Irini Georgi

Irini Georgi

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Tag: trauma

How trauma sabotages your love life

One of the most confusing things about trauma is that it rarely looks like “trauma” in dating.

It doesn’t always show up as flashbacks, panic attacks, or dramatic emotional breakdowns. More often, it appears quietly through patterns people repeat without understanding why: chasing emotionally unavailable partners, losing interest when someone healthy shows up, overanalyzing text messages, pulling away after intimacy, people-pleasing, shutting down emotionally, or constantly fearing abandonment.

Many people think they simply have “bad luck in love.” In reality, their nervous system has learned to associate intimacy with danger.

As a dating coach, I see this constantly. Intelligent, self-aware, capable people who deeply want connection, but unconsciously sabotage it because closeness activates old survival mechanisms.

The difficult truth is this: trauma doesn’t just affect your past. It changes how you experience relationships in the present.

 

When Healthy Feels Wrong

One of the clearest signs of unresolved relational trauma is feeling drawn to inconsistency and uncomfortable with stability.

People often assume they’re attracted to emotionally unavailable partners because of chemistry, excitement, or “passion.” But in many cases, unpredictability feels familiar to the nervous system. If love in childhood or past relationships came with anxiety, withdrawal, criticism, emotional volatility, or abandonment, then calm intimacy can feel suspicious or even suffocating.

This is why some people lose attraction when someone is kind, emotionally available and consistent. They may suddenly feel trapped, bored, overwhelmed, or emotionally numb, despite finally meeting someone healthy.

Meanwhile, emotionally unavailable people can feel intoxicating precisely because they recreate the emotional uncertainty the nervous system already recognizes.

Many people confuse emotional activation with compatibility. They are not the same thing.

Hypervigilance in Dating

Trauma also creates hypervigilance: a constant scanning for signs of rejection, betrayal, abandonment, or loss of interest.

This often looks like:

  • obsessively analyzing texting patterns
  • spiraling when someone takes longer to reply
  • reading into tone shifts or emojis
  • assuming distance means rejection
  • constantly needing reassurance
  • monitoring for “red flags” so intensely that dating becomes exhausting

People often mistake this for intuition or emotional intelligence. Sometimes it is simply a nervous system stuck in threat-detection mode.

The problem is that hypervigilance distorts perception. Trauma survivors often struggle to accurately assess danger. They may perceive threat where none exists, while simultaneously missing genuinely unhealthy dynamics because chaos feels normal to them.

This creates a painful cycle:
anxiety leads to reassurance-seeking, reassurance-seeking creates pressure, pressure pushes people away, and the eventual distancing confirms the original fear of abandonment.

The Self-Protection That Sabotages Connection

A huge amount of dating self-sabotage is actually self-protection in disguise.

People convince themselves they are being “careful,” “independent,” or “guarded,” when in reality they are avoiding vulnerability altogether.

This can look like:

  • emotionally detaching when things get serious
  • focusing excessively on flaws and incompatibilities
  • ghosting when intimacy increases
  • picking fights when connection deepens
  • cheating or flirting to maintain emotional distance
  • refusing help or support
  • never fully expressing needs
  • leaving before they can be left

Many trauma responses are unconscious attempts to avoid future pain.

If someone learned early on that vulnerability led to humiliation, rejection, neglect, manipulation, or emotional punishment, then closeness itself can feel dangerous. The nervous system begins prioritizing emotional survival over connection.

The tragic part is that these behaviors often create exactly the outcomes people fear most.

The “Independent” Trauma Response

One of the most socially rewarded trauma responses is extreme self-sufficiency.

Many people pride themselves on “not needing anyone.” They see themselves as low-maintenance, hyper-independent, or emotionally self-contained.

But healthy independence is very different from trauma-driven self-reliance.

Healthy independence allows closeness.
Trauma-based independence avoids dependence entirely.

People with this pattern often struggle to:

  • ask for support
  • receive care comfortably
  • communicate emotional needs
  • rely on partners
  • tolerate vulnerability
  • let themselves be emotionally seen

They may appear emotionally strong while secretly feeling profoundly disconnected.

Intimacy requires interdependence. Not emotional fusion, but the ability to lean on another person sometimes without feeling weak, trapped, or exposed.

The Fawn Response in Dating

Not everyone responds to trauma by withdrawing. Some respond by adapting excessively to others.

This is often called the fawn response: people-pleasing as a survival strategy.

In dating, this can look like:

  • shape-shifting to match a partner’s personality
  • suppressing opinions to avoid conflict
  • over-accommodating others
  • ignoring personal boundaries
  • prioritizing another person’s comfort over authenticity
  • becoming whoever the other person seems to want

At first, these relationships may feel unusually “easy” because there is little friction or disagreement. But over time, resentment and emotional disconnection build because the relationship is no longer based on authenticity.

You cannot build genuine intimacy while hiding yourself to maintain approval.

And unfortunately, fawning also makes people vulnerable to unhealthy relationships because they become highly tolerant of poor treatment.

Trauma and Attachment Triggers

Modern dating culture amplifies trauma responses dramatically. Dating apps create constant uncertainty, inconsistency, comparison, and ambiguity. Texting removes tone and physical reassurance. Social media intensifies scarcity mindset and fear of replacement.

For people with attachment wounds, this environment can become psychologically destabilizing.

  • A delayed reply can trigger abandonment fears.
  • Mixed signals can trigger obsession.
  • Ghosting can retraumatize rejection wounds.
  • Love bombing can feel like safety.
  • Avoidant behavior can feel magnetic.

Many people are not simply reacting to the present moment. They are reacting to accumulated emotional history. This is why one of the first exercises I do with my clients is called Relationship History.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

Healing trauma does not mean becoming perfectly calm, secure, and untriggered. It means becoming aware of your patterns before they control your behavior.

Therapy can be essential, especially for complex trauma, emotional abuse, neglect, or abusive relationships. Trauma-informed approaches like EMDR, somatic work and nervous system regulation can help people understand why their body reacts the way it does.

My coaching work is more about the behavioral side of healing:

  • learning to slow down emotionally
  • recognizing attraction to unhealthy dynamics
  • appreciating consistency instead of chasing intensity
  • communicating needs directly
  • setting boundaries earlier
  • identifying red and green flags more accurately
  • regulating anxiety without impulsive behavior
  • staying grounded instead of fantasizing or catastrophizing
  • choosing compatibility over emotional chaos
  • building emotional self-awareness in real time

The goal is not perfection. The goal is creating enough awareness and emotional regulation that trauma stops unconsciously driving your decisions.

 

The Most Important Thing to Understand

Trauma responses are not character flaws. Your nervous system adapted to experiences that overwhelmed you emotionally. Those adaptations probably protected you at some point. But survival strategies that helped in unsafe environments often create problems in healthy relationships later.

The good news is that relational patterns can change.

People can learn to tolerate intimacy without panic. They can stop confusing inconsistency with chemistry. They can become more secure, more emotionally regulated, and more capable of healthy connection.

But this usually requires something uncomfortable: staying present long enough to let healthy love feel unfamiliar without automatically running from it. That’s part of the real work. If you want to start working on it with me, fill in the form and I’ll get back to you!

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The Netflix series we needed

I made a video a while ago where, at the beginning, I mentioned that teenage boys can be somewhat scary and intimidating to women. A lot of people were outraged in the comments—why was I saying that? What did I mean? I explained:

“Teenage boys go through a phase where they need to prove their masculinity to one another and to the outside world. It becomes a performance, a spectacle, and unfortunately, this often translates not just into shouting loudly and swearing but also into harshness—because that’s what patriarchy has taught them. That sweetness and kindness are signs of feminine behavior and weakness, things to be avoided at all costs.”

In the introduction of my book, Who Women Want, I say that not all women want the same thing—because women are people. They are not bees with a hive mind.

The closest thing to a hive mind isn’t found in women but in boys growing into men. Not because boys are less intelligent or because they are simple creatures—none of that nonsense, don’t worry.

It’s because of the man-box. These characteristics that become the “masculinity meter,” the standard by which boys measure and evaluate one another, and anyone who deviates is pushed to the margins. That’s why breaking the cycle of stereotypical masculinity is so difficult—because of fear. Boys are constantly weighing and testing one another in a relentless effort to prove they are “man enough,” so they don’t fall in the hierarchy and risk being ostracized. Keep that word in mind.

Sophisticated, educated (or posh) types like us, who stand on the other side and fail to see the suffering of boys, who only see the shouting, the swearing, the bullying, and the behaviors we label as “toxic masculinity”, we bear responsibility.

We are the ones who use difficult words like ostracized and exclude them, and right when we talk about dismantling privilege, we flaunt it.

The anger toward difficult words reminded me of a play I watched last year that had me crying from start to finish: Another Thebes. It reminded me of a young man I once dated. We’d met online—our lives ran on parallel tracks, and we would never have crossed paths in real life. I called him The Bronx. I’d written about him:

“His vocabulary consists of about a hundred words. He’s uninterested in anything beyond his own life. He doesn’t read, gets bored even watching movies, and finds nothing enjoyable except women, motorcycles and food. We have absolutely nothing in common. He constantly insults me, belittles me, and sometimes it’s exhausting.

But I ignore it. I don’t know how I realized this, but I know he doesn’t mean any of it. And I don’t take it to heart, which even impresses me. It’s like he has to say these things, so I don’t think he’s ‘soft,’ so he appears strong in my eyes, to maintain some invisible, unknown standard that I can’t even fathom. He insults me and I tell him I want him. He replies with a hundred kisses, tells me he’s thinking of me, then insults me again—then says he wants to hold me tight.

He would get angry whenever I used difficult words—angry at me even though he was actually angry at himself.

One day, we had ordered pizza. We were sitting on the bed, and he was still eating. At that moment, I had let my guard down, and without thinking, I reached out and stroked his beard. It lasted a few seconds. He turned to look at me. Oh shit, I messed up, I thought—he’s going to have a go at me.

Instead, he said, ‘Irini, I have pizza, music, and you stroking my beard. It doesn’t get much better than this. I don’t know how I’ll ever get over it.’ And he didn’t say it sarcastically. But of course, right after that, he took it back and started insulting me again.”

Sometimes, you get a glimpse of the boy beneath the mask. Sometimes, they show it to you on purpose—because they know that you, the overly emotional woman, crave to see it. It’s precious to you, and you’ll do anything to protect it. So they show it to you in order to take advantage of you.

But sometimes, they can’t control it, and the mask falls. And beneath the man, there is the boy.

“Do you like me?”

That desperate need to be accepted and loved—a need that both men and women share. But men are only allowed to satisfy it through sex. The fact that they aren’t allowed anything else destroys them—because on some level, they know.

They see what they’re missing. They see the magical world of women, full of sharing, emotion, and touch that isn’t shameful. They see it through the glass, like The Little Match Girl, and they know it’s not for them.

A tenderness they can’t touch. And that makes them angry, but with a rage that has no clear target. They don’t know how to be angry at society, and they’re not yet capable of being angry at themselves. (That comes later—with addictions, gambling, substances and other self-sabotage and self-destructive habits).

So they get angry, because anger is the only negative emotion men are allowed to express. But beneath the tip of the iceberg, it’s not anger. It’s sadness. It’s grief. It’s the pain of losing something they never had, but could have had, if only they weren’t required to be men.

And when women deny them sex, the only form of intimacy they’re allowed to seek, that makes them even angrier. A rage that terrifies women, forcing them to live in fear. And so they get angry too. They insult men—all men—because they want to stop fearing them. And men, in turn, get even angrier, hating the women who reject them because they fear them. Many find comfort in the arms of the manosphere.

Even when they’re in relationships, many men only get a fleeting glimpse, just a sliver, of what true freedom could feel like. The freedom to not constantly fear your own shadow in a world that judges you by how masculine you appear to be. The freedom to be accepted as you are, to be told you are enough. A mere idea of what love might feel like. But that light and brilliance scare them because they’ve spent their whole lives in the dark.

They become avoidant. The tenderness of staying is unbearable. Just as they get close, they pull away again. The light is not for them. They prefer to keep a safe distance, wearing loneliness as armor, fortified in their stronghold of self-sufficiency and autonomy. This is the prison of masculinity—even within a relationship, even within a marriage.

I’ll bring money home and protect you (from whom?), and you’ll have food ready, sex available, a clean house, and care for me when I need it. Closeness and connection, in moderation, because it is blindingly terrifying.

And women are left with bitterness, which is a mixture of pain and shame. The bitterness of an overflowing river of tenderness that has nowhere to go because the one it’s meant for refuses to receive it, except as home care or emotional labor. Tenderness that freezes and hardens instead of flowing from its spring.

The light is not for them—unless they were lucky enough to have parents who had all the colors on their palette and the willingness and ability to paint outside the lines. The invisible privilege that becomes a kaleidoscope. Parents who were emotionally present. Parents who were intentionally boring. Parents who were generous givers, both in words and actions, of love and attention, love for who you are, not for what you achieve or accomplish. Predictably, consistently, unwaveringly.

Except for the rare few who managed to do it alone, even with parents in the grey. The greatest challenge is transcending masculinity itself. It’s what we beg men to do, but they won’t do it just because we beg. No matter how much we beg. It’s a singularity—a space-time anomaly. They need the right stimuli at the right moment, repeatedly, aligned with a sequence of experiences that slowly confirm an initially vague and unformed idea: Maybe something in the world we know isn’t quite right.

And once the singularity occurs, it takes effort—an effort few are willing to make. It takes curiosity. It takes time. It takes energy. But above all, it takes what we hear in therapy: lean into the uncomfortable. To lean in and sit with discomfort. Until it becomes familiar. Because new ideas and beliefs can be uncomfortable at first—like new shoes. You have to try them on, walk in them, break them in until they become part of you, fitting you perfectly, until you never look back. Not just because you chose them, but because if you ever try to wear the old ones again, you wonder how you ever endured the rotten soles and the holes that let water seep in.

“How did you feel when your father looked at you with shame?”
We talk about the male gaze toward women, but not about the male gaze toward men. The gaze that measures and evaluates. Are you man enough? And so many boys, so many men, feel ashamed of the male gaze upon them—because it finds them lacking, because ithe man they look up to is ashamed of them.

Shame—not for something they did, but for who they are.

“I don’t deserve hot chocolate; I shouted”
I don’t deserve that much grace. I don’t deserve that much kindness. I don’t deserve love for who I am because I am not good enough. Something inside me—or about me—excludes me from the privilege of being loved for who I am. Something, sometime, made me believe this. And I will carry it all my life, and so will those who come close to me. And if I don’t let it go, it will define me until I die. Or until I destroy another life.

“We have to accept that we could have done more.”
From this story, you will remember the boy. But you must also remember the father. He was as good as he could be, but he should have been better. How could he be better with the father he had? I don’t know. I do know that masculinity is a generational issue—and a social one.

We should have done more. Who? All of us.

Parents must be present. Teenagers must question their parents, they must stop seeing them as gods and recognize them as flawed human beings. And parents must accept this loss and step back, slowly, carefully, with a steady love and unspoken safety nets. Because only then can children move forward and surpass them.

The debt is not to the past but to the future.

The debt is to the next generation. But what do you do when the next generation moves backward instead of forward? When it rediscovers lies we thought we had left behind, repackaging them in new, shinier package, this time not in books no one will read, but in short-form videos with millions of views. Coated in baby oil on the arms of alpha male influencers on TikTok.

We were not prepared for this.

Parenting is the hardest job in the world, yet everyone is doomed to do it as an amateur. Clumsy, awkward, imperfect—at best. Or much, much worse. No matter how many resources, books, and mental health professionals exist, there will always be a gap in understanding. The world of teenagers will always be a mystery to the world of adults.

We were not prepared for the fact that while a child sits quietly in their room, staring at a screen, their life might slowly be unraveling. Invisibly. Silently. And boys have been taught not to ask for help. Why? Because they have to be men.

We should have done more. Who? Everyone. Children are not raised by their parents alone. They are not raised in a bubble or a greenhouse. Every child is shaped by every classmate and, therefore, by every parent at school. They are shaped by everything they see or read. By every celebrity who becomes a role model. By social media. By pornography. Every child is raised by society. We all take part in raising them. We need to do more.

 

 

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Not just dating coaching

If you follow dating coaches on social media or have watched Later Daters on Netflix, you might have a very specific idea of what a dating coach does. Let me stop you right there. That’s not who I am.

The whole concept might seem very life-coachy to you or you might think it’s about teaching Pick Up Artist tricks or just charlatanism. On top of that, since I openly do this from a feminist perspective, I often hear men say that because feminists don’t want to meet men, so what I must be doing is teaching women to hate and avoid them. Let me stop you again. I don’t do that either.

What I want is to destigmatize dating in general because we don’t take it seriously enough. Meanwhile, we take marriage and family very seriously, which makes me wonder, how are you supposed to meet someone to marry? Will you open the fridge and find the love of your life inside, right between the cheese and the half eaten leftovers?

We need to remove the stigma from the dating process and from any tools that make it easier, like dating apps. It’s a shame that being on dating apps is still considered embarrassing for many people. As I often say, it’s like looking for a job or to fill a position, but being too embarrassed to create a profile on LinkedIn. But my thoughts on dating apps are all on my interviews, I won’t bore you here.

It’s not just about the dating process itself. It’s about how we approach the process, what baggage we carry, and what tools we use. In dating and relationships, we bring our whole selves. Everything that we are. From social norms and stereotypes to personal beliefs, values, ideals, and even traumas and repetitive patterns that have proven to lead nowhere.

Regarding my coaching, I often talk more about the work I do with men, because otherwise, men assume it’s not relevant to them. That’s because men don’t pay much attention to what women say and, when they see women speak, they often watch with the sound off.

I coach both men and women, and the work I do depends on each person’s specific needs and the level at which I can meet them. With women, we often go into deeper issues and do what we call “deep work” because they’re more likely to have gone to therapy or to have done some work on themselves, while men might mainly be interested in advancing their communication skills. But not all men are like that, and not all women are either.

Generally, my coaching goes way beyond first approaches and texting or guidelines for first dates. We go much deeper. For example:

For a man who told me his goal was to build confidence, I sent the following:

 Confidence is crucial in dating and relationships, although people usually view it superficially. In reality, the foundation of confidence is self-esteem, that’s what it’s built upon. In our culture, we don’t talk enough about how to build solid secure self-esteem.

We can work on this together. We can identify the limiting beliefs that hold you back and create your own hero story, so you feel like the main character in your life. And of course, we’ll explore what exactly is happening in your relationships with women—what mistakes were made in the past, what needs redefining, improvement, perspective shifts and new approach strategies.

For a woman who told me she was tired of dating and felt like she always messed things up and that it was her fault, I replied:

I understand that modern dating creates a sense of frustration, and often women, in particular, wonder if they’re doing something wrong. The answer is that while we all generally have dysfunctional patterns that we project in romantic relationships, that doesn’t mean things are easy or that it’s entirely our fault. The only thing we can control, however, is our own actions.

It’s worth examining your Relationship History to deconstruct what has happened so far, understand the past and gain insights for the future so you can break out of potential vicious cycles and make wiser choices. You may need to learn to use new tools and adopt new habits and behaviours to unlock blockages and move to the next level.

 This is the work I do. I also wanted to note a question from my interview on fortuno.gr. The male journalist mentioned a line he heard from a woman:

“Sorry, I can’t go on with this. I don’t know how to behave with men who aren’t assholes.”

His question was:

“How easy is it for people to change the pattern of who they’re attracted to, even when they’re aware it’s harmful?”

 I answered that this is the million-dollar question. This is where therapy comes to play, because our choices and behaviours in relationships are rooted in our trauma. The logic is, “we marry our unfinished business,” meaning we don’t choose partners who are truly suitable for us or who are likely to bring us closer to happiness. Unfortunately, we often choose those who remind us of a familiar unhappiness.

We keep entering these relationships, trying to fix our past and change the ending. That’s why “nice guys” seem boring.

It’s not because women want “bad boys”. It’s because people who haven’t done enough self-work are programmed to seek the familiar in their relationships, even if it’s painful, in an attempt to rewrite the story and finally find resolution.

In my work, it’s extremely helpful to understand what happened in the past that led someone to behave and function the way they do now. Even if they can’t see the patterns clearly, we see them together.

It’s important to be aware that everyone is made up of dozens of coping mechanisms developed in the past for self-protection, but are now dysfunctional. Recognizing and intervening to change them is key.

Another useful aspect is that of core beliefs about oneself that have been shaped by past traumas. We can also intervene in these and start challenging them. In my coaching, we do exercises to identify them, but it helps when people have heard about all this before because hearing it once is not enough. We need to hear the same things and relate to what we hear many times, until something inside us begins to shift.

In general, the coaching I do includes trauma awareness, because while true healing is about the past, coaching is about the here and now, with clear, practical steps. My coaching also involves education, mainly for men, as well as self-exploration exercises for everyone, along with tools for relationships and communication. This way, the pieces of the puzzle come together and work in synergy.

If any of this resonates with you, if you feel the time has come and you’d like to see what we can work on and achieve together, fill out the form below, and I’ll get back to you. Let’s do this!

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