Aug. 15, 2025

How To Find Love as a Trauma Survivor

In this deeply raw and unfiltered episode, I share the truth about my journey from being a man who sabotaged love at every turn to someone who has learned—through years of painful self-discovery—what it means to truly love and be loved. From cheating, lying, and manipulating to chasing fleeting validation through strangers, I reveal the destructive patterns that came from a childhood shaped by abuse, neglect, and the belief that I didn’t matter.

This isn’t just a story of mistakes—it’s about the work required to heal, to build self-love, and to create space for others to love you in return. I explore why so many of us equate love with pain, how to break free from that cycle, and why allowing love—both for yourself and from others—is the most courageous thing you can do. If you’ve ever felt unworthy of love or pushed it away out of fear, this episode will challenge you to make a simple yet life-changing choice: to allow love in.

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I have made every mistake that a man can make in a relationship over the course of my life. Before I started this journey of choosing myself and walking down the path of discovering what it means to be a healed man, I did every despicable thing that a man could possibly do. I cheated on women who loved me. I hooked up with strangers thinking that their physical touch and companionship, whether it be for 10 minutes or two hours or two days, would somehow fulfill me.

I had relationships inside of relationships—inside of relationships. I learned how to navigate people's emotions to get what I wanted. Probably the worst part of all of it is I used to tell myself that it's okay. No one loves me, so why does it matter?

And then I walked the path of choosing to become a healed man. I did not anticipate this path. I certainly did not expect that one day I would wake up and recognize many of the truths I've shared here to be not only embarrassing, but earth-shattering, because they all lead down one path. That path is: prior to becoming a healed man—or a person, woman, whomever you are—you cannot fully know love.

So, where does love start? For many of us, love started with parents who were absent, neglectful, abusive—mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, financially, and perhaps sexually abusive or neglectful or truant. For many of us, love started with the baseline belief that we didn't matter and were not important. That no matter how we existed, no matter how much we showed up, pretended, or capitulated, it did not matter. No matter what we did, we would not be loved.

That's a sad, unfortunate truth for many people in the world—myself included—growing up with drug-addict alcoholic parents, a mother who cut my finger off when I was four years old, a grandmother who was viciously abusive and racist, a stepfather who was unbelievably abusive physically, mentally, and emotionally, and a system of peers and compatriots who could care less if I killed myself. I learned at a very young age that I did not matter.

If you grow up and come from a space of feeling like you don't matter, you will live life as a person who believes that. And if you live life believing you don't matter, you will do things that carry no weight. So what happens when you do things that carry no weight in a society built around people who are taught to care about each other? If you're like me, you lie, cheat, steal, break hearts, break up, manipulate—anything to get what you want, except the one thing you desire most: love.

To be accepted, appreciated, acknowledged, cared for. And most of all, we reject love—the very thing that's arguably the most important thing a human could ever want—because it was stripped from us before we ever understood its meaning. We fight against our own intuition, our own self-narrative, and our own understanding of the world, in pursuit of this idea that we are capable of being loved, only to be consistently rejected.

So what do we do? We find love in ways we think match our self-narrative: drugs, alcohol, sex, or other things. But mainly, it's about hurting ourselves—giving ourselves the very thing we were taught was acceptable in our version of love. We equate and associate pain with love. And if you tie those two concepts together, you will seek both pain and love, not recognizing you are causing your own suffering.

This moral dilemma has plagued trauma survivors their entire lives. How do I know? Because I was one of them. People say, “Once a cheater, always a cheater.” I'm not dead yet, so I can't prove them entirely wrong, but since I started the path of becoming a healed man, with a few missteps along the way, I can say that in my last relationships, I have exited gracefully—with kindness and love, not with painful arguments, cheating, lies, and the worst parts of me.

That didn’t come without a tremendous amount of work—being willing to sit in the depths of the pain, staring in the mirror, and recognizing that I did not love myself. And so the question became: what does one do to love themselves? To love themselves enough to shelter the love of another human being?

That’s the million-dollar question: how do you feel love for who you are—simply because you are you—and then allow love to coexist with that? It’s a hard question, one I’ve spent years trying to answer. At the core of Think Unbroken, I realized it’s not just about helping people with severe trauma become the hero of their own story. That’s simple: change your habits, change your life. But how do you change a habit around love and acceptance—for yourself and others?

It’s not built around habits—it’s built around allowance. Many of us are really good at giving love—codependent, even. We give every ounce of energy to everyone else and put ourselves last. I know I did.

But what if loving yourself and creating a container for others to love you started with you doing what you knew was necessary to create self-love? What would that look like? How would you show up? How would you talk to yourself? Treat yourself?

I ask myself: how would a person who cared about themselves act? How would they commit to their goals? Treat their body? Allow others to treat them? While self-love looks different for everyone, from far enough away it looks the same.

And once you’ve built self-love, how do you also allow others to love you? I don’t believe you should separate the journey of self-love from allowing others to love you. Yes, there may be a period where you need to be alone—but don’t cut yourself off from connection. I’ve discovered the greatest healing in my journey came through love with other humans. That part is often skipped.

Eventually, a declaration must be made: I am allowed to love and be loved. Not to fight it, not to push it back, not to sabotage it, but to embrace it. In that embracing, love can find its way into you.

Recently, I looked up my ex on Facebook—something I hadn’t done in a very long time. That day, I found out her boyfriend had just proposed to her. My first thought: that’s happening because of my decisions. That should have been me—but I was unhealed then, living in trauma. Instead of anger, my thought was, “I hope he takes better care of her than I did.”

Since then, I’ve realized the love we seek, we often push away, because our emotional home—the comfort of what we’ve always known—feels safe. It’s not until we leave that comfort that we can truly let someone else love us.

Looking at that moment, I thought: I’m so glad I’ve been doing this work. I know my future love will come to me because I believe that. I feel lucky. My person is out there.

The journey changes only when we allow ourselves to be loved—by ourselves and by others. We all have moments where something “should have been” but isn’t, because of our decisions. If we learn from them instead of repeating them, life changes.

So, people often ask: how do you love yourself? Simple—do what you know you’re supposed to do, and everything will change.

Dating now, as an almost 40-year-old man, is entirely different than when I was 20 or 30—for one reason: I decided to allow people to love me. When it hurts. When it’s ugly. When it’s joyful. All of it.

So, my friend, I’ll leave you with this question: Can you allow yourself to be loved?