The Inner Critic Book Club: Haunting Adeline

Bleeding Hearts & Blurred Lines: Trauma Healing in Haunting and Hunting Adeline

Dark romance isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s gritty, brutal, seductive, and sometimes uncomfortably honest. And in Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton, we don’t just see pain—we live it through Adeline’s eyes. Her story is tangled in trauma, obsession, survival, and ultimately, reclamation.

If you’ve read both books, you probably asked yourself at least once: Why am I still reading this? Why am I rooting for these characters? Why does it feel like healing in hellfire?

The answer lies in the raw truth that dark romance dares to explore: trauma doesn’t look pretty, and healing doesn’t either. Sometimes, trauma doesn’t whisper—it screams. Sometimes love isn’t soft—it’s jagged. And yet, there’s something profoundly human in the mess of it all.

Let’s dive into how Haunting and Hunting Adeline reflect trauma exposure, the nervous system, and the long, non-linear journey toward reclaiming agency, using a lens of trauma-informed therapy.

🖤Before we talk about trauma, let’s talk about why we even voluntarily put ourselves through stories like this.

Dark romance creates a container—a fantasy space—to explore what we’ve been told we’re not allowed to feel:

• Rage

• Revenge

• Obsession

• Fear and desire coexisting

• Pain as a path to power

In real life, these themes are dangerous. In fiction, they become symbols—of what we repress, what we want to understand, and sometimes, what we need to name in order to heal.

⚠️ Adeline’s story is a stark portrayal of complex trauma. She experiences:

• Stalking and manipulation

• Sexual violence and coercion

• Kidnapping and captivity

• Terroristic control tactics

• Survival through psychological detachment

This isn’t a mild “bad day” narrative. This is nervous system-level survival. Her body and brain go into freeze, fawn, fight, and flight—sometimes all in one chapter.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth:

For many trauma survivors, Adeline’s reactions aren’t unrealistic. They’re familiar.

🧠Adeline’s journey isn’t just a story—it’s a metaphor for how trauma lives in the body. Her hypervigilance, distrust, sexual dissociation, rage, and numbness are all textbook trauma responses.

Trauma severs us from our sense of safety, control, and self.
But what’s rarely talked about in mainstream healing circles is that trauma also cracks open the shadow—the parts of ourselves we’re told are “too much” to feel.

And that’s where Haunting/Hunting Adeline becomes more than just a dark romance. It becomes a Jungian shadow journey.

• Zade is the embodiment of danger and devotion.

• Violence becomes both weapon and intimacy.

• Sex is both reclamation and re-traumatization.

This duality is the core of shadow work—where light and dark are not separate, but tangled.

🔒Let’s be clear: Zade is not a safe partner in the traditional therapeutic sense. He crosses boundaries that in real life would be deeply unethical and abusive. The story romanticizes many of these moments—and that’s what makes reading dark romance a complex psychological experience.

But this is also where exposure through fiction plays a role.

Many readers of dark romance are trauma survivors themselves. They aren’t reading to find healthy dynamics—they’re reading to:

• Confront emotions that feel unsafe in real life

• Reclaim fantasies they were shamed for

• Witness power struggles where someone fights back

And yes, sometimes it’s a dark, violent fantasy that gives language to pain when therapeutic language fails.

🧩 Reading dark romance doesn’t heal trauma—but it can support healing in the following ways:

1. Exposure in a Controlled Setting
   You can pause, put the book down, cry, rage, journal, and return when you’re ready.

2. Narrative Completion
   Many survivors never get to fight back, be heard, or be chosen. Fiction creates a symbolic rebalancing.

3. Shadow Integration
   Stories like Hunting Adeline allow you to face your inner rage, shame, or twisted desires—without judgment.

4. Somatic Awareness
   Tracking your physical reactions while reading can give you insight into where trauma still lives in your body.

✨Adeline’s evolution from haunted to hunting is symbolic of trauma integration. Her growth doesn’t come from forgetting what happened. It comes from facing it, feeling it, and ultimately, reclaiming her body, her voice, and her story.

This is what real trauma healing looks like:

• Feeling the terror and acting anyway

• Screaming and not apologizing for it

• Letting your body move—fight, cry, run, rage

• Choosing yourself again and again, even when it hurts

💬Dark romance like Haunting and Hunting Adeline isn’t everyone’s medicine. For some, it’s too much. For others, it’s everything.

If you’re a trauma survivor and you find these books stir something in you—you’re not broken. You’re responding to a story that mirrors your nervous system, your rage, your longing to feel powerful again.

You don’t need to justify why a story resonates.
You just need to honor what it awakens in you.

And if that awakening becomes the start of real-world healing—through therapy, journaling, movement, or reclaiming your voice—then maybe the darkness wasn’t just for drama.

Maybe it was a doorway back to yourself.

Interested in exploring your healing journey through shadow work, trauma-informed therapy, or narrative processing? Let’s create space for all the parts of you—especially the ones that feel “too much.”