Hope — Living With Someone Else’s Trauma: Part II

In my practice working with couples and families, someone else’s trauma often shows up in the therapy session as tales of hurt, gridlocked conflict, and emotional disconnect. Confusion and frustration are the primary expressions I hear from the partner or family member who is on the receiving end of their loved one’s inability to move out of survival mode and into new skills.

“Is there hope for us?” may come up as the situation has been reviewed from several angles and the picture seems to remain bleak. 

In these conversations, I first review safety and boundaries and then discuss goals and relationship skill building. As we process through what has happened and what we would like to happen, the person I’m working with may not immediately see a path forward.

Yet, reframing a person’s experience in the context of living with someone else’s trauma often provides a glimmer of hope. I ask my clients to reflect on their loved one’s unhealed wounds, their lack of coping and relationship skills and how they may be suffering from physiological automatics such as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. This perspective generates a new, more helpful way of thinking about their loved one and stimulates new options for how to proceed in the relationship. 

Once someone is able to recognize the patterns of dysfunction as a severe lack of skills, the crazy-making push/pull dynamics of “my fault/ your fault” can then be laid to rest. In the relationship–whether it is a friendship, parent/child, couples, or close co-worker–the enemy can now be viewed as the trauma response and not the other person.

The third party in the room is the past trauma that causes a chain reaction of defensiveness and fear, setting in motion automatic responses which damage the relationship. The enemy is not your loved one. The enemy is their hurtful learned behaviors that have served to self-protect them in the past. 

Understanding does not mean condoning. We seek to understand what is actually happening in these troubled relationships not so that we can continue to put up with painful dynamics, but so that we can stop blaming ourselves or the other person and instead shift our energy to more productive problem-solving.

This might involve changing our own behaviors that support the trauma response by assuming a more neutral stance (healthy emotional detachment) and setting ourselves up as a safe person in our loved one’s life. Safety involves things such as: expressing empathy, asking questions instead of assuming, and being aware of our loved one’s triggers so we can find ways to help mitigate them.

However, one of the most effective forms of safety that we offer in the relationship is to hold strong, consistent boundaries. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is to hold our loved ones accountable for their automatic (or habitual) actions and reactions so that motivation for change is generated. 

When living with someone else’s trauma, we must also be open to understanding our own trauma and the ways it intersects with our partner’s. The way we act and react within the relationship is also built upon our own self-protective measures and this is an area that we do have the power to change.

We may find ourselves in difficult relationships for various reasons, but very often there is a complicated connection between our partner’s trauma and our own. Changing the relationship, then, is a cooperation between creating safety, holding boundaries, and understanding our own underlying trauma triggers as we seek to understand our loved one’s. 

Hope is possible. Learning new, more effective ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting can shift our relationships from frustration and despair to a place of healing, growth, and forward motion.

Stay tuned for more on a breakdown of the change process.