The Oasis by FOLA

Dr. Gabor Maté said it best: "Trauma is not what happens to you. It's what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you."

And that inside part — the neural rewiring, the defensive adaptations, the subconscious beliefs about safety, worthiness, and trust — doesn't stay neatly contained in your individual psychology. It shows up every day in your relationship. In the fights that don't make sense. In the distance that has no explanation. In the patterns that repeat no matter how many times you promise yourself "never again."

The ACE Connection

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study — conducted by Dr. Vincent Felitti and Dr. Robert Anda with over 17,000 participants — remains one of the most significant public health studies ever conducted. It found a direct, dose-response relationship between childhood adversity and adult health outcomes, including relationship functioning.

The ten ACE categories include physical, emotional, and sexual abuse; physical and emotional neglect; and household dysfunction (domestic violence, substance abuse, mental illness, parental separation, incarcerated family member).

Here's what matters for your relationship: a person with an ACE score of 4 or higher is significantly more likely to experience difficulty with emotional regulation, trust, and intimate connection in adulthood. Not because they're damaged. Because their nervous system adapted to an environment of threat, and those adaptations persist long after the threat is gone.

In the FOLA assessment, we screen for ACEs not to diagnose or label, but to illuminate. Because you cannot navigate a pattern you cannot see.

How Trauma Lives in the Body

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's landmark work, The Body Keeps the Score, fundamentally changed how we understand trauma. His research shows that trauma is stored not primarily in narrative memory (the story of what happened) but in the body — in muscle tension, breathing patterns, postural habits, and autonomic nervous system settings.

This means you can go to talk therapy for years, develop a sophisticated understanding of your childhood, and still flinch when your partner raises their voice. Because the body hasn't received the memo. The implicit memory system — the body's record — still carries the encoding.

In my hypnotherapy practice, this is where the deep work happens. We bypass the narrative mind and go directly to the somatic encoding. "Where do you feel it in your body when your partner criticises you?" The answer is always specific: the chest, the throat, the stomach. And when we follow that sensation back in time — using age regression techniques — we almost always arrive at a scene from childhood where that exact sensation was first encoded.

The goal isn't to relive the trauma. It's to resource it. To give the younger self what they needed at the time — safety, protection, validation — and to allow the nervous system to complete the defensive response it was never able to complete. Running if you needed to run. Saying no if you needed to say no. Crying if you were never allowed to cry.

When this completion happens, the present-day trigger loses its charge. Not because you've forgotten. Because your nervous system no longer needs to protect you from something that already happened.

The Four Trauma Responses in Relationships

Pete Walker's work on Complex PTSD identifies four primary trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Every person has a dominant response, and every relationship has a pattern built on the interaction between two trauma responses.

Fight: The partner who becomes aggressive, critical, or controlling under stress. Their nervous system learned early that the best defense is a good offense. In the relationship, this looks like escalation, blame, and a need to dominate the narrative of the conflict. Underneath: terror of helplessness.

Flight: The partner who stays perpetually busy, avoids emotional conversations, or literally leaves the room during conflict. Their nervous system learned that safety lies in distance. In the relationship, this looks like workaholism, distraction, and emotional unavailability. Underneath: terror of engulfment.

Freeze: The partner who shuts down, dissociates, or goes blank during emotional intensity. Their nervous system learned that the safest response to overwhelming threat is to disappear internally. In the relationship, this looks like stonewalling, emotional flatness, and an inability to respond in the moment. Underneath: terror of annihilation.

Fawn: The partner who over-accommodates, people-pleases, and abandons their own needs to maintain the relationship. Their nervous system learned that safety comes from making the other person happy. In the relationship, this looks like chronic self-sacrifice, difficulty with boundaries, and eventual explosive resentment. Underneath: terror of abandonment.

The Dance of Two Wounded Nervous Systems

Every couple is a system composed of two individuals, each carrying their own trauma history, their own dominant response, and their own set of triggers. The relational "dance" is the predictable pattern that emerges when these two systems interact under stress.

Fight-flight: One partner escalates, the other runs. The pursuer-distancer cycle.
Fight-freeze: One partner rages, the other shuts down. The attacker-stonewaller cycle.
Fawn-fight: One partner over-accommodates until they explode, shocking the other. The martyr-villain cycle.

These dances are not chosen. They are emergent properties of two nervous systems doing what they learned to do. And they will continue, automatically and indefinitely, until both partners develop awareness of their own patterns and compassion for their partner's.

The Way Forward

1. Know your ACE score. Not as a diagnosis, but as a map. Understanding the terrain of your childhood adversity helps you predict which relational situations will activate your nervous system. The FOLA assessment includes an ACE-informed screening specifically for this purpose.

2. Identify your dominant trauma response. Are you a fighter, flighter, freezer, or fawner? And what is your partner's? Once you can name the dance, you can begin to change it.

3. Practise window of tolerance expansion. Dr. Daniel Siegel's concept of the "window of tolerance" describes the zone of autonomic arousal within which you can function effectively. Trauma narrows this window. Healing widens it. Practices like breathwork, bilateral stimulation, yoga, and — yes — hypnotherapy all serve to expand your capacity to stay present during relational stress.

4. Seek trauma-informed support. Not all therapy is created equal. If trauma is a significant factor in your relationship, you need a therapist who understands it somatically, not just cognitively. EMDR, somatic experiencing, EFT, and clinical hypnotherapy are all evidence-based modalities that address trauma at the level where it actually lives.

5. Lead with compassion — for yourself and your partner. You are not your trauma response. Your partner is not their trauma response. You are two people who survived difficult things and developed brilliant strategies to keep yourselves safe. Those strategies are now outdated. They need updating, not condemning.

The uncommon practice is this: to look at your own wounded patterns with honesty, to look at your partner's with compassion, and to commit — together — to building something safer than anything either of you has known.

That is not naive optimism. That is neuroplasticity. The brain that was shaped by fear can be reshaped by love. Not romantic love — though that helps. But the love that shows up, stays present, and does the work even when it's hard.

Especially when it's hard.