by guest bloggers Suzanne B. Phillips Psy.D.,ABPP,CGP, and Dianne Kane DSW,CGP

The disruption of intimacy is too often the collateral damage of trauma. Trauma, be it the loss of a child, a natural disaster, a diagnosis of illness or combat stress affects relationships. Because trauma assaults one’s sense of self, one’s view of the world and trust in others, it changes the definition of personal safety and the conscious and unconscious desire for closeness. Whether one partner or both are hurt, grieving, having nightmares, too numb to feel, too angry to speak or too sad to hope- both partners in a relationship struggle and suffer.  Accordingly, trauma often disrupts partners and the intimacy they share.

Believing that a couple’s relationship is not only often the locus of pain but a crucial source of resilience and recovery, the goal of our chapter “ Dancing in the Dark “ in the book Healing Together: A Couple’s Guide to Coping with Trauma and Post-traumatic Stress is to help couples understand how and why trauma disrupts their sexual functioning and to offer strategies for reclaiming, renewing or re-inventing their intimacy. In our work with hundreds of couples in the aftermath of trauma, we found that couples always fear that they alone are having problems with closeness and sexual intimacy. Feeling shame or blame, they avoid talking about it – most often with each other. Adding to this, partners in pain often “assume the worst.”   Sometimes they fear that reaching out may traumatize the other-so they don’t or they mistake the other’s attempt to reach out as insistence that “ nothing has happened” that everything is supposed to stay the same.   It is a relief for them to know that they are not alone, that when the world feels unsafe, when someone can barely sleep, when you feel emotionally or physically different, it is very difficult to imagine dancing in the dark.

 We found that clarifying and normalizing the impact of common trauma symptoms on a couple’s relationship served to lower anxiety, reduce helplessness and blame, and foster the safety and trust needed for connection and intimacy. For example, recognizing  hyperarousal in a partner’s  inability to relax, sensitivity to touch, sound or movement changes perspective and related feelings of guilt and rejection. Understanding avoidance and constriction as the persistence of the body and mind’s protection from feeling horror and loss in the face of trauma makes meaning  of “numbness” and the common fear of not feeling love for a partner.

Often couples are unable to see the stress between them in the context of the trauma because they are unaware that symptoms are often delayed. It is relieving for them to understand that often months after the cancer is in remission, a partner is home from Iraq or a they have rebuilt after the storm, depression, nightmares, shame and avoidance emerge in painful and perplexing ways.

Validating that the road back form trauma is a difficult one and that trauma often freezes couples in pain and disconnection, we invite couples to reach back behind the trauma to a “ Safe Place” one that the very thought of engenders feelings of happiness and being together. We remind them that this is part of their resilience as a couple, one that they can reclaim and draw upon.  Listed as one of the first strategies in the book, Healing Together, we observed when working with couples that this glimpse always brings with it a positive shift in feeling – a small but  necessary glimpse of their non-traumatized selves. Building on this we invite couples to take small steps in both verbal and non-verbal ways to communicate the wish to be  “ more than just friends.”  Given the loss of self and shame consequent to trauma, just knowing there is mutual desire lends patience and hope to the idea of dancing in the dark together.

Suzanne B. Phillips, Psy.D., ABPP, is adjunct professor of clinical psychology in the clinical doctoral program of Long Island University.  Dianne Kane, DSW, is assistant director of the counseling unit of the New York Fire Department.  They are the authors of Healing Together: A Couple’s Guide to Coping with Trauma and Post-traumatic Stress.  Their website is www.couplesaftertrauma.com.