Acceptance of love after trauma is a feeling that not many people understand. You are often seen as an uptight, arrogant person who plays hard to get. But few know about the battle inside you where you feel hopeless, and loved, but can’t let go of your fear and trauma.
When you feel uncomfortable accepting love, it doesn’t mean that you don’t believe in it, it’s just that you find it hard to believe that love isn’t meant to hurt. Because of your traumatic experiences, you have come to associate love with pain, hurt, and disappointment, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t bring yourself to see that true love is never supposed to hurt, it is supposed to make your heart feel full.
If you can relate to everything we’ve talked about so far, let’s learn more about the signs you’re having a hard time accepting post-traumatic love. Perhaps reading these signs out loud can help you understand and deal with your pain. So, let’s get started, shall we?
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7 Signs you have a hard time accepting love after a trauma
- Never feel at peace in any relationship, even if your partner is a good person.
When you get into a new relationship, you can’t bring yourself to be happy and peaceful in it. Your partner may be a very good person and genuinely love you for who you are, but you find it very difficult to let go and trust your past painful experiences. Because of your past toxic relationship or childhood trauma, you always find yourself doubting your partner’s intentions and words.
Childhood trauma affects attachment to a relationship to a great extent, and not only that, even if you force yourself to look at things in an optimistic way, this mindset is most of the time short-lived. Trying to read between the lines, doubting your partner, not believing their compliments, and constantly thinking that they are going to leave you too, will affect you and after a point, your partner and the relationship too.
- You suffer from abandonment anxiety.
When you suffer from abandonment anxiety, you are either extremely clingy to your partner or are constantly pushing them away for fear of being abandoned. You want to love, but you cannot love. You don’t want to be clingy, but you can’t help it. You don’t mean to push them away, but you’re so afraid of getting your heart broken again.
This is what trauma does to you. It takes away all your joy, happiness, and faith and leaves you with a veneer of the person you once were. Also, there is no middle ground. You will either feel completely dependent on your partner, or you will refuse to accept their love and support.
- You’re looking for true love in the wrong people.
Looking for love with the wrong kind of person is one of the biggest signs that you are having trouble accepting love after a trauma. Whether it was traumatic childhood experiences, or past toxic relationships, because you were taught that love is supposed to hurt, you chase after people who treat you like trash.
You refuse to understand that you deserve better; You keep falling for people who are no match for you and like every time you are the one who is left with a broken heart. The more hurt and disappointed you are, the more you will believe that this is what love is supposed to feel like and that you will never be happy again in your life.
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- You suffer from cleavage.
Dichotomy occurs when you tend to see things from a very black-and-white point of view, and this is also on a subconscious level. How you feel about someone now may suddenly change the next moment. For example, you may feel happy and in love with your partner but after just a few minutes, you find yourself annoyed with him.
Almost all the time, your emotions are all over the place, and even though you’re aware of that, you don’t seem to understand what you need to do to feel more emotionally stable. Separation makes you feel more emotionally distressed and unstable and this leads to more complications in your relationship.
- You suffer from traumatic flashbacks.
It’s not easy to let go of the past, especially when you’ve been through a lot of trauma. If you grew up with abusive parents, it can be very difficult to get out of that painful cycle because your parents are after all. It’s hard to forget the way they treated you because that’s the only kind of “love” you’ve known since you came into this world.
Being in toxic and abusive relationships can destroy your mental and emotional health. You keep reliving those bad times and this keeps you in a vicious cycle of painful and painful memories. Your memories are extreme and intense and these memories can be very painful and unwelcome.
- You have tendencies to self-harm and self-numb.
When it’s so hard to deal with the pain of the past, you give in to harmful things, hoping they’ll help you deal with it all, or rather numb you from it all. Whether it’s physical self-harm or psycho-emotional abuse, the effect is the same – it pushes you further into self-destruction.
Engaging in toxic practices may make you feel better in the short term, but unfortunately, it will prove harmful to you in the long run. You can run away from your true feelings for a while, but after some point, they are bound to catch up to you. Drug abuse and addiction will never help you live a happy life, it will only make it worse and more difficult to deal with.
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- You feel guilty all the time.
This is one of the main reasons why you may have difficulty accepting love in adulthood. You feel guilty for not seeing the signs earlier. You feel guilty that you were not strong enough to leave them sooner. You feel guilty for not moving on faster. You feel guilty for getting involved with them in the first place. And, perhaps most painfully, you feel guilty for not being a “better” son/daughter for your parents.
You keep berating yourself for the “mistakes” you’ve made, without realizing that none of them was your fault; You are just a victim of your circumstances. It wasn’t you who let them down, they let you down!
The next time you ask yourself, “Why am I so afraid to accept love?” Remember, you’ve been through a lot in your life, and beating yourself up for it all the time will only hurt you more.
It’s hard to accept love when you’ve been through trauma, but you know something? He will be fine. Will be okay. You are not shocked, and you are more than shocked. You are so much more than your toxic relationships and neglectful parents. It may be hard to see this now, but trust me when I tell you this: You deserve all the good things in life and so much more.
