Having been studying and thinking about trauma for some time, I've come to the conclusion that its the source of most mental illness and that trauma-based therapy will be the future of therapy; though the drug companies may fight to stop this as it will eventually be a threat to their profits. And while trauma is often considered something that only happens on a battlefield or in a car accident, it has to be noted that it can happen through other scenarios, even if its not as extreme; to emphasize that trauma has a spectrum of experience and severity, a person can traumatize you with a text message if you make them emotionally significant enough.

Sue Johnson's couple's therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy or EFT, which is possibly the most effective couple's therapy in existence, based off of John Bowlby's attachment theory, and claims a 70-75% success rate, had me thinking that attachment and positive social connection or "unconditional positive regard" as it would be used by a therapist, might be more valid than trauma in the future of therapy, but its more likely that they will be equally valid, since recently I realized that EFT is actually a trauma healing therapy for couples.

In books around healing trauma, Waking The Tiger by Peter Levine and The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk, the idea of fighting, fleeing, and freezing are all addressed in their relation to trauma; and these are all responses to trauma in the animal kingdom. In Sue Johnson's books she talks about the three ways couples disconnect, through fighting, fleeing, and protest, which in an interesting twist, mirror the animal kingdom responses to trauma. The only difference being that protest is fighting to keep a relationship going, rather than fighting to defend one's life. Where protest seems to come about primarily in a heterosexual relationship because of different gendered brain structures and projecting one's brain structure onto their SO who is the other gender without realizing there are differences, the biggest difference arguably being commitment is seen as more loving than sex for most women, and sex is seen as more loving than commitment for most men.

Attachment trauma, or a couple other ways of wording it, disconnection, or negative connection, in emotionally significant relationships (both platonic and sexual), starting with a person's parents, can affect them radically. We live in a universe of probabilities which include our thoughts, emotions, and actions, and negative connection in relationships with enough emotional significance to the individual will affect how they approach dating and relationships. It can decide whether someone will be anxious, avoidant, or secure, and in what way; and can severely screw up people in different ways, or give them, to some degree, the ability to heal others.

And with trauma in general, freezing or "playing dead" is the last ditch response to trauma. When a lion is chasing down a zebra and pulls it to the ground, the zebra might go totally frozen, as Peter Levine has suggested, its disassociated and waiting for a moment to escape: its disassociated to better face death, but there is also an incredible amount of "survival" energy locked in it, waiting for the right moment to fight and escape.

Animals who survive traumatic encounters tend to literally tremble and shake it out, or even play out the trauma in order to master and move past it; human beings can shake, and seem to play out trauma as well, sometimes in strange ways, and sometimes to their detriment. As human beings, our brains are so complex that this traumatic survival energy can get perpetually locked in our bodies, and the more fragmented memories that trauma produces in comparison to normal memories can get suppressed, and our ability to be more present and mentally healthy can be damaged as a result of trauma.

We can freeze over and over again in response to one or more extremely traumatic memories, this is also where most anxiety seems to come from, including approach anxiety. And in criticism or arguing in relationships, when someone is freezing up as a result of criticism or an argument, they are totally disempowered. They are either being dragged into the feeling of past trauma that's locked in the body, where the fragments of memory around that feeling of trauma may not even be accessible to them, or alternatively, they are presently being traumatized.

Judging from EFT, the healthiest relationships appear as though both people have developed an understanding of the best possible outcome being in positive social connection, stating their needs, and working together as long as boundaries aren't crossed-- which is inevitably inclusive of boundaries caused by the red pill ideas of male and female sex differences, alongside the idea of framing problems as something you work on together, rather than framing the other person as the sole source of the problem. Where these couples recover from criticism, anxiety or fear, and arguments by quickly moving towards positive connection, and being as open as possible to the different ways that positive connection manifests; which if you want to get technical about it from a more therapist angle, this would manifest as sex and the five love languages. Where two people have trained themselves to connect and be open to connection rather than manipulating or bargaining their way towards that connection, because they've seen that it has the best possible outcome for the relationship that they want.

And with the sexual component taken out of this, it can still work, so stating needs, asserting boundaries, framing problems as a group effort, connecting positively, and openness to the different ways that others show positive connection can benefit relationships in general.