One of the things we love the most is being in love. Most of us are willing to pay almost any price for that experience, yet often find it elusive or fleeting. Navigating the ups and downs of loving relationships is often challenging – even for the most psychologically balanced among us.
Lots of us are avoiding committed relationships. According to the US Census Bureau 38% of adults were single in 2019. Compare that to the 1990 census when only 29% of Americans 18 and over were single. We have become more commitment phobic since then.
So why are such huge numbers of people staying out of committed intimate relationships, even though being in one is one of our most powerful drives and desires?
One big answer is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some people clearly remember something terrible that happened to them. Plenty more may not remember any one big traumatic memory, yet live with what I call “low-grade PTSD”.
Even people with low-grade PTSD struggle with their brains and nervous systems being on high alert much of the time. This makes it close to impossible to let someone else into their space without feeling withdrawn or panicky.
People with PTSD may either avoid sex like the plague, or may be promiscuous and have it freely with lots of people. Both of these behaviors are most likely an avoidance of real intimacy.
Here are three ways relationships get hijacked by trauma.
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- Our brain’s alarm system gets stuck on overdrive
People who grew up with trauma in childhood often have a hard time discriminating between the need to respond to real threats or to be able to relax in the face of harmless encounters. It has been demonstrated in many studies that trauma literally rewires the brain and endocrine system to stay on high alert most of the time. This prevents us from being able to let down our guard and be intimate with others.
2. We tend to attract the wrong partners
Another way traumatized people miss out on intimacy is through the people they tend to attract. People who were abused as children tend to keep attracting abuse in adulthood. According to the major CDC-Kaiser adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study from the 1990s, women who had been molested or neglected as children had a 700% higher likelihood of being raped as adults than girls who did not experience abuse. Girls who saw their mothers getting beaten had a much higher incidence of experiencing domestic violence as adults.
After going through the agony of a series of failed relationships due to such negative childhood conditioning, many trauma survivors choose to become part of the majority of adults avoiding committed intimate relationships.
3. Projection, avoiding our inner shadow work
We are living through a time of rapid changes on our planet, including shifts in consciousness bringing buried emotions up to the surface, in our face. Often much faster than we would like.
To complicate this further, disturbing feelings bubbling up inside of you may not even come from you! You could be psychically picking up on the pain of others, or groups of others you are connected with. Yet it’s the easiest thing in the world to project those discomforts onto other people, including those you meet in the dating world. This contributes to more feelings of skittishness about opening up to others.
Shadow work refers to your commitment to stop running from your inner pain, or projecting it onto others. It’s about exploring and making friends with your feelings instead. I am in a loving, committed relationship, and the willingness of both of us to practice shadow work, openly facing our difficult feelings, is a main reason the relationship is working.
What is the solution?
Fortunately there are new healing methods that have shown good long-term results for clearing the burden of trauma. Some of the most promising therapies include EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, acupuncture or cognitive therapies. Quantum Catalyst Healing is an advanced new system that transforms trauma by bathing the brain and nervous system in the pure love and presence of the true, higher self.
All of these therapeutic methods help trauma survivors develop a more grounded and healthy relationship with their bodies. They can all help people to feel safer and less liable to be hijacked by old memories of abuse. These methods tend to work better than talk therapies or drug therapies because people are doing the real inner work of remodeling their brains, and learning that it is safe to fully inhabit their bodies.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
