My partner lashes out on me when her trauma is triggered
My girlfriend (37f) and I (29f) have been together for 6 months. It is her first relationship with a girl, while I have only dated/interested in women.
We were friends for about 6 months before getting together and we confessed feelings/got together a few weeks before I moved away so it has been long distance but we see each other every month.
After the first 2ish months, her past trauma started showing herself. She hasn’t had it easy for many reasons but the main thing is past relationships with very abusive people and complex s*xual trauma. She was open about it from the get go and communicated that she would need to take it VERY slowly on the physical front, which I’m ok with as I have a pretty low sex drive/it’s low on my priority list when it comes to relationships.
With that said, it has happened several times that she gets worked up over the fact that everyone wants to have sex in relationships and therefore I must do too and lashes out on me by closing off, getting angry, saying that I don’t need to be with her if I can’t deal with her outbursts and saying things like ”and now I also have to deal with the fact that Youre going to get worked up over what I said” or ”you need something from me that I can’t give me” or ”you feel an x way”
I grew up with a very emotionally unpredicatable and unsafe mother and have been very open about how my body physically shuts down when someone is yelling at me and I struggle setting boundaries. We clash in the sense that she says everything shes feeling as she feels it, while I usually need to go away and think and then come backs and debrief certain things that end up on my mind.
I see a therapist every week, she has a therapist she meets maybe once a month/two. We have also had a couples counselling session about how our communication styles clash. It was good and we’ll have another one but as were the city the counsellor is in once every two months, it won’t be a very regular thing.
After ”outbursts”, she feels bad, acts self-deprecating and also says that she doesn’t remember most of what she said during the argument.
I feel very emotionally drained by these situations and unfortunately end up tip toeing around her, which she also thinks is uncomfortable as ”shes not scary and not my mother”.
We had one of those recently, it’s been a very long visit and we’ve hung out in her city for like a month straight so tensions are a bit high but I feel very frustrated and stuck - it feels like I’m doing everything to be understanding and respectful of her boundaries and she says that she doesn’t think that I overstep her boundaries in any way but that doesn’t make the things she says when she gets worked up easier to ignore. Her consensus is that I’m the first ”nice” person shes been with and she learned to be in relationships in a certain way, aka by fighting/being emotionally explosive
It feels like a horrible loop that we end up in and I don’t know what to do. I care about her very very deeply and want this to work but it is also taking a big toll on me and I can’t seem to relax and not get stuck in my own scared child loop of ”if I’m very very good and small then maybe I’ll fix everything and nobody will get mad at me”.
Any advice lol?
Posted Aug 12, 2026, 8:28 PM UTC