Have you ever felt that your partner has an intense hold on to you and the relationship you are in? Do you feel that your relationship is consuming you? To an extent where you chose to disconnect with your close friends and family to put in more efforts in your relationship and keep your partner satisfied? If Yes! Then you are in what we call as Trauma Bonding Relationship.
What’s a Trauma Bonding Relationship?
It’s when one partner misuses feelings of fear, excitement, or sexual attraction to trap another partner in an unhealthy relationship, typically an intimate one. The “abuser” in such a relationship can make you feel intense love and excitement at times. But these alternate with periods when they may ignore, mistreat, and even abuse you and even though you may no longer feel any affection, trust, love, or attraction to your partner, you still turn to them for care and support. When you do get those things, your brain makes chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine, and others that help strengthen the bond with your partner. This cycle between intense closeness and mistreatment creates a bond that has both an emotional and physical basis and tends to keep on growing over time. This is part of the reason why more time spent with an abuser can make it harder to leave.
It is very normal for the abuser to hurt you and later show expert love and care for the very wound that they create in the first place and promising to completely change their behavior. Winning you’re heart all over again with their charm and sweet words.
What Are the Warning Signs of a Trauma Bond?
There are some things you might notice about your own thinking and behavior that may suggest a trauma bond relationship:
• You justify abusive behavior that you know is wrong. If your partner calls you names or yells at or even hits you, you say it’s because they’re having a tough time or had an unhappy childhood. This is a very strong sign of a trauma bond.
• You trust the untrustworthy. Here you continue to extend trust and goodwill to your partner, even though by any reasonable standard they have breached that trust over and over again.
• You want to leave but can’t. You may even decide to leave and then find yourself drawn back. You may not even like to be around your partner. But when they’re not around, you feel a sense of panic that overwhelms you. Some mistake this feeling for love, but it’s often rooted in fear and previous trauma in a relationship with parents or others.
• Some convince themselves that strong emotions make the relationship unique and different for you. This feeling is not love, but the trauma bond itself.
What Can You Do to Break a Trauma Bond?
Learn about it. The more you know about how trauma bonding works, the easier it will be to see the warning signs both in yourself and in your partner.
Cut off Contact. Though tough to do, it’s a very effective tool to help break the power of the trauma bond.
Speak with a Mental Health specialist. It can be hard to take yourself out of an abusive, trauma-bonded relationship. A qualified mental health specialist may be able to help you to leave the relationship and understand the dynamics of the relationships.
Nurture healthy relationships. If you have a habit of falling into abusive relationships in your intimate, social, and work life, you can now learn by try to focus on safe, healthy relationships. It is going to take time.
Take Time and Feedback to Develop a New Relationship. Rebound maybe not be an ideal idea for you to get over an trauma bonding, Instead you now need to pen down the qualities that attracted you in the relationship and make the right chose by not choosing to be in a relationship right away.
It’s ok for you have chosen a partner which was not ideal for you. Now is the time for you to learn from it. Don’t question, blame or cling to the facts on how it destroyed your self-esteem but instead look at the bright side you are now able to take care and nurture the New YOU.
