I absorbed my partner’s trauma — and it tore me apart

By Henry Fry

Nightmares, panic attacks and triggers galore — welcome to the codependent world of Projective Identification.

Relationships are scary, whether that be familial, platonic or romantic. A mutually nourishing relationship of any kind requires trust, openness, give and take, and a certain level of vulnerability — which is why picking a complementary partner is vital to your mental health and wellbeing.

We’ve all heard about ‘toxic relationships’. We know we riff off each other. Your mum’s in a bad mood. You argue. You feel annoyed. You wonder when she’ll have a go again. Or you have a friend who hates their job. Every time you mention your job, he makes a passive aggressive comment. Maybe you ignore it, recognise it’s his problem, his insecurity. Or maybe it hits a chink in your armour and stings. Because maybe, just maybe, a little bit of you agrees with him.

In psychology, this chink in your armour is called a ‘hook’. It’s a space made by past experiences or trauma and is easily triggered or co-opted by similar scenarios, relationships or people. We all have them — the ‘jellyfish’ of Bridget Jones’s small talk party nightmares. In a small way, they can make us feel annoyed or attacked. In a big way, they can destroy our sense of self and grasp on reality.

Last year, I was in a relationship that seemed perfect — at first. But, two months in, I started seeing a counsellor. I was getting inexplicably anxious, triggered by innocuous things. My partner would tell me how mad he was about me, how much he loved being with me, how he couldn’t wait to see me again. But his actions often contravened this; he wouldn’t reply to texts for 24 hours, lie about having seen them, didn’t want to see me for a week or two weeks, gradually tried to avoid having sex with me.

All this served to make me increasingly anxious, and it ended up taking me ten months of counselling and two therapists to understand why I couldn’t sleep any more, why everything I enjoyed I now thought was stupid, why I felt like I had become an annexe to him, his opinions, his emotions.

On the surface, it was becoming pretty clear that our prototypes for intimacy were at opposite ends of the scale. But we didn’t think this had to be a make-or-break issue. We talked about it. We amended our natural behaviour for the sake of the other. This alone, wasn’t healthy behaviour. Yet the whole time, something else was going on beneath the surface.

Several months in, when my anxiety had become all-encompassing, preventing me from going to work or live a functioning life, we had a big chat. We talked about everything that had ever happened to us, from parents to sex, to trauma — with a fair amount of overlap between them all.

After talking this through with my counsellor, it all started to make more sense. Melanie Klein proposed a theory: Projective Identification. This is the notion that some traumas are so painful that the conscious brain cannot conceive of them, so it looks the other way. The problem is that a trauma buried is a sleeping monster waiting to be woken. If a trigger that mimics the source of the original trauma — often a close relationship — comes along, it can awake, and begin to spill out in all sorts of the unconscious, often non-verbal ways.

My partner would put me down, tell me my opinions were wrong, criticise my choice of career … but this wasn’t the worst of it. The worst were nightmares of things that had happened to him. My changed attitude to sex as something shameful or disgusting. My inability to know how I felt any more, or regulate those feelings.

In short, I had become one massive hook for all his unresolved trauma. This was neither of our faults, but it was certainly a problem. It started as a problem for me, but soon it took over our entire relationship. Interactions became battles. Sex was the worst. Everything was tainted and dark. The qualities I liked about myself dimmed and went out. They were replaced by his worst memories and experiences.

One essay I read described it as seeming ‘more like magic or art than science’, the recipient of the trauma possessed by it ‘not as a theoretical construct but in actual experience’. It sounds impossible, but I can assure you, it was very real.

After six months, I ended it, and the relief I felt was instant and incredible. It took four more months to stop having the panic attacks, and — one breakdown later — I am back to my usual self again, albeit changed. The guilt was another thing. I felt like I’d abandoned him. But, as one therapist told me, I’m not responsible for him, nor can I change all those things. I’m responsible for my own happiness, and he for his.

A healthy relationship compliments you, supports you, makes you stronger. One that hurts you, makes you weaker and unhappier, isn’t something you need. However much you want it to work, it won’t. Everyone has shit from their past. The trick is to find someone who’s shit matches with yours in a loving, mutually-nourishing way. My ex might be able to find happiness — but I know now that it will never be with me.

Further reading:

http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/projective-identification