(If you came here and you missed the first part about being a safe person for beginners, please follow the link and read that first. It is the foundation for everything we do in a deeper relationship as well.)
When you are not just someone who sometimes gets in contact with traumatized people but you are someone important in the life of a survivor, who is willing to walk the walk with them, you will need a certain set of character traits and relationship skills for us all to be safe in the relationship. We struggle with our symptoms, with the beliefs and relationship skills we were raised with, with trust in any human being and with memories of terrible relational experiences that are overshadowing our current ones. Being in a relationship with us can be demanding, frustrating and painful at times. We need you to have self-control. Here is what that looks like:
Be predictable. Do what you said you would do. Tell us in advance if you need to change plans. Don’t just change plans without telling us at all. It helps when you have certain rituals or routines that we can observe, even if that is just a handshake, the way you drink your coffee or a way you organize yourself or our time together. The more predictable you are the more relaxed we can be in your presence. When you are consistent in the way you respond to our needs we might even let you come a bit closer.
Be on time. Punctuality is incredibly important for us because it means that you are predictable, reliable, responsible and therefore trustworthy. We struggle to trust anyone. The more reliable you behave the more trust we can have. And being on time is one of those classic situations where we pay attention to what you promise and how well you keep it. We carefully observe how well your words align with your deeds.
Be truthful. It means being authentic and sharing vulnerability. We chronically suck at vulnerability because we experienced it as something dangerous and painful. So we will protect ourselves in all kinds of ways, using control, manipulation or intimidation. If you return that, it is a confirmation that we are still not safe, that the rules of TraumaTime still apply. We need you to make yourself a target by sharing your truth. I can’t promise that we will never shoot at that target, you will get hurt (this is true for every vulnerable relationship, so we all better learn how to manage that without hurting the relationship even more!). You being truthful gives us a chance to trust you.
It also encourages us to be truthful as well and slowly take down our protections. We learned that these protections save our life. It takes extraordinary courage to lower them. We need pretty much unconditional love, acceptance and support when we first experience safety in a relationship. We usually have deep issues of chronic shame that can make it terribly painful to share our truth, we expect that people will leave or hate us when they learn who we really are inside. Being seen for who we really are becomes one of the scariest things in our life. You will see all that fear when you try to come closer. It is not pretty and we might run and hide.
Based on being truthful, make sure we talk about things that are important. We are often used to just silently endure things that are hurtful because we learned that saying something won’t make a difference. We might not be able to start a conversation. But we can learn, if we experience lots of open conversations about heart topics where we can see that it is safe and makes a difference and increases connection and love.
Don’t be angry with us if we lose track of the conversation. Sometimes our memory doesn’t work properly, we zoned out for a moment (or switched) and we feel bad enough about having to ask what you just said. It kind of sucks that we will have slips like that more often when you share emotionally difficult things but that is really because our nervous system is not strong enough to support you and it’s not because we think that what you have to say is unimportant. We will not be able to meet all your emotional needs the way you would need it. You have to have other people to talk to for that. We will fail you and it is not our fault, but you have to expect it and plan for it. Have someone safe you can go to when we mess up. If we are your only close relationship we are both in trouble.
Don’t ask us about details of our trauma story. This will keep all of us safe. We might open up something inside we don’t know how to contain again and suffer as a result. And you might hurt your soul just listening to things that bad. It usually changes your thoughts and behavior towards us and rarely makes a relationship better. Sometimes people who get too deeply involved with someones trauma history will start to show signs of PTSD themselves. So if you start to have nightmares or insomnia, anxiety, hyperarousal or pictures haunting you, you need to step back and find help for yourself.
If you are not our therapist, don’t try to take that role. Even if we are super needy and tend to overshare because we don’t have any personal boundaries, don’t take that role. You will under-estimate the situation and get both of us hurt. If you have this romantic idea that your perfect love will heal all our wounds, please find therapy for your savior-complex and refrain from abusing us for that.
Be a powerful person.
Define the relationship. Maybe you want to use the circles of relationships for support. We need to know where we stand with you, what we can expect, where you would place us in your life, who gets the higher priority in your life and in our life, on what level of intimacy our exchange should be, all that and more. It is ok to speak about the relationship, goals of the friendship or partnership and our expectation. It might actually save us all from confusion and misunderstandings.
Regulate your own emotions and physiological states. First regulate yourself, then engage with us. We have spider senses for your stress levels and we will get stressed, with an increase in symptoms, by just being around you if you don’t manage your stress.
We are also very good at picking up other people’s emotions, but we are not always good at interpreting what we sensed. If you are burning with anger in our presence we will think it is because of us or that you will show aggression towards us. It helps when you explain the real reason why you are angry. Getting more angry with us because we react scared is not helping.
Don’t expect us to help you regulate your strong emotions, many of us struggle to get by ourselves and we might be overwhelmed with helping you. We might even be really good at co-regulating you but don’t make us responsible for that, that is a form of emotional abuse many of us know from our mothers. Regulation is ultimately the job of the person experiencing the dysregulation.
That means that you are also not responsible to regulate us and you wouldn’t do us a favor if that was a standard agreement between us. It is called co-dependency and it is the opposite of being powerful. If you always do things for us we cannot learn how to do them for ourselves and you will always have to be there for us, giving up your own freedom, and minimizing ours. So protect us from your own tendencies to want to help every time, but co-regulate when needed. Just don’t work harder on our problems than we do.
Remember that your physiological state is contagious for us. When you keep calm, we will become calm. When you are stressed, we get stressed. But because of our PTSD that always comes with an increase in symptoms, we don’t just get mildly stressed. You do us a great service when you make it a priority to have a regulated body.
It gets a little more difficult to stay regulated when we are not (our stress might be contagious too) so it might need some effort of calm breathing to keep cool while we are not. If you empathize too much you actually lose your ability to help us because you get drawn into the drama. Sometimes we don’t need you to understand, we need you to be grounded. Don’t use a harsh voice or flat face on us when we are dysregulated, it is not a sign that you are doing well with your self-regulation and makes things worse for us.
Communicate your own wishes and needs openly. Don’t try to give us hints or communicate hidden expectation or use emotional blackmail. All this is emotionally abusive. You do us a favor if you point it out to us in a loving and caring way if we do that kind of thing to you. We often grew up in families where manipulation was normal and we need help to learn how to communicate properly, that is directly and with words. Please don’t judge our weakness in this area, we are not doing it on purpose, this is literally how we were taught by our parents and sometimes it helped us to survive, to the point that it might cause fear of death to try something new. We just need time and patience to learn to do it differently and you are helping by giving us a safe example.
Relationship ruptures happen. Sometimes it’s your fault, sometimes it is ours, sometimes there was miscommunication, a misunderstanding, we were triggered and our flight/fight/freeze response kept us from being properly engaged or understanding an exchange. Often there is some transference happening. Be ready to fix relationship ruptures quickly and without a fuss. Make sure to communicate the ‘I love you’ message first and when we are in a state where we can understand it. Don’t argue with us when we are in hyperarousal or shutdown. When a rupture happens we are often very scared of losing you, so it would help to get that out of the way first. Don’t ever use blame on us. Let us figure out what happened and why it happened together and with curiosity instead of judgment.
Keep healthy boundaries with us and in all your relationships. We always observe how you treat others. Be ok with our ‘no’. That is one of the most important things you can ever do for us, respecting our boundaries wherever they might be, without trying to challenge them. When we can’t meet a need, don’t push us.
Set healthy boundaries with us, don’t give beyond what you give with joy. Not time, not attention, not resources. We can sometimes be very needy and scared and we don’t have a lot of people to turn to, but if we hurt our relationship with you by crossing your boundaries all the time, that will end the friendship sooner or later and then our loss would be complete. We do have spider senses for love that is not given freely too and it will take the edge off our pain but we will always know and it won’t fill the deep void we feel. More
Allow us to make choices and don’t take them away from us because we are struggling with them, it will just reinforce our sense of helplessness. If we get stressed and feel pressure to make a fast choice our brain can sometimes shut down and we can’t think clearly anymore. It helps to give us some space or a short break where we can distract ourselves with a safe topic and then come back to the decision. When our brain shuts down, no pressure in the world can make it work again, so don’t push! We are actually incapable of thinking at that moment. More
Don’t use any form of punishment in our relationship. Not by giving us pain or removing resources, not by giving us the silent treatment or paying us back in some childish way. Punishment is a tool of the abusers and it makes you an abuser. Work with communication and consequences and proper confrontation to get to the root of the problem. Punishment demands submission and obedience and when our relationship gets to this point and that is how we usually interact with each other, the relationship can rarely be saved. We exchanged love for fear and control. There is nothing safe in that.
Confront whenever you see us use punishment on you. We grew up with this and we always believed it was normal. We might need help to learn proper relationship skills. Please don’t judge us for not knowing any better people skills yet. But don’t let it pass without a confrontation. We can only learn how to manage healthy relationships when we are confronted with our problematic behaviors while we are also secure in the knowledge that they will not destroy our relationship. We need room for mistakes so we can learn from them and learning this together will make our relationship deeper.
We might react extremely scared and dysregulated to confrontation. Some move to attack (anger or blame), some move towards manipulation (self-shaming or negotiation), but we rarely react appropriately at first. Those are the only defense strategies we know from trauma time. We don’t know that confrontation could be safe. We are used to punishment or abandonment. We can only learn that you confront safely when you a) confront and b) don’t use punishment and c) don’t just abandon us. It is that simple. We can only learn that there is room for mistakes if you give us grace with our mistakes. We can only correct our behavior when we know it needs to be corrected and only realize that what we grew up with is not normal when you help us to see what normal would look like.
We need you to have decent people skills to learn decent people skills. And we need you to use them on us long before we are able to return anything close to proper relationship behavior, because we often don’t have these skills. It is not our fault, but we need to take responsibility and learn them. Until we get there, we need you to show superior skills to ours.
Let me be very clear about this: If you judge us, you can’t help us. We might have messy ways of coping and lousy people skills. But if you judge us for having a victim mentality, please go and help someone else. Your judgment isn’t going to bring any healthy fruit in our life. It creates an atmosphere where we have to hide our real selves and how has hiding problems ever helped to solve them? Always believe that we are doing the best we are currently capable of and go from there. Only if we try to find the root of the problem together, in compassionate connection, there will be change. There is always a good reason for being stuck, even if it seems irrational to you. It used to make sense in TraumaTime, I promise.
I make it sound kind of bad. The truth is that survivors rarely show all the problems that could be created by chronic trauma. Usually it is a difficulty here and there, we are not terrible people. Most of us are actually very compassionate, sensitive and caring. Some of the wisest people I know have a background of childhood trauma. You should still have the full set of skills because it is impossible to tell where problems might arise in your particular relationship.
Dr Karen Treisman summed things up as
Safe hands, thinking minds, regulated bodies
‘Safe hands’ stands for all your actions, not just touch, a lot of them are actually verbal, that should communicate safety for us.
‘Thinking minds’ means that you keep us, and our special needs or triggers, in mind during the time we share together and maybe beyond that. It includes the understanding that our broken relational behavior is not a character flaw but the only tools we learned as children and that our physiological state determines our thoughts and abilities.
‘Regulated bodies’ are the foundation of co-regulation, your almost magical ability to help us to calm down by being grounded and present with us.
All these skills will make you a safer person for everyone in your life, not just your survivor friend. They are worth learning, because they make you a healthy person and that attracts other healthy relationships to your life. You don’t learn all that for us. If you have children, it will make you the best possible parent too.
If you are a part in a DID system, all these skills will make you the catalyst for healing in your system. The other parts need someone safe to turn to and you can become that someone.
If you want to support us, learn about the different stress responses and our coping strategies, especially DBT Skills, orientation and grounding exercises, distractions that work well for us and how to assist in stopping dissociation. It is better to use things that we have taught you and remind us of them, when we are too stressed to remember them ourselves, than to try completely new strategies that might not work well or even be triggering.
If you want to be friends with someone with cPTSD it pays off to take the time to learn about symptoms and what helps to reduce them. It makes us feel a lot safer in your presence and gives us greater courage to face more of life when you are at our side. It means that we can experience more freedom and beautiful things without the constant fear of being alone and exposed in case we run into a problem. With a person who knows what they are doing at our side, we might conquer our fears and create an almost normal life.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.
If you are a survivor yourself, what are the things you need in a relationship to feel safe with other people?
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honestly the only people it is appropriate to demand this level of perfection from is – maybe – therapist (and they are only able of being this because the relationship is so obviously non-reciprocal and you never have to see a therapist being messy & troubled).
even really well-adjusted people will not be able to perfectly control and regulate their physiology always, to never ever ever ever need or demand anything from you emotionally, while at the same time being perfectly patient receptacles for your everything. but personally i’d much rather invite other survivors as important people in my life anyway, and obviously they must be allowed to be as messy and flawed and learning as i am, and here i find a mutual commitment to be our best much more important than pressure to be something we cannot yet be.
this is not meant as a guide to perfectionism. It is meant as an ideal and a standard that can show us where we might have room to grow.
it is also not meant to create pressure but inspire and maybe help to understand why some situations get difficult. I am sorry you are hearing pressure anyway. That will probably make it difficult to get any inspiration from it.
mhm, let me rephrase this, then:
i think the biggest flaw in this relationship advice is how it creates a double standard. partner A must communicate clearly and directly, to fail to do so is emotionally abusive. partner B, however, must be allowed to fail at communicating well, must be shown lenience and gentle guidance and understanding, because they still have to learn. partner A is supposed to demonstrate superior people skill, so that partner B may learn. in a conflict, a situation where both partners might be prone to dysregulation, partner A must carry the onus to remain regulated but also show understanding to partner B’s dysregulation. (and so on). i fundamentally feel this to be unfair demands on any relationship that is not a professional one. (obviously my therapist should remain regulated when i am not; but my partner, when we both are stressed by conflict? why should for them to be considered ‘safe’ any ‘superior’ skill be demanded of them compared to mine?)
i think this attitude is especially dangerous because it seems to me that intimate relationships among survivors are much more common than a relationship between a non-survivor and a survivor.
however, what is not rare, is that one person is ‘officially’ a survivor – i.e. is personally more comfortable identifying as such, has experiences with professional help, is ‘in therapy’, has diagnoses – while the other survivor hasn’t. this ‘less-acknowledged’ survivor is then especially vulnerable to be exploited in a relationship where their trauma & trauma responses remain entirely unacknowledged and they are supposed to act like ‘an ally’ and are judged as such. people who already had this kind of ‘be a helper – or else’ role in their families of origins will be especially vulnerable to that kind of dynamic. and this is, i believe, a dynamic that can get exploitative fast, if one isn’t mindful.
it is important in relationships to acknowledge that the other partner might be just as damaged as you, and burdened with ghosts. and to collaborate on solutions, instead of expecting one partner to carry the emotional load for their ‘sick&traumatised’ partner.
I wrote this article for my non-traumatized friends and semi-professional helpers. They seem to have different questions than survivors have. Amongst ourselves we usually know how to treat people or why they respond in certain ways, there is a different level of understanding. This post was ultimately not written for survivors but for people who don’t understand trauma responses and want to support people with PTSD. It is published in the ‘for helpers’ section, not the communication&relationships section we also have.
This is the best advice I can give my friends and the best way I could find words to help them understand why things get difficult in our relationship. there is never a time when all of this is needed, but parts of it can explain specific situations.
there is an imbalance whem we are dealing with a relationship between someone who grew up in safety with safe attachment and someone who grew up in a trauma family. the idea is that we get support where we are weak until we learn how to cope better. the idea has always been to actually learn and heal and be responsible. that is why I speak about gentle ways of keeping people accountable while also supporting them where they are still weak. the imbalance is not meant to be there forever.
Basically, I think you are not in the target group for this article, which is why you see a lot more problems than the people who usually come here to look for some explanation for things they don’t understand in their friend.
books can be written about survivor-survivor relationships but I don’t think that it is my job and it was never the aim of this article.
maybe you want to write that book.