How to Achieve and Maintain Intimate Relationships with CPTSD
The reality is that both post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD can both affect your relationships. However, complex PTSD is known to come with traits like increased symptom severity, difficulty with emotional dysregulation, negative self-perception, and trouble in interpersonal relationships.
The term complex PTSD, in fact, was coined because PTSD did not seem to capture the experiences of those who have been through ongoing or repeated trauma rather than a single traumatic event.
Often, issues with Complex PTSD and romantic relationships involve some form of interpersonal trauma. Types of interpersonal trauma like childhood abuse from caregivers or domestic violence are often prolonged, which can change the way you relate to others, as well as how you connect with yourself.
Despite this, people with complex PTSD can have happy, healthy, and fulfilling relationships of all kinds, including romantic partnerships. The key is to understand how complex PTSD shows up in your relationships and create new patterns. People with complex PTSD can and do heal. So, what should you know?
This article will uncover how to build intimate or healthy romantic relationships with complex PTSD. Let’s go over some examples of the ways C-PTSD can impact an intimate partnership first. Then, we’ll go over tips you can use to help yourself through it and how complex PTSD education can help couples working through Complex PTSD triggers and symptoms together.
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How Does Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Impact Relationships?
Complex PTSD can make life and intimate relationships harder, but everyone with C-PTSD has different experiences. Like other mental health conditions, you don’t have to have every symptom of PTSD or C-PTSD to live with the condition. Instead, you just need to meet a certain number of symptoms and other criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V).
One person with complex PTSD might struggle with handling codependency, whereas another person with the disorder might struggle more so with letting people in and might be hyper-independent to the point that their need to “do it all alone” is unhealthy.
Sometimes, people with C-PTSD have trouble speaking up when they’re hurt due to fear of abandonment and internalizing symptoms. Others might experience anger or other external symptoms. C-PTSD can make it harder to establish trusting physical, emotional, and sexual intimacy in a romantic relationship.
This is similar to how related conditions, like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), can present differently from person to person. Regardless of how C-PTSD shows up for you, people with Complex PTSD can learn to build and maintain healthier relationships.
How to Achieve and Maintain Intimate Relationships With C-PTSD
Traumatic events that could lead to complex PTSD include but aren’t limited to childhood abuse, ongoing sexual abuse, and domestic violence. When you experience prolonged or repeated trauma, those traumatic experiences can become all that you know or the majority of what you know and expect.
You might feel it in your body through a heightened startle response, panic attacks, and other complex PTSD symptoms. People with C-PTSD are also more likely to experience things like chronic pain, which can complicate daily life. If triggers come up, you could experience distressing memories, return to painful and overwhelming emotions related to your trauma, or shut down and have trouble communicating with a partner.
6 Ways of Sharing Intimacy as Someone With CPTSD
Especially if you experienced ongoing or repeated trauma at a young age, you may be used to certain unhealthy dynamics or patterns. You might not have had many healthy relationships before. The question is, what can you do now?
Here are some of the steps you can take to heal and work toward a place where building and maintaining relationships that are healthy for you is possible.
1) Identify Complex PTSD Triggers
Common complex PTSD triggers include feeling like you need more space from a partner, or, alternatively, feeling like you’ll be left by your partner (fear of abandonment). The reason some people leave relationships or push people away can even be that they want to leave “before the other person does.”
Conflict can also be extremely triggering for people with complex PTSD, and it might be hard to speak up about your needs. Your complex PTSD triggers from a partner or spouse, or otherwise, will be unique to you, so it is important to reflect on how it shows up in your life as an individual. That way, you can start taking the steps to change what no longer serves you.
2) Work to Overcome Maladaptive Patterns
First, identify the maladaptive patterns you have and how they affect current or past relationships. Once you identify your maladaptive patterns, you can create a plan for what to do instead when you notice triggers that would normally lead you to act in ways you don’t want to.
3) Strengthen Self-Esteem
Low self-esteem is common in those with C-PTSD. However, good self-esteem is associated with better interpersonal relationships and both improved physical and mental health.
Solid self-esteem can also help you maintain healthy relationships in more than one way. It can help you feel more secure, experience lower levels of emotional distress, work through conflict effectively, speak up, and achieve goals. Some research even says that self-esteem is associated with better relationship satisfaction.
Working on self-esteem can help you feel more able to receive love if that’s something you currently struggle with, too. Overall, it’s important to be able to listen to yourself, trust your inner voice, and feel like you’re on your own team, so this can be a critical part of PTSD or C-PTSD recovery.
4) Establish a Toolkit of Coping Strategies
Emotional dysregulation is another hallmark complex PTSD symptom. If you don’t have healthy coping mechanisms right now, or if your current set of skills is inadequate, you can develop healthier coping mechanisms or add to what you have. Some examples include but aren’t limited to:
- Using self-care practices or taking a break in times of distress.
- Grounding techniques or mindfulness.
- Positive self-talk.
A mental health professional can help people with past trauma or trauma-related disorders like C-PTSD build a strong, personalized set of coping skills that work for them.
5) Look for the Right Partners
Complex PTSD can affect emotional intimacy, but a romantic partner should be someone you feel safe with. You want to feel secure and like you can be open with each other. When you’re recovering from PTSD or C-PTSD and are working toward a healthy relationship, it can be important to reflect on what an ideal partnership would look like.
What do you expect and need in a healthy relationship? How would you like to handle conflict? Once you’re ready to search for a partner, look for someone who is the right fit.
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6) Create a Strong Support System
Building a strong support system matters for all of us. For people with complex PTSD, that could mean building a community of supportive people that is stronger than one you’ve ever had before. Your support system might include professionals, family members, friends, or romantic partners.
Even though your support system will be unique to you, creating relationships that are positive for your nervous system and emotional well-being can change your life and support your overall health. Positive relationships can even support your self-esteem.
Like with partners, look for people who respect and understand you. A therapist can help you explore who your most supportive people are or what to look for when you are meeting those people.
Why C-PTSD Education is Important for Romantic Partnerships
Individual and group therapy aren’t the only types of therapy that can help people with PTSD. Couples counseling, for example, can help partners understand each other. If you have complex PTSD and feel that it’s impacting an existing relationship, you may consider looking for a trauma-informed couples counselor. A trauma-informed couples counselor or therapist can help by:
- Providing education on C-PTSD and what it is, including why certain behaviors or thought patterns might emerge in those with complex PTSD.
- Helping you and your partner make a plan for what to do when you experience Complex PTSD triggers.
- Guiding you through clear, effective communication and giving you the tools to communicate better in daily life.
- Regulating emotions.
These are just a few examples. Psychoeducation, or education on a mental health condition like PTSD, matters because it helps individuals and their loved ones understand one another better.
While couples counseling makes sense for those working through the way complex PTSD symptoms show up in a romantic partnership, family therapy and therapy with other important people in your life can help if that’s where you notice common complex PTSD triggers causing interference.
Treatments for CPTSD Symptoms That Affect Relationships
While C-PTSD isn’t easy to live with, people with C-PTSD often have many strengths. Trauma-focused therapy can increase these strengths and help you overcome unhealthy patterns that impede relationships, including thought and behavioral patterns.
Therapies used for people who have endured complex trauma include but aren’t limited to the following:
- Cognitive processing therapy.
- Prolonged exposure therapy.
- Trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy.
- Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).
Maintaining meaningful relationships is 100% possible with effective treatment for complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Whether you’ve been through a singular traumatic event, multiple traumatic events, or persistent trauma, professional treatment can help you through all of the ways that complex PTSD can interfere with both relationships and your life at large.
Get Help for Complex Trauma and Relationships at Catalina
Catalina Behavioral Health offers trauma-informed care in Arizona state. Although it can be challenging to seek professional help for trauma, it can make daily life and relationships feel easier and safer.
To find out how our programs can help, contact Catalina Behavioral Health today. Reach us by calling the admissions line on our website.
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FAQs Regarding Complex PTSD and Romantic Relationships
What are the destructive behaviors of CPTSD?
Some people with complex post-traumatic stress disorder might experience destructive behaviors like pushing people away or isolating themselves, negative self-talk, self-harm, substance abuse, or eating disorder behaviors. Many of these things, like substance abuse, are common co-occurring experiences rather than actual symptoms of the disorder. If you notice these behaviors in yourself, treatment can help.
What to do when someone with complex PTSD pushes you away?
There are a couple of things that you can do when someone with Complex PTSD pushes you away. One of the most important things you can do, regardless of your approach, is stay calm. Let the person know that you’re here to talk to. Take some space first if you need to, and offer it to the other person.
For example, you might ask, “Do you want space right now, or is it okay if I’m here?” When you do talk, remain non-judgmental and work to understand.
What does a CPTSD trigger feel like?
With C-PTSD, triggers often feel like intense threats to the nervous system. For example, if you’re triggered by feeling like someone is getting too close too fast, you might experience a fight, fight, fawn, or freeze trauma response. These are involuntary responses that happen when the nervous system detects a threat and wants to keep us safe.
What are typical responses to CPTSD triggers?
If you tend toward a flight response, you might leave when people get close. Similarly, if you tend toward a freeze response, you might shut down rather than communicate that things are moving too fast for you.
When you start to understand your personal responses or reactions in therapy, you can work to navigate complex PTSD triggers in relationships and other parts of life more effectively.
References
- https://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treat/essentials/complex_ptsd.asp
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-023-00247-z
- https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/09/relationships-self-esteem
- https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response
