What Does It Mean To Date Your ‘Oppressor’? On Dating Through Systemic Trauma

Once I saw this TikTok explaining how straight women are the only species expected to date our natural predators, I have not looked at dating the same way. The internet has definitely made me hyperaware of how trauma impacts essentially every aspect of our lives, and our dating habits are no different. Instead of trying to figure out the psychology behind this by spiralling down Reddit threads on my own (do not advise!), I asked Sahra O’Doherty, Director of the Australian Association of Psychologists, about how and why trauma can affect one’s dating life. Her insights changed the way I’m approaching dating in 2024.

Like so many issues, breaking down the underlying tension within dating requires looking at two halves: personal and systemic trauma. Personal includes things like your dating and sexual history, or things that might have happened in your personal upbringing. With 2 in 5 Australians having experienced physical or sexual violence in their lives, many people you date will have some sort of personal trauma. Systemic trauma refers to the harm caused by practices, procedures, or conditions within society that impact us as individuals. The type of harm systemic trauma inflicts can vary, from psychological, emotional, economic, spiritual, physical, or sexual harm. It recognises the role of factors like racism, sexism and colonization.

Both your personal and systemic traumas influence how you respond to others. “When you have one’s individual experience reinforced by and reflected in a socio-cultural experience, it just perpetuates that idea that dating is dangerous and dating or entering into a new relationship can be traumatic and re-triggering,” Sahra says.

Sahra explains that once our fear and threat perception in the brain become activated, we usually respond to that fear (triggered by trauma) in one of four ways:

• Fight: The manifestation of trauma as aggression or conflict within relationships.
• Flight: The inclination to avoid emotional intimacy and commitment as a protective measure.
• Freeze: Emotional detachment or shutting down as a response to past trauma, “like our brain is silent screaming and our body can’t respond or move.”
• Fawn: Prioritising others’ needs and desires over your own to maintain safety and avoid conflict, which Sahra says is a very gendered response. “It occurs a lot in women and it’s essentially when we are taught to tend and befriend.” 

We also use different ways to protect ourselves from re-traumatisation as we attempt to explore dating, for example: Black, Indigenous and women of colour who avoid dating white men; meeting only in public places; queer women preferring to date women because it feels safer; or dating men predominantly as an inverse trauma response.

I asked Zee Feed readers whether this affects their dating life, and the revelations proved just how deeply we internalised personal and systemic traumas:

Anna, 25: “As a queer, Aboriginal woman from a low socioeconomic background, my identity is intersectional and so is my trauma. When I was younger I was sexually assaulted and that certainly has had very real impacts on the way I date and interact with men. I think most women are traumatised by men and change their behaviour to compensate for bad men, but maybe they don’t identify it as trauma. I know we all let our friends know where and when and who we are going on dates with in case we go missing.”

Julia, 24: “The lingering echoes of a deep-seated sense of abandonment that threaded through my formative years have left an indelible mark on my choices of partner. Society has given a label to my struggles, referred to as ‘daddy issues.’ However, it goes much deeper than this. These traumas and the associated triggers have made me vulnerable to predatory and aggressive behaviour, particularly from significantly older male individuals.”

Kriti, 27: “I’m always looking for a challenge or an obstacle to focus on in my relationships so that I don’t have to address the systematic challenges that I can’t fix… Most recently it’s been the fact that I was in a year-long situationship — I hate that word! — with a man who loved me but didn’t see a future with me because I didn’t have blonde hair, white skin or blue eyes. I guess you can break up and wipe your hands clean, but this then parlayed into the way I started to view all the other relationships in my life because not only did he feel that way about me, but he was consistently confused on why other people didn’t see me that way and could love me. And that’s a lot to unpack.”

While the people we spoke to were very aware of their triggers and the way it shaped their dating habits, not everyone is at that stage of the healing journey. “It’s important to recognise you’re not just entering into one particular circumstance, one particular conversation,” Sahra says. “We have all of our histories of every other conversation that we’ve ever had and all of our experiences going into this one interaction. It might be something innocuous, like a smell, that might set us off. And then we’re remembering past experiences that might not entirely match with our present day experience, so all of the emotions that we felt in that past experience are now coming into the present day.”

Preventing re-traumatisation

At this point in the conversation I was ready to delete all the dating apps and cancel my date for later that week – it felt like I had no control over my trauma and how it was subconsciously driving my dating life. Thankfully Sahra said that there are ways to to prevent re-traumatisation.

When it comes to noticing red flags or any similarities to a previous traumatic situation we can decide for ourselves: is this threat enough for me to want to step away? “If I’m recognizing that this person is treating me in a way that I don’t like, that is reminding me of another person who also treated me poorly, can I choose to no longer engage with this person? Or can I speak to this person and maybe we can talk about these issues and see whether or not together, if I feel safe enough to do so, we can come up with a solution that works for this particular relationship.”

I pointed out to Sahra that systemic trauma is often so ingrained you don’t know where to start… and as I said it out loud, I realised this was probably internalised-sexism coming through in an urge to not burden a partner with a problem that ‘only’ affects me. “It’s so important to be aligned with your partner in terms of your values,” Sahra says. “It doesn’t matter what topic of conversation it is. It could be about something, you know, really, really pivotal that you hold very dear or it could be that you like pineapple on pizza. If you don’t feel safe enough to raise a topic of conversation with your partner, something is wrong, right?” Although topics like gender inequality and colonisation may seem very broader, they still personally affect us all – which makes them fair game for discussion with a partner.

It may seem obvious, but Sahra also highlighted the need for boundary setting when it comes to dating.  “If your line in the sand is ‘I can’t date a racist, I can’t date someone who is sexist’ and your partner meets 95% of your eligibility criteria, but they cross that line in the sand… It’s a really important personal decision for you to make whether that is something that you’re  willing to accept.”

That doesn’t mean that you will never argue with a partner or someone you are dating, but you should know what your limits are. “Having a really good argument with a partner can be invigorating. It can be fun sometimes, right? But if it leaves you feeling as though you’ve made a mistake, like you weren’t listened to, or if you end up with a fight, flight, helplessness or hopelessness feeling afterward, then it probably wasn’t a safe discussion for you to be having. It’s really important to always be checking back in with yourself and your own sense of safety,” Sahra explains. That includes taking breaks from the dating scene when you need to – pushing through trauma triggers when you need to step back will only leave you feeling burnt out and put you at risk or re-traumatisation.

“We are social and communal creatures. One of the core human desires is to connect with other humans, which means dating is going to be part of the game.” But if we are able to recognise in ourselves our traumas – personal or systemic – it can allow us to take control of our dating journey. Remember: we are not our trauma. Past experiences may shaped who we are, but they do not determine our worth or ability to find love and happiness.

Smart people read more:

11 People in Interracial Relationships on the Intense Experience of Watching Get Out – The Cut

Gen Z’s So-Called Sex Negativity Is Very Progressive, Actually

What I’ve Learned Since Getting a Glory Hole in my Home – VICE