When Two Survival Systems Fall in Love
By Adrian J. Connolly, MA, LCPC, LPC
Imagine two smoke alarms moving in together.
Neither one is broken. Neither one is trying to make life difficult. Both have simply learned that keeping everyone safe is an important part of their job.
Now imagine someone making toast.
One alarm sounds. The other responds to the first. Before long, both are reacting to a danger that isn’t actually there.
Complex trauma can sometimes work in a similar way within relationships.
Many couples come to therapy believing they have a communication problem. While communication may certainly be part of the difficulty, something deeper may also be happening.
Each partner brings a nervous system shaped by earlier experiences. When those experiences included trauma, emotional neglect, inconsistency, criticism, abandonment, or relationships that did not feel safe, the nervous system may have learned particular ways of protecting itself.
Those protective responses don’t disappear simply because we enter a loving relationship.
Sometimes they become most visible there.
You Didn’t Marry Your Partner’s Trauma
But you may encounter the ways they learned to survive it.
One partner may become quiet during conflict while the other becomes more insistent.
One may need reassurance while the other needs space.
One wants to resolve the disagreement immediately. The other needs time before they can even understand what they’re feeling.
Neither response is necessarily random.
Each may make sense when understood in the context of that person’s earlier experiences.
The difficulty is that strategies that once helped someone remain emotionally safe can create distance within an adult relationship. Withdrawal may feel protective to one partner and rejecting to the other. Seeking reassurance may feel necessary to one person and overwhelming to someone who learned to cope by becoming self-reliant.
Understanding these patterns doesn’t mean that every behavior is acceptable. It means becoming curious about what lies underneath the behavior rather than assuming that the behavior tells us everything about the person.
If you recognize this pattern, you may also find Why Do I Keep People at a Distance? How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adult Relationships helpful.
Relationships Can Become Time Machines
One of the lasting effects of trauma is that experiences from the past can quietly become activated in the present.
Imagine that your partner forgets to send a text.
On the surface, it is simply a missed message.
But for someone with a history of abandonment or inconsistent caregiving, that silence may carry a much deeper meaning.
Another person may experience questions about the missed message as controlling or intrusive because earlier relationships taught them that closeness came with demands.
Suddenly, two people are responding not only to what happened today, but also to what similar experiences came to mean much earlier in life.
This is one reason relationship conflicts can sometimes feel disproportionately intense.
The nervous system recognizes patterns before the thinking mind has necessarily had time to consider whether the present situation is actually the same as the past.
Healing involves gradually learning to recognize the difference.
Sometimes the Person in Front of You Feels Like Someone From the Past
A partner may simply say:
“Can we talk?”
Yet for someone whose earlier experiences associated conflict with criticism, rejection, anger, or punishment, those words may register very differently.
Before there has been time to consider what the partner actually means, the nervous system may already be preparing for threat.
The person may become defensive, withdraw, shut down, become angry, or immediately try to repair something that hasn’t actually gone wrong.
Their partner then responds to that reaction, and a cycle begins.
Trauma can make it difficult to distinguish between what is happening now and what the present moment reminds us of.
Part of healing is learning to notice when an old expectation has entered a current relationship.
Your Nervous System Doesn’t Read Calendars
We may understand intellectually that something happened many years ago while still responding emotionally and physically as though some part of the experience is happening now.
The nervous system is less concerned with dates than with detecting possible danger.
A particular tone of voice, facial expression, period of silence, disagreement, or feeling of distance may resemble something that was once genuinely threatening.
The body can respond before we have consciously understood why.
This is why someone may say:
“I know my reaction doesn’t make sense.”
Often, the reaction makes considerably more sense when we understand what that person’s nervous system learned in the past.
Understanding the reaction does not excuse hurtful behavior.
Compassion and accountability can exist together.
When we understand why a protective response developed, we have a better starting point for changing what happens next.
When Different Survival Strategies Meet
Trauma can shape several familiar protective responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn.
Within a relationship, those responses can interact in complicated ways.
One person may pursue while the other withdraws.
One becomes louder while the other becomes quiet.
One apologizes quickly to restore harmony while the other needs distance before they can reconnect.
One experiences space as abandonment while the other experiences closeness during conflict as pressure.
Neither partner necessarily intends to create this cycle.
They may simply have learned different ways of finding safety.
Over time, the protective response of one partner can activate the protective response of the other. The more one pursues, the more the other withdraws. The more one withdraws, the more urgently the other seeks connection.
Eventually, both people may feel misunderstood.
If shutting down during conflict is particularly familiar, you may find Why Do I Shut Down During Conflict? Understanding the Freeze Response helpful.
The Problem Isn’t Usually the Dishes
Couples sometimes describe arguments about seemingly ordinary things: dishes, household responsibilities, a forgotten errand, being late, or not responding to a message.
The immediate disagreement matters.
But so does what it comes to represent.
A disagreement about the dishes can quietly become:
“I don’t matter.”
“I’m carrying everything.”
“Nothing I do is enough.”
“I can’t depend on anyone.”
“I’m being criticized again.”
The intensity of a conflict often makes more sense when we understand the meaning each person has attached to it.
Trauma can make those meanings particularly powerful because present-day experiences may connect with older beliefs about ourselves and relationships.
Trauma Can Fill in the Gaps
When relationships have been unpredictable in the past, uncertainty can be difficult to tolerate.
A sigh may be interpreted as disappointment.
Silence may feel like rejection.
A request may sound like criticism.
Distance may awaken fears of abandonment.
The mind fills in what it doesn’t know using what it has learned before.
For some people, this can lead to people-pleasing: closely monitoring another person’s mood, anticipating what they need, or trying to prevent conflict before it happens.
These patterns are not signs of weakness. They often developed because paying close attention to other people once felt necessary.
If this sounds familiar, you may also find Why Do I People-Please? Understanding the Trauma Behind People Pleasing helpful.
What Makes Complex Trauma Therapy for Couples Different?
Traditional couples therapy often focuses on communication, conflict resolution, and helping partners better understand one another.
Those things remain important.
Trauma-informed couples therapy also asks:
What is each person’s nervous system trying to protect?
Before asking couples to have increasingly vulnerable conversations, it can be helpful to understand what happens to each person when tension begins to rise.
Who pursues?
Who withdraws?
Who becomes defensive?
Who shuts down?
Who apologizes simply to make the conflict stop?
Who experiences a request for space as abandonment?
Who experiences a request to talk as criticism or pressure?
Understanding these patterns can help couples recognize that they are often responding not simply to each other, but to the meanings their nervous systems have learned to associate with conflict, closeness, vulnerability, and distance.
Therapy may therefore begin by slowing the cycle down.
Rather than immediately entering the most emotionally charged conversations, we may first work on recognizing triggers, understanding protective responses, strengthening emotional regulation, and developing greater safety within the relationship.
This doesn’t mean avoiding difficult issues.
It creates a stronger foundation from which those issues can eventually be explored.
Emerging research into Developmental Couple Therapy for Complex Trauma has begun examining approaches designed specifically for couples affected by complex trauma. In a small implementation pilot involving seven couples, participants showed improvements in trauma symptoms, emotion regulation, and attachment-related anxiety. These findings are encouraging, although larger studies are needed before conclusions can be drawn about effectiveness.
The goal isn’t to decide which partner is right.
It’s to understand what happens between two people when each person’s protective system begins responding to the other.
Healing Happens Within Relationships
When both partners are activated, it can be difficult for either person to feel calm.
Over time, couples can learn to recognize these moments earlier and find ways of helping themselves—and one another—return to greater emotional safety.
Sometimes your calm becomes your partner’s calm.
Sometimes theirs becomes yours.
This doesn’t mean either person becomes responsible for regulating the other’s emotions. Rather, both partners can learn how their tone, timing, presence, and responses influence what happens between them.
Practical skills can also be useful. Approaches drawn from DBT can help with emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and communicating effectively when emotions are intense.
Individual trauma therapy may sometimes complement couples work as well. Approaches such as EMDR Therapy, Somatic Experiencing®, and Parts Work (Ego State Therapy) can help individuals better understand and work with trauma responses that also emerge within their relationships.
Over time, couples may become better able to notice when an old pattern has been activated without allowing that pattern to determine what happens next.
Healing Doesn’t Mean Never Arguing Again
Healthy relationships still include disagreement.
Partners misunderstand one another. They become frustrated. Sometimes they say things poorly or need time before they can reconnect.
The goal of therapy isn’t to eliminate these experiences.
What can change is what happens during and after them.
Arguments may become less intense.
Repair may happen sooner.
Both partners may become better able to remain curious rather than immediately assuming they know what the other person means.
They may also become more able to recognize the vulnerability beneath anger, defensiveness, withdrawal, or criticism.
For some people, that vulnerability is connected to a much older sense of shame—the feeling that conflict means there is something fundamentally wrong with them.
If that experience is familiar, you may find Why Do I Feel So Ashamed? Understanding Shame After Childhood Trauma helpful.
Gradually, couples can begin asking:
“What happened inside you just now?”
rather than:
“What’s wrong with you?”
That shift—from judgment toward curiosity—can create room for something different to happen.
Becoming Safer Partners
When complex trauma is part of a relationship, couples can sometimes feel as though they’re pulling on opposite ends of the same rope.
The harder one person pulls, the harder the other pulls back.
Eventually, both become exhausted.
Neither person may actually be the enemy.
The struggle may be with old fears, old expectations, and protective responses that developed when relationships did not always feel safe.
Those responses deserve understanding.
So do the people carrying them.
Healing isn’t about becoming perfect partners.
It’s about becoming safer partners.
Partners who can pause before reacting.
Partners who recognize when an old survival response has entered a present-day conversation.
Partners who can take responsibility when they hurt one another without becoming overwhelmed by shame.
Partners who gradually learn that today’s relationship doesn’t have to be governed by yesterday’s pain.
Conflict will still happen.
But the relationship can become a place where conflict no longer automatically means danger, rejection, abandonment, or loss.
And perhaps this is one of the most hopeful possibilities for couples affected by complex trauma.
The relationships in which old wounds are sometimes activated can also become relationships in which new experiences of safety, trust, repair, and connection are gradually created.
Complex Trauma Therapy for Couples
If you recognize some of these patterns in your own relationship, you don’t need to have everything figured out before reaching out.
Trauma-informed therapy can help couples better understand the protective patterns that emerge between them, slow down cycles of conflict, and develop new ways of responding to one another.
If you’d like to explore whether working together might be helpful, I offer a free 15-minute consultation.
References
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Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge.
Herman, J. L. (2022). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Revised ed.). Basic Books.
Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment Theory in Practice: Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with Individuals, Couples, and Families. Guilford Press.
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.
MacIntosh, H. B. (2024). Developmental Couple Therapy for Complex Trauma: Results of an Implementation Pilot Study. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 50(3), 545–566.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
