In order to heal from narcissistic abuse, whether familial or in relationships in general, it is absolutely vital to have a clear understanding of what the trauma bond is. We have to be aware of this because it is at the heart of the dependency that maintains narcissistic/vampire type relationships.
The word trauma refers to: ‘a severe and lasting emotional shock and pain caused by an extremely upsetting experience’ (Cambridge English Dictionary).
Now if we couple that definition with the word bond which refers to a joining of 2 things then we already get a clear idea of what the trauma bond is all about: it is about being attached/joined to severe and lasting emotional pain.
In order to understand why this would be the case, that someone would find themselves inextricably bonded to severe pain, we need to go back to the cause (as we do in Panel 1 in the Mind Map).
So, if you are experiencing extreme distress and pain in any of your relationships today but find that you cannot seem to break away despite knowing that something is off, then you may very well be in a trauma bond.
However, the trauma bonds in your life today are not actually the problem, they are the symptom and as such, a window into the past. We must view them as such in order to really heal at the causal level or otherwise we will keep experiencing them until we do take action!
In order to ascertain the cause of the trauma bond in your life, we must go back to your first experience of bonding/attaching to someone else and of course, this will be with your mother. In that sense, if you experience trauma bonds now as an adult, then your mother was a deeply distressing experience and the cause of emotional pain for you. In fact, she was the trauma in the bond you first experienced with her. Your mother was trauma and thus you had to try to attach to trauma in order to survive.
In this sense, trauma/being in distress in relationship was/is your safe place because it was the only attachment you knew of! Trauma and love became one and the same.
You may be able to see here the key feature of the trauma bond which is the love/discard cycle, the on/off nature of the relationship that keeps you in a state of uncertainty and stress and ultimately gives rise to CPTSD. It keeps you at sometimes in despair (withdrawal) when the love is not there and at other times you are relieved when the ‘love’ is momentarily restored!
So as an adult, one replays this mother trauma by attracting others who will repeat it. The repetition compulsion is our subconscious minds way of trying to keep us safe on one hand (in the familiar attachment) but also to resolve the internally unresolved trauma by replaying it in order to get a different result.
It never works though! We keep going back the abuser in order to find healing and as Dr Judy often says, the hurter cannot be the healer. All that happens is we get retraumatised over and over again until one day we decide, no more! But it is often after being completely at the mercy of the trauma bond and the abuser, at a point where we feel our lives have been completely sucked from us and we are left with nothing.
This is where the Mind Map can be so incredibly helpful as it allows for a deep exploration of this pattern in relationships and also fosters the momentum and empowerment to choose differently.
However, it is important to be very frank about the power of this trauma bond. The feeling of attraction and draw to the abuser is so incredibly powerful because it is meeting our needs on so many levels. Professor Sam Vaknin (2014) describes it as even more powerful than the bond between mother and child because as adults it promises to meet our needs on many deeper levels. We crave love so much that we are willing to go through the times of being discarded in order to just experience those feelings of being idealised again.
Many people stay for years in this type of relationship, gradually allowing themselves to be sucked dry of their life, all their energy, their purpose. Why? The trauma bond is about creating an emotional dependency which keeps the abused enslaved through intermittently reinforcing their lovability- much like many of the soldiers captured in the WWI were emotionally and psychologically broken down through reward and punishment to eventually side with their captors.
In addition to this, the trauma bond is about creating not only an emotional dependency (giving the abuser control of how you feel about yourself) but also an addiction to love! As a young baby in the moments when you felt loved by your mother, you felt alive and seen, but these were inconsistent. As a result you were driven by the growing need to get the ‘love’ feeling back and so in adult life, you will find yourself love-addicted (addicted to the feeling of being in love). The problem with this however is that it is generally one-sided love and unrequited (as it was in infancy).
Finally, in summary, why is the trauma bond a safe place for some people and how do we come out of it?
- It is safe because it is familiar as a result of mother infant disconnect
- Abuse has been confused with love.
- People don’t believe they can have anything better nor do they find themselves drawn to other types of relationship
- It is an addiction.
In order to escape, we must first of all be very brutally honest with ourselves because a large factor in these bonds is that we tend to deny that it is unhealthy in order to maintain it.
We need to take stock and ask the question: who am I trauma bonded to in my life?
Next we need to know our own attachment experience and why mother was trauma for us.
Finally it is important to also begin focusing our energy on our own lives. This can be done by actively reaching out to others and creating friendships, pursuing activities we like and creating a life that is not in need of one person to come in and be the center.
Birch, A. (2016) The Most Powerful Motivator on the Planet – Intermittent Reinforcement. Retrieved from: http://psychopathsandlove.com/intermittent-reinforcement/
Floyd, K. (2103) Beware of Toxic Affection. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/affectionado/201310/beware-toxic-affection
Christiana is a qualified psychotherapist in London, England. She has a particular interest in the effects of Narcissistic Parenting, Attachment and Co-dependency.