Initially posted this to a polyamory advice subreddit. If you’re not familiar with poly and it makes you uncomfy you should stop reading.

Idk if it really matters for this, but insofar as poly and structure go, I have a spouse that I live with, a boyfriend that I see once or twice a month, and the partner I’m speaking about here, who I see twice a week and talk to daily. They’re solo poly, and my brand of poly is probably best described as descriptive hierarchical (I don’t enforce any kind of hierarchy, but it’s worth acknowledging that I am hitched and there’s some hierarchy that intrinsically comes with that). They have no other partners right now, but they were casually dating a few folx up until recently.

With that out of the way, what I’m here for:

I have a partner (31) who was married to a narcissist, and has a bunch of trauma from that relationship. I’ve been there myself, but our healing has looked quite different. I’ve got a real powerful dissociative disorder, and mostly toggled between actually okay or an anthropomorphized version of a screen saver for a couple years. The mostly okay side of me was able to be close to people, and the screen saver was a screen saver.

For them, as we get closer, they are really anxious. They’ve said they’re waiting for something awful to happen - that they feel like they don’t deserve me being kind to them, and that a part of their brain is convinced any kindness, affection, love, etc. is a ploy to get them to let down their guard so that I can work my way in and control them or treat them poorly. They’re also pretty convinced that they do not deserve to be treated well, and so someone treating them well must be inherently deceptive. Which, oof.

When we’ve talked about it I just say that’s okay to feel that way, and if you need space or a break that’s okay too. I’m trying to let them take the lead and to just be patient and loving. I know quite well from my own experience that it takes a long time to recover, and that - at least for me - there’s a part of you that may never fully recover.

I asked them the other day if there was anything I could do differently, or anything about our relationship we could structure differently, that would be helpful for them. They drew a blank.

I kinda want to propose ideas that might help, but my experience of this was pretty different on account of the dissociation stuff. I get intuitively a lot of what they’re saying, but I’m just at a loss about what, other than time and the work they’re doing on their own, might help. Maybe there’s nothing I can really do to help, and I can accept that and can just chill. Our time together, despite all thi s, is still one of the greatest joys in my life.

So I guess my question is, do y’all have any ideas about what could help them? Whether that’s structural stuff, or like things we could try together, or things I could do, or just information/resources about recovering from that kind of trauma that either of us might find helpful. Ideally, I’d like to provide some ideas and see how those ideas sit with them and go from there. Like a menu of options for creating some comfort during recovery.

I just want them to be okay. And I know that’s a long road, and that there’s really very little I can do. Still, if there’s a non-zero something that I can do, I’d like to do that. And if that isn’t possible, I’d like to understand more, if only to be a better human to lean on if they want to do that.