How Trauma (of Any Kind) Impacts Intimate Relationships, and What to Do About It

Unresolved trauma shows up in the most inconvenient times. Does this ever happen to you?

During intimacy with your partner, everything is going well and then, the next moment, you feel flooded by uncomfortable emotions. Maybe your body tenses and intrusive thoughts or memories threaten to overwhelm your experience. You may suddenly feel rageful, or terrifyingly unsafe, or like you're frozen and can't feel your body.

While you might feel alarmed, this is a normal experience if you have unresolved trauma — not just sexual or relationship trauma, but trauma of any kind.

During intimacy with your partner, your body begins to send you unmistakable signals that something is wrong and it's not okay. Everything was going well, and then, for no discernable reason, it’s not.

These moments can be extremely confusing for you and your partner. And when they happen repeatedly, they have a lasting impact.

It's easy to take it personally and start to question if there's something wrong with you. It may even cause you to question the relationship or your ability to be in the relationship.

It has nothing to do with a personal failing or your relationship.

If you find yourself having a stress response — going into Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn — that makes it hard to stay present during intimacy, it’s an indicator of unresolved trauma in your nervous system.

Here’s the thing that most people don't understand.

The trauma doesn't have to be from previous sexual or relationship events for it to show up during intimacy.

Any kind of unresolved trauma in your nervous system is likely to show up this way.

It could be unresolved trauma from a car accident or medical emergency, surviving a natural disaster, or being in a conflict zone. It might be from things that happened or didn't happen in childhood, or from ongoing experiences of racism.

Of course, it could also be from past sexual or relationship trauma, but it doesn’t have to be.

There's a good reason, embedded in neurobiology, that trauma shows up this way.

Trauma and the Arousal Response

When we look at how trauma shows up in the body and the nervous system, we can see why our intimate relationships are often the place that trauma — of all kinds — starts to show itself.

Even though the trauma might not be related to sexuality or intimate relationships in any way, a trauma response is more likely to happen during arousal.

This is because a trauma response follows a similar pathway in the sympathetic nervous system as the arousal response. The body experiences the same activation during arousal as we experience from a stress response, we just give it meaning differently.

Except when we have unresolved trauma, experiencing sympathetic nervous system activation tends to trigger a trauma response that can lead to overwhelm or shutdown.

Instead of being able to tolerate the heightened levels of arousal, our nervous system floods with traumatic imprints and we struggle to make sense of what’s happening.

Here’s what’s going on…

Unresolved trauma stays present in the nervous system until the body feels safe enough to heal.

Until it resolves, the traumatic imprints of what happened is coded up as an implicit memory, which is a different kind of memory, than our normal, non-traumatic memory. Normal memory is called explicit memory.

Implicit memories naturally want to resolve into explicit memories. They seek to move out of being intense thoughts, feelings, and sensations into the kind of narrative memories that have a beginning, middle, and an end. Explicit memories are the kind of memories that change every time you access them, which is a normal function of memory.

By contrast, implicit memories are the same every time. This is one reason why being triggered into a trauma response feels so overwhelming and like, “No, not again.”

The body and brain anticipate what they think is going to happen next and the nervous system floods just like the original overwhelm that happened during the trauma in the past.

Implicit memory activates the sympathetic nervous system, which is the same pathway through which we experience arousal – and sexual arousal.

That means that feeling sexual arousal is likely, at some point, to activate neural networks that are associated with unresolved trauma in the nervous system.

The body can easily misinterpret the rush of biochemical changes that accompany sexual arousal as a trauma trigger. Because the sympathetic nervous system activation that happens with sexual arousal feels the same as experiencing a trauma response, the body responds by going into Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn.

This can look like suddenly feeling angry or rageful “out of nowhere."

This can feel like becoming extremely avoidant and wanting to end the experience without explanation. 

This can feel like numbness, like your arms and legs are heavy or cold, or you can no longer move or even breathe. You might feel collapsed and in despair. This can even feel like dissociating from your body and feeling a little bit outside yourself. 

This can also feel like switching suddenly into performativity and a focus on your partner’s experience while giving up on your own. 

All these responses are normal and happen because the nervous system can't yet tolerate the trauma response, which is activated by the arousal. And the trauma response will happen again and again, at different levels of severity, until we resolve it.

Secure Relationships Create an Opportunity for Trauma Healing

One sign that we're securely attached and bonded with our partner is that trauma responses feel safe enough to surface. Our subconscious is experiencing enough safety in connection to bring up what needs to be resolved, because we have the support of a safe and caring partner.

If we don’t know this, the fact that trauma is coming up exactly when we’re happily partnered can wreak havoc on our self-esteem, though. It can feel like just when we find someone who we feel comfortable with, old imprints resurface and get in the way.

If we see the flashbacks and out-of-proportion stress responses as a chance for healing, we can get the support we need to move through and resolve the trauma, once and for all.

This can be a temporary setback. We don’t have to get stuck in shame or blame.

So many of us do get stuck at this point, though.

We try to "get over it" by exposing ourselves, again and again, to the trauma triggers. We white-knuckle our way through intimacy, hoping that this time it will be better. We care so much about our partner and the relationship that we don't want to risk losing it by sharing about what's really going on.

We may try to hide what's happening by rushing intimacy. Or we get lost in worries about what our partner thinks. Or we might decide to perform in an effort to make them happy, desperately hoping they don't notice our lack of presence (but they do).

If you find that you're in this very normal situation and you're unsure what to do, here is a map for how to support yourself.

How to Interrupt a Trauma Response during Intimacy

Here are some suggestions for how to navigate your experience when a trauma response comes up.

1. Go slow.

Slowness and safety are almost synonymous. Slowing down gives the body time to process, attune, and land in the present moment, realizing it is safe enough to be here. If in doubt, slow down.

2. Track your presence and self-compassion.

Your ability to stay present is a direct measure of how safe you feel. Dissociating, starting to think about something else, or holding your breath can be signs that you are no longer fully present. It’s important to meet these moments with self-compassion, again and again. Bring yourself back lovingly, with kindness. If you feel judgmental towards yourself, it might be a good time to stop.

3. Negotiate that you might need to pause or stop.

It’s helpful to let your partner know what you’re going through. This can feel challenging because it’s so vulnerable, but they will likely cherish the opportunity to meet you where you’re at and help you heal. This can look like being willing to pause or even stop when you notice you are no longer able to maintain presence during intimacy.

4. Hold yourself with love.

The most important reaction to a trauma response is love. When a trauma response interrupts connection and pleasure, choose to meet yourself with love. When you feel frustrated and wish it would go away, meet yourself with love. Again and again, as many times as it takes. Choosing to respond with love will change the inner environment of your nervous system.

5. Allow yourself to be held.

It’s one thing to hold ourselves in love through challenges. It’s another to allow our partner to hold us. This is the moment where authenticity and vulnerability start to alchemize a new way of being present and exploring pleasure — if we let it.

A New Way Forward

Pushing through a trauma response during intimacy will only make the underlying trauma worse. When we ignore the body's needs and override our natural responses (especially when they're uncomfortable), they don't go away — they just get stronger.

If we continue to override the body’s needs, we can expect more numbness, more anxiety, and more shutdown. We are risking our relationships when we don't want to heal what’s begging to be recognized.

If we decide to take slow and courageous steps towards healing, we give our relationships the chance to get stronger. We allow the body’s authentic self-expression to be heard and witnessed, creating an environment of deep safety that can catalyze healing.

It can be scary to do this in partnership, but it's one of the most healing ways to work with trauma of any kind. Because when we acknowledge what's already here and give it a chance and a place to heal, we come home to ourselves and our partners.

I want that kind of healing for everyone. I want that for you.

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Thank you for reading.

I'll be teaching an online workshop, Trauma Skills for Relationships, in mid-November. Sign up here to get notified. If you can't make it, I’ll send the recording to your Inbox.