Love and trauma — loving someone with a difficult past

Trauma changes how the nervous system experiences safety, which means that loving someone who carries significant trauma involves understanding that certain responses — flight, freeze, rage, shutdown — are not about the present moment or about you. This does not make the responses easier to live with, but it does make them navigable with the right understanding. This domain examines what trauma does to intimate life and what both people need to make love possible within it.