It can be easy to miss the signs of an abusive relationship, toxic love, and trauma that binds a narcissist, especially when you have a fear of abandonment issues.
If you find yourself in a pattern of being magnetically drawn into abusive relationships with a narcissistic or toxic person, this may be a sign of painful codependency.
In fact, when you’re madly in love, you can overlook signs of abuse and narcissistic personality.
How do you break a trauma bond with a narcissist when you are blinded by the fantasy of being loved?
Related: The Hard Truths I Learned About Life & Love From Dating A Narcissist
In order to recognize if you are experiencing trauma with a narcissistic abuser, you may notice that you will do whatever it takes to get love from the abuser in order to escape the despair of feeling unloved or abandoned.
Love is a basic need, but why does a person ask for love from an abuser?
Trauma bonding occurs as a result of ongoing cycles of mental and emotional abuse, where intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates strong emotional bonds that are resistant to change.
Therefore, abuse is accepted by strengthening love, which can form a strong bond that is difficult to break.
How can the illusion of love mask abuse?
In trauma, the attachment bond is so strong that it prevents the victim from seeing the abuse, confusing them with love.
In the love bombing stage of an abusive relationship, you can quickly feel deeply in love when you are idealized when they associate you with the relationship.
Once you’re lured into a relationship with someone who confesses how much they love you, you don’t really notice the red signs of abuse as they slowly creep up.
The feeling of love overshadows everything else.
Feeling intensely in love can cloud your judgment, causing you to overlook signs of an abusive relationship and mistake it for love.
You can convince yourself that insults or put-downs could mean he loves you a lot, and tell yourself that they are just being honest with you.
When they turn the problem into your fault, you end up believing them because you trust them, more than you trust yourself or your judgment.
Slowly, you lose yourself in an emotionally abusive relationship because you feel like the person who abused you knows you better than you know yourself because you think they love you so much.
Gradually, abuse becomes acceptable and tolerated, as you find ways to make them love you.
You will do everything in your power to get the love you crave, at the expense of yourself.
You can become addicted to love bombing and want more. When you are abused, you learn to act in ways that give you the love you want.
The actual truth is that the abuser often needs the relationship to feed the empty void within themselves, or control the relationship to compensate for their insecurities.
Related: What is Trauma Bonding? The scientific reason why so many women stay stuck in emotionally abusive relationships
You can be punished if you don’t comply, forcing you to give in to his every need, until you gradually become controlled and afraid of the person.
Neediness, possessiveness, and jealousy can be disguised as love.
Actual insecurity can seem like it wants you too much, but in reality, it’s a way to control you.
To maintain the fantasy that you are loved, you will end up feeling sorry for them or wanting to help the person who is abusing or controlling you.
The more you focus on pleasing the narcissist, the more you lose sight of yourself.
Nothing will ever be enough to fill the narcissist’s empty void, so the more you give the more you lose yourself to his or her needs.
You give because it feels like love, but it’s not real love. A person who loves you will not hurt you.
So, what makes you trauma-related in an abusive relationship?
Trauma bonding develops during an attachment bond that is created through repeated abusive or traumatic childhood experiences that cause this pattern to be internalized as a learned behavioral pattern.
If you are connected to your parents through a trauma bond, you are familiar with adapting your behavior to fit your abuser in order to get the love you need from them.
This may mean walking on eggshells to avoid conflict or pleasing them so you feel loved.
It’s easy to put abuse outside one’s awareness when you long for love from your abuser.
You may suppress yourself to meet the abuser’s needs to avoid emotional outbursts.
You may end up enduring abuse in the hopes of feeling loved.
Sometimes, a parent may be a narcissist where the child puts so much effort into trying to get the love they want, that they are drawn to the narcissist as a way to fulfill this desire for unmet love.
If you have unmet love needs — such as emotional neglect or abuse — you may also develop feelings of love toward the narcissist in relationships.
Being attracted to an abusive narcissist allows you to remain indirectly attached to the abusive parent, hoping to compensate for the unmet love.
You can sacrifice yourself for love, abandoning your own needs in the never-ending conquest to find love.
If you were abused as a child, the way you sought love can become a familiar pattern, as you are drawn to abusive partners in ways that seem familiar to you.
This painful attachment bond allows you to become addicted to the toxic relationship by finding ways to get the love you crave.
Related: Why A Bully In The Workplace Could Actually Be A Narcissist (& How To Stop It)
But what happens when the other person ignores or abuses you?
Once you experience love withdrawal, you will end up chasing the abuser to regain the original feeling from the love bombing, returning to the abuser and ignoring the abuse completely.
In the case of a traumatic association with a narcissist, you can end up minimizing and denying the abuse, hoping for love, as you become emotionally dependent on an abusive relationship.
The bond is so strong that you fear losing it and will try hard to fix your partner.
The desire for love can be the perfect bait for an abusive narcissist.
When you meet all their needs, you feel loved and good enough, which allows the abuse to continue.
If you realize that you are not good enough, you can learn to please your abuser as a way to get the love you want.
You end up attracting abusive partners with the desire to be good enough for them and thus get the love and approval you seek.
Abuse can seem normal because it is the internal bond that keeps you attached to the abusive parent so that you do not experience the pain behind abandonment.
Sometimes, breaking the trauma bond with a narcissist and confronting feelings of abandonment is difficult, because it triggers the pain of the original longing, prompting the person to find ways to reconnect with the abuser.
