Unpacking The “Why” Of Harmful Relational Behaviors

Let’s be honest. Trauma survivors don’t always behave well. Even if they’re trauma symptom is people-pleasing niceness, that usually rides shotgun with passive aggressive resentment and punishing behaviors that result from poor boundaries and over-giving. But there’s a special kind of acting out that happens when someone with disorganized attachment (a combination of anxious and avoidant resulting from growing up with caregivers who terrified the child) partners up with someone with reasonably secure attachment. When someone with severe attachment wounding finally begins to attach to someone who is safe enough, kind enough, and loving enough, they suddenly start hurtling through all the childhood developmental stages they missed the first time around. And if you’re the “safe object,” the securely attached one, you’re bound to feel like you’re dealing with a naughty foster child. Because in a way, you are. 

Until they learn to reparent their own child parts, whether you like it or not, they’re going to act out with you as if you’re the parent they never had. And even though you’re not their parent and don’t want to be, they may have entitled expectations of you, expecting you to be what they never got- someone who would tolerate all their immature behaviors until they grow mature enough to behave better. This is not to excuse these behaviors, but it can be helpful to at least understand them, whether you’re the one acting out all kinds of sideways or the one being expected to tolerate immature, confusing, bewildering, or even abusive relational behavior.

Some of the behaviors you’ll encounter when you become the “safe object” to a trauma survivor will make you feel like you’re in a relationship with a bull in an emotional china shop. They may say or do things that seem heartless, self-centered, impulsive, explosive, insensitive, rude, or downright cruel. You might start wondering, “Am I being gaslit? Manipulated? Used? Should I just cut and run?”

Sometimes, yes. It’s important to be able to discern the difference between a well-intentioned, clueless, and maybe a bit brutish trauma survivor and a conniving, corrupt, dangerously manipulative sadistic sociopath. But often—especially in trauma survivors with disorganized attachment, what looks like manipulation is actually dysregulation and dissociation. What looks like malice or coercion is actually a panicking part. And what feels like a betrayal is often the tragic result of a jacked up or collapsed nervous system, just trying to protect a terrified inner child.

I’m working on writing something I’m calling How To Love A Trauma Survivor: A Survival Guide For Securely Attached Partners Of Those Who Have Been Through Hell, which I’m previewing in LOVE SCHOOL, for those who are learning relational skill building, IFS, and relational recovery tools, in community together. If you join LOVE SCHOOL now, you can get access to all the past LOVE SCHOOL sessions, including the last one, where we dissected the few behaviors we’re going to discuss. (Join LOVE SCHOOL here.)

In a series of blogs, let’s parse out some of the most common trauma-driven behaviors you’re likely to encounter—and explain what might be happening underneath the surface for a big clumsy oaf who is not a sadistic sociopath. Then, without expecting a securely attached person to always get it right, we’ll talk about the kind of ideal inner response you might cultivate when your partner acts out.

1. Breaking agreements or crossing boundaries.

Behavior: Lying, disappearing, violating your trust, pushing your boundaries, or breaking commitments you thought you both negotiated together.

How it feels to you: Betraying, destabilizing, untrustworthy, terrifying, abusive.

What’s happening inside them: When you’re the one on the other side of the betrayal that rides shotgun with broken agreements and crossed boundaries, this can be the hardest behavior to tolerate and witness compassionately, which makes sense. It’s never okay to excuse this kind of abuse, no matter how much you care about someone and how much you understand why they do what they do.  Behaviors like this are rooted in unhealthy entitlement. Many survivors of severe relational trauma have protector parts who feel entitled to break rules in the name of survival. Agreements feel threatening to their autonomy. Your boundaries or even the agreements you come up with together, which some parts of them agreed to comply with, feel like control to the parts of them that felt dominated in the past. So they rebel to reclaim a sense of agency and double down on their entitlement, even if it hurts you.

IFS Reframe: A rebellious manager is protecting a part that equates respecting boundaries or keeping agreements with captivity, submission, and being dominated.

Secure Partner’s Ideal Inner Response: “This hurts and it’s not okay. I need to protect myself and take space. But I also see how some part of them believes this is the only way to feel free or safe. I can hold that understanding, so I don’t take it so personally- without tolerating repeated harm.

2. Withdrawing right after things get sweet.

Behavior: After a beautiful moment of connection, your partner becomes cold, distracted, critical, cruel, withdrawn, or emotionally unavailable.

How it feels to you: Confusing, hurtful, like emotional whiplash.

What’s happening inside them: A part received something it always longed for—closeness, intimacy, safety. But as soon as that need was met, a protector part swooped in with panic: “This is too good. Something bad is about to happen. Don’t get used to this. The other shoe is going to drop any minute now. Shut this shit down immediately.” This is an intimacy hangover, not a sign that the closeness wasn’t real or that this person doesn’t care about you.

IFS Reframe: A protector part just locked the doors after a vulnerable exile that longs for connection peeked out and felt good and safe.

Secure Partner’s Inner Response: “Oof, that came out of nowhere. A part of me wants to chase or feel abandoned. But I know this isn’t really about me. I’ll take space, self-soothe, and stay grounded in my own worth while they regroup.”

3. Picking fights or creating unnecessary drama for no reason.

Behavior: Your partner starts an argument out of nowhere—right before a romantic weekend, after a loving moment, or when things finally feel calm. It seems irrational, unprovoked, and out of left field.

How it feels to you: Like being punished for doing nothing wrong.

What’s happening inside them: Calm, loving, tenderness and the sweet nectar of closeness feels utterly alien to them. From a polyvagal theory perspective, they’ve spent their whole lives with their nervous systems in either a sympathetic “fight or flight” stress response or a shut down “dorsal vagal” collapse. They might have never spent any time in a healthy, connected, stress-relieving, co-regulating, self-healing ventral vagal state of the nervous system. There’s literally no template for that kind of nervous system state. It’s completely foreign, so the novelty of it registers as dangerous. The mind-body-heart-soul says, “This doesn’t feel normal. Better create a problem here so we’re back in familiar territory- STAT.” Picking a fight or creating chaos gives them back a sense of control. Even though it feels painful and confusing to you, they’re not doing this to you intentionally. They’re doing this to create a sense of normalcy for their own nervous system.

IFS Reframe: This is a manager part trying to restore emotional homeostasis through chaos and intimacy avoidance. It’s not about what you’re actually fighting about. That’s just a distraction. It’s a decoy to try to get you not to notice that what the intimacy avoidant part of them actually wants is to sabotage intimacy, no matter the cost. They want you arguing over the decoy so you won’t call them out on their real strategy- to push you away and restore some normalcy to their nervous system by making sure it’s dysregulated.

Secure Partner’s Ideal Inner Response: “They’re creating drama and chaos because calm, close connectedness feels unsafe. I don’t have to join this chaos. I’ll respond with boundaries and warmth, not fuel the fire.”

If you also have insecure attachment and you’re trying to tolerate these behaviors while holding your own boundaries, it’s going to be challenging! Learning and practicing a daily IFS practice can help. I’ll be leading a 6 week Zoom course on IFS For Self-Healing starting June 25, along with special guest IFS trainer and therapist Laura Schmidt.

And if you want to join us for our ongoing relational recovery program LOVE SCHOOL, we’ll be unpacking some more common naughty relational behaviors, to understand them from an IFS point of view. The next few we’ll be unpacking from an IFS lens is:

• Withholding affection or sex
• Idealizing you, then devaluing you
• Becoming emotionally or logistically incompetent (regressing)
• Recklessly offering themselves up for exploitation because they can’t imagine you’d stay unless you’re using them
• “Testing” you with provocative behavior
• Shooting you with the machine gun of narcissistic defenses- and then blaming you- after you protest any of these behaviors.

Curious to learn more so you can have more compassion for both your own parts and the parts of those you’re trying to relate with? 

Join us for our next LOVE SCHOOL on June  9.

Save $100 if you join us during the early bird special for IFS For Self Healing June 25.

Remember, you don’t have to put up with these behaviors. You get to protest, hold someone accountable, hold your boundaries, and insist on couples therapy. But it can be helpful if you at least understand the behaviors from a trauma-informed point of view, so you can stay compassionate with yourself and the ones you’re relating with, while also being fierce about taking care of your own parts.

Also, if you need support with healthy boundaries, Heal Your Wounded Boundaries is a prerecorded homestudy program that includes my book about IFS-informed boundaries The Boundaries Handbook.

Learn more about Heal Your Wounded Boundaries here.