Dating After Trauma: How to Heal and Build Emotional Intimacy
The thought of dating can bring a lot of feelings to the surface even in the best of circumstances. From excitement, worry, vulnerability, and so much more, these emotions can feel even more heightened when you are dating after trauma, particularly unresolved trauma. What might have felt only slightly emotionally or physically unsafe without trauma can become an overwhelming hurdle to jump.
If this sounds familiar, you aren’t alone and it doesn’t have to be this way forever. By understanding your trauma responses, you can heal and find happiness and emotional intimacy with another person. By understanding that your nervous system is simply trying to protect you, you can move more easily in the world without being too hard on yourself. You deserve emotional intimacy if that is something you desire!
Why Dating Feels Hard After Trauma and How to Recognize the Signs
Having experienced trauma in a relationship (familial or otherwise) creates a connection in the system that connection with another person is dangerous. When dating after trauma, your whole body, mind, and spirit will yell “This person isn’t safe! They will only hurt you!” as loud as it can until the possible connection is sabotaged unless it is checked. At a minimum, you might feel hypervigilant about that person abandoning or betraying you in some way, making it really difficult to experience contentment or joy in the relationship or dating process. Your brain will try to register this danger at any turn, even if none is present.
Common Trauma Responses When Dating:
Panic on a date (or the thought of it)
Shutting down emotionally
Overthinking your reactions or comments
Overthinking their responses to you
Preoccupation with the idea that they don’t like you
Difficulty trusting your instincts about this person because they have been wrong before
Healing tip: don’t be hard on yourself about this. It is easy to get caught up in the cultural narrative around having “daddy issues,” or “baggage,” or “trust issues,” but in reality the way in which you are reacting to dating after trauma is perfectly common and not to be judged. Self-compassion and understanding will help you move through this better than anything else.
How Unresolved Trauma Affects Attachment Styles in Relationships
There are a lot of ways that attachment changes due to interpersonal abuse or trauma that a person has experienced. In my therapy practice, I like for my clients to take an attachment style quiz to understand how this trauma has impacted them and how it might be showing up in their relationships now. Here is a good one that I like to give to people; what I enjoy about it is that it gives a good description of the different attachment styles, as well as shows you that you aren’t only one style.
Important thing to note: attachment styles aren’t fixed. Different people may bring out different attachment styles in us, and as we heal, our attachment style becomes more secure.
Common Trauma Responses That Affect Dating Behavior:
Fawning: being overly-accommodating to avoid conflict, tension, or rejection
Hypervigilance: reading too much into small behaviors, convincing yourself of the worst
Anxiety: feeling very worried about any perceived emotional distancing
Avoidance: pulling away when they come closer to you emotionally
Difficulty with boundaries: saying yes to things you don’t want to do
Reminder: these trauma responses were survival strategies and it is not helpful to pathologize them.
Building Emotional Safety While Dating After Trauma
If you get anything from this blog, I want it to be this: you don’t have to be perfectly “healed” from your trauma in order to start a meaningful connection with somebody. With self-compassion, self-care, and self-awareness (along with therapeutic support), you can feel great while dating!
Regulating your nervous system prior to a date can help relieve anxiety.
Somatic Awareness Techniques for Nervous System Regulation
Cultivate an internal sense of safety by listening to your body’s cues instead of dismissing them because you’ve been taught they’re “too much” or inconvenient.
Before a date if you start to have some anxiety, try these things to help regulate your nervous system:
Check in to see where you feel anxious in your body. What is the quality of that sensation (numb, tingling, heavy, tense, for example)?
Ask what your body is trying to tell you at that moment
This is when you can really start to reality test your body’s assumptions that it is in danger, and speak to that part of you that is scared. Practice grounding, deep breaths, or get creative with what you feel like your nervous system wants to do at that moment.
Learn About How Somatic Experiencing Can Help >
Slowing Down and Honoring Your Needs
Trauma reactions come on quickly and strongly. Automatic reactions are common with trauma, because of the amygdala’s over-reactivity to triggers. By slowing down, however, you can create some time for your problem-solving, forward-thinking brain to come online. Remind yourself that you have time, and regulate your nervous system by breathing, doing some yoga, stretching, drinking tea, or making a healthy snack. Give yourself permission to move at a pace that feels right.
Ways to Practice Slowing Down While Dating After Trauma
Take time before responding to texts.
Limit how often you see the person at first if it feels too overwhelming
Say “I’m not ready yet” to physical intimacy.
Ask for space before deciding on plans.
Expressing Emotional Needs in New Relationships
Relational trauma, in whatever its form, communicates to the person that their needs aren’t important. It becomes safer for that person to abandon their needs than to get them met. If a person has had the experience that their needs push people away, overwhelm others, make others angry, and so on, they are likely to repress their natural needs and wants.
Healthy relationships honor both party’s needs. Although dating after trauma might be scary at first, and might require the help from a trauma therapist, asking for what you need and want from your partner is essential for happiness in a relationship.
Here are ways that a healthy person will respond to you expressing your desires:
Thank you for letting me know!
I’m happy you shared your feelings with me, it makes me feel closer to you.
How else can I help you?
What else do you need from me?
I feel lucky that you shared that with me.
Long story short, they should make you feel like a blessing, not a burden (because you are).
How to Tell the Difference Between Trauma Triggers and Present Reality
Waves of fear, panic, and overwhelm happen when trauma is triggered. Trauma triggers bring the person right back in time to when the worst of the event was happening, making it difficult to convince the nervous system that it is, indeed, safe now.
Here are a few ways to counteract trauma triggers when dating after trauma:
Orient to the present (example here)
Use a mantra that makes you feel safe
Do something physical with the energy present in your body
Use a cold compress on the neck or chest
Seeking Help: Why Therapy Can Support Relationship Healing
The best thing you can do for yourself long term is find a somatic therapist or EMDR therapist who can help you to understand why you are responding the way that you are, and to help you reduce the emotional intensity associated with the trauma. Healing from trauma is not a quick process, but a very worthwhile one. These coping skills listed are all super helpful, but the overall goal is to make it so that the trauma triggers don’t happen anymore.
You Deserve Love
Dating after trauma is hard work. You will be reminded of ways in which others have profoundly wounded you, and it might feel very scary to let another person in. However, developing a healthy attachment with somebody new is possible.
If you’re having a hard time in relationships and dating and are tired of navigating the healing process alone, reach out to me to explore how we can overcome your trauma together! You deserve to feel safe again.
Frequently Asked Questions About Dating After Trauma
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Dating can trigger trauma responses such as hypervigilance, emotional shutdown, or fear of abandonment. These reactions are survival mechanisms and not personal failures.
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Yes. You don’t have to be fully healed to start dating. With self-awareness, boundaries, and possibly therapeutic support, safe emotional connections are absolutely possible.
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Trauma can disrupt trust, increase fear of vulnerability, and lead to avoidant or anxious behaviors. Understanding your trauma responses can help you build intimacy safely.
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Deep breathing, somatic check-ins, orienting to your surroundings, and using physical anchors (like a cold compress) can help regulate your nervous system before or during dates.
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Signs include disproportionate fear, intense emotional reactions, body tension, or avoidance behaviors. Noticing these signs can help differentiate between past trauma and present safety.
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Absolutely. Trauma-informed therapy, including somatic therapy or EMDR, can reduce emotional intensity and help you feel more secure and empowered in relationships.
Stevie Olson-Spiegel is a Licensed Therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner located in Kansas City. She uses Somatic Experiencing as her main body-based trauma healing modality, as well as EMDR. As an Intuitive Eating Counselor, she uses these principles to help her clients challenge their relationship with their cultural misconceptions about their body and food.
