Trauma Link: You Hurt Me But I Need You

There are many prison-like emotional relationships in which love hurts and destroys all happiness and self-esteem. Despite this situation, the victim is unable to break this bond because affection and attraction blinds them to the point of minimizing the damage. The trauma link is very similar to Stockholm syndrome.

From the outside, this type of situation may seem strange and contradictory to us. Why does anyone tolerate the intolerable? Why stay with someone who humiliates, mistreats and emotionally abuses the other? In the field of human relations, it is sometimes necessary to have to understand buried psychological processes.

At first, it will not help to tell someone in this situation to get away from the person as quickly as possible. Codependency can be so intense that the mind stops functioning rationally.

Indeed, it is the emotions and the unhealthy attachment that completely control this bond. It is a bond that corrupts, but which continues to fuel needs as basic as the fear of abandonment.

What is the trauma link?

The idea of ​​trauma bond began to be studied for the first time in the 1980s. It was psychologists Donald G. Dutton and Susan L. Painter who analyzed the cases of hundreds of abused women who lived with their partners.

The first thing they discovered is that sometimes fear is not that mechanism that, in normal situations, would encourage the escape or confrontation of what hurts us. What we see in this type of link is submission and a clear difference in power. One submits the other.

Victims have an unhealthy attachment to which they do not react. What is the reason for this permissiveness and tolerance for suffering? In reality, these relationships follow the following circular pattern: the executioner offers affection, then mistreats the victim, the victim gets angry, then forgives him and so on.

The problem of attachment and the narcissistic personality

Donald Dutton and Susan Painter did a study in the 90s to better understand these types of relationships. They were able to demonstrate that many of these women who were trying to leave their abusive partner did not succeed because their emotional attachment was very intense.

Added to this was the low self-esteem of the victim and the domineering personality of the executioner. Much of the trauma bond is established with a narcissistic profile. As we well know, these figures are adept at manipulating, controlling, and draining their victims of any psychological and emotional resistance.

A cycle of abuse, addiction and affection that destroys

In the emotional, cognitive and behavioral diagram of the person who displays a link by trauma, we can add an undeniable factor: the addiction to this unhealthy love. It is an all-tolerant type of attachment. Codependency is based on low self-esteem, idealization of the other, fear of loneliness and self-sacrifice.

In order for the trauma bond to continue, as we noted earlier, a very particular cycle of abuse often takes place. It follows the following rules:

• The relationship accumulates tensions (arguments, mistreatment, humiliations, offenses…).
• The victim ends up reacting to a more serious incident.
• The person who abuses them acts quickly by changing their behavior,  showing affection, saying they regret and showing their express desire for change.
• Reconciliation takes place and, in general, it is intense and rewarding. Then follows a brief period of apparent harmony.
• The abuse and mistreatment reappear and the cycle begins again.

One of the main characteristics of the trauma bond is that when the victim is hurt by their aggressive partner, they hope to receive consolation and forgiveness from the latter. This unhealthy urge feeds back the traumatic bond.

Link by trauma: how to act in such a situation?

There is one important thing we need to understand about the traumatic bond: it feeds on unbalanced power which results in periods of punishment alternating with moments of reward (like reconciliations). It is decisive that the person is able to break this pattern.

However, this can be complicated because, often, the victims are completely isolated. Narcissists tend to separate their victims from their family and friends, so it is difficult for them to completely let go of what hurts them.

Social support is essential in these cases; the entourage, work colleagues, neighbors and social services must be these figures attentive and sensitive to these realities.

The keys to leaving a traumatic link behind

To face and leave this traumatic bond, certain strategies prove to be effective. Here are just a few:

• Separation of victim and aggressor.
• The victim must recognize and become aware of the emotional abuse, mistreatment, codependency and this unhealthy attachment that results in a harmful bond.
• Development of a support network. The person must be able to count on figures to whom he can speak, with whom he can share, to feel understood and helped. This proximity with other figures than the aggressor will allow him to see his reality in another way in order to feel stronger and to set new goals.

• Psychological therapy is, in these cases, essential to treat the injury of the trauma and to rebuild identity and self-esteem. It is also necessary to provide the person with strategies so that they do not fall back into relationships of emotional abuse.

To conclude, very often, the fact that a person has a greater tendency to develop this type of emotional bond comes from their childhood and the type of education that they received. The psychological work must then be deeper and more delicate to heal the marks of a trauma which persists and which manifests itself constantly in each link. It is, without a doubt, a very complex reality.

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