I might have missed this above, but how long have you been seeing her?

1.5 years or so.

So it sounds like there are a lot of positive effects on both sides so far.

There might be advantages to this: She could be a sort of treatment for you. You have the chance, with her, to learn to deal with the triggers rather than get upset or leave or whatever else might have happened with them in the past. It sounds like, so far, she triggers you but that triggering has not been so major as to threaten to become a dealbreaker.

Sadly, such is not the case. Combine cPTSD, booze, a binary tendency, and a trigger and you've got a dealbreaker almost every time I melt down. I've broken up w/ her a dozen times but she won't let me go and she forgives me my many trespasses the moment I come out of my booze-fueled conflagration. At times, I've begged her to just let me go, but she refuses.

So, yes, she is a walking minefield for me. And yes my shrink says that while she might be great, she isn't great for me in particular. But we continue on -- hopeful that this time, with booze out of the picture, I can control my meltdowns better. And so far so good.

But this trust thing, born of the dic pic situation, still looms. Sobriety has kept me from acting out on it, but it is a problem. I'll be bolted awake at 2 am with her on a train, the tape of what happened unspooling from the get go and wrecking my sleep, with thoughts of her doing the same or similar with me in the picture.

What have you been doing to work on that stuff?

Well, the big thing is stopping drinking, which has had a huge impact. I'm also seeing a great psychiatrist who is much more than a pill pusher and is experienced, to the degree one can be, with cPTSD and how to try to fight it, mainly using DBT.

To me, the significance of the above depends on how far removed in time she is from that relationship. It sounds like not so long, given your expression recent vacation. It does not surprise me that she would have some residual entanglement with him. I consider that rage to be an entanglement of sorts. If she was really past him he just wouldn't matter, he'd be irrelevant and there would be no rage.

Yes, I followed the narcissist by less than a month up to four months, depending on which way my gf presents it at the time of talking about it. But, in any event, I'm close.

So therefore to me this is something to tell her if you are going to see if you can save the relationship with her. But I wouldn't come at her wanting to forbid things. My approach would be to tell her how her contact with him makes you feel, and see what sort of reaction you get, and specifically see what if anything she offers to do to help you. I mean, it is easy to say No contact ever but I wouldn't be eager to create an explosion point when some contact can quite likely occur just in the normal course of life. Trust, when possible, is much better than forbidding and/or snooping.

I have told her how her contact with him makes me feel, in response to which she said she would redouble her efforts at no contact. The no-contact failures, however, have not occurred in the course of normal life.

Is this something that you would want to pin down with her, who is more experienced/naive? I wouldn't. The way I see it, she might need to have that image of herself. Why would you want to destroy that self-image? Remember this:

A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

--William Blake

Many of us have images of ourselves that could not stand up to the searchlight of truth, but these images have their value for us. Stay away from attacking or destroying hers in the name of truth.