There’s one kind of romantic relationship that I wouldn’t wish on anyone — and that’s the kind that’s been made intense by a trauma bond. This is another name for dynamic also known as “intermittent reinforcement,” where one person gives intense affection and approval to the other, and then alternates it with neglect, disapproval, abandonment or even abuse.

You would think this kind of emotional on/off torture — blowing hot and then cold to the point of cruelty — would drive away prospective partners. It should signal major danger to anyone who actually wanted to be loved. But that’s exactly where people traumatized as kids are vulnerable. 

If that’s you, you probably recognize right away what I’m talking about — whether you had a name for it or not. And you’ve already noticed that when someone treated you like this — loving you, then turning cold and betraying you — and then repeating the cycle again and again — it had an insidious power to hook your mind, to grab onto your heart and keep you obsessed and sad and feeling too messed up to get out.

Trauma bonding can, in theory, happen to anyone. In warfare it’s a form psychological manipulation used on prisoners of war to break them down and get them to abandon their loyalty to their own cause and to their own self-interest, and instead to become completely dedicated to serving their captors. It’s a terrible thing to do to a person, because it’s playing on deep wiring from infancy to turn them against themselves. 

For the person being manipulated, responding by attaching harder is a survival tactic leftover from childhood, to do whatever it takes to stay protected and connected to a parent, even if that parent is abusive. When the pattern continues into adulthood though, clinging to a destructive relationship is purely maladaptive. It reminds me of the way mistreated animals stay loyal to abusive owners. It’s like an involuntary reflex to get away from pain, that keeps you trapped in pain.

When I was six years old I went to a little roadside attraction once, where they had chickens in wire cages, and you could put a coin in the slot and an electric current would run through the wires and make the chickens “dance” to a some tinny music that cranked out of a machine attached to the cage. I’ll never forget that. I was totally charmed for 5 seconds, and then I asked my brother how they train chickens to dance, and he explained the electric shock. I was horrified to realize I had caused the chicken pain by putting my dime in the slot, and I couldn’t make it stop — that poor chicken had nowhere else to put it’s feet, except on the electrified wire mesh of the cage’s floor. It could not stop itself from jumping around.

Trauma bonding is like a groove in your psyche that can form in your childhood, when a parent (sometimes intentionally, but sometimes for reasons beyond their control) could only give love and attention to you some of the time. If they’re caught up in alcoholism or addiction, it’s very common to be warm and loving, and then suddenly become “out-of-it” and not repsonsive to the child, or rageful or behaving dangerously. 

Later, parents like this sober up and are often ashamed and sorry, promising never to do this again.  but they do. And for some, this remorseful phase never comes. 

In this environment, a child learns to hang on to every tiny sign that the parent loves them — every little crumb of praise or attention. And can very easily cause long-lasting damage to a child’s emotions and self-concept. When you grow up like this, you can end up with a high tolerance for the same kind of treatment from partners. It shows up as an attraction to unavailable people, as love addiction, as a willingness to stay and even an inability to leave abusive partners. Of course, anone of this is fulfilling. None of this can coexist with happiness.

Trauma bonding is a mental hook. It creates a sense of dread about losing the relationship that’s completely unrealistic. If you were literally a captive, you could leave! But when you’re trauma bonded, you simply don’t. 

There’s a compulsion in trauma bonding to keep trying and trying, believing that if you could just figure out the right words, the right behaviors, the right responses, you could win the love of this hot-and-cold person and the love would get switched on for good. 

Many people who have been hurt through this dynamic come to believe that the hot/cold person was manipulating them on purpose, for the sake of cruelty, or domination. You me be such a person, or you may be someone who has done this to others without realizing it. Perhaps you have a disorganized attachment style (flipping between clinging and fleeing). Or you simply couldn’t make up your mind. There are some people who really do manipulate others intentionally, but (in my opinion) this is a small percentage of cases.  

I have noticed that trauma-bonding seems to mostly  develop between two people who have been conditioned in the past to have an intense emotional response to abandonment. Yes, there could be abuse and if you’re in an abusive relationship, get help and get out.

But here, I’m talking not about abuse per se, but about an unhealthy, unhappy dynamic when one partner isn’t reliable or committed or equally “into” the other, and the result for the other partner is to become increasingly hooked. The intense feeling of love and relief that comes rushing in when you’re allowed back into the arms of the abandoner feels like the greatest love of all time, but it’s not actually love. It’s a bug in the system, in your conditioned responses, that makes you hold on for dear life when you feel threatened with being rejected. 

It’s like the dance of that chicken in the cage with electrified wires. It’s an involuntary response to a stimulus. In other words, if getting hooked in a trauma bond with someone blowing hot and cold has happened to you, it was involuntary. It’s not your fault. And I want you to get out of the shame and self-attack that you’ve been carrying about these relationships (and there can be a lot of shame). When you’re hooked on someone like this, all your friends can see the person doesn’t treat you well. They tell you to leave, you know they’re right, but it feels impossible.

But here’s why I urge you to be strong and fix your mind on what it will be like to get free. For those o us who were neglected as children, the more time we spend living on the emotional crumbs in a trauma bond, the harder it is to change. You’ll be driven to try, but you don’t want to get good at handling this lousy treatment. You want to be bad at it. You want to give voice to the part of you that still knows that this is NOT what you were meant for.

You were born to be loved. You are designed to thrive when you are safe and accepted and supported. If you’re in a relationship where you don’t have those things, then effectively you’re blocked from your full development. It is so important for you to heal and change that dynamic either by getting out of it, or no longer contributing to it. 

It takes two to be in a trauma bond. And if you’re not literally captive to someone, you’re the only one who can change the way you relate to that bond. It’s you. You’ve got to fight your attachment to the idea that somehow, the other person will change or someone else will come along to save you.

You are the one who is going to save you. That’s the first thing to understand. 

The second thing is to address the void in your life that makes the drama and loneliness of a trauma bond seem like something you’d want at all. If that’s happening for you, I’d wager that you’re also suffering from a lack of connection with other people in your life. Maybe you’re ashamed of your relationship and you’re hiding, or keeping people at arm’s length so they won’t judge you. But you need a friend or two. You need people to whom you can tell the truth about what you’re going through.

Just because you’re in a hard relationship doesn’t mean you have to leave. Sometimes just being connected with other people reduces the pressure on the relationship, reduces the need you have for that relationship to be everything for you. Sometimes that’s enough to produce a positive change in the dynamic. This is especially true when two people who love each other and want to be in a relationship are still trauma bonding in some degree by fighting and going through drama too much of the time — and even using those upsets to then trigger the happy reunion, the removal of the threat of break up and the restoration of harmony as mini kind of trauma bond in itself. A couple could go their whole life doing this, but if you have abandonment wounds from childhood, it can exert a constant packward pull on your healing progress — a trigger re-activating your dysregulation and trauma wounds. Peace is a better goal.

 If you’re in a relationship you want to preserve, and you both want peace, you can reduce the drama by drawing a hard line against dramatic statements and threats to the future of the relationship. If you don’t threaten abandonment, you don’t get the high of the happy reunion — so get ready. It can make the relationship and your life feel “flat” at first. There’s a lot of communication that needs to happen instead, and it’ll take time, but you can start to strengthen your real bond, and not have it be so dependent on adrenaline and endorphins to feel real to you.

If you’re in a relationship where you’re genuinely not loved, though, and you’re aware the right thing really is to leave, then getting support from friends to make your transition out (as quietly and intentionally and as drama-free as possible) will help prevent a re-triggering of the trauma bond. 

Having friends and real connections makes leaving much more doable; without friends it can feel  unthinkable. With friends, you can envision a life where you’re going to be OK. You’ll have people to hang out with. Maybe a place to stay while you get your life sorted out. So even if you don’t leave the relationship yet, you can focus on making friends and strengthening your connections with them and other supportive people, including a therapist if you have access to one.

A trauma bond is in many ways like a drug addiction, and there will be withdrawal. Strategies for a smooth exit are what I teach in my online course, Dating and Relationships for People with Childhood PTSD.  In it, I teach you to be ready for something lasting and real, so you can avoid falling into your old pattern, where you may have found yourself again and again with abusive or unavailable people.

Healing is possible: Feel that in your bones. A better life is possible for you, one where you’re safe and loved, and you deserve that. You’re meant for it.

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