If you are in a relationship or you were in a relationship where you have negative feelings towards your partner, maybe you don’t like to be around them but you can’t stop missing them, thinking about them or thinking you love them or have fears that you will never find love like the love you have with them, these are all signs of a potential trauma bond.
What is a trauma bond? A trauma bond is a response to abuse where the abused person forms an unhealthy attachment/bond to their abuser. This bond comes from intermittent reinforcement. What that basically means is that you know a reward is coming, you don’t know when and you don’t know how big but in between then there is some sort of punishment and you crave for when you get that reward.
It usually starts from childhood. When we are a baby we form attachments with our parents. If we did not form a secure attachment with our parents where we did not feel our needs were met and they were given to us inconsistently then an insecure attachment will form. So we will form an anxious attachment or an avoidant attachment. Since we did not feel we could get our needs from our parents and they were inconsistent, when we get older we will look for others to meet those needs which makes us more vulnerable to trauma bonds with others. Not only that but you may likely have had a trauma bond with your own parent.
Growing up with an abusive parent whether they were an addict, a narcissist, borderline or bipolar when you have this parent, you usually get trapped in the cycle of abuse. In this cycle, they will devalue you, push and pull you, and emotionally abuse you but then it is followed by love-bombing where they are great and the best parent in the world. Then it is this continuous cycle over and over.
What happens when you grow up in this type of environment is that they will justify their parents’ behavior, they are made to believe they need to keep this a secret. So because kids can’t reason till they are nine, they will personalize it and think something is wrong with them and they think they have to protect their parents. They have to rationalize and think if this is my parent then I can not imagine what the outside world is like. So they confuse this as love.
There are three chemicals that go off during the love-bombing stage when you are in a trauma bond. That is oxytocin which is the love chemical, dopamine which is the feel-good but also the reward chemical, and then there is serotonin which is the pleasure feel-good happy hormone. Then when you are in the devalue stage the chemical that goes off is cortisol. cortisol is The chemical that goes off when you are scared and feel you are in danger which is your fight, flight, or freeze.
So because of that, you go into survival mode and what do you do in survival mode? You latch onto your need and since they have become a need, you latch onto them. You need their love, validation, and attention so you will hold onto them more. The more that this happens, the more of a bond it creates. This is because like with your parents, you associate it with love so you think you ate falling deeper and deeper in love but you are falling deeper and deeper into a trauma bond, abuse, and the feeling that you need them.
So you feel like you can’t get away from your partner or your ex because you feel like you need them as much as food and water. They instill this in your brain over and over when they say ” you can’t do better.” It then becomes an addiction, similar to a drug addiction where you are addicted to the high after the low. That is why it is so hard to break out and why you will go back to them again and again. Even though you know you feel uncomfortable and you feel confused where you have cognitive dissonance because you don’t like them but you want to be around them or you feel like you need them, it is the addiction. This shows that it is not your fault.
It is because it is familiar. Intermittent reinforcement is often confused with love where you feel you have found your person. Really it is something you experienced as a child and this “love” is familiar. So you will gaslight yourself when you are in these types of relationships just like you were gaslighted as a child. You feel something is off but then you second guess yourself.
Also, we either date someone that is similar to our parents or someone that is the opposite. If you are looking for someone that is similar when you had an abusive parent, it is usually because you are seeking your parents’ approval through the approval of this abusive person. You feel it reflects your self-worth. It may feel like you if you were better then maybe your parent would have loved you. This is where cognitive dissonance comes in and in order to break the cognitive dissonance, you have to call out where the bias lies.
