Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) happens when a person experiences something traumatic. Specifically, relationship PTSD or post-traumatic relationship syndrome/stress (PTRS) occurs when a person is traumatized by an abusive, intimate relationship.
Post-Traumatic Relationship Stress (PTRS) isanewly proposed mental health syndrome that occurs subsequent to the experience of trauma in an intimate relationship.
Knowing the symptoms and impact of post-traumatic relationships is helpful because it can help the person navigate and exit the toxic dynamic they have with their partner. Here are the symptoms to look for.
What Is Relationship PTSD?
Relationship PTSD happens when a person experiences physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in their intimate relationships. It’s linked with PTSD because the symptoms are similar.
Fundamental similarities between people who get PTSD and post-traumatic relationships lie in a person’s internal narrative around their identity and the world. Our core beliefs are what make us functional in life. They give a person a mental map of how the world works and how to act appropriately, making them feel secure.
Most of the time, the people who an abusive partner takes down are usually those who have an innocent outlook on the world. They tend to have maladaptive beliefs, such as love being the most essential thing in a relationship, but trust, respect, and affection not being so important. This is just one of the many innocent assumptions that a person can have.
What makes toxic relationships hard for people is that traumatic events in a relationship shatter the very core belief that a person holds, and in effect, they lose that sense of security, which makes them insecure.
The mind dislikes having a functional map to view the world. So, it constantly reviews past events so that the person can create a new narrative. If a person still gets anxious thinking about a negative experience that happened 18 months ago, that’s a good sign that the experience is indeed traumatic.
The mind attempts to fill the gaps in understanding by alarming the person with negative emotions that motivate them to look for answers about how they fell into a toxic relationship. Physical manifestations can include preoccupation, flashbacks, and anxiety. Although emotions are unpleasant, they are the mind’s best way to motivate the person to develop a healthier understanding of themselves and their relationships.
Forming toxic narratives around relationships is a common trap that people in abusive relationships fall into. It’s common for people who have been in a toxic relationship to either demonize or fully worship the opposite sex, which is just a form of fight-or-flight response towards a threat.
The bad thing about toxic narratives is that they keep the person anxious. It’s not healing and can even damage current and future relationships.
Although being in a toxic relationship is not recommended, it can be a wake-up call to develop a deeper, healthier understanding of what makes a relationship healthy and how to achieve it.
With that said, it’s worth noting that people who finally have understood and have acquired a healthy interpretation of toxic relationships will stop showing signs of PTSD-like symptoms. That’s because the mind can rest knowing that the person already understands.
Relationship PTSD Symptoms
The majority of the symptoms of relationship PTRS syndrome stem from the mind trying to form a narrative around the abuse. Common intrusive symptoms may include intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, nightmares, and insomnia.
Forming toxic narratives can also manifest as PTSD symptoms. For example, the belief that the person deserved the abuse can result in low self-esteem, shame, guilt, self-blame, and sexual dysfunction.
Those symptoms are unpleasant, and common coping mechanisms include fight-or-flight. In other words, an unhealthy coping response consists of the person accepting defeat to those feelings or outright fighting them. It’s common for people who are abused to switch coping reactions from time to time, but they generally stay on one of them.
Symptoms for people who have caved into their feelings of inferiority can include worshipping the other person, being a people pleaser, fawning to avoid conflict, loneliness, and isolation.
Symptoms for people who fight their feelings of inferiority can include demonizing the other sex, avoidance, increased irritability, and trust issues.
What Causes Relationship PTSD?
The cause of PTRS is physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Physical abuse is when the intimate partner becomes physically violent. This can include, hitting, threatening with harmful objects, or using one’s physical size to intimidate.
Emotional abuse includes treating the other person with disrespect, unwarranted criticism, manipulation, and creating dependence on the intimate partner.
Sexual abuse can include coercion or the forcing of sexual acts. Also, stringing someone with a sexual promise without ever intending to act on it is sexual abuse.
Effects of Relationship Trauma
Trust issues are the effect of relationship trauma. People who have been abused in relationships before will mentally associate intimacy with danger. They may become agitated with the thought of being intimate with people they find attractive. That makes it hard to form healthy closeness with them.
It’s also common for people who were abused to start being abusive to other people. It could be towards their intimate partner, friends, or family.
How to Heal from Relationship PTSD
Therapy
Healing from traumatic relationships requires the person to understand the nuance of toxic relationships. This is where therapy comes in handy. During the therapeutic session, the therapist can pinpoint the exact maladaptive beliefs that a person has. Their job is to challenge those beliefs and redirect the person toward a healthier one.
Write past experiences down in detail
If a person doesn’t have access to therapy – either because they can’t afford it or they live in a remote place where access to a mental health expert is difficult – writing about past experiences in detail is the best alternative.
The person will benefit from narrating the past, as objectively as possible, in order for them to properly see what actually happened. Of course, this is going to be triggering for about two weeks, but after that, people who do this will start to feel better about themselves.
In the writing, the person will lay out how they ended up with the toxic dynamic and admit the role they played no matter how minor it is. The point of that isn’t to beat themselves with guilt but to admit humility so that they can learn about their contribution and not do it in the future.
This is also a good time to look for the things that the person could have done better in the past and do them now in the present. Maybe the person could have said no and established boundaries in the past. Knowing that it could have been a long time ago, it’s time to do it now. The person may be awkward and bad at doing it now, but it’s better than nothing.
Writing about the past can help them objectively know what happened in the past, review what could have been done differently, and create strategies on how to navigate and exit an upcoming abusive relationship if it happens.
Develop a vision toward a healthy relationship
Recovery from an abusive relationship doesn’t just entail reviewing the past. It’s also good to develop a vision of what kind of healthy relationship the recovering person wants to have.
Most of the time, if the person starts having new relationships with people who care for them, their emotions start to autocorrect themselves. That’s because our minds are naturally self-healers. All we have to do is get out of the toxic relationship and spend more time with people who care for us.
Take your time to heal
People who are recovering from abusive relationships tend to want to fix their issues immediately. However, it’s important to understand the importance of patience because healing takes time.
We Provide Support for Those with PTSD from a Relationship
Recovering from a traumatic relationship can be confusing and triggering for the person who experienced the trauma. We at Luxe Recovery have been helping people with PTRS navigate through their recovery process.
