Trauma bond

This one is kinda serious and heavy and realistically it’s probably not for me, a non-psychologist, to be explaining it badly.

What I know about it is this:

• It’s very complex.
• It’s what keeps victims bound to their abusers.
• It’s one of the reasons why battered wives stick with their violent husbands.

Here’s my half-assed spiel:

It’s a psychological attachment formed over many cycles of abuse punctuated with small amounts of kindness. This is kinda like the slot machine analogy, or the doom-scrolling analogy. You doom-scroll through short videos hoping that the next one will be good, then the next one, then just one more and so on until it’s 1:00am and you realize you just spent two hours scrolling not the five minutes you planned.

But it’s not just that. When the bad - bad - bad - good - bad - bad - good - bad - etc. pattern happens over time, it rewires your brain. You’re attachment system and nervous system fall into lock-step with this and it just becomes you. You get into some kind of weird resonance with it and it becomes all you subconsciously know. Your basic survival and ability to find peace and comfort become tied to how you appease the abuser. This gives you some control. Anything outside of this takes you out of your comfort zone (and probably threatens your control because your new word is unpredictable and unfamiliar). You’re entire self, your self-worth and your identity become this. Add in fear, shame, isolation, not to mention addiction to the intermittent-reinforcement and you become hopelessly trauma-bonded.

Apparently, even when it becomes apparent to a person that the are trauma bonded, it’s still very hard to break free.