of emotional abuse and perhaps narcissism though i'm hesitant to label or diagnose and i hoped you could help before i met angela i had a feeling about the kind of relationship i wanted to have i wanted a partnership with someone who wanted to grow together and this was kind of new for me in the past i used to just approach relationships with a see how it goes attitude but there was never a goal and for the record i'm a divorced father of two and my past relationships even though they didn't work out in the end were pretty good with angela i went into it knowing i wanted a lasting relationship and she let me know pretty early that she was on board there was a lot of synchronicity it felt magical we were texting all day every day having video chats and spending a lot of time together where we talk about the future within three months we were talking about collaborations on business ventures and perhaps even moving in together in the near future about this time we went on a trip together and everything suddenly changed practically overnight we had been at a big festival and i had to leave and go home and she stayed longer before i left she said that she could feel herself withdrawing and something about sabotaging the relationship and that i would be more hurt than she would be i asked her what she meant if she meant we should break up or something and she deflected and talked about plans to move in together in the future after i got home i got a call from her and she said she didn't want to be in a relationship anymore she said she wasn't relationship material i said so we're breaking up then and she said whoa stop thinking in such extreme terms she said that is linear thinking she went away to her folks place for a while and i thought well we're not broken up yet let's just see what happens now this is where i get mad at myself the whole dynamic went on through the summer where we weren't broken up but we weren't in a relationship her communication at this time was cold the total opposite of the first three months i knew it wasn't healthy for me but when i would start to pull away she'd want me back she called me from a cafe and blamed all of this on her avoidant attachment disorder she said i was the love of her life and apologized and said she wanted to heal and grow together again so then i'd take her back thinking well if she's aware of this attachment issue maybe we can work with it and then as soon as i'd get back into it the cold communication started again for example when we were at the festival she had uploaded a lot of photos that were taken of us together there she put them on her facebook page it didn't really bother me except that there was no communication with me about it and then when she had that flip happen when she turned cold again she took all the photos down then later she'd put them all up again still not communicating with me and then take them down again and through all of this there was no communication and i asked her at one point why did she take the photos of me down and she said well they gave the impression that we're in a relationship and we're not another time over the summer those photos came up again and she denied that she ever put them up and took them down again the worst thing about all of this is the confusion yeah that's just one example of back and forth but it went on for months and that's why i get angry at myself i feel like i betrayed myself and i enabled her if she saw me pulling away again she'd send me a playlist with love songs she told me once that she was afraid i'd leave her and so while she was away she started a journal of her uninhibited thoughts and promised to send them to me or to give them to me when she got back into town and of course that never happened she came back but never spoke about the journal again by this time i felt like any attempt to communicate with her was going to just be confusing i never knew who was going to show up i told her i needed time alone and i made that clear the word breakup did come up it was brought up by both of us but first by me she said is that's what's happening and i'm nodded i circle things that i want to come back to when i i'm going to read the letter again and we're going to come back and talk about parts of this so she looked sad and i asked for no contact and for her to just let me be to let me be in my power to let me be grounded to not be confused to connect with my soul again to connect with the feeling i had before we met the next morning she sent me a selfie because she was starting a new job and i texted her to say you look good they're lucky to have you but please no more contact she waited two days and said i'll wait for you to contact me then she sent a little sad face emoji and another and another and within a couple more days she just started flooding me with texts incessantly and trying to call using guilt it was all about her she said i'm trembling inside please have some compassion she wanted to meet to come get some kind of closure with me when i didn't respond at all her tactic went from guilt to anger and then rage she started smearing me on facebook it may be going on still but we've blocked each other after a couple months though i sent her a letter explaining my timeline how i understood what happened between us that it seemed like she felt entitled to me and she didn't have to respond but i wished her the best she didn't respond for more than a week and when she did she said i received your letter and i will answer it soon i didn't expect anything but maybe a month later she called and said i'm just calling to tell you i will not be answering your letter but the texts started again come on we're friends show some compassion and be there for me and my problem is i want so badly to answer her texts it's like an alcoholic who wants to take a drink if i text her i'll be hooked again i've come so far getting over her but if i connect again it'll be like starting from day one what i really want is that feeling that i had before we met i know how i want it to feel and i've learned what to look out for i was stronger in my boundaries in the beginning and then it all got lost but i'm getting stronger now i'd love to meet someone really wonderful and live our lives together but i haven't quite gotten free of the pull of this woman i know is out there i can't get over it i don't even know what to grieve the woman i thought i loved the relationship i thought we had or the person i was before she met me how can i heal and get free so that i can move on with my life and never get pulled down like that again martin oh so this letter it this is a hard one just reading this i feel my energy like sucked out of me that's how this story affects me and i think this might be something like what you're feeling martin uh and why you're having trouble disengaging from this because it feels like you ought to be able to get your energy back like it got taken away from you from this woman and maybe you could somehow get it back let's go through what you wrote about a year ago i met a woman i'll call angela we entered into a relationship pretty quickly all right for people who have had trauma as a kid and i know you had a separate story about that which i didn't cover here going quick is one of the fastest ways to have a relationship that sort of brings up all of our stuff and so if you've watched any of my videos and i think you have you know that i'm always advocating like slow it down slow it down but by the time i'm getting letters from people they've they're usually in something that brought up all the old stuff and so here we are and that's fine so you got in quickly and it was very intense and now you've been broken up for several months but you're still suffering the relationship was only good for about three months and you think you're experiencing a trauma bond i think so too and the relationship has markings of emotional abuse i think so too and perhaps narcissistic traits i think so too i don't know if we would diagnose anyone here we don't have to we can just say that the traits are there so before you met her you had a feeling about the kind of relationship you wanted to have so you were in touch with yourself you say i wanted a partnership with someone who wanted to grow together and this was kind of new for me in the past i used to just approach relationships with a see how it goes attitude so you used to just kind of cast it to the wind and that's kind of a cptsd thing too the the pattern that i notice in your letter is that in a lot of what you're going through you have given away the power and your fate to another person and a little bit i could just hear there's a there's sort of a fog of denial that actually you're the one with agency you're the one who decides so you would see how it goes but that sort of in this case knowing what i know from this letter i would say you're waiting to see like how does the woman feel about it so when you lose your power like that it's an extremely vulnerable place a lot of people say oh i attract narcissists and i always say well it doesn't really matter who we attract what matters is who we end up getting together with and so for somebody who's very selfish and wants to use somebody to fill in some gap in their life but not actually care about them as a person which is kind of the story i'm hearing in this letter that that's how she treated you well that becomes possible when they find someone who's just going to sit around and wait and see what they do and it doesn't really have a boundary or a set of standards for themselves you have standards but they got wobbly here around her and i can only guess she must be very dazzling i don't know beautiful talented charming fun so a lot of great things happened there to sort of draw you in but then you were it's a foggy world where you have no defenses that's the feeling i get about this relationship so you didn't have a goal in previous relationships and for the right you're a divorced father of two cool having kids puts extra premium on having a healthy relationship if you have one at all because it's so important for the kids right to model that for them so fantastic that you're not in this relationship anymore and that's not going to influence the kids any more than it may have already and that your past relationships have been pretty good even if they didn't work out but with angela you went in knowing what you wanted she let you know she was on the same page she wanted a big future big you know long-term committed relationship that you would grow together sounds really good and then you got really enmeshed you were texting all day every day that's i mean when people fall in love they do that when it has a sort of dark side to it that's when we call it enmeshed and so even the most pure love when it doesn't have any oxygen from the outside world when you're just completely into each other texting all day every day video chats talking about moving in together getting together and always being about the future that's really vulnerable and so martin i know that you're you know hoping to meet somebody great and so just as i go through this one tip i'm going to give you here is when you are dating be very careful about talking about the future the future is something you could really you know i always suggest to people like if you have a criteria like i'm looking to get married i have kids and you would be their step parent those are things that kind of need to be floated out there fairly early in the dating relationship but talking about the future and trying to imagine it and construct it especially if you have attachment wounds or trauma or one of your parents or both of them were very neglectful to you it can be a really vulnerable thing it can be prone to fantasy and limerence so even though you're sitting with a real person right in front of you you're interacting with a fantasy person and i would say this person was interacting with some kind of fantasy of her own i don't know her and she hasn't written in and she can't speak for herself here but something's going on there some people call it future faking you know i want to move in with you it turned out very quickly that wasn't at all where she was coming from but that's one of the reasons why going slowly because you know just because we have cptsd we will often find ourselves kind of having a romantic involvement with someone who who doesn't have those boundaries who leaps into the future who's not really capable of building a relationship and building commitment and building a real true friendship where deciding to live together would happen at an organic time after you actually knew if you were compatible and wanted a future together i think you know when you get to be north of 40 and younger really moving in together becomes you know you many of us have had the experience that it's it's not easily undone it's something to take extremely seriously some people just don't even do it they either get married or they live separately it's a complicated kind of commitment it's it's it has a certain open-endedness to it and yet your livelihood your home everything becomes like wrapped up in the relationship and if you have that wound inside and you have that fear of abandonment going on having your home wrapped up with an unreliable person and your money and your social circle and all that stuff it's just too much to lose and you could end up clinging to a bad relationship much longer than you should or losing it all together because the person leaves you well we can tolerate a certain amount of that in life but if you've had a traumatic life i really wish for you to have a slowly unfolding romance where maybe you date several people to see who the one is and then a slow unfoldment of one who turns out to be like a really good person for you to be with which you could discover in certainly no less than a year usually more like a year and a half three years would be a normal healthy time to be dating somebody before you decide to stake everything on them and especially because your kids what's great about kids is you can think about what's good for the kids what's good for the kids is good for you so just as they uh it would not be good for them to have some partner of yours sort of come in and leave or a bunch of drama it's not good for you either so this is where the story gets gets odd and hard for you about this time you went to a big festival and everything suddenly changed it was like overnight just boom so you were gonna move in together everything was so great then when you had to leave and she stayed and she said some weird thing about feeling like she was withdrawing and maybe it was over and you're just you know and then she denied when you said are we broken up she's just like what are you talking about no we're moving in together very confusing very you know right there the red flags are just starting to like it's a red alert okay after i got home i got a call from her she said she didn't want to be in the relationship anymore she said she wasn't relationship material by the way when people say that even though sometimes that's a cover for something else that they don't want to tell you like perhaps what might be the case here she met somebody else um but it means they're not when somebody wants to be with you how you'll know is because they are with you because they don't want to risk losing you okay and so they don't mess around with scaring you or saying they're not relationship material they're going to put on their best behavior and try to impress you so then you said so we're breaking up and she said whoa stop thinking in such extreme terms and she said i was linear thinking okay this is hallmark everybody gets mad when i say this there can be all kinds of ideological and spiritual abuse but accusing you of linear thinking is a kind of ideological abuse or maybe spiritual abuse like you know when monogamy is expected and had been promised and you're accused of being too much in your head or thinking too linearly it's like more red flags red alert you're not too linear of a thinker by asking are we broken up when she says she doesn't want to be in a relationship with you so this is just like all out gaslighting here and saying you're too linear you're too extreme and it sounds like i'm just going to read between the lines here well i'll read about the next part here about the facebook pictures then she went away to her folks and you thought well we're not broken up yet so let's just see what happens and i circled that martin because you said that in the past you used to have this let's just see how it goes attitude and no goal so what so this is the point where you really surrendered your goal and you're just like well let's just see if she wants to if she comes around and wants to be with you and at this point i think if you were stronger and more healed inside you'd be going f this person wouldn't they're being awful and inconsistent and blowing hot and cold and saying terrible things and accusing you of being too linear that you want to know if you're in a relationship or not at that point i think that would be it's a pretty obvious time to break up with somebody but you think let's just see what happens and and maybe you mean like let's just see what your heart tells you but how this story plays out i just see you getting tossed around on this stormy sea of this other person and her whims for you and that her whims for you have everything to do about what's convenient for her and never anything to do with how you might feel and i'm guessing that there was a precedent for that in your childhood that people did not take seriously what you needed and things were all about them all right so then you said this is where you get mad at yourself good healthy healthy anger the whole dynamic went on through the summer where you weren't broken up but you weren't together how convenient for her right her communication at this time was cold the total opposite of the first three months i knew it wasn't healthy for me but when when i would start to pull away she'd want me back surprise surprise yep she wanted you not here not gone she wanted you right about here you know probably for not evil reasons but that's just kind of where she wanted you and she knew that wouldn't work for you and so you know she just kept saying she just fed you what you wanted to hear so that you would stick around it's nice to have somebody kind of waiting in the wings for you it sounds very much though like she wanted to appear single for for one or more other people and just keep you kind of as a backup insurance policy and that's very harsh to say but that is that is definitely what i'm sort of detecting here all right you knew it wasn't healthy for you no it wasn't but when you pull away she'd do it again just pull you back in and she called you from a cafe and she blamed all of this on her avoidant attachment disorder you know maybe that there's certainly signs of that but it sounds like it's something even worse um and i'm not a therapist or a clinician of any kind but what i know about avoidant attachment disorder is it you know it's it's all about avoidance so this like you know getting all enmeshed and pulling together that suggests that there's something else going on so she said you were the love of her life and she apologized and she said she wanted to heal and grow together those are like the magic words for you right i want to heal and grow together because that was your ideal and she knew that and so that you'd you take her back and you did and you were thinking well now if she's aware she has this issue maybe we can work with it and i totally get it you know i was in a relationship with a guy who had a terrible drug addiction and he said i'm so sorry i'm going to go to treatment and he got into treatment and i thought see so as long as he's actually in treatment there's hope for us but like just you know obviously our two cases are very different but in that case when i look back i just say even if he was utterly sincere which he wasn't he was doing it just so i wouldn't leave even if he had been utterly sincere it's a long road for somebody who's that dysfunctional to actually heal enough to become a person who would be good to be in a relationship with whether it's drugs or whether it's this just like crazy back and forth deception and inconsideration and selfishness so let's just say it's not like some kind of a personality disorder anything it's the facts this is how she acts and i just wouldn't recommend to anybody and i don't want for you you're just like a dear person you want love i just don't wish this on you at all for somebody to treat you like that but i get it how the trauma bonding as you mentioned for anybody watching trauma bonding is it's like a psychological phenomenon it could happen to anybody not just traumatized people where when somebody's like i love you i love you i love you and then they're like i'm not talking to you and then i love you i love you i love you and then i'm not talking to you it it like hooks something in our brains it just gets us hooked in it gets us obsessed with when am i going to get the next you know cookie of affection of of acknowledgement of touch of talking and contact it can make a person obsessed it can make a person addicted okay okay so then you give us the example of the cold communication which is that when you were at the festival she put a bunch of pictures of you guys up on facebook without asking you and i'd say in a new relationship yeah you're supposed to ask it's a very public thing to do and especially if you tag them you know it goes on their page and it's like announcing like hey i'm the girlfriend of this guy so you know what some people might call a pissing match and um and you but you didn't bother you you were okay to be public except it was weird that she didn't talk to you correct then when her whole personality flipped when she turned cold again she took all the photos down then she put them back up there again and then take them down again and through all of this there was no communication you asked her at one point why she did it and she said well they gave the impression that we were in a relationship and we're not okay so martin this is the like hardest tough love moment of this why would somebody at a festival take pictures down it's so that they can appear available to somebody else i am getting a strong sense there was somebody else or many people i doubt it was like the love of her life or anything worked out great because she's very erratic with this stuff but putting you up there without talking to you is you know lots of people do it it's normal but that thing where she doesn't talk to you and throws it up there and wants to create an impression it's all about how other people see her that's what it's that's what i'm saying how you feel about having the pictures put up how you feel about having them taken down don't matter to her they wouldn't matter to anybody both things putting them up taking them down it speaks a lot and anybody would have feelings about that that she doesn't care and that she later denied that she ever put them up and down okay that's uh that's bs okay that's not cool um that's a utter self-centeredness and she seems to be completely driven about how other people see her and doesn't want to appear to be in a relationship and there's only one reason why people do that okay the worst of it you say is the confusion that was just one example of the sort of back and forth and back and forth of hot and cold it went on for months and that's why you get angry at yourself which i understand you feel like you betrayed yourself and i underst i mean yes but i understand how that happened you know it could happen to any of us really it has and you enabled her i guess so yeah you could call it that if she saw you pulling away again she'd send you a playlist with love songs she told you once she was afraid that she'd get left and so while she was away she started a journal of all her uninhibited thoughts i'm guessing that's some sort of sexy thing and promised to send it to you or give it to you when she got back into town man what a manipulative hook basically like if somebody was an alchemist and tried to take a man's brain and just put a giant gaffing hook in it and go just yank it but then just throw it aside i'd say that's how to do it you know that would be how to do it so it never happened she came back it was never spoken about again but this time you felt like any attempt to communicate with her was going to be confusing and you were right you never knew who was going to show up and so that's interesting yeah just like a totally unstable personality there i'm sure not going to be surprised if she was traumatized too but just because we're traumatized doesn't give us the right to trample all over other people it may give us difficulty in relationships it may cause our personalities to go out of control i know lots of people struggle with mental illness but that still doesn't make it okay to abuse people emotionally everything that you suspected here narcissistic traits emotional abuse and trauma bond i think you're right i think your perception is accurate and i just want to validate that sometimes sometimes just having that validated by someone who gets it is enough to just help you go okay you know and wash that person out of your hair i love that song i'm going to wash that man right out of my hair and that's there's a time for that isn't there so get ready get that shower warming up martin it's time it's coming time let's read the rest of the letter okay i told her i needed time alone and i made that clear clear i'm going to circle because what i think is part of the part that you might be able to adjust about this for your next relationship is your concept of what is clear and what is not clear you say the word breakup did come up it was brought up by both of us but first by me it's weird how you use a sort of passive verb on that the word was brought up it's like i you don't say i broke up with her i made it clear that i was breaking up with her that's not what you say you say i needed time alone and the word came up like it had a life of its own and it came in and it flew out of my mouth it flew out of her mouth i'm not really sure what to make of it but she said is that what's happening and you nodded okay nodding instead of going yes angela it's over babe that's it you know that's that would be clear but i nodded that's ambiguous all right and i get it but this i just you know the picture i have of this and the way that i feel drained reading the letter i just think you are dealing with a vampire and yeah even coming close to the story it's very draining she she looked sad when you nodded and at and when you asked for no contact you asked not told when you want no contact you don't ask for it you declare it all right that's i'm just i'm just telling you here i'm i'm hearing the passivity in what you're doing here and i think that's what it is that spell that this whole relationship has cast over you it's like drained your power to the point that you're like please can can you just give me no contact and not just pulling down the wall yourself and then you ask for her to let you be to let you be in your power so if it's your power nobody has to let you be in it your power is your power and you you generate that power you hold that power regardless of what she wants or allows right and you wanted to be allowed she said you asked her to let you be grounded you asked her so that you could not be confused you wanted to connect with your soul again and connect with the feeling that you had before you met and so here there's just like this crucial you know mind f here where you it got you believing that she had to give that to you that she held all the power and because you fell into that false belief it actually became a true situation she had all that power over you not that she could do anything with it she sounds very unwell but the next morning she sent you a selfie so you said no contact so she sends you a picture the next day because she was starting a new job so you had said no contact but did you have no contact no you typed back and said she looked good oh you made her feel good about herself and you said they're lucky to have you but you know actually i don't think they are based on how she treated you i think that it's very unlikely that that's going to go very well for people so you but you gave her the compliment and i just you know that's a clue sometimes when somebody is emotionally abusive to you and you're like you look good honey they're so lucky to have you like in what dynamic do we do that right the dynamic would be more like narcissistic and codependent again can't diagnose anybody but that's the dynamic that that looks like then you say please no more contact so again please like you're begging her for no contact and you know if you really if you're serious about no contact you can do it you block the person and if it comes to it you can get a restraining order and i don't think that would be totally out of line here because because of what she ended up doing okay and then that's where you tell us about this she waited about two days after you said no contact so no respect here and then she said i'll wait for you to contact me oh you know i could just see her calculating what can i say to break contact and try to hook him in again okay i'll wait for you to contact me uh okay but you said no contact then she sent little sad face emoji and another and another so she's just sitting there it's like like with a fishing pole just casting out with her hook come on martin come on come on come back to me but with a hook you know just like not love there's nothing here that's love you know that right this is not love this is consumption then she started flooding you with texts incessantly trying to call trying to call you on the phone using guilt it was all about her yeah she said i'm trembling inside please have some compassion so she's trying every tactic in the book oh poor me it's going to break me she she wanted to meet and come and have some sort of closure okay big red flag word for anybody who's watched my videos that word closure in the context of a breakup closure sure if you had a serious relationship let's say you were married and suddenly the person leaves or you were engaged you know like in a serious committed relationship that suddenly ends and one person never knew why then having that conversation eventually would be closure but in this one you don't need closure there's no closure closure is almost always a code word for the opposite of closure i just want to get together and talk so we can have some closure means i just want to get together and talk so i can hook you in again get that emotional ball rolling again right so you say when i didn't respond at all her tactic went from guilt to anger and then rage i'm not surprised because she's trying she's just trying the full like spectrum of tactics to hook you in she started smearing you on facebook okay this is where it goes from i can't tell whether you know it's emotional abuse because i wasn't there but smearing people on facebook yes that is abuse and it may be going on still except you've blocked her good job after a couple months though i sent her a letter you say explaining my timeline okay oops so you had a relapse that's what that is and i know that your mind is thinking okay it was a couple months and but i i'm just going to say martin what were you thinking would happen if you explained your timeline like what possible good could come from reaching out to an abusive unstable person so that they know your timeline like oh now i know your timeline and what you believe happened and then what happens they they say oh i'm so sorry i yeah i was a jerk i wish you know or i'm coming back to you i realize i love you you mentioned this there's parts of the letter i didn't include we had a very long exchange on it but you know this is addiction and that's addiction can sort of grab hold of your mind and make you think like okay it's been two months i can do it now like it's safe for me to have contact now just like an alcoholic will go okay i didn't drink for two months now i can drink it'll just be one it'll be fine you said she she it seemed like she felt entitled to you you're right you have very good perception about this it's just that some part of your brain gets hijacked and just keeps thinking that somehow you can make it change if you just say and do the right thing and so you know so the rest of our hair just to go oh yeah we've done that too and it never works okay and you said she didn't have to respond but you know what that's going to happen you said you wished her the best and she didn't respond for more than a week oh i like that tactic too like let there be a little bit of worry that she's not gonna that you're not gonna get back you know that's how you sort of build suspense suspense in a trauma bond you can never just get back to somebody you have to delay it so that they just get all like wound up waiting for that so that when they do get a lousy text from you they're just like i got a text that's how trauma bonding works it always has to be interspersed with neglect and abandonment and just coldness and then ooh you know love bum right when she did respond she said this is just to tell you i'll answer it soon okay then you say you didn't expect anything but i'm going to say you did or you would never have written her and then maybe a month later she called and she said i'm just calling you to tell you i won't be answering your letter well when you're not going to answer somebody's letter you don't call them that was a hook that was another one and i love that it's like all dressed up as like you know i've got boundaries right but it's not boundaries it's it's a hook and it's a break of contact but that's okay we all do it we're all just drudging along here trying to figure out how do we love how do we live life right so you're just like everyone here and you're you're good all right but the text started again so here come the text from her and she starts saying come on we're friends show some compassion be there for me more of her tactics so then you say martin my problem is i want so badly to answer the text it's like yep that's what they were designed to do and it's like an alcoholic who wants to take a drink if i text her i'll be hooked again and i've come so far getting over her but if i connect again it'll be like starting from day one so one thing that alcoholics do when they're an early sobriety is they don't go around people drinking and they um sometimes live in sober living houses and they they set themselves up to eliminate the trigger and the trigger for you is contact with her it would also be thinking about her fantasizing that it could have been okay and so this is i would i would class this as a form of limerence with somebody you actually did have a relationship with but you're having um a romance with the idea with that incredible experience you had in the first three months and even though it went totally to hell you're still like in love with that her and with that you and with that couple and that possibility that you once had there and so the process of healing is going to involve just facing that and seeing it for what it was that that that was the hope of what it was but time did allow you to see what the reality of that relationship is and a lot of what you know you can learn a lot about relationships we we were so good at compartmentalizing things because of that crap fit thing from growing up being very good at sort of compartmentalizing it's like i know that you know mom and dad hit each other but we're also a very nice family and i can show that to the world we get so good at compartmentalizing abusive behavior from this other part of life that it seems normal to you or is possible to you that the person who treats you like this could actually be this you know wonderful relationship and so it keeps your heart engaged with it and it's very painful to face to face reality and say this is a very disturbed and unstable person and we don't know i don't know exactly what's wrong with her but i know how she treats you and it's unacceptable and it's definitely nothing that would ever turn into a happy relationship and so one gut check and reality check is well what does it feel like to be with this person well what did it feel like to be with that person well that is how it feels to be with that person it feels like it just does not feel good it makes you feel bad it makes you angry you turned it on yourself like you're angry at yourself for putting up with it but i think as time goes by your anger will quite rightly be directed outward at the person who mistreated you so it's interesting you say what i really want is that feeling that i had before we met so you know i think sometimes people come into our lives like a tornado and they just come in and they wreck the whole trailer park and we can remember how it was before that happened but really what we're going to do now is take what we learned and move forward because the one silver lining of a terrible relationship or anything bad that happens to us i wouldn't wish it on anyone but when it's happened you can begin to see what are your tender spots where is your unhealed trauma what is your vulnerability to abuse so it points you to where you can begin to heal and work on that now you know i teach these techniques the daily practice to start unpacking and and releasing the fearful and resentful thoughts and beliefs about yourself and the world that would have you you know impulsively following decisions in your life that are more driven by trauma than by what you really want or what's good for you or what is going to bring love into your life of course we want love in your life you absolutely deserve to have a good loving person who appreciates you for who you are so this happened wash it out of your hair and i really encourage you to get extremely active and structured in your approach to healing from the trauma that would allow this to happen to you if it happens once it kind of increases it increases the odds that it's going to happen again especially afterwards it's weird how it works like that it's almost like it forms a magnetic groove in you and you very easily can fall right into the same thing or you can change the pattern but a lot of times that takes a conscious effort to change that pattern so it's conscious effort time and you you know you got in touch with me which is so brave and and is i do hope very much that what i'm saying to you can help you can help you believe in yourself enough to take action i'm going to also recommend you have no contact at all even if it requires a restraining order with this person this is just flat out toxic so you had said i don't know what to grieve the woman you thought you loved the relationship you thought you had or the person you were before you met you get to grieve that is what heartbreak is and the good news is what feels like it's about the other person is usually more about the ideal that we had and the ideal has with that person has been lost but it's been revealed for what it is and the beautiful relationship that you crave still lies ahead of you and all you need to do to become ready for it is to heal i know easier said than done but that's what this channel is all about if you want to take a quiz anybody watching to see if past trauma may be affecting your life today my cptsd quiz is right down in the description section with my courses and if you want to talk more about red flags and being able to see them in advance i've got a video lined up for you right here and i will see you very soon

Channel: Crappy Childhood Fairy

Views: 221,715

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Id: 7P95IlOw31g

Length: 41min 20sec (2480 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021