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Off the top of my head, there are three classes of ‘traumatic bonding’:

• bond created when someone harms/traumatizes you in the context of a relationship
• bond created when you go through something traumatic with someone
• bond created when you and/or another person share your trauma together

We use “trauma bond” casually for all three situations

…and invariably, whenever someone uses the phrase, another person pops up in the comments being pedantic about how “trauma bond” only applies to victims with an abuser. They’re technically right, but it’s extremely annoying, since “trauma bond” (in my opinion) best describes the situation where two people in a crisis have bonded to each other through the crisis. But it honestly could also describe when two people share their trauma with each other.

So I’ve been workshopping better language for each iteration of the ‘traumatic bond’:

• A “trauma bond” definitionally is the ‘abuse bond’ a victim has toward an abuser with whom they are in a relationship. (It could be considered “pathological attachment” since the victim is attached to someone despite being harmed by them.)
• A “trauma-forged bond” (crisis bond?) is what happens when we go through something traumatic with another person, not because of that person. Not only is a bond forged, but the level of intimacy is reinforced since people who did not go through the crisis cannot relate to or understand it. (I was originally thinking along the lines of “trauma-induced bond” but I think I like “trauma-forged bond” better because it’s clear the bond comes through experiencing the crisis together.)
• A “trauma-sharing bond” is when you and/or another person create a bond (intimacy), or attempt to create one, by sharing trauma. This one is a trap because it can rush intimacy with another person before you really know who they are. When we do this, we think that sharing our trauma equals ‘sharing who we are’, when in fact it is only over time that we can truly know someone and build intimacy. Trauma-sharing is a shortcut to emotional vulnerability. This doesn’t mean we can’t appropriately share our trauma with someone else (who has consented) but that we shouldn’t confuse the closeness this fosters as ‘knowing someone’, even if you’ve been through the same things. The reason this is different than the intimacy built through a crisis bond, is that that intimacy was built being with the other person and seeing how they act/react in a crisis. Witnessing someone’s character, and seeing how they treat you in a crisis, is vastly different than a person giving you a narrative about what they have experienced. One is direct knowledge not only of someone’s character but also how they treat you, and one is basically a story you are being told.

I’m landing on:

• trauma bond
• trauma-forged bond/crisis bond
• trauma-sharing bond/trauma-disclosure bond

(I also considered “trauma-linking bond” and “trauma-intimacy bond” but I think they run into the same problem that “trauma bond” has, which is that they aren’t clear enough about the origin of the trauma and the relationship dynamic the bond exists within.)

See also:

A trauma bond occurs when you have become emotionally attached to someone that abuses you.

Emotional attachment is not the same thing as love. It can co-exist with love, but extreme and intense emotional attachment itself is not love. The attachment in a toxic relationship becomes a chain that binds, not something that lightens the yoke of the relationship.

See also:

• Trauma bonds often form due to repeated cycles of intense emotional experiences, where periods of abuse are followed by periods of kindness, creating a confusing and addictive emotional rollercoaster
• Intense relationships also tend to hijack all of a survivor’s relating capacity from this amazing website
• Trauma bonding
• Signs it is not love but a trauma bond
• 5 signs you’re in a dangerous trauma bond with a toxic person
• The 7 stages of trauma bonding
• Trauma Bonds are relationships with a dysfunctional cycle that keep people physically addicted to one another
• Undoing a trauma bond can mean undoing an emotional addiction to a person
• HOW OXYTOCIN CAUSES TRAUMA BONDING AND ATTACHMENT
• During a toxic relationship a dysfunctional attachment is formed
• Trauma bonds v. Authentic connection
• Types of trauma bonds
• Trauma bonding with a narcissist
• Trauma bonding is loyalty to a person who is destructive
• 10 Steps to Recovering from a Toxic Trauma Bond
• Trauma Bonding: How to recognize and break traumatic bonds
• Going no-contact gives us a chance to break trauma bonds
• You might be trauma bonded if…
• Why is it so hard to leave the narcissist in your life? <—– trauma bond through a blend of intermittent reinforcement and abuse bonding
• Trauma bonds involve a cycle of addiction where you keep coming back in hopes behaviors will change
• Narcissists use trauma bonding and intermittent reinforcement to get you addicted to them: Why abuse survivors stay: Exploitive relationships create betrayal bonds. These occur when a victim bonds with someone who is destructive to him or her. Thus the hostage becomes the champion of the hostage taker…
• What is a trauma bond? A trauma bond is an attachment to an abuser in a relationship with a cyclical pattern of abuse
• Healthy relationships nourish and support us. Like poison, a TOXIC relationship is one that is damaging to us.
• “I knew I was done with trauma bonds when I stopped betraying myself to be chosen.” – Nicole LePera
• When we confuse connection for love, we hold on to people that harm us <—– the difference between ‘love’ as a feeling and actual love)
• Abusive relationships are like bookends. The honeymoon period in the beginning is so sweet because they mirror your good traits back at you. By the end, you’re mirroring their awful traits back at them
• “Your partner is not supposed to be the pain and the relief. They should not be hurting you and also soothing you. That’s not love. It’s a trauma bond. That’s not how love works. It’s how abuse works. ” – Synthia Smith
• Trauma bonding isn’t healing

and while I’m at it:

• The REAL role and purpose of forgiveness
• The truth about forgiveness and why healing doesn’t require forgiveness
• The ‘forgiveness tulpa’, and how the false forgiveness paradigm perpetuates abuse dynamics
• The forgiveness imperative, and compassion
• The role of anger and pain in the healing process
• Before you can ‘hold on’ to negative experiences, negative experiences hold on to you
• The misunderstood role of blame in healing and why you should blame your abuser
• Forgiveness is for the purpose of preserving relationships
• “Forgiveness is usually confused with permission.” – u/ ThrowRAReallySadH, comment
• “When people insist on forgiveness, very often they’re not expecting it at all. What they’re expecting is FORGETTING, that the wounded party will simply pretend there is no damage and then nobody will ever need to examine what was done. forgiveness requires repentance, which requires changed ways.” – u/ smcf33, excerpted and adapted from comment
• Our pop-culture understanding of forgiveness is based in Christianity…but even Christians misunderstand the Biblical underpinnings of forgiveness
• “Everyone wants OP to make peace because her pain is inconvenient. They don’t care if she hurts for the rest of her life as long as she shuts up about it. Their indifference is cruel. Their relentless badgering for OP to ‘forgive’ is a form of bullying too.” – u/ LissaBryan, comment
• ‘Forgiving someone is packaged [incorrectly] as allowing this person back into your life so they feel “forgiven” for what’s happened.’ – Nicole LePera (adapted)
• A lot of what we see in terms of healing is prescriptive (forgive! let go! move on!) tends to actually be DESCRIPTIVE.
• Trauma Recovery Rubric

My original solution to having bad boundaries was to never be in a position where I would have to have them.

Once I realized that there were people who did not have my best interest at heart, and that I had been conditioned from childhood to appease aggressive people, I started avoiding aggressive people like the plague.

And I still stand by that.

As a strategy, it’s fantastic for protection.

The problem is that it hinges on your ability to control the people in your environment.

So it fails as soon as you have to go to work or deal with police officer, or any situation where you don’t have a choice about whether you can opt out or leave.

It also doesn’t help build our ‘psychological immune system’.

It’s good to develop the proactive ability to assert yourself and your boundaries.

Not only is it a core line of defense for how you protect yourself, it’s your MAIN line of defense legally.

• If you allow people to trespass on your property, and they create a trail or road they use frequently and without your objection, you may have given them an ‘easement’ on your property.
• If someone builds a fence on your property but you never contest it, they may actually be able to claim your property through ‘adverse possession’.
• If you allow someone to stay with you, after a certain amount of time, they are legally a resident or tenant: with rights. A situation you may not have ever intended, and one that means you may have to actively evict them to get them to leave.
• If a police officer stops you, you often have to actively assert your rights in order to preserve them.

A lot of people are non-confrontational.

They ‘go along to get along’, and in the process, can accidentally disempower themselves legally or otherwise.

As the economy gets worse, takers take harder.

And if you’re an over-giver or someone who struggles with boundary and confrontation, it’s important to realize how crucial it is that you’re able to set boundaries.

They’re going to have a sad story, and it may even be true, but you have to figure out where your “no” lies because it isn’t possible to give them everything they want or need.

And if your boundaries are poor, you can end up with a tenant in your house you never intended.

It isn’t just hobosexuals, it could be anyone who ‘just needs a place to stay’

…and then pushes and pushes and pushes to stay, until they’ve suddenly established residency or tenancy without you even realizing it.

It’s one thing to decide you want to help someone, it’s another to be coerced into giving them what they want.

…or to be tricked into giving them rights in your home.

This actually happened to me with my abusive ex many years ago.

He was suddenly living with me, and when I told him I wanted him to go back home (to his momma’s house – I know) it was our first big argument. I said I wanted to be able to decide when we did that, not ‘slide into it’, and he insisted that he didn’t live here, just ‘stayed here’. And then told me I was the one who wanted him there, and hadn’t he done all these things to help around the house and make it better? And apparently letting him be there was a irrevocable choice that I could never re-evaluate. Then he told me I was weaponizing my ‘power’ over him because I had the ability to make him leave, and that was abusive.

Oh. my. god.

And now it’s years later, and I’m watching people be evicted from their homes onto the street. People that young-me would have jumped to offer a place for them to stay, where current-me knows that I have to be extremely careful who I allow in my house. Not just for legal concerns, but because I have a child, and their safety takes precedence.

What I can do is help them self-rescue.

Provide respite, a place to charge their phone or take a shower, give them a tent (I should own stock in tents), direct them to specific resources, make calls on their behalf.

I can still be on their side.

But if I took no-boundaries Invah and brought her to today, she would be eaten alive.

I mean, I’m still working on it.

But I’m doing better. And I hope everyone in this community is doing better too, because it is going to be a mass disaster.

And when people are drowning, they will drown the rescuer.

Sob stories work; that’s why con artists use them.

And it is so successful as a manipulation because it’s hijacking natural interactions that exist between people and that rely on the benefit of the doubt we give each other for society to work.

It pricks someone’s compassion

…it can also make a person be aware of how they would look to others if they said “no”. It can even cause a minor existential crisis because you might be aware that it is manipulation but you don’t want to be the kind of person that manipulation would no longer work on.

Manipulation often occurs from weaponizing our good qualities.

The only sure way to prevent that kind of manipulation is shut down the parts of yourself that would be kind to someone in distress and to assume everyone who tells you a sob story is trying to con you in some way, or that everyone who says they need help or are in danger is lying.

I find that victims of abuse in particular are extremely concerned with being ethical and want to be good people (versus just appearing to be a good person).

…genuinely being concerned on an ethics- and human-level, especially since that was likely a major component of HOW they were abused. Being told they were a bad person or partner, a bad child or friend.

And so victims may have to retreat from compassion – at least for a time – to give themselves space to learn healthy boundaries and what safe people look like.

But part of learning to protect oneself is figuring out how to be open to supporting others without making oneself vulnerable, and without cutting ones heart off from connecting with people, while recognizing that there is a point where ‘helping’ becomes enabling.

And so much of the healing process for victims is a process of navigating their understanding of what is ethical, what it means to be a ‘good person’.

…how to participate in the fabric of humanity without being torn themselves.

The Ultimate Lesson of ‘The Good Place’: Change Is REALLY Hard

It’s worth looking at

• where the standard originates (is it even ‘your’ standard, or did someone else thrust it upon you)
• reasonability for that standard
• the socio-cultural perspective of that standard
• if and how that standard is being used by someone else to power-over you

It is also possible that we have standards for ourselves, that are organically ‘ours’, which we aren’t living up to.

People commonly feel insecure around

• their bodies
• their career
• income
• partner or lack of partner
• intelligence
• emotional expression

…and whether ‘who they are’ is intrinsically okay.

Self-esteem is actually a barometer of self-efficacy beliefs: the extent or strength of one’s belief in one’s own ability to complete tasks and reach goals.^[1] Basically your beliefs around your capabilities and competence.

Self-esteem is also a result of self-respect:

• Are you in integrity with your own values and standards?
• Do you do what you say you will do?
• Are you effectively setting and maintaining boundaries?

And self-respect is a measure of how you exercise your will and power in the world.

Self-esteem is also related to self-compassion for yourself as a human being. This perspective is rooted in a growth versus static mindset.

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¹ Ormrod, J. E. (2006). Educational psychology: Developing learners (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.

I’ve talked before about my issues with forgiveness-as-enlightenment, and my perspective on the truth about healing and why healing doesn’t require forgiveness

…but both are pieces in a larger paradigm.

I was raised in a neo-enlightenment environment which subscribed to the idea that anger and hate and fear served to disconnect us from others, and that we should only act from love and joy.

Anger itself was considered to be toxic.

Then one day I realized that, in the Bible, even Jesus had occasions of righteous anger. Of moments where he basically said that this shall not stand.

That was my aha! moment.

And I realized that it isn’t an act of love to allow someone to hurt others, it isn’t an act of connection to ignore the pain they cause, that there is no joy in suffering. And that people who’ve been harmed can connect through their anger and fear.

I wasn’t particularly religious – my church was of the bourgeois hippie variety – but I found the Jesus perspective to be authoritative enough to allow me to reject the anger-is-bad message.

They were so self-congratulatory about their perspective on sin, and yet they essentially preached the sin of humanity, that normal human emotions and responses are toxic in and of themselves. That you should accept the ‘negative’ actions of others, and forgive them, regardless of how they have harmed you, but never accept ‘negative’ emotions in yourself.

It is an unwitting cult of self-negation.

You couldn’t even say you were sick or feeling poorly because that would be ‘affirming’ negativity. You couldn’t experience your own suffering because ‘suffering is a choice’.

At least Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity is upfront about viewing people as sinful; but this church, and others like it, praise humanity but denigrate actual humans.

I think that remembering the purpose of anger and hate and fear allows us to engage with those emotions mindfully. Recognizing their place in the pantheon of the human experience can give us perspective, using them as a tool helps protect us, and this coping mechanism moves us forward.

What a gift anger and fear can be.

Love is a result of acceptance.

• “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun… To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is right here and now.” – Fred (Mister) Rogers
• “Love respects and protects. It seeks the highest good not just for oneself, but for the one who is loved.” – u/mementovivere <—– can you respect without accepting?
• “I hope you are able to grow to respect whoever you are inside.” – Fred (Mister) Rogers
• “Respect is when you treat something that matters like it matters, and disrespect is when you treat something that matters like it doesn’t matter.” – u/danokablamo
• “Love is not based on understanding, but acceptance.” – L.E. Modesitt, Jr., “The Death of Chaos”
• “As a father, my love and acceptance of my daughter must always be more important than my expectations of her.” – u/vwboyaf1
• “What does “unconditional” love mean? This is the gift of the parent: the knowledge that who and what you are is enough. Enough to be loved, enough to exist, enough to be entitled to your self. A parent recognizes this very existence, your essential humanity; you are seen, heard, touched, supported and validated.” – u/invah
• Self-Compassion is Key to Self-Acceptance

Love, like happiness, is a byproduct

…in this case of the process of acceptance. The template for unconditional love is parental love: complete acceptance –

Being seen, and having your life witnessed, and your existence acknowledged, and your experiences validated; and of being worth positive regard and attention; being worthy of existing, and as your own person.

The other components of parental love, however, are teaching and support. The parent co-creates the child’s existence and experience, guides and supports them in becoming.

This is, of course, the idea of parent-love, and not all parents are able to build this foundation, either in whole or in part, however, this is what we have in mind when we talk about unconditional love.

The parent doesn’t withhold their love and acceptance until the child is ‘better’, and those who do are not parenting.

This can be translated in context of self-love

…honest self-acceptance is seeing yourself for who you actually are, without warped perception, and acknowledging your existence, validating your experiences, believing you are worth positive regard and attention, knowing that you deserve to exist, and as your own person.

You can accept yourself while knowing that as a human being being human, you are still becoming, you are growing and learning, you are deciding who and how you want to be in the world.

A lot of the things we ‘need’ to change are indicative, interestingly, of our lack of self-acceptance.

It is why people who believe they will be happy and finally feel good about themselves when they lose weight or build muscle or make money or get a girl- or boyfriend often feel empty when they do finally accomplish these things.

Do they honestly believe they deserve to exist in the world, as they are? Do they see themselves as less than or equal to others? Do they have a clear understanding of who they are, an identity independent of everything that time and life can strip away from us? Do they see and acknowledge themselves?

In Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”, she writes about a concept of negating, of Xing, that has stuck with me throughout the years. This negating of another person – and, in the the case of the book, whole planets – is unNaming, of destruction, of annihilating their existence.

I think self-acceptance operates on this fundamental level of existence

…self-acceptance that does not attribute intrinsic “wrongness” or unworthiness to someone who needs to change. This person does not need to change to deserve to exist in the world regardless of whether they actually need to change, and they themselves can decide – without condemnation – who and how they would like to be in the world.

A close cousin to “you’re just doing this for attention”, “don’t hold on to negative experiences” is a subtle type of victim blaming

…one in which a victim is told that they are responsible for their own pain because they ‘refuse to let go’. This perspective contributes a cult of self-negation, one that demands the victim to accept someone else’s perspective on their reality before that someone else is ever required to see or act from the victim’s perspective.

It also completely misunderstands that healing is a process, and these people mistake the effect of the healing process for the cause of the healing process.

In order to accept what happened and let go of your pain, your experience needs to be validated. Anyone who demands you ‘let go’ so you can heal, when what you need is validation of your experience and support for that experience, is invalidating you and harming the healing process.

The healing process moves through several, sometimes simultaneously occurring, stages

• harm ends
• experiences validation
• receives support
• processes experience
• learns about and from experience
• accepts the reality of their experience
• letting go
• forgives (optional as fuck)

I conceptualize it as a spectrum, and a victim organically moves from one end to the other. (Edit: Though, now that I think about it, maybe it’s more like Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs.)

Pushing a victim to ‘complete’ a later stage of the healing process deprives the victim of the foundation of their healing experience, requires their performance of healing for an outside party, and creates a toxic facsimile of the healing process. It also completely misses the fucking point that acceptance, letting go, and forgiveness are results of the healing process, not causes for it.

Victims often experience more harm through their community’s reaction to their trauma than from the actual trauma itself.

In refusing to validate someone’s experience, they effectively gaslight the victim. In withholding their support, they isolate the victim, reject, and push shame onto the victim. Whether the intention is ‘helpful’ for someone’s ‘healing’ is not the point. This response again traumatizes the victim, again strips them of their agency, again puts the reality of their experience in someone else’s hands. It is utterly unacceptable.

We have this dysfunctional approach to processes in where we devalue the process if we believe anyone ‘unworthy’ is benefiting from it or taking advantage of it, and therefore us – e.g. welfare – I suspect that this paranoia is behind some of the actions toward victims.

We see performative emotion in children and believe it isn’t real, that they are acting, and therefore unworthy of our compassion and empathy. We, too, recoil in seeing this behavior in adults, though there are many cultures that experience performative emotion, particularly with respect to grieving. Performing an emotion doesn’t inherently invalidate that emotion.

There are adults who use their negative experiences to relate to the outside world, like children who realize they only time they receive a parent’s positive attention is when they are hurt and injured. There are adults who, in seeking to validate an underlying harm, subconsciously create new harms for validation. These adults are still victims, and no one has to participate in their healing process if they don’t want to; it is, however, unnecessary to invalidate the victim’s experience while setting boundaries with them.

There are adults who calculatingly use negative experiences to manipulate others. These adults are not victims. Rejecting their ‘experience’ makes no intrinsic difference, as they will weave your rejection into their existing narrative, to ‘prove’ their point and further their ends.

Fear of being ‘taken for a ride’ by the second does not justify invalidation of the first.

Subconsciously we know how important validation is because we withhold it from people who we believe are unworthy of it.

A lot of this perspective is a result of less empathy-driven parenting styles, and the adults who are attempting to meet this childhood need are legion; those adults are still victims.

Our brain is literally wired to pay attention to our negative experiences, assisted by salience hormones such as dopamine, so that we can avoid them in the future and protect ourselves. But if people are questioning our reality, and we, therefore, begin to question our reality, how can we avoid those experiences in the future? We are attempting to re-write an experience from a ‘negative experience’ to a ‘positive experience’ or an ‘I’m-the-problem-here experience’.

We learn to question ourselves instead of learning to get the fuck out.

Above all this, there is an underlying entitlement that someone must possess to believe they are in a position to not only judge a victim’s experience, but either proscribe or prescribe a victim’s thoughts and actions.

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I’ll be the captain of my ship
I’ll survey that vast horizon
That ocean of what might be
Don’t have a clue what waits ahead
But I’ll place my trust in me

–Anthony Sullivan

Blame, like forgiveness, is a completely misunderstood part of the healing process.

People are exhorted to stop blaming your parents! Move on! Let go!

‘Each moment you hold onto the resentment, you keep yourself stuck in a prison of victimhood.

You are not responsible for what happened to you as a child.

It happened.

You were young back then.

But now, today, you are responsible for what you choose to do.

It’s this ‘hurry up’ mentality toward healing because you need to be healed, recovered, better – and right now! – or you are unenlightened, deficient, creating your own misery.

Like many cases of abuse, healing is a process that occurs over time. In many cases, victims have had to live a lie for years – the lie that everything is okay, the lie that nothing is happening, the lie that their abuser is the best person in the world – so many lies for so many years. If you tell a lie for long enough, you’ll start to believe it…or, at the very least, identify with it. The lie becomes an inextricable part of your identity.

Blaming helps you claim your history, the truth of what actually happened, and rewrite your identity.

People believe that ‘victim’ is dis-empowering, but what if you have never before been able to tell the truth of your situation? To finally be able to speak the truth is empowering, to acknowledge your experience and, finally, allow yourself to feel what you’ve been suppressing to maintain the lies.

Blame is a tool that helps reinterpret those perceptions that have been skewed through attempts to cope in profoundly dysfunctional situations.

Blame is a function of the need to obtain support and validation from loved ones and the community, the need to reverse what has been pushed onto a victim by an abuser, and the need to reassert the truth.

Will blame always serve in someone’s best interests?

Of course not. But we need to fundamentally re-assess our concept of what healing entails; to expect someone to heal immediately from wounds that were inflicted over years is harmful, short sighted, and selfish.

Blame is warped in abusive relationships.

Abusers often blame the victim, the community often reinforces that blame, and victims blame themselves. The healthy, appropriate re-direction of that blame is healing for earlier stages of recovery.

It isn’t about ‘creating your own misery’, it’s about acknowledging the misery of your experiences.

The more I learn about abuse recovery, the more I think there is a law of conservation of emotions. And research shows that the brain will ‘defer’ dealing with strong emotions until it is safe to do so. You can’t wish away your emotions because healing means you’ve just decided to ‘live in the present’.

And of course, no one ever tells you to ‘get over’ and ‘move on’ from happy emotions.

What these stupid exhortations really mean is that you shouldn’t be angry, fearful, upset, frustrated, or ‘negative’. Because those emotions are ‘bad’ and being happy is ‘good’.

It’s like saying a hammer is ‘bad’.

A hammer is simply a tool.