At least a more normal one. One never knows what is normal in the end. I often wondered how it is. I would read some articles about how it feels wrong and scary for quite a long time at the beginning. And how it can have a healing effect on a long run. But I did not quite understand where the healing effect would come from, also I did not like the idea that my healing would depend on someone else. Also, "feeling wrong" is not a really good tell-tell sign of a right relationship to use. So now I understand a bit more.
The flashbacks and the feelings that everything will collapse any moment are the same like before. Except it does not collapse. But even when it does not, another flashbacks come, of moments when it did, just a bit later. And if that other person is able to accept also that, and all the follow-up flashbacks, there comes a moment at the end of which I feel.. tired. Ashamed. Regretful. Of having wasted time on that. It is a feeling of a 5 year old being scolded by their parents for forgetting themselves in the moment, and now coming back to reality. I think it is also a matter of luck if someone is able to understand this at all. I suspect this can unwind quite wildly with someone who maybe is not toxic and does care, but is not able to understand how someone can be "too emotional".
Expecting hurt from that other person stays too. Paranoid analysis of everything they said, did, or didn't do, and trying to match it with previous experiences. But there is an end to that, there is always a limit to how far the paranoid thoughts and flashbacks can go, and this limit is somehow organically defined by the interaction between the two people. There is no bottomless pit I am falling into every time I have an anxious thought. As if it was a system with boundaries that is protecting itself from destabilization. It does not always have to be the other person giving support, sometimes it is just me telling myself "okay, enough". But somehow I think I would not be able to tell it to myself if I was not in that system.
And this is actually also a bit scary. It does feel a bit like being inside my family of origin. I think it is about being inside a system of relationships. And yes, I did have a few moments of panic because of it. It felt like the panic I felt a few times when I thought that I will die. It feels like.. losing control. Like I am part of something that has a life on its own, and I do not know where it will take us. And I saw it taking people to miserable places, with death at the end.
On the positive side. There is an unexpected effect or learning how to care about myself. Because the other person cares about me and I automatically empathise with them, I transitively have to empathise with them caring about me. And in those moments I usually get quite astonished. Of how far away my level of caring about myself is from the level I have been empathising with. It makes me retrospectively question a lot of relationships I had in the past, not only romantic ones. There is usually a moment of thinking "wait a moment, is it not a bit weird", and then when I compare it to how I see other people treating other people, or how I try to treat other people, I have to come to the conclusion that this is actually normal.
There is also a thought in the back of my head: such a pity that I have wasted so much time and energy before.