When you’re in a toxic relationship, leaving your partner is the best course of action. But what happens when you feel like it’s impossible to break free? When you can’t seem to end the relationship or find yourself coming back over and over again?
If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so hard for people to leave hurtful partnerships, it’s important to understand the concept of trauma bonding — which refers to an abusive, painful relationship with brief moments of positive reinforcement.
WhatIsTraumaBonding?
Trauma bonding is the emotional attachment that forms between a person and their abuser, often making the abuser feel compelled to stay in the relationship.
“Trauma bonds are the attachments we have to our abusers,” psychotherapist Jordan Travers, LCSW, tells MBG. “When we feel good or miss the people who abused us, we’ve developed a connection to them. One minute things are good, and the next minute they’re not.” Trauma bonds frequently appear in romantic relationships but also extend to power imbalance dynamics including, but not limited to, abusive parent-child relationships, sex trafficking, military training, fraternity bullying, kidnapping, cults, and hostage situations. The situation can vary, but at its core, it’s about relying on an abusive person to meet your emotional and spiritual needs. The attachment pattern alternates between devaluation and intimacy. The person you want most to comfort is the one who hurt you.
In practice, trauma bonds look like a compulsive cycle of wanting to please your partner to avoid upsetting them, followed by an episode of physical, emotional, or verbal abuse, and then a honeymoon period where everything seems okay again. Your partner may cry to you in remorse and say that it wasn’t their character and they won’t do it again, which feeds your fear and trust in them. You want to believe that things will get better, which is why you stay. Yet the pattern persists.
What Trauma Bonding Is Not
Trauma bonding has become a bit of a buzzword, but according to psychologist Nadine Macaluso, a licensed marriage and family therapist, it’s often misunderstood, undervalued, and even romanticized.
She notes that people sometimes think of trauma bonding as simply bonding over shared trauma, or that it’s just about overcoming obstacles and difficult moments together. Trauma bonding is a hallmark of abusive relationships.
“Because we tend to think of bonds as beneficial and romantic love as transcendent, we don’t understand the prevalence of trauma bonding in the modern age,” she says. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in four women and one in 10 men are victims of intimate partner violence.
TraumaBondingSigns
Trauma bonding can happen so subtly that it can be surprising to realize that some of your partner’s erratic behaviors aren’t random but point to an unhealthy pattern. Here are some common signs to watch for:
- You ignore the warning signs and look to the allure of the honeymoon phase.
Post-trauma bonds start with promises of love, trust, and security. During the happy-go-lucky phase, you’re lured into believing you’ll be loved and protected,” says Macaluso.
When you bond with a partner, your body releases happy chemicals like dopamine (released through attraction) and oxytocin (released through orgasm and cuddling), which strengthen your connection to them. However, in post-trauma bonds, they can make you “addicted” to them and cling to moments when they’re kind to you.
“Emotion and seductive promises push your intuition aside,” she explains. “Your pathological partner may lure you in using specific psychological tactics like lying, deceit, lovemaking (showing you gifts, affection, or excessive attention), and twinship, which is when they seem interested in all the things you care about.” Then the mask falls, and you cross the line.”
- You defend your partner’s bad behavior.
Here are some phrases Travers says you might say to your loved ones when you’re talking about your partner:
“They acted this way because I pushed them to.”
“They wouldn’t say these things to me if I didn’t deserve them.”
“They treat me this way because they love me.”
Travers says if you’re immediately defending them and justifying their actions toward you, even when they’re wrong, that’s a major sign you’re in a traumatic relationship. In a healthy relationship, you should both step in and take responsibility when you can both do better. If they blame you for their problematic actions and can’t admit their mistakes, that’s a red flag.
- You feel drained and avoid open communication.
Even though the relationship has some happy intervals, being with your partner doesn’t make you feel revitalized and renewed. You feel drained. A toxic relationship is filled with crazy behavior because your reality and truth are often reinterpreted to frame your actions as acceptable. As a result, you fear sharing your thoughts openly, so over time, you speak less and share less.
It’s important to remember that healthy relationships not only tolerate conflict but welcome it because it’s seen as an opportunity to strengthen the relationship. It shows that you trust each other enough to get your needs met. However, in trauma-related relationships, there’s a lot of anxiety about maintaining the status quo. You don’t want to get into the details because fighting can be exhausting, leading to feelings of helplessness. So, you ignore the drama of what’s going on and hope that the behavior will change. On the other hand, you may justify their terrible behavior as your fault and try hard to avoid upsetting them.
- You don’t feel like yourself and you keep secrets.
A key feature of trauma bonding is coercive control. “Coercive control is a pattern of oppressive behavior that aims to control someone and strip them of their sense of self,” says Macaluso.
Coercive control can include:
Direct or indirect isolation (for example, your friends and family can’t stand your partner and so they start distancing themselves from you)
Deprivation
Monitoring and questioning you
Restricting access to finances
Physical and emotional abuse
When someone is subjected to coercive control, they may eventually begin to perpetuate these behaviors themselves—monitoring themselves, depriving themselves, and isolating themselves. To make matters even more confusing, trauma bonding is characterized by cognitive dissonance, which creates confusion. You may begin to twist and see love through the pain, thus filtering your partner’s abusive behaviors as acceptable and far from a place of love. Even though you try to downplay the fight, you’re still afraid of what your loved ones might think if they knew. You may keep the true dark side of the relationship and its problems to yourself to feel ashamed.
This is all done subtly, Macaluso points out, and you may not realize the hole you’ve dug for yourself until you’re so deep in it that it’s hard to climb out again.
- You remain loyal even in the face of danger.
According to Macaluso, loyalty to an abusive partner is the hallmark of post-traumatic bonding. You may try to remember the good times and ignore the bad times to stay in the relationship.
“A traumatic bond occurs when your partner intentionally harms you through a pattern of threats, intimidation, manipulation, deception, or betrayal to gain power and control,” she says. “You remain loyal to your offending partner despite feelings of fear, emotional pain, and distress.”
Why Trauma Bonding Occurs.
Romanticizing “Intense” Relationships
According to Macaluso, traumatic bonding often occurs because the relationship feels intense—and that intensity can be mistaken for love.
“The irregular and unpredictable cycle of cruelty mixed with gestures of care is essential to forming traumatic bonds,” she explains. “No one is mean or threatening all the time.” “The combination of fear and seduction ironically deepens the bond because it provides an intensity that increases attraction and arousal. When you don’t understand traumatic bonding, you often mistake intensity and passion for love.”
Because you don’t see the traumatic relationship as abusive, bad behaviors go unnoticed in time and may be overlooked at first.
Attachment Issues
Travers and Macaluso add that childhood attachment issues can also contribute to traumatic bonds.
“Early attachment experiences lay the foundation for our future self-esteem and how we relate to others,” Macaluso says. “It’s where you learn about personal boundaries and what your role is in relationships. You discover your emotional needs and how to meet them. You form beliefs about yourself and the world.”
She notes that adults with an insecure attachment style are more likely to enter into trauma bonds, while the perpetrator often has a fearful, avoidant attachment. “Individuals who experienced childhood abuse or parental absence are more likely to develop trauma bonds with intimate partners because we unconsciously gravitate to partners and relationships that feel familiar,” Travers adds.
This makes perfect sense—if you were surrounded by a lot of difficult relationships growing up, you may unconsciously attract partners who replicate the same pain you experienced growing up. As difficult as it may be, choosing a dysfunctional version of love is all you know. It can feel like you’re “coming home” even if it generates a lot of negativity and anxiety for you.
Personality
Another factor that can influence trauma bonds is personality. In her work, Macaluso has observed that individuals, particularly women, who score high on traits like agreeableness and conscientiousness can fall prey to toxic and abusive partners.
“These social personality traits [can] make them magnets for extreme pathological partners who lack these traits,” she explains. “So even if you address your codependency issues, these innate personality traits don’t go away. So, you need to understand your vulnerability to enter into a trauma bond.”
HowToHeal.
“Healing from an abusive or traumatic relationship doesn’t happen overnight. Individuals involved in these relationships need support and resources; “working with a trauma-informed therapist and joining a support group is a great place to start,” suggests Travers.
Don’t reach out to your ex until you can focus on yourself completely. Since trauma attachment works in isolation, move to the other side of the spectrum by intentionally reaching out to others. Suppressing your emotions and pushing what happened away will prevent you from processing the relationship, which will keep you spiritually frozen. By sharing openly, you reduce feelings of loneliness while cultivating restorative relationship practices.
As you heal from trauma attachment, developing your relationship with yourself will be essential as you find safety again. “My advice to anyone: Discover your attachment style, understand the basics of your early life relationship trauma, and figure out what your Big Five personality traits are,” says Macaluso. “The more you know, the stronger you are. And the stronger you are, the less likely you are to choose someone who will take it away from you.”
Keeping a journal to record your thoughts privately and identify patterns can be extremely helpful when you come back to yourself. Working on your self-esteem will help you recognize the difference between healthy and unhealthy attachments in the future. It also goes hand in hand with developing boundaries and higher self-esteem.
You’re not only caring for yourself emotionally, you’re also caring for yourself physically, which can be overwhelming. Toxic relationships cause emotional suffocation, and unprocessed trauma can turn into stuck energy, which can overwhelm your body’s systems and your overall perception. It can also lead to high blood pressure, and muscle tension, and send your sympathetic nervous system into overdrive. Relying on movement, mindfulness, and self-care will be vital.
