My Partner Triggers My Trauma

Overcoming Trauma Triggers With Support at Catalina

Past trauma can negatively impact your current situation. You may find that you have many triggers that send you spiraling back into your trauma, making your life more complicated and uncomfortable. Perhaps one of the biggest issues with a trauma response is when a partner triggers that response.

Now you likely want to know: if my partner triggers my trauma, what should I do?

Catalina Behavioral Health offers treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder to help you manage your trauma responses, even in relation to your partner.

Keep reading for more details, and if you need help handling your trauma triggers for your emotional well-being and restoring a healthy relationship, reach out to Catalina for more help and recovery options!

Improve Self-Awareness of Your Own Triggers

Before you can start to deal with the intense emotions that are disrupting an intimate relationship, you need to have a good handle on your own triggers. A traumatic event can take many forms, and it can also create unique emotional reactions in an individual. You start the healing process by being more aware of what happens when you encounter traumatic memories.

Take some time to survey your feelings and the reaction that you have to them. What about your partner’s behavior triggers these memories? How do you feel when your partner triggers trauma responses?

This work can be done with the assistance of a skilled therapist or counselor. However, you might need to do the heavy lifting on your own. When you feel a triggered trauma response coming on, take a break and journal about what you are feeling and your response. This will help you to gain clarity and self-awareness.

Pinpoint Reactions Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Methods

As part of your campaign for self-awareness, you can view your reactions to situations through the lens of cognitive behavioral therapy. Under this treatment model, you will survey your thoughts, feelings, and actions as well as how the three work together. If you experienced trauma, there is a great chance that your thoughts surrounding your experience are influencing your actions toward your partner.

Take time to survey how you feel and the thoughts that come up for you. Jot them down in a notebook or keep a running mental list of the thoughts you have when around your partner. With this list in mind, think about how they make you feel.

These two pieces may lead you to how you choose to act on those thoughts and feelings. If you lash out at your partner or withdraw from them, it is important to know and understand what leads you to act. This is especially true if you tend to react impulsively. Recognizing your thoughts and feelings can interrupt a negative cycle of behavior.

Set the Stage to Communicate Openly

With some of these self-awareness pieces in place, it may be time to start having conversations with your partner. Share with them what they do that triggers you and how it makes you feel when it takes place. If you struggle to have this conversation with them, it may be useful to seek professional mental health help at Catalina or couples therapy, depending on the state of your relationship overall.

No matter what setting you have the conversation in, you will need to be clear and direct about your past traumas and how they influence you today.

When talking with your partner about your emotional reaction to certain triggers, it is important to take full responsibility for your own feelings. This means that you should communicate with your partner using “I statements” versus “you statements” that place blame. For example, you might say “I feel triggered when you slam doors in anger.”

Plan Ahead to Potential Trauma Triggers

Chances are that trauma triggers will pop up for you ongoing for a very long time. Even once you are far removed from the initial situation that triggered you, reminders can pop up. Part of what you can do when your partner triggers a trauma response is to make a plan to avoid situations like that in the future.

Such planning and preparations are a core component of trauma treatment programs at Catalina and for good reason.

Instead of simply waiting for the situation to arise again, you can take control of it. This goes hand in hand with open and loving communication from a place of empathy. Once you know what exactly is going to trigger you, planning with your partner to avoid it is possible.

Even in situations where the trauma trigger is unavoidable, you can alter how it takes place. For example, you might have a conversation with a partner that goes something like this: “When you did X, I felt Y. Let’s make a plan for how to face this situation in the future to minimize that feeling for me.”

Open conversation of this type can make you feel more empowered to take charge of the situation and clues your partner into how they can help you cope with your trauma responses. Such an approach can help not only your emotional well-being and self-esteem but theirs as well.

Setting Boundaries to Protect Your Emotions

Once you have started to communicate openly with your partner about how their actions trigger you, the time has come to start setting boundaries. Understanding your own boundaries and making moves to protect and enforce them can be extremely empowering. A traumatized partner must be even more clear and diligent about crossing these lines.

The question is: how can you set boundaries with your partner?

It might be as simple as not having conversations about your experienced trauma outside of a professional therapeutic setting. You might draw boundaries against certain types of physical contact. Understand what you need and how your partner can support you in this to avoid triggering you further.

The important thing here is to move from a place of empathy. Conversations about boundaries can be challenging under the best of circumstances. This is where your “I statements” will come in handy to prevent your partner from going on the defensive.

Prioritize Your Safety from Past Trauma

There are times when your partner may be the actual cause of your trauma and their continued behavior can trigger your trauma responses. If a partner triggers your PTSD or CPTSD because they are the cause of the initial trauma through abuse, it may be time to start seeking therapy for both of you.

If current abuse is this issue, then seeking a safe environment is always the priority.

You need an impartial therapist or counselor to work through these serious issues. Catalina Behavioral Health can guide you through the process of determining what each of you needs to create a healthy relationship. We can assist you in creating a safety plan so that abuse does not continue to haunt you.

It has been found that safety planning is an important aspect of coping with intimate partner violence, especially among marginalized individuals. A solid safety plan should include resources you can tap into when you feel unsafe, social support to give you someone to talk to when needed, and more related to your ability to practice self-care.

Put Physical Boundaries in Place

Physical touch is an important component of a healthy intimate relationship, but it can be a minefield to navigate with PTSD. Especially if you were sexually abused, having someone touch you without warning or at an inopportune time can deplete your mental resources and ability to cope. It can put you right back in that situation where you had no power over the outcome.

Instead, you and your partner should consider putting physical boundaries in place as well as emotional ones. Be clear about what types of touch are acceptable and tolerable, as well as when those types of touch can take place.

It can even be helpful to establish a system of asking before touching takes place. Asking empowers you to speak up for what you need whether that means personal space or some type of intimate touch.

If you find that your wife or husband triggers your trauma when they touch you, you will need to come up with a system that works for both of you. This can be complex and may require some professional help to sort out what both of you need within the relationship.

Take Time and Use Coping Mechanisms to Regulate Your Nervous System

When you find that one partner triggers your nervous system response to trauma, it can be deeply distressing. Feeling triggered leads to feelings of emotional and physical overwhelm that can place you right back in the mindset of your trauma. Take time for yourself to calm down and center yourself in the present before continuing a conversation with your partner.

Here are a few ways that you can start to implement more coping mechanisms and prioritize self-care.

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness is one of the most effective and prominent ways to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. This should be done in a safe space where you can focus on your own well-being and reactions. The goal of mindfulness is to have some degree of self-reflection. Notice how you feel emotionally and physically. The goal is not to judge your feelings but simply to notice them.

As you meditate on what you are feeling, acknowledge the thoughts and then let them go. Using this strategy, you can notice how your partner triggers your trauma and then release it. You can take as long as you need for a meditation session.

This is a great way to take a break from a conversation that is triggering traumatic experiences. While it may be a necessary conversation to have, mindfulness and self-care activities can give you a sense of peace and well-being. The result is a profound impact on the effectiveness of that talk.

Take a Few Deep Breaths

What can you do when feeling triggered at the moment? Perhaps the easiest way to start undoing negative patterns is to center yourself. If you do not have the quiet space for mindfulness meditation or you need to deal with a topic right away, you always have time to take a few deep breaths. This can help with the hyper-arousal that many people with PTSD experience.

To practice deep breathing, sit in a comfortable chair and place one hand on your belly. Breathe in deeply through the nose, feeling your stomach and chest expand. Make sure that you inhale oxygen to completely fill the entire lungs. When ready, exhale it all out slowly through the mouth and feel the belly fall inward.

Take about five of these breaths per minute, stretching each breath cycle to fifteen seconds or so.

Create a Safety Plan for When a Partner’s Actions Trigger Trauma

Sometimes, there is no way to avoid activating each other’s triggers. This can be a challenging experience that compromises your ability to feel safe with your partner. It makes sense that you would need to have some space to cope with your own issues, especially if you feel scared or upset when spending time with a partner.

While you are in couples counseling, it can be a good time to create a safety plan for when trauma triggers arise. Discuss what it would look like for you to notify your partner that you feel triggered and need a little bit of space in order to work through it. Both parties should be understanding and immediately grant the space needed for self-care.

Once you are alone, you should have a list of acceptable activities that can help you regulate yourself. Call a friend, go for a walk, do some yoga, practice deep breathing and breathwork, or meditate for a few minutes.

Make sure that you feel safe walking away from a conversation with your significant other and trusting that they will give you the space you require to calm down. If not, this may be a topic to broach during a therapy session.

Tap Into Your Inner Voice

Most people have a critical inner voice that takes on various forms depending on their trauma. If you want to stop feeling triggered with partners, you might need to formulate new responses rather than the go-to for your disturbing experience. You can journal about what this inner voice has to say to you when a person triggers you, being as specific as possible.

Once you have the words it uses down on paper, start to reframe some of those feelings, possibly by using DBT-based skills. This is where mindfulness exercises can certainly help.

With a degree of awareness surrounding your relationships and the triggers they present for you, you can start to take control. Particularly in terms of romantic relationships for CPTSD clients, this knowledge is vital to repairing and improving intimacy with your partner.

Creating an Open Dialogue About Trauma and Triggers

If you feel comfortable, you may even share some of these inner thoughts with your partner. This can give them a clearer insight into how you feel and what they might be able to do to minimize those negative reactions from you. A supportive partner will try to avoid situations where they trigger this critical inner voice and therefore help stop you from feeling triggered.

Keep in mind that it is ultimately up to you to do the heavy lifting when it comes to managing your own emotions. Your partner can help you avoid some situations that trigger you, but they may not be able to completely erase all of them. Take responsibility for your inner voice and do some deep work to eliminate some of the messages it sends you.

Get Professional Help for PTSD at Catalina

PTSD is a complex disorder to treat and often does not improve on its own without some sort of professional intervention. Especially if your partner triggers your trauma, it may be time to enroll in help for both of you. A skilled therapist or counselor can give you the tools you need to stop triggering each other and to cope with tough situations as they arise.

When you feel ready to embrace professional help, Catalina Behavioral Health is here for you. We offer treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, including an inpatient program for complex PTSD. Both you and your partner can benefit from a therapeutic intervention that puts you back on solid ground.

If you are ready to embrace healing and move forward with your partner, reach out to us today to learn more about how Catalina can support your healing process.