What is a trauma bond? How do you break them?
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A trauma bond is made when feel good chemicals are released into the body when someone is being very nice to you. We call this love bombing.
After them being nice, they can turn to being horrible (devaluation) and this can hurt you very much. They say horrible things to you and call you names. They might hit you or be unkind to your pets.
You can’t leave, because your body wants those chemicals to come back. You hang around for a long time hoping to get your ‘fix’ again so you can feel better. When you don’t have your ‘fix’ you feel very very bad. The horrible person knows this and they use it to keep you around.
In time after someone goes between being nice and being horrible, your body becomes addicted to those chemicals and you can’t do with out them.
This is why people who are with horrible people can’t leave. It’s not that they are weak or stupid, it’s that their bodies crave the chemicals so much that they hang around in case they come back.
There’s only one way to break a trauma bond and that’s to leave the horrible person. For some people that might take years and things have to get really really horrible before they find the courage.
When they leave they are in a lot of pain because their bodies no longer can get those chemicals. It’s a pain like being addicted to drugs or alcohol and you can’t get them anymore.
You can make it easier to break the trauma bond by making sure the horrible person can’t come near you. You have to keep them away by blocking their number, stopping them seeing you on social media and stopping yourself from seeing them. You have to get rid of all your photos, gifts, anything that might remind you of them because if that happens, you might weaken and go back. If you do, you have to start all over again only this time it will hurt even more.
Going to therapy also helps because you can learn things about yourself that shows you why you didn’t leave the very first time they were being horrible. Therapy also teaches you how to recognise these horrible people and their bad behaviour, and how to keep yourself safe from them in the future.
There is no pain like the pain of the trauma bond. It hurts when you’re in it and it hurts when you try to break it.
It can take years for a trauma bond to break and, even if you think it’s broken, just seeing a photograph of them can make you feel really bad again and you start wanting those lovely chemical feelings to come back again. So you have to be really careful to not see anything.
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