What to Expect As The Partner of A Childhood Trauma Survivor

As psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, our understanding of what constitutes traumatic experience and how it affects human development continues to evolve. Psychotherapists routinely learn from patients about the many overt and covert ways trauma warps human experience and shows its effects within (and beyond) the individual lives of its inheritors. While there is literature written for both professional and nonprofessional audiences regarding the essential contributions long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy can make in the lives of survivors, comparatively less is written for their loved ones. Experience has shown that partners too need information about how to support a survivor and maintain a satisfying relationship, particularly while a partner is in treatment.

Obviously, this is a very big category and one of the problems in writing about it is that the audience assumed is by no means a monolithic group. Survivors of childhood trauma often partner with survivors themselves. However, in some cases people end up committing to partners who have no direct personal experience with trauma and as a result are not consciously alert to the ways in which the damaging past is experientially present in the somatic, affective and interpersonal encounters of the survivor’s present. This brief excerpt is aimed at partners who do not share a trauma history with their significant others. In what follows, a list of suggestions is offered. In no way is this meant to be an exhaustive expose on the topic, but instead, a beginning take on how to address the emotional and informational needs partners may have.

1. My partner does not remember what happened, so how can they deal with it?

Memories often first appear through disconnected symptoms (e.g. unexplained headaches, stomachaches and body aches, phobias of very specific things, panic attacks , nightmares) that may be distressing to you and your partner and on the surface unrelated to the past. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy helps people find the meaning and memories attached to their symptoms. Partners do not need to question the validity of these experiences or be focused on curing a person of them. The best thing you can do is to make room for your partner to share their understanding of the significance of these experiences with you, as they come to know their meaning through treatment. Sometimes there are contextual adaptations that may make the process of remembering less over-stimulating and if the survivor asks for these, you can consider facilitating such requests (e.g. temporary avoidance of specific triggers, providing consolation and holding after a nightmare, etc.). Ultimately your faith in their commitment to treatment is the best gift you can give a partner in unravelling the meanings encoded in these symptoms.

2. Therapy is making my partner ‘worse’

Therapy is not a linear process with a neat beginning, middle and end and partners should anticipate this as much as our patients come to understand it. Work is done in ways that may not be easily interpreted from outside the experience and can take a long time. Our psyches are equipped to know about only what is tolerable at any given time. As we grow in treatment and become more resilient, we become better able to access, recall and remember disturbing things within our selves and our past, but with remembering comes grieving. Your loved one may look like they are in pain, but this is an actual achievement because mourning is a big part of what they have come to treatment to be able to do. This requires a leap of faith on your part to trust that the person you love is getting the help they need, even when you may not see any (immediate, consistent) evidence to prove it or the form it takes does not match your expectation.

3. He/She is in crisis again

Part of remembering and recalling trauma is re-encountering it in a modulated sense in the present tense during the course of treatment. Emotional crises can take many forms – including but not limited too: emotional withdrawal, depressive affect, you may see or suspect self-injury, suicidal ideation and/or substance abuse. It goes without saying that safety comes first and if you are alarmed about the physical safety of your partner, do not hesitate to call 9-11 or take them to the ER. However, if suicide is not your concern but they seem to be in crisis, it’s important to be clear that your job is not to rescue your partner from the emotional upheaval they are in. Nor do you want to avoid confronting your partner with your concern. Avoidance and intrusion are equally dangerous ways to handle these moments. Instead, be direct about your concern, enlist the help of professional others, and review and plan collaboratively around issues of safety. This will keep you involved as a caring other without robbing the survivor of a sense of their autonomy. Also, keep in mind that these crises are usually very important benchmarks along the way in terms of the treatment and that a good therapy will make excellent use of these breakdowns as opportunities to repair underlying fragile states and the memories these states house within.

4. What do I do with my feelings about this process

Have your own support system in place. You do not have to be a survivor yourself to need a place to bring your reactions and feelings about sharing a life with someone who is. As the partner of a trauma survivor, it is common to feel cast in a supportive acting role, but you must be able to centre your own life and not feel lost in the margins of someone else’s story. It may not be possible to expect your partner to make you feel this way consistently, which is why you must create and maintain spaces in which your experience is centred. Your own therapy is an excellent place to do this. It cannot be stressed enough that being in a relationship with a survivor itself is grounds for getting treatment. Friendships and other relationships may also provide this kind of space. Maintain it.

5. I’m having a hard time believing these things happened

Denial and Disbelief, these are the weapons of perpetrators and because survivors themselves often have a degree of attachment to their perpetrators, they will have internalized representations that show up as denial, dissociation and disbelief themselves. It is ubiquitous that with trauma comes denial, and you should expect to find disbelief and uncertainty in your own reveries. It’s important not to get cast in the role of detective. It is not helpful to you or your partner to become the arbiter on truth. Know that when you come into contact with feelings of disbelief, you are resonating empathically with the mindset of both the perpetrator and the survivor and try to use the feeling to understand something about what your partner has to encounter regularly in coming to accept their own reality. Ultimately your partner will make sense of their story; you will bear witness to it.

6. Fatigue

Partners get tired! Tired of hearing about trauma, tired of living with the ways in which it limits and depletes interpersonal experience and collaborative functioning, not to mention the financial costs it asks of a person in treatment. Facing trauma costs everyone a great deal of time, emotional resources, and money. And yet with treatment a survivor - and the generations to follow - are given an opportunity out of suffering and repetition of the past – an arguably priceless investment. While you cannot avoid the costs, there are some things you can do to minimize depletion. A common impulse for partners may be to make their own needs, wishes, and desires smaller. This actually leads to resentment, which then hurts both you and the survivor. When you invite your loved one to participate in the here-and-now relationship with you, you give them an opportunity to remember that the present is not just a repetition of the past, but instead ripe with new potentials waiting to bloom. Being a partner who is able to communicate your needs and desires with the survivor albeit in emotionally attuned ways is very important. Overcome the common impulse to not make life ‘harder’ for the survivor by asking things of your partner. Not only are you taking care of yourself by making your desires known, you’re also giving a survivor a chance to participate in a reality that (hopefully) isn’t informed by their traumatic compliance. For many survivors, it’s a lot easier to bear the past when the present calls on their involvement in affirming interpersonal ways.