Trauma from Dating Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

Dating someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) can be an emotionally intense experience that may leave you with lasting wounds. Individuals with BPD often experience rapid mood swings, fear of abandonment, and unstable relationships. 

Understanding the impact of these experiences is the first step towards healing. Trauma isn’t always about dramatic events; it can stem from emotional volatility, unpredictable behavior, or a constant state of uncertainty. If your past relationship with someone with BPD has left you feeling anxious, mistrustful, or with low self-worth, know that you’re not alone, and healing is possible.

While these relationships can be filled with passion and deep connection, understanding what is happening or what happened is helpful.

Dating trauma is a real experience that can significantly impact one’s mental and emotional health, and is rooted in how the brain processes and stores traumatic experiences. The amygdala’s role in the fight-or-flight response and the frontal lobes’ capacity for rational thought [1] are key factors in understanding and addressing this type of trauma.

Let’s explore how dating someone with BPD can lead to trauma, how trauma manifests in symptoms, the impact of trauma on the brain, and how healing can be achieved.

Key Issues Dating Someone with BPD

1. Emotional Intensity: Partners with BPD may experience extreme highs and lows in the relationship, with emotions changing rapidly.
2. Fear of Abandonment: People with BPD often have an intense fear of being left, which can lead to clingy behavior or unfounded jealousy.
3. Unstable Self-Image: Your partner may struggle with a fragile sense of self, leading to identity issues and self-criticism.
4. Communication Challenges: Misunderstandings can easily escalate due to distorted perceptions and communication difficulties2.
5. Idealization and Devaluation: You might be placed on a pedestal one moment and harshly criticized the next7.

The Neurobiology of Dating Trauma

Trauma and the Amygdala

The Amygdala is an almond-shaped structure in the brain’s emotional system, is responsible for processing emotions, particularly fear and stress.

When faced with a perceived threat, the amygdala activates the fight-or-flight response, releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to prepare the body for action.

Traumatic experiences from dating can heighten the amygdala’s reactivity, causing it to overreact to situations, that feel familiar but are not genuinely threatening. This can lead to an amygdala hijack, where strong emotions overwhelm the logical, rational part of the brain, resulting in impulsive and irrational behaviors.

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The Frontal Lobes
The frontal lobes, located at the front of the brain, are responsible for higher-level cognitive functions like reasoning, decision-making, and emotional regulation. When you’re relaxed, having a good time, the frontal lobes process information to determine if a threat is real, overriding the amygdala when appropriate. However, during a bad date, the rational part of your brain can get hijacked by the amygdala, and get taken offline. This is when we find ourselves, trying to crawl through the a small window in the restroom to try to escape our date.

Neuroception
The nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety or danger in the environment, a process called neuroception. Traumatic experiences can rewire the brain to be hypersensitive of what it interprets as threatening and cause it to seek protection instead of connection. This means the nervous system may be in a constant state of alert, even in safe environments.

Traumatic Dating Experiences

Sexual Trauma: Being pressured into sexual activity that you are not ready for is a form of dating trauma, and is more common than one might think. This can include feeling pressured to have casual sex.

Outside Comfort Zone: Dating can be uncomfortable when you don’t know your boundaries, but you can feel when those boundaries are crossed. This could involve going to a date’s house on the first date, allowing a date to drive you, or getting physical too soon. When personal boundaries are crossed, it can lead to a traumatic experience. This can include emotional, physical, or sexual boundaries.

Ghosting: Being suddenly ignored or “ghosted” can be a traumatic experience, especially if it triggers past feelings of neglect or abandonment. Ghosting can lead to feelings of rejection, which are processed by the same pain receptors that advise us of physical pain [2].

Being Stood Up: Being stood up for a date, or being the object of other kinds of negligence can trigger feelings of not being good enough, especially if there is a history of similar experiences. It’s hard not to take the negative actions of others personally.

Unmet Needs: Trauma can result from unmet needs, abandonment, and neglect. These unmet needs can create or exacerbate feelings of low self-worth and insecurity, especially with the uncertainty of dating.

Neglect: Past experiences of emotional neglect or feeling “not good enough” from primary relationships can make a person more vulnerable to experiencing trauma in dating situations

Signs & Symptoms of Dating Trauma

Anxiety: Increased anxiety around dating and meeting new people is a common symptom of dating trauma. It can manifest as constant worrying and intrusive thoughts.

Depression: Trauma sustained from dating can lead to feelings of depression, low self-worth, and self-consciousness because it’s tough to put yourself out there. Depression can also arise from unmonitored stress levels.

Flashbacks: Reliving traumatic events through flashbacks, including physical symptoms like a racing heart or sweating, is a sign of trauma.

Avoidance of Places: Avoiding places where a traumatic experience occurred is a way some people manage feelings associated with trauma.

Mistrust: Trauma can cause mistrust in others and oneself, influencing attachment styles and leading to questioning the intentions of others and not giving people the chance to gain your trust.

Low Self-Esteem: Trauma can lead to self-limiting beliefs and shame, which can cause a person to lower their standards in relationships or not express their own needs. Dating people for validation is an example of low self-esteem or settling for breadcrumbs when you really want a long-term relationship.

Feelings of Shame: Feelings of guilt, blame, or shame are common responses to traumatic dating experiences.

Feeling Minimized: Dating trauma can make you feel lonely and minimized, without an outlet to express your feelings or anyone to talk to.

Living in Fear: Trauma causes activation of the amygdala, resulting in anxiety and intrusive thoughts. This can lead to fearful or self-sabotaging behavior.

Lack of Hope: Trauma can lead to feelings of hopelessness and negative assumptions about that date you just went on or new relationships. You automatically assume that they are rejecting you, if you haven’t heard back in a hot minute.

Feeling Lonely or Disconnected: Trauma can cause feelings of loneliness and disconnection from others and from one’s own body.

Sleep Disturbances: Nightmares, trouble falling asleep or staying asleep related to traumatic dating experiences can be symptoms of dating trauma.

Substance Use: Substance use may arise as an unhealthy coping mechanism to deal with uncomfortable feelings that arise in the dating scene. You may be drinking too much on dates, sabotaging an authentic connection.

Fear-Based Thoughts: Frightening or fear-based thoughts about dating or social anxiety can be a sign of trauma.

Deleting Apps: Deleting dating apps to cope with trauma.

Taking a Break From Dating: Some may take a hiatus from dating to cope with trauma, due to difficulty trusting others and dates not going well, in general.

How Trauma Impacts Dating

Subjectivity of Trauma
Trauma is a subjective experience. What is traumatic to one person may not be traumatic to another. Also, trauma impacts everyone differently, and it can be hard for some to recognize.

Common Traumatic Experiences in Dating
Dating experiences like waiting for a date in a restaurant and then being stood up, being pressured for sex, or being ghosted can trigger trauma. These situations can create a feeling of abandonment and rejection, similar to previous traumatic experiences.

Impact on Relationships
Trauma can impact how you view yourself, the world, and your relationships; it can also impact how you relate to and respond to others. You may find yourself isolating, feeling socially anxious when you know you should be out there meeting people.

Mistrust
Trauma can lead to a general mistrust of others and oneself, influencing attachment styles and causing individuals to question the sincerity of others or look for “red flags”. You might think that everyone is lying to you, if you have experienced the trauma of being with someone who was cheating and so you don’t give people you meet the chance to prove themselves trustworthy.

Low Self-Esteem
Past trauma can harm self-esteem, causing self-limiting beliefs and shame, which leads to accepting unhealthy relationships or not expressing one’s needs. Dating people for validation is an example of low self-esteem. Being with someone who cheated may leave you feeling shame, even though it was not your fault they cheated.

Thoughts Change: Traumatic experiences alter one’s view of the world and oneself.

Ability to Trust: Dating trauma can significantly affect one’s ability to trust others25. This can manifest as mistrust of others and oneself.

Nervous System: Trauma impacts the nervous system by heightening its reactivity, leading to a constant search for safety. This can result in a person being in a constant state of alert.

Neuroception: Traumatic experiences can rewire the brain to seek protection instead of connection. This process, called neuroception, means the nervous system is constantly scanning the environment for cues of danger and being constantly on edge on dates.

How Hypnotherapy Helps Dating Trauma Someone With BPD

When dating someone with BPD, individuals often look for help for the person with BPD.

But the person who really needs help is you. You might have even started reading this article trying to find help for the person you’re dating.

But you’re the one looking for help.

You need to put on your own oxygen mask before putting on someone else’s. You’re the one who is feeling out of sorts, traumatized – even if it’s trauma with a small T.

Experiential Healing
The remedy to resolve your trauma is experiential healing. Think non-verbal therapy, not talk therapy.

Because traumatic memories are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain, they are fragmented, somatic, nonverbal, emotional, and behavioral. Healing involves showing the nervous system that you’re safe rather than just talking about it.

Hypnotherapy is effective because it involves experiential learning. It’s the difference between reading about how to ride a bike v. getting on a bike and learning how to balance, pedal, brake, and steer. The experiences you have in hypnotherapy stay with you long after your session is over and have a transformative effect.

If you’ve been looking for help for someone else or doing years of talk therapy for your trauma and you’re not getting to where you would like to be, hypnotherapy can enable you to get on a bike that takes you to all the way to your desired destination.

Lets’ connect.