How to Date After an Abusive Relationship
How your brain falls in love differently after abuse and how to crack the right code.
Photo Credits Insta @blairdestiny
My wise therapist warned me one day, “After an abusive relationship, your brain is used to being maltreated and even feels ‘at home’ hormonally, living in a constant state of ‘survival mode’. This is why most survivors of abuse unknowingly end up in another unhealthy relationship. It’s because their body system literally feels strange and hormonally imbalanced when they date good partners who are kind to them.”
Her statement completely freaked me out.
‘Does this mean I’m doomed to start another abusive relationship after I’ve worked so hard to leave my abusive ex?’ I worried.
As a nurse, I understood what she meant on a physiological level.
The same way our bodies change their hormonal balance to adapt to a certain substance for too long, like nicotine from cigarettes, or high sugar levels…my body naturally began overproducing hormones to help me live my life in an emotionally and physically unsafe environment (this imbalance is also a symptom of PTSD).
For this reason, a common thread among survivors of abuse is to unwittingly find another abusive partner who makes their body feel ‘at home’ once again, by behaving in an abusive way which enables their body to continue releasing those fight/flight or freeze hormones like adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol that it’s already used to overproducing.
“No worries, I have faith in myself. I will NEVER enter another unhealthy relationship again” I vowed to my therapist. My vow stood as strong as I did, but hell, my therapist was so right.
I met over a hundred men over years and found that I was deathly bored by the good, kind men I met.
Alternatively, I found myself extremely sexually aroused by the ‘bad boys’ who were uncaring towards me or even narcissistic to some extent.
I explained behaviour to the good men I dated apologetically, “I wish I was more into you because you are such a damn good person. Unfortunately, I think you have to become an ax murderer for me to be attracted to you. I guess my ‘romantic compass’ is hopelessly broken.”
The nice guys only looked at me with concern and nodded their heads understandingly.
But learning to live with someone who truly loves me for the first time isn’t as easy as I dreamed it would be.
My brain is telling me that I’m thrilled and overjoyed and grateful. But my body is just plain old confused and overwhelmed and even feeling dissociated, unsure how to process what love and kindness feels like in my body.
How do you feel pleasure from something that just feels vagirifically weird?
I realized that mentally healing from an abusive relationship is actually a two-step process that my therapist missed out on.
The first step to healing is learning how to STOP gravitating towards unhealthy relationships that make you feel ‘familiar’ and ‘at home’ again. It’s learning how to stop hormonally needing all those extra nicotine-like, drama hormones from the people around you.
The second and most important step to balancing my psyche and developing a healthy relationship is practicing HOW TO FEEL emotions of safety, love, and care so that they don’t feel weird or foreign anymore.
So that they start becoming your new baseline of what ‘at home’ and ‘familiar’ feels like. So that one day, feelings of love come easy and naturally to you.
The secret to real psychological healing from trauma doesn’t rest in your brain or in understanding the shitty things that happened to you.
Your true mental health fairies are just embryonic feelings that are glowing, dancing around your body, just waiting for you to develop the hormonal and emotional capacity to learn how to feel them.
Every day, when you gaze at them for long enough, in the palm of your hand.
Tanya is a mental health nurse specializing in trauma therapy and women’s health. She writes for Rewire Trauma Therapy’s online therapy services: https://www.rewiretraumatherapy.com/
