Love After Trauma
When the Body Pulls the Emergency Brake
1. When Calm Is Not the Measure
We are often told that love is supposed to feel easy, comfortable, and regulating. A soft place to rest in, something that fits neatly into our lives without disturbing too much. So when fear appears, we assume something must be wrong.
But what if the fear doesn’t mean the love isn’t real? What if it appears precisely because it is?
Sometimes love doesn’t activate calm. It activates memory. Not the kind we can explain with words, but the kind that lives in the body. The kind that reacts before the mind has time to catch up. The kind that makes you want to run as if a lion were about to have you for breakfast, even when there is no lion in sight.
I understand that fear. I feel it too.
2. The Body Remembers What the Mind Has Already Understood
No matter how much work you’ve done, how aware you are, or how many tools you’ve learned, there are things that don’t integrate cognitively. They integrate somatically, or they don’t integrate at all.
Trauma doesn’t disappear because we understand it. It softens through safe, lived experiences with others. Through correlation, not isolation. And yet, we live in a culture obsessed with self-sufficiency, self-healing, and self-regulation, where needing others is quietly framed as failure.
We communicate constantly online, while real relationships start to feel overwhelming to our nervous systems. So when intimacy arrives, when closeness becomes real, when someone stays present long enough to matter, the body panics. Not because something bad is happening, but because something vulnerable is.
3. Sex, Safety, and the Nervous System
Sex, sleep, tenderness, being seen, being held: these are not neutral territories for a traumatized nervous system. They are places where old associations live.
That’s how you can have a night of connection that feels alive, playful, deeply present, and then wake up hours later with your chest tight, your breath shallow, your body convinced something is wrong. Not because the night was wrong, but because safety and intimacy were once intertwined with danger.
The body doesn’t ask for explanations. It asks for protection.
4. Capitalist Love and the Fear of Discomfort
We’ve also been sold a very specific idea of love, one that mirrors capitalism more than humanity. Love should be easy, convenient, comfortable, efficient. If it disrupts your routine, walk away. If it activates something uncomfortable, it’s a red flag. If it requires time, patience, or emotional labor, it must not be aligned.
We scan relationships the same way we scroll through apps, looking for reasons to be disappointed early so we can move on quickly to the next best thing. We confuse discernment with avoidance, and self-respect with emotional withdrawal. This is not emotional intelligence. It’s capitalist love. A love that must perform perfectly from the start. A love that must not interfere with our independence, our image, or our curated sense of self. A love that must never ask us to slow down, stay present, or feel what hasn’t been felt yet.
But real love is not comfortable in that way. Real love is alive. Intense. Involving. It requires vulnerability. It asks us to risk feeling the full spectrum of emotions, not to avoid them. And emotions are not there to be feared. They are there to be felt.
5. Regulation Is Not the Same as Disconnection
There is a difference we rarely talk about: regulation is not the same as numbness. Sometimes what we call being “regulated” is actually being shut down. Calm, but flat. Stable, but distant. Peaceful, but unreachable. A nervous system that never gets activated is not necessarily healed. It might just be protected. True regulation doesn’t mean never being triggered; it means having the capacity to come back, to stay present with what arises, to feel activation without immediately needing to escape it.
When we confuse regulation with disconnection, we start rejecting relationships that awaken us, simply because they make us feel.
6. Sexuality, Trauma, and the Body as an Unsafe Place
For a long time, my sexuality was a way to approach emotional intimacy with people who didn’t have the tools to meet me emotionally. My body became a bridge where words, presence, and emotional attunement were missing. At other times, after having experienced sexual abuse, my body became an object, something external I used to access pleasure while staying disconnected from myself. Even now, reconnecting with my body is part of my healing: physical, emotional, psychological. Being present during sex is not always easy. I go to my head. I dissociate. My body learned that being fully there was dangerous, so it learned to leave.
Reclaiming embodiment is slow. It’s not linear. And it doesn’t happen alone. It happens in relationship, when safety is built gradually, when the body learns that the present is not the past.
7. When the Present Isn’t the Past, But the Body Thinks It Is
Not long ago, I met someone and something felt different. There was safety. Friendship as a base. Mental connection, emotional openness, physical ease. A rare feeling of being met instead of mirrored. When the mind and the heart connect, the body often follows with joy, playfulness, desire, aliveness. Time dissolves. Presence expands.
Then Christmas arrived.
Christmas is terrible timing for already activated nervous systems. Mine included. Pressure, expectations, family dynamics, old wounds resurfacing. We don’t meet each other at our best. We meet at our most defended. Two nervous systems, both overwhelmed, both trying to survive. The body doesn’t ask, “Is this the same?” It only says, “This feels familiar.”
8. Fear Does Not Automatically Invalidate Love
This is where we often get it wrong. We assume that if fear appears, the connection must be unsafe. That if the body recoils, something is wrong. That discomfort equals incompatibility. But what if the fear has nothing to do with the present?
The deepest bonds in your life will activate unresolved material, not because they are harmful, but because they are close enough to touch it. This doesn’t mean we ignore boundaries or force ourselves to stay. It means we stop confusing activation with danger. Sometimes love is not hard because it’s wrong. It’s hard because it’s real.
9. Choosing Presence Over Perfection
We are messy, contradictory, cyclical. Regulated one day, overwhelmed the next. And yet we keep trying to fit ourselves into boxes: healed, secure, independent, low-maintenance, as if being healthy meant being perfect.
What if someone needs space? What if someone is transforming? What if vulnerability shows up awkwardly? Does that automatically mean misuse, dependency, or danger? Or does it simply mean human? People are not perfect. They try. And sometimes that has to be enough.
10. Walking Each Other Home
I don’t think love is meant to be painless. I think it’s meant to be honest. And honesty includes fear, hesitation, and moments where the body lags behind the heart.
Ram Dass said, “We’re all just walking each other home.” Maybe that’s all love is. Not a performance. Not a guarantee. Just a willingness to stay present long enough to soften what once had to harden to survive.
I don’t know where this path leads. I only know that avoiding love to avoid pain is also a kind of loss. So today, I choose to stay open. Not reckless. Not naive. Just alive.
With love always,
Maria Luisa
PS: Loving is never a mistake. Feeling deeply is not an excess. Being wounded does not make an intention impure.
Con amor siempre,
Maria Luisa.
If this reflection resonated, you are welcome to join my newsletter.
I share writings, insights and gentle reminders to support your own Spiral Way.
