A Dating Guide For Those With Complex Trauma

There comes a day when someone with C-PTSD looks back on the rubble of their dating life, and is washed over with frustration and regret. Blissful memories of paradise, moments filled with joy and love, missed opportunities, fatal mistakes, and monumental collapses; relationships for a person with complex trauma tend to have it all — with heartbreak and agony being the icing on top.

While reminiscing, you may wonder how your old relationship might play out if you live it all again with what you now know. If only you had the lay of the land, and understood what to expect before going in. If only you possessed a guide to dating as a person with Complex-PTSD.

People with complex trauma rarely select partners with foresight and care. They don’t take their time, slowly building intimacy and trust from a safe distance, gradually closing the distance towards commitment. No, people with C-PTSD dive in head first without hesitation, overcome with blissful intoxication.

The first months of the relationship are filled with ecstasy, 24/7 companionship and openness while being void of limits, frustration and pain. The person with C-PTSD believes they have finally found their soulmate. The one.

Yet the reality is far more sinister.

Here are some guidelines to consider when dating with complex trauma:

1. You are not attracted to each other, you are attracted to each other’s trauma.

Traumatised people have a knack for being magnetically drawn to each other. Not all traumatised people, mind you, but those whose core wounds resonate with the other.

Although trauma has predictable patterns, such as neglect, abandonment, abuse, shaming, humiliation and so on, everyone grows up with a unique recipe of these elements. Complex trauma leads to endless symptoms, such as ADHD, arrested development, angry outbursts, rigidity, immature thinking, insecure attachment and more. These ‘disadvantages’ make it difficult to form and maintain relationships with un-traumatised people, who are often confused by the traumatised person’s behaviour and way of seeing the world.

Yet life always finds a way. Evolution does not make exceptions. To help you on your road to healing, life pushes you towards people who understand your pain and share your worldview. Therefore, we can say that our worst relationships play an evolutionary purpose.

Furthermore, traumatised people tend to experience life in extremes; an overabundance of excitement can quickly switch to the heaviest of lows. ‘Normal’ people rarely trigger the traumatised person’s intensity, which can make that person seem boring.

Finally, traumatised people need to heal. This cannot happen unless your trauma is activated and made conscious. Chances are your subconscious mind knew exactly the right person who would pull you out of your distractions and addictions, while thrusting you head-first into your core wound.

Yet nobody in their right mind would agree to such a painful experience. To convince you to undertake this treacherous journey, life seduces you with fantasy and bliss.

2. It is not a perfect match — it is trauma-induced fantasy and projection

Trauma is unbearable, and being with someone who can potentially activate and trigger that trauma will typically ensure the relationship ends before it has a chance to develop.

This is why people with complex trauma experience something akin to a drug-induced high during those heady first months. While the ‘honeymoon period’ is common for all budding loves, complex trauma injects it with uncanny wonder beyond all limits. Together you will explore the world, conquer all challenges, and create a life together that has never been lived. The audacity of this unhinged fantasy rarely crosses your mind. It all feels so real, so inevitable.

In the back of your mind, you might have doubts about your wild plans. But the dopamine and serotonin flooding your system quickly wash your concerns away. Enjoy this phase of the relationship. It is helping you to bond with your lover, to lay the foundation for the work ahead.

It is preparing you for hell.

3. Expect lurking predators from unexpected places, at unexpected moments

Complex trauma lies at the core of all personality disorders. Cluster-B disorders such as psychopathy, narcissism, borderline and histrionic are incredibly common. Codependency, paranoia and dissociation come with the territory. You remain blissfully ignorant of this during the initial honeymoon months. Your lover has eyes only for you; their expression soft, warm and loving.

Yet beneath this glimmering ocean, predators lurk. Your lover might have a specific personality disorder, such as narcissism or borderline. They could be a full-blown psychopath. In most cases, they might simply be on the spectrum, having traits from certain personality disorders.

While it can feel reassuring to attach one label to a person, remember that C-PTSD is a recipe of wounds. The resulting personality structure is therefore also a unique recipe. Your lover might be avoidant or anxiously-attached. They could have a psychopathic sub-state, where they only act viciously and deceptively when triggered in particular ways. The rest of the time they may be needy and loving or hot and cold when expressing their borderline. Their confidence might swell at moments when their narcissist is active. Anything is possible with complex trauma.

‘Sub-states’ can seem like ancient ocean predators, crashing suddenly out of the calm waters of your relationship, terrifying and abusing you, before returning into the depths, leaving you shocked and confused for days or weeks after. To make matters worse, your trauma will often be triggered in such moments, making the experience infinitely more destabilising and painful. These occurrences come more and more as you transition out of the honeymoon phase, being triggered in a multitude of seemingly-mysterious ways.

4. Not all is as it seems

Fantasy has a way of blinding us from seeing reality. This holds especially true when someone has complex trauma.

People with C-PTSD dissociate often and have gaps in their memory. Because reality can feel so terrifying when you carry trauma, you might create an abstract image in your mind of your lover and interact with that instead. In this way, you gloss over the real person and what they are going through. The idea is to create a ‘perfect’ avatar in your mind who cannot hurt you.

Also, traumatised people sense that something is wrong deep down. However, they want to feel normal, and they want to present themselves to others as normal. This means they need to conceal the truth and harbour secrets. To top it off, dissociation leads to them often not knowing what the truth is. Reality is a patchwork of events with many gaps. So they fill the gaps with their imagination while believing in their own fiction.

Such a landscape leads to immensely maddening outcomes in the relationship. Two traumatised people don’t know who they are, who their lover is, or even what is real and what is not. When the drug of fantasy gradually fades, a relationship between traumatised people devolves into insanity. This can lead to shouting matches, confusion, deception, betrayal, cheating and even domestic violence. A trauma-fuelled relationship may descend into madness, before collapsing brutally. It can ruin the lives of both people involved, leading to re-traumatisation, bankruptcy, loss of career, loss of friends or family, and more.

5. To love or not to love?

Knowing all of this, it is no surprise that those who have particularly heavy complex trauma might eventually consider giving up on love. Why go through all that pain and insanity, only to end up destitute, depressed or worse?

The short answer is: To love is to embrace life. Giving up on the former greatly hinders the latter.

Life is rooting for you. It wants you to heal, to gain clarity and self-knowledge, and to progress as much as possible with what you have. This is why it pushes us towards these inevitably horrible relationships. Life’s role as a matchmaker is to arrange the pieces so that you can resume where you left off when the trauma occurred. We all learn something from our relationships, even when we get dragged under and spat out in a re-traumatised state.

Every relationship for the traumatised person gives them a crucial piece of the puzzle. It gives you chances at love, even when those chances are slim, and that love is doomed to fail. To love is to live. Unfortunately, life for a traumatised person is also to be crushed by pain, and in that destruction, to hopefully be born anew.

The healing never ends for the traumatised person. They have an arduous journey ahead of them. The odds are stacked against them. In many cases, it might be a case of doing your best, before handing over the work to the next generation (if you decide to have children). Yet even without children, every act of healing, every descent into your core wound which is followed by a small victory, will have a flow-on effect in all of your relationships, even with your acquaintances. Your healing makes the world a better place.

Best of all, every ounce of healing, every lightbulb of insight and wisdom, will remain with you as you dare to love again, leading you once again into potential hell, but also offering you an unprecedented opportunity to discover a more realistic, grounded form of heaven.