What is: Trauma Bonding?

Trauma bonding is characterized as loyalty to a person who is destructive. Despite the term “bonding” having a positive connotation, the act of trauma bonding is anything but that. Trauma bonds are both unhealthy and dysfunctional.

Origin

“Stockholm Syndrome” was first coined by Professor Nils Bejerot to explain the phenomenon of hostages bonding with their captors.

• Stockholm, Sweden 1973, two bank robbers held four people hostages for six days.
• Wide publicity: hostages came to care about their captors and perceive them as protecting them against the police.
• “Stockholm syndrome” is common in trauma bonding.
• In abusive relationships that include physical violence, incest, or hostage situations, trauma bonding can occur as a way to emotionally manage the abuse.

For example, a hostage may bond with the hostage-taker and come to sympathize with their captors or abusers. This is the opposite of fear, terror, and disdain that might be expected from the victims enthuse situations.

Many mental health professionals consider “Stockholm syndrome” bonding with someone abusing you as a coping mechanism, or a way to help victims handle the trauma of a terrifying situation.

Abandonment and trauma

Abandonment causes shame by having us doubt ourselves in our actions. In the case of being abandoned by betrayal, victims tend to form a mechanism to help them defend themselves against falling victim to further trauma. The system elevates into an alarm state and the survival instinct we live with goes from willfully cautious to suspicious. Some victims fall to paranoia due to the trauma they’ve faced from an abuser or a traumatic experience.

The victims are grieving this loss, the abandonment in this case, and are sometimes in a state of shock, disbelief, fear, loneliness, and sadness. Their guard is up which might inhibit them from healing fully. This can lead to the victim even abandoning themselves, thus entering a state of depersonalization.

There’s a highly addictive process of attaching ourselves to the persons who have hurt us. We might be ashamed of ourselves and blame ourselves for the situation. We’ll find ways to doubt ourselves, creating artificial defects to our failed efforts. We slowly slip away from our lives amongst all the chaos of the situation.

This can lead us to distrust our won judgement and distort ourviews and our own judgement to our realities. We place ourselves at more risk and brace ourselves against further hurt. Taking precautions which almost guarantee further pain.

This is called: a trauma bond.

Betrayal Bond

1. When everyone around the victim is having negative reactions so strong the victim is covering up, defending, or explaining a relationship.
2. When there is a constant pattern of non-performance and the client continues to expect them to follow through anyways.
3. When there are repetitive, destructive fights that are no win for anybody.
4. When others are horrified by something that has happened to the victim and the victim isn’t.
5. Trauma can take many forms and exposes victims to PTSD

PTSD Treatments

APA’s Clinical Practice Guideline strongly recommends four interventions for treating posttraumatic stress disorder, and conditionally recommends another four.

1. Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on the relationships among thoughts, feelings and behaviors; targets current problems and symptoms; and focuses on changing patterns of behaviors, thoughts and feelings that lead to difficulties in functioning. Cognitive behavioral therapy notes how changes in any one domain can improve functioning in the other domains.

For example, altering a person’s unhelpful thinking can lead to healthier behaviors and improved emotion regulation. It is typically delivered over 12–16 sessions in either individual or group format.

2. Cognitive processing therapy is a specific type of cognitive behavioral therapy that helps patients learn how to modify and challenge unhelpful beliefs related to the trauma. CPT is generally delivered over 12 sessions and helps patients learn how to challenge and modify unhelpful beliefs related to the trauma. In so doing, the patient creates a new understanding and conceptualization of the traumatic event so that it reduces its ongoing negative effects on current life.

3. Cognitive Therapy is derived from cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive therapy entails modifying the pessimistic evaluations and memories of trauma, with the goal of interrupting the disturbing behavioral and/or thought patterns that have been interfering in the person’s daily life. Treatment entails modifying the pessimistic evaluations and memories of trauma, with the goal of interrupting the disturbing behavioral and/or thought patterns that have been interfering in the person’s daily life. It is typically delivered in weekly sessions over three months individually or in groups.

4. Prolonged exposure is a specific type of cognitive behavioral therapy that teaches individuals to gradually approach trauma-related memories, feelings and situations. By facing what has been avoided, a person presumably learns that the trauma-related memories and cues are not dangerous and do not need to be avoided. Typically provided over a period of about three months with weekly individual sessions. Sixty- to 120-minute sessions are usually needed in order for the individual to engage in exposure and sufficiently process the experience.

However, there are a multitude of methods that can assist in the process. Some of the treatments are holistic in nature while others explore non traditional medicinal practices. Brief eclectic psychotherapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (which might sound similar to hypnosis treatment), Narrative Exposure therapy, and medications are some of the many prospective processes of treatment.

There is no magnum opus to recovery and healing is a monolith in itself.

11 Signs of Trauma bonding and how you can recognize the pattern and break free of it

1. You know someone is bad for you, but you keep going back.
2. You want to leave the relationship – and abuser — but you find yourself being drawn back into the relationship or to the abuser.

Fear of cutting them out of your life creates emotional distress

3. You get upset at the thought of leaving this person, even though you know your relationship ins’t healthy.

4. You exclude everyone from your relationship.

Yes, everyone. No one comes between you and your abuser.

5. You worry about doing things that may upset them

This can include hanging our with friends, doing activities, or even dyeing your hair certain colors the abuser doesn’t like. If they don’t like it, you avoid it.

6. You defend their negative behaviors to others.

This can come in the traditional form of, “it’s my fault they got so angry.” Or this can manifest in other lesser ways, like when your abuser says a terrible comment about you and you defend is as their “humor”, instead of what is is: an abusive verbal attack.

7. You know they are abusive and manipulative, but you can’t let them go.

8. You hate the behaviors they exhibit, but you feel unable to walk away from them despite wondering if you’d be happier somewhere else.

9. You consider their happiness to be your happiness

10. You base all of your actions on their happiness. You want to make them happy in everything you do.

However, they don’t seem to concern themselves with your happiness. Their actions suggest that you don’t matter.

11. You have lost your sense of worth.

12. You feel like you don’t have any value, whether to yourself or in your. relationship. You may have felt at one time that you did, but it’s been gone since getting entangled with your abuser.

13. You feel invisible in the relationship

Everything is out of someone else’s happiness, someone else’s wants, someone else’s dreams and needs. You don’t feel like you matter to them, even though they matter to you quite a bit.

14. You view the abuser as your “drug.”

15. You don’t feel right unless you’ve spent time with your abuser or have mollified the in some way. Trying to go out and do things on you can leave you with a sense of fear.

Comparing Trauma bonds with True Love

Trauma bond

• The relationship starts with instant attraction and irresistible chemistry

True Love

• The relationship starts with attraction and curiosity that builds over time

Trauma Bond

• The connection is highly physical and sexual

True Love

• The connection is physical, sexual, emotional and intellectual

Trauma Bond

• The relationship cycles through extreme highs and lows

True Love

The relationship is stable and predictable based on mutual trust

Trauma Bond

Important conversations are avoided

True Love

• Important conversations are a priority

Trauma Bond

• The relationship feels like an addiction that you are powerless to quit

True Love

• The relationship feels like an honor, a privilege, a choice

Citations

• Patrick J. Carnes. “Trauma Bonds”. https://healingtreenonprofit.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trauma-Bonds-by-Patrick-Carnes-1.pdf (Accessed December 6, 2020)
• @dimplepuinjaabi. Instagram. “Trauma Bonding and how to identify it”. https://www.instagram.com/p/CD9M7T-jdBv/ (accessed December 6, 2020
• APA. Post traumatic Stress Disorder. https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments (accessed on December 13, 2020
• Bubblesandquotes. Instagram. “Trauma bond | True Love”. (Accessed December 28, 2020)