'I'm a relationship expert, here's the one thing ruining your love life.'

If you want to support independent women's media, become a Mamamia subscriber. Get an all-access pass to everything we make, including exclusive podcasts, articles, videos and our exercise app, MOVE.

The dating pool can feel polluted — like swimming in murky waters full of wounds, defences and bad habits. Much of this comes from unhealed trauma, that we unknowingly leak into a collective love pool.

The truth is this: if we don't heal our trauma, it'll sabbotage our love life. If we don't learn how to spot other people's trauma, we might wake up a few months — or even years — into a situationship or a full-blown partnership and realise we are heaving under the weight of someone else's unhealed wounds. Because when you choose a partner, you choose their wounds too.

As a therapist, I've seen countless clients either leaking their own unhealed trauma into relationships or quietly carrying the weight of someone else's.

I've seen it in my girl group too — intelligent, beautiful, powerful women who are thriving, deeply caring friends, mothers, bosses and community space holders, yet whose love lives are, quite frankly, the pits.

I've been there myself — spilling my trauma all over the place and carrying a man's stuff that was never mine to hold. As women, we've been conditioned for decades to carry others' burdens, absorb their pain, and smile sweetly through it all, even when it's killing us. But that's an entirely different article.

Watch: The BAYH team explain trauma bonding in relationships. Post continues below.

It was about three years into my post-divorce dating journey that I realised I was trauma-dating. The level of anxiety, distress, triggers, and shame I was experiencing was completely at odds with how early dating should feel. Early dating should feel exciting, a little nerve-wracking, somewhat vulnerable, and maybe occasionally awkward.

When our feelings feel out of proportion, it's often one of the first signs that we might be trauma-dating.

This tends to happen for two main reasons:

1. Our nervous system is haywire.

Nervous system dysregulation often comes from unresolved experiences that have left their mark on our body and mind. So, we don't feel safe to begin with.

Add in the uncertainty of a new potential love match, with all the intense emotions, future fantasies, and risk of heartbreak, and our nervous system goes into overdrive — spiking cortisol, racing the heart, and triggering reactive behaviors.

These can range from over-texting, over-demanding, over-analysing, and ruminating, to shutting down, pushing away, ghosting… or worse… hot and cold, push pull behaviour.

2. Story and role projection.

If we haven't processed past traumatic relationship experiences, we tend to super-impose them onto our dates, lovers and partners — either we keep choosing people who have similar unsuitable (or toxic) traits, that will never be able to love us the way we truly want, or we meet nice available people, but we keep seeing or feeling the problems of the past…red flags that just don't exist.

We turn people int perpetrators or lay out unrealistic demands that they will never be able to meet.

The healing process.

Healing asks us to start noticing when our feelings feel out of proportion to what's happening in the present. When it's our big feelings, it's about creating a nurturing space to be with and process them. Often, these emotions have little to do with our date — they're old trauma stories surfacing, asking to be healed.

If the intense feelings belong to the person we're dating, we need to approach them with compassion without becoming a human pacifier. This is where boundaries matter. We own what is ours to heal and invite them to own what is theirs. When both people commit to processing the past, healthy love becomes possible in the present.

Another surefire sign of trauma dating is demanding certain behaviours to feel safe. After I left my marriage, I felt wildly unsafe. I got married young and we were together for nearly two decades, so all of a sudden, I found myself all alone in my mid-thirties with two kids failing about in the wicked sea of life without an anchor or life jacket.

Instead of taking time to heal, I flung myself full force into a new relationship. Unconsciously, I made it that man's mission to make me feel safe. And of course, he never did.

I see the same pattern with many clients who are in early stages of dating after trauma. There are demands for a certain communication cadence, or huge amounts of validation, or constant physical contact.

Listen: In this episode, clinical psychologist Dr. Anastasia Hronis tells us what trauma really means, what PTSD looks like, and shares some ways people can get support. Post continues below.

When we are seeking safety from someone else, they will always fail to give it to us at some point, and they will likely become fatigued and resentful because we are asking them to change to be in relationship with us and making our wellbeing their burden.

This sets up a dynamic of never enough vs too much, which over time, can feel like agony. In some cases, it can cross the amorphous boundary into abusive dynamics.

Healing asks us to cultivate a sense of safety inside ourselves and to notice every time we start demanding that people change in service of our safety. If we find this happening regularly, it's a sign that before we are ready for love and partnership, we need to learn to be alone, consider going to therapy, build our social circle and begin to date slowly, rather than leap right into something and get lost in someone else's energy.

On the flip side, healing also asks us to learn to date people who seem relatively safe inside themselves… and we can really only learn this over time.

This is why embracing the slow burn is the new ultimate way to stop the cycle of trauma dating for good. Slow is the new sexy.

There are many ways trauma can show up in our love lives, and the healing process is often complex, non-linear, nuanced and different for each of us. The starting point is to learn to spot it.

As more of us commit to healing our trauma, the dating pool becomes cleaner, clearer, kinder and begins to be populated with more emotionally available potential mates.

Every time we choose our healing, we are seeding the potential of epic love.

Feature Image: Supplied.