6.3 Dating in Dystopia: Jaws Themed Dating | PUWBs & Sharks in Fish's Clothing6.3 Dating in Dystopia: Jaws Themed Dating | PUWBs & Sharks in Fish's Clothing
CPTSD Recovery: We Are Traumatized Motherfuckers
A raw, research-laced rant about dating with CPTSD in a tech-shaped dystopia, unpacking PUWBs, secret sharks and the illusion of safety created by online wellness education. It questions both how to spot predators and how easily any of us can become unwitting threats while trying to heal and date at the same time.
40:43•31 Mar 2026
Dating in Dystopia: Sharks, PUWBs and Trauma Brains on the Apps
Episode Overview
- Modern dating is framed as “dating in dystopia”, where technology, surveillance and fear shape how people relate and hook up.
- Internet wellness and pop-psych education may have unintentionally helped predators adapt, creating “sharks in fish’s clothing”.
- PUWBs (performative unintegrated wellness boys/bitches) talk like healed, therapised partners but lack behaviour to back it up.
- Red flags include heavy psychobabble, vague but virtuous-sounding relationship goals, and conversations that feel scripted or empty.
- Everyone absorbing wellness content risks becoming a “secret shark” themselves, thinking they’re healed while still causing harm in relationships.
“We fear the sharks while being sharks accidentally ourselves.”
What drives someone to seek a life without alcohol and chaos, then willingly re-enter the dating pool in a society that feels like a bad sci‑fi film? This episode of *CPTSD Recovery: We Are Traumatized Motherfuckers* takes that question and dunks it straight into the glitchy, hyper‑online dating scene the host bluntly calls “dating in dystopia”.
You’ll hear a sharp mix of research chat, trauma humour, and swearing-as-self-care, all aimed at people with CPTSD and relationship trauma who are trying to date without getting emotionally shredded. The host first sketches out dystopia as “a bad place where citizens live in fear, dehumanized and controlled through propaganda, surveillance, or technology,” then connects it to modern app-based dating, endless options, and the “paradox of choice”.
From there, the conversation zeros in on how the internet’s wellness boom and pop-psych content might have backfired. The host asks whether all this education has “been chumming the waters and giving the apex predators better camouflage,” pointing out that abusers and manipulators consume the same content and adapt faster than the rest.
This leads to one of the episode’s standout ideas: PUWBs – “performative unintegrated wellness boys” – or, as the host sums them up, people for whom “everything that they say is disintegrated from their actual behaviours.” You’ll get specific red-flag clues, like overusing psychobabble, vague “intentional relationship” talk with no concrete detail, and conversations that feel like a therapy essay instead of a real person sharing their life.
But there’s also a tough mirror held up to everyone in the healing space: “we fear the sharks while being sharks accidentally ourselves,” collecting wellness memes faster than we can truly change. If you’ve ever swiped with one eye on your trauma history and the other on TikTok attachment advice, this episode might leave you asking: are you actually safer, or just more confident in waters that are still full of sharks?
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