Lessons From My Therapist: Don’t Let Past Trauma Ruin Your Life

Let me be frank, this ain’t my first rodeo, and if you’re reading this, it probably ain’t yours either.

Over the past two months, I have been waiting for what felt like an eternity for the guy I decided to give a 17th chance to, to finish Ramadan and come see me.

In truth, I’m feeling a bit like I’m stuck at the post office to pick up an amazon package that got delivered while I was at work. The post office is full, the cashiers are taking forever, one is on sick leave and the other has gone on a coffee break. And truth is, I don’t even know if I will like what’s in the package nor if it’s going to fit me.

But I’ve paid for it, I’ve waited patiently for it to arrive, I may as well pick it up and try it on.

Three days. Three days until he comes.

At the beginning of the year, as one of my new life mantras, I adopted something I (and every other friend reading this blog) picked up from my sister in law who wisely said:

You know you don’t HAVE to take any s%*t at all, right?

So here I am, trying to navigate the world of no s%$ts taken after 37 years of welcoming it into my life with understanding and open arms.

To be fair to him, he’s been nothing short of amazing since he’s come back into my life with conviction, however he now has to deal with 37 years of previous demons and traumas that I have experienced and that are haunting me.

As I turned to look at my friends I realized that it’s not just me. Every single one of them if flooded by traumas they struggle to cope with and to let go of or even simply to make sense of.

Trauma doesn’t just walk off once its come by for a visit, it holds your hand and once in a while tightens the grip with much more strength than you can handle to remind you of the pain you could feel if you take another step forward.

What’s the role of negative experience and traumas in our lives?

Our brain and bodies hold on to traumatic experiences for a reason: to ensure they don’t happen again.

They are meant to activate our fight or flight response saving us from pain that may be coming our way.

I once heard that fear is the projection of past pain onto a future that doesn’t exist.

We are wired to be safe, but what is the cost of this mechanism if it spirals out of control? What is the cost to our current partner of having to deal with a bunch of fears that may have absolutely nothing to do with them?

The incredible thing is that we store what we live and experience in the same box of our brain that also stores our friend’s experiences, books we’ve read, podcasts we’ve listened to and all of our favorite TV series. Our brain doesn’t distinguish between ‘it happened to me’ and ‘it happened to my friend’, so imagine just how over-populated this box currently is and just how many processes you may have programmed to take action in case of emergency in order to save you from having to experience more pain.

So here we come, daters in their 30’s, wonderful and dysfunctional, often traumatized and even when aware of it still quite triggered by any little thing that’s brought to love disaster in the past.

And honestly, at this age, practically any word or action our new partner says or takes will remind us of a previous relationship that went to s%*ts hence screaming RED FLAG even when nothing bad is potentially happening.

We’ve seen it all:

The married one
The cheater
The one who never decides and wastes years of our lives
The narcissist
The selfish
The careerist
The sticky one
The one who can’t commit
The one who’s still in love with the ex
The one with FOMO
The one that’s not ready yet
The too perfect one…

And we’ve also most likely been all of it for someone else.

(Oooooops!)

I don’t believe there is a specific dating age which is better or worse, however I do believe that we all need to work on ourselves and our own patterns because once we reach our mid-late 30’s, the experience we carry can be inadvertently quite damaging to our desired or current relationships.

My therapist told me something very valuable:

If you want to date a Man, you will need to step it up because the type of man you say you want is not going to put up with all your BS.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know about you, but I am used to dysfunctional partners. I am great with unstable, problematic, needing fixing kind of people. I’m the balanced and wise person in the relationship with the psychopath, I’m the rock in the ocean of despair for the depressed, I am the beam of light for the homeless.

Now, dating someone who has it together, who achieved in a year and half what I haven’t been able to…that’s a whole other story.

I tried giving advice: he didn’t need it.

I tried giving advice even on things that are pertinent to my job and I know better than he does: he also doesn’t need them. He could use them, sure, but need…that’s a different word.

He doesn’t need for me to pay rent and travel, as my previous boyfriend did. He doesn’t need me to resolve his career issues nor to help him identify his values.

He’s not perfect, nobody is, he still has a lot of growing up to do, but he doesn’t need me to fix him and I don’t want to. I’m over the nurse era.

The ghosts of our dating past

I’ll be frank with you, especially since you already know my journey over the past few years: sometimes, in secret, I stop believing Love exists or that it will happen for me.

I say in secret because it’s an unpopular thing to say, we all want to hear sunshine and rainbows, but I have seen it happen so often, my 40-something friends not finding someone and not having children or finding someone too late to start a family. It’s scary.

It’s scary even when they now have made peace with it and are happy in a million other ways. Maybe I’m not ready to let go of the full dream just yet.

A part of me believes I will get this sorted, part of me thinks it’s time to make peace with the fact that it may not happen.

We live our lives and we also kind of live a second life of ‘projected inexistent reality’ which is driven by the world of social media.

Even when we are not addicts, I’m pretty sure we are all impacted by what we see and what we do see on socials is typically a fictitious projection of happiness that may or may not be there and of lives that seem perfect until we see them blowing up. Not to say it’s all fake but let’s face it: it almost never matches real life.

So instead of faking it, here I am sharing my deepest and most real fears with you, my wonderful readers, in the hope that if you’re also feeling a bit of sadness, of disappointment, of worry, of fear, you know you’re not alone in this. We are all there at one point or another.

As I keep working on myself and as I try hard to make sure my expectations and fears don’t lead me to making really bad decisions in life and potentially loosing something that is good, I thought I’d check on how you’re doing, (I mean in real life).

If you’re trying hard not to f%&k a good thing up…

I don’t believe in luck nor in fate. Or better, I don’t count on either, if I get lucky then great but in the meantime I try to take responsibility of what I can, to be as aware as I can be of all of these dynamics, and open to actively and purposefully make the changes I need to make to ensure things I want happen.

I know fears can take the best of me at this point in life, so I call my wonderful therapist, I journal, I talk to my friends, I take some me time and try very very hard not to let past trauma make bad decisions for me in the chapters I have yet to write. I welcome them as learnings, however with eyes open and feet on the ground I try to take one step at a time, (forward), even when I feel like so triggered all I want to do is run the opposite way.

Wow, it’s hard to give love another chance.

So here we go, this is what I hope for us all:

I hope awareness, and our ability to actively make choices ‘thanks to’ and ‘despite’ our worst traumas and negative experiences, will allow us to find a glimmer of hope.

I hope gaining clarity will allow us not to project our past traumas onto a future we have yet to write and maybe for a second, even just for an instant, I hope we get to believe again.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean?

My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me

The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex

The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence

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