[Issue #29] In the Name of Love

A broad exploration on the impact of trauma and PTSD in intimate partnership

“Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure…This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise.”

-Bell Hooks, “All About Love”

Bell Hooks is right, you know. The news itself is an endless barrage of negative, world-ending views and opinions, horrifying facts and acts of violence, and a desperate lack of acknowledged benevolence - which I choose to believe exists because, how can all this terrible shit happen, and nothing good come of it?

My wife pulls me in and nestles her head into the crook of my neck. I kiss her collar bone and feel the back of her breath, lungs expand and deflate, a deep sigh washes over both of us and she tells me, “I like your hugs.”

I stumbled through a response, my reaction being one of total shock. Not because my wife doesn’t extend compliments to me. I’m shocked because I realize, in this moment, how many of these wonderful, beautiful compliments slip right through me, my brain too full of anxious fuzz and nauseating fear to hear my wife’s words of love.

The irony sits with me. My Love Language is Words of Affirmation, and yet, I hardly hear them. I do, however, pick out and hear whatever my brain labels as negative, without help or awareness.

This seeming inability to hear the positive stuff is a broad symptom of complex trauma and PTSD. The good news is, we can train our brains to hear more of the positive stuff, too, while still holding space for the negative. After all, if we’ve learned anything from this newsletter, we’ve learned that everything requires balance. Otherwise, shit will hit the fan.

Last week, we dove into some pretty hard-hitting stuff. We touched on abuse and what the abuse cycle looks like. We learned that aggression can be abusive, and that true, healthy love is not a relationship formed through trauma-bonding.

This week, we’re exploring the role of post traumatic stress disorder within intimate partnership and how to manage our PTSD symptoms so that we may embark upon, and flourish in, our romantic partnerships.

When you have PTSD, romantic love feels like a game of Russian roulette. Your anxiety spikes, you see holes and dark-shadowed agendas where there’s probably only a couple stops at the Tasty Freeze and phone calls to friends.

Where there’s loving touches of affection, like hand holding and hugging, your skin feels tight because your defenses sharpen (against your will) because your brain’s entire neurobiology has rewired itself to protect you from any and all trauma like that of before.

Where there’s a long date-night out on the town, strolling through the streets with glazed lips and smiling eyes, PTSD clouds up the view. PTSD distorts the whole thing so you think everyone is an enemy, and by 7 PM, you’re ready to leave, retreat to the comfort of the quiet inside your home because you’re not convinced the guy at the ice cream shop didn’t seem shady.

And sex?

Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Intimacy is deeply affected by our mental health - not just those of us suffering from PTSD, but all of us. If our family life is stressful, or work sucks, we’re potentially more likely to distract and avoid using sex, or we’ll avoid and isolate which makes having sex difficult.

There’s medications, rituals, products, the list goes on to help bridge the physical gap within intimacy. But PTSD doesn’t hit the physical body - it hits, haunts, our memories, our visions of the future, our expectations and beliefs. PTSD finds its home inside our souls, if we let it go on too long. PTSD turns us into sad shells of creatures and outside ourselves. PTSD makes us afraid of everything. Ourselves, you, friends, the world, the stories in our heads. There’s no medication that can truly cure this condition. We’ll be getting into medicines and natural remedies for our mental health struggles in the coming months, but for now, let’s go with the current state of things; that is, mental health and intimacy aren’t covered within popular media nearly enough. Or studied much, either, from what I can tell.

So, while I have some resources guiding me as I write this, the research is scant and I’m largely going into a dark room, flashlight on E.

We’ve covered neurobiology quite a bit (and if you’re a nerd like me, you should check out We know how the neurobiology behind love and intimacy works, but we haven’t much studied the intersection between the neurobiology of PTSD and that of

What’s Love Got to Do With It

OT is also involved in attenuating the neurophysiological and neurochemical effects of trauma on the brain and body by facilitating both physical attachment such as wound healing, and psychological/social attachment, thereby increasing resilience to subsequent traumatic events.