What the Fuck is Trauma Bonding? Definition, Signs & Examples — And How To Break Free
WTF is Trauma Bonding, Anyway?
Trauma bonding is that messy emotional glue that keeps people stuck in toxic relationships way way past their expiration date. If you’re the victim in a trauma bond, it’s what makes you defend the person who’s been hurting you, and crave validation from someone who’s emotionally starving you. Many victims believe that the highs are worth surviving the lows, but man oh man, they are almost certainly not worth it.
Read on to learn more about trauma bonding, and be sure to check out our other therapyish topics on children of emotional neglect (CEN) and infantilization and enmeshment and gaslighting and narcissism (which can come with DARVO) and love-bombing.
What Exactly is Trauma Bonding?
Trauma bonding is what happens when repeated cycles of abuse and reward create a warped emotional attachment between the victim and their abuser, and this relationship can come in many forms. An emotionally immature parent can create a trauma bond with their attention-starved child, An abusive husband or boyfriend can do the same to their partner, and so can a toxic boss to their employees. The insidious shit about trauma bonding is that you know it’s band and you acknowledge that you feel like crap, but you can’t let go because every once in awhile, they throw you a breadcrumb of affection that appears to make all your emotional labor worth it.
If you’re looking for an official clinical definition, Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing for Canadian Practice by Wendy Austin and Mary Ann Boyd describe trauma bonding as a “strong emotional attachment between an abused person and (their) abuser, formed as a result of the cycle of violence.”
Of course, it should be noted that violence can take many forms other than physical. Emotional violence and psychological manipulation can be just as damaging that often leaves deeper longer-lasting scars that no one else can see.
Where Did the Phrase Come From?
The concept of traumatic bonding as a theory was first developed by a pair of big-shot psychologists named Susan Painter and Donald Dutton to describe the kind of relationship that a victim of an abusive relationship forms with their tormenting perpetrator, typically with a power imbalance like boss versus employee or parent versus child.
Eventually, as interest in the subject grew among counselors, therapists, and psychologists, International Institute for Trauma and Addiction Professionals (IITAP) founder Patrick Carnes described trauma bonding as the “misuse of fear, excitement, sexual feelings, and sexual physiology to entangle another person.” These relationships can include parent/child dynamics, as well as intimate romantic and sexual partnerships.
The idea is that people can form deep emotional attachments to those who abuse them, especially when the abuse is peppered with occasional shows of affection and gift-giving and maybe even a hint of remorse for their past behavior.
Trauma bonding is pretty closely related to Stockholm syndrome, but they stem from different contexts and emotional dynamics. When we talk about Stockholm syndrome, we’re typically referring to hostages developing sympathy toward their captors. However, when it comes to the kind of trauma bonding that typically happens in common ongoing relationships — be it romantic, your family, or in the workplace — a strong but toxic attachment is created by cycles of abuse and intermittent kindness. Stockholm syndrome is a rather unique and honestly a pretty extreme situation, whereas trauma bonding happens over time in personal relationships.
Common Signs of Trauma Bonding
The wild think about trauma bonding is that a lot of people don’t even realize it’s happening to them because they’re part of a relationship dynamic that’s been so normalized to them. If an adult child is trauma bonded to their emotionally unavailable father, they might spend the rest of their lives chasing approval while mistaking the occasional breadcrumb of attention and bouts of lovebombing for love. The child will excuse the neglect and inconsistency, overanalyze their abuser’s comments, and internalize the belief that if they hold out a little while longer, then the abuser will love the child the way the child deserves to be love.
If that sounds like anything like a relationship you’re in, here are some other signs to look for and think about:
- You feel very attached to the relationship, even when you know it’s toxic.
- You rationalize, minimize, defend, and even outright dismiss their behavior to others, no matter how fucked up and dangerous.
- You obsess over the brief and few moments when they were kind and available.
- You walk on eggshells around them but still believe they will change their behavior.
- You confuse emotional chaos with intensity and passion.
How to Break a Trauma Bond
Trauma bonding fucks with your brain chemistry, making it very hard to leave and break the bond. This does not mean that you are weak. It means that you were conditioned to accept the situation as normal and okay. If you grew up in a traumatic home, then unsafe situations you encounter later on in life may have a lot more power over you, especially if you’re not able to recognize those situations as abnormal. The good news is that bonds can be broken, and performing some of these actions can help:
- Name it! Acknowledging the pattern is the first step out of it.
- Cut contact! Going low-contact or no-contact is totally a thing. Even if it’s just digital and you’re blocking their texts, the silence is healing.
- Find a trauma-informed therapist! Seriously, it can truly help, but we understand that many of us are broke and underinsured.
- Validate your own experience! You’re not being dramatic.
- Stop waiting for closure! They won’t give it. You must.
If any of this hits a little too close to home, that’s okay. You’re not alone and you’re not broken — you’re trauma bonded.
Consequences of Trauma Bonding
Unfortunately, the consequences of trauma bonding on victims can be quite severe, particularly on their mental health. Trauma bonding doesn’t just fuck with your relationships, it can also totally rewire your brain, chip away at your own sense of self, and trains your nervous system to interpret emotional chaos as a form of love. And long-term exposure to these unpredictable crazy-ass cycles of affection and abuse floods the body with cortisol and dopamine in unhealthy doses that create an addictive loop.
This is a neurochemical rollercoaster that conditions you to crave the highs of fleeting tenderness even as you drown in the lows of neglect and cruelty. Over time, your baseline for what’s acceptable in relationships changes and gets dangerously distorted, making it harder to set boundaries, trust your instinct, and recognize red flags as they pop up. You become hyper-vigilant, anxious, emotionally dysregulated, and often struggle with complex PTSD symptoms like dissociation, intrusive thoughts, and low self-wroth.
The damage doesn’t end there, tho. People stuck in trauma bonds often go on to unconsciously recreate these dynamics in future relationships and dragging the same unresolved shit into their new situations, whether they’re romantic, platonic, and professional. And if they become parents without doing any healing for themselves, they may unintentionally pass along the same emotional confusion they themselves endured, continuing that goddam cycle of intergenerational trauma.
In other words, trauma bonding doesn’t just hurt you, but sets the stage for generational emotional dysfunction — unless someone is brave enough (and exhausted enough) to break the bond.
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