The Third in My Relationship- My Partner’s Childhood Trauma
The dance of living with someone with CPTSD is challenging and complex
My partner has PTSD. Not the “gee, he was a great guy before and then a thing happened” type of PTSD. He has the “his life never had a chance” version. He has the type of PTSD that shaped his brain before he was even born. He has the type that impacted his personality before he had one. We wonder if there is ever a version of him that could not have it.
I won’t give too much of his story away here. It’s not really mine to tell (though I have his approval to write this). Suffice to say, his childhood was dysfunctional- verbally abusive and emotionally erratic. This adrenaline rollercoaster would have started before he was even born, laying down neuronal pathways more comfortable with fight or flight reactions than relaxation or happiness. The subsequent 18 years only reinforced emotional vigilance; that it was him vs the world and that everything would turn to shit sooner or later.
This trauma is the third that I- 20-something years later- get barging into my otherwise happy relationship every so often. Complex (or chronic) PTSD is exactly that- complex. My partner is loving, kind, funny, smart, sensitive, considerate and actually makes enormous efforts at being aware of his triggers and behaviours. He is super-aware of not being abusive or damaging in any overt way.
But the sneaky bits still napalm us every so often.
His mind lies to him. It interprets me with a vicious distrust, insisting that I am being disingenuous or obstructive. The emotional flooding leaves him in a spiral of anger and helplessness that leaves him inarticulate with rage and despair. He literally can’t remember anything good about me. Literally. As in it all disappears and he can only see me as the villain of THIS moment, THIS feeling. There is no balance, no perspective, no rationality.
He projects his own lack of self-love and fear of true intimate connection onto me, accusing me of being uncommunicative and not understanding him. Good lord- if I had a dollar for every time he has said I don’t understand him…. Ka-ching! I reflect on this long and hard to make sure I am not being as oblivious as he says I am, but it’s hard to make this about me as- when he is calm- he is the one who owns that it’s not.
There are triggers. On the surface, he gets frustrated and blames me for something- repeating myself, him not understanding my mood, me reacting. Underneath it, he is blaming himself. It has taken me a while to dig through, but I now realise that he keeps worrying that he has offended or hurt me, but you know what they say- offense is the best form of defence, so when he feels insecure, he lashes out.
He accuses me of curating or editing myself, which I actually do! But I am attempting to find the best possible responses to not add to his trauma and to find the pathways that we agreed last time would be helpful to make him aware that he is back in Trauma. I go out of my way to consider the healthiest ways to meet him in any moment. I hate it when he weaponizes my efforts and throws them back at me as being part of the problem.
And, of course, it happens just when I relax. Whin I think things are going ok and he is going to not implode this time. It happens despite me consciously and successfully changing or renavigating whatever triggered him last time. And then I end up back in the yo-yo of setting appropriate boundaries and doubting myself and our relationship.
I have not yet found an effective way to navigate this. Honestly, I am often caught up in my own reactions of feeling blamed or inadequate and then fight back. Then he says I am defensive and infuriating. When I can hold on to myself and not react, he says I am cold and infuriating. When I am calm and remind him of the PTSD, I am ‘deflecting and avoiding my own stuff’. Walking away is ‘avoidance’. Staying is ‘argumentative’. I point out that there are no avenues via which I can win and he melts down in emotional overwhelm.
We seem to have to get to these meltdown points for him to calm. They are getting better. Early on, the build-up took days and the calm was slow in following. Now, the fights are shorter and the “oh shit, Trauma smacked us again” comes faster.
He has been working on self-love and self-acceptance, but I am finding that the Trauma (as I have taken to calling this side of him) just gets subtler and subtler in its stories of how I have failed him this time. It is a never-ending shifting of the goal posts of what the problem is and how we get back from it.
And here’s another thing- I am a therapist. I know all the red flags for victims, abusers and dysfunctional relationships. I know all the red flags for being a rescuer, for projection, for attachment and trauma. It helps- trust me, it really helps me to have a deeper understanding of all the dynamics we are juggling- but it does not stop us from weaving in and out between happiness and misery.
We are both in our 40’s, so we are not exactly new to relationships or life. We are both very self-aware, introspective and reflective. In our saner moments, we are calm, rational, loving and genuinely want the best for each other. But with age comes some sort of wisdom- we both question how often we can go round and around this little not-merry-go-round before it gets too hard.
We are currently on a break- facilitated by the pandemic world ‘encouraging’ us to live in separate countries for a while. The time apart has given us both space to recover, to regroup and to recharge, but we have no delusions that it has magically made our intermittent interloper vanish. We may always be dancing in a triad, but hopefully we can find some grace and rhythm to help us through.
