Reflection
Trauma Bonding: Why It Feels Like Love, and Why It Is Not
It feels like love. That is the whole difficulty.
People arrive in my consulting room able to describe, in detail, what someone has done to them, and in the same breath say that they love them and cannot leave. They are not confused about the facts. They are confused about what the feeling is, and that confusion is not stupidity. It is the predictable result of how the bond was built.
A trauma bond is very intense, and human beings read intensity as significance. If I feel this much, it must be love. It must be more real than anything else I have had. What else could it be?
It can be something else. It very often is.
What the term actually means
The phrase comes from research, not from the internet. In 1981 the psychologists Donald Dutton and Susan Painter described what they called traumatic bonding: the observation that an emotional attachment can be strengthened rather than destroyed by intermittent abuse, where there is also a marked imbalance of power. Two ingredients, both necessary. Not constant cruelty, which tends to produce fear and flight. Alternation: harm, then relief, then harm, then relief, delivered unpredictably by the same person, in a relationship where one party holds more of the power. The first high is often love bombing, and the contrast it sets up is what gives everything after it its force.
The cement of such a relationship is no longer affection, or a shared life, or tenderness. The cement is the alternation itself. That is why these bonds hold so strangely well, and so badly.
It is worth being precise about what does the work here, because it is neither the harm nor the kindness. It is the distance between them. The further apart the high and the low, the stronger the bond that forms.
This is counter-intuitive enough to be worth stating plainly. A relationship that is consistently cold produces unhappiness and, in the end, departure. A relationship that swings between adoration and contempt produces attachment. Which means the warmth is not relief from the mechanism. The warmth is half of the mechanism, and without it there would be no bond at all, only fear.
That is also why the beginning matters so much. Where the high phase was love bombing — overwhelming, disproportionate, far above anything the relationship had earned — the gap it opens is enormous, and so is the hold.
A note on the words, because two different things are called the same thing. People sometimes use “trauma bonding” to mean becoming close to someone through shared hardship: soldiers, medical teams, survivors of the same disaster. That is a real and often healthy phenomenon, and it is not what this page is about. This page is about the bond that forms to the person causing the harm.
Why intensity gets mistaken for depth
Here is something I have come to think is underestimated, in therapy and outside it.
Human beings love intensity. Not pain, intensity. And when there is no intensity, many people do not feel calm. They feel empty.
Emptiness, to some extent, is harder to manage than intensity. That sentence explains more about why people stay than any amount of talk about low self-esteem. A relationship that runs hot and cold, that produces despair on Tuesday and euphoria on Friday, is at least full. It occupies everything. There is no room in it for the flat, unbearable question of what your life is for.
So when someone says they cannot leave because they would not know who they were without it, they are being accurate. The bond has been doing a job.
The pattern I could not un-see
Years ago I worked with people living with domestic violence, and I saw something there that changed how I understand this.
A woman would come in having been badly assaulted. There would be a period of safety. She would begin to recover, physically and otherwise. And then she would go back to the man who had done it.
It is very easy, from outside, to read that as weakness, or as a failure of judgement, or as not having been told clearly enough what was happening to her. It is none of those. She knew. She could often describe the risk more precisely than anyone around her. What she was returning to was not a misjudgement about him. It was a bond that had been laid down in her body over years, and an emptiness on the other side of leaving that nobody had helped her face.
If you are going to help someone out of this, you have to take seriously what they are being asked to walk into. Not just what they are walking away from.
What is happening physiologically
I want to put this carefully, because the internet is confident about it and the science is not finished.
The working model, and the one that matches what I see, is that two systems are being activated together and repeatedly. The bonding system, in which oxytocin plays a central part, fires during the reconciliations, the apologies, the intimacy, the relief. The stress system, cortisol and adrenaline, fires during the harm and the waiting. Over time these stop being separable. Closeness becomes inseparable from alarm, and relief becomes available only from the person who caused the need for it.
What that produces, functionally, is closer to a dependency than to a preference. I say this as someone who has spent a long career in addiction, and I do not use the comparison loosely. The structure is recognisable: tolerance, escalation, the narrowing of life around one source, the inability to stop despite knowing the cost, and a withdrawal on stopping.
This matters practically rather than theoretically. If the bond behaves like a dependency, then advice built on willpower is the wrong instrument, and the exit has a shape that can be anticipated.
It is not only romantic
Most of what is written about this assumes a couple. In my consulting room it appears at least as often elsewhere.
Between an adult child and a parent, where the alternation of warmth and contempt goes back to the beginning and has never been named. In friendships, particularly intense ones, where one person is reliably the one who apologises. In families around a member whose moods organise everyone else’s behaviour. And in working relationships where the power gap is real and the approval is intermittent, which is one reason some workplaces produce people who cannot sleep.
What defines a trauma bond is the structure, not the category. Alternating harm and relief, with unequal power.
Underneath it, usually, something older
This is where the analytic work begins, and where the question changes from what is happening to why it is this that holds you.
Very often the bond is a repetition. Not a coincidence, and not bad luck twice. The alternation that feels so compelling in adult life is frequently the alternation someone grew up inside: a parent who was loving and then frightening, available and then gone, and a child who learned to read the weather and to earn the warm version back. For that child, intermittent approval was not a red flag. It was the normal climate, and attunement to another person’s mood was a survival skill rather than a choice.
An adult who grew up that way does not walk into these relationships because they are drawn to suffering. They walk in because the pattern is legible to them. They know how to operate it. The calm, steady, reliably warm person is the one who feels like nothing is happening.
On the attachment side of this, see disorganised attachment, where closeness and danger were learned together, and the fear of abandonment, which is the engine underneath a great deal of staying.
The signs, as they actually present
Not a checklist from a magazine. These are what people describe to me, in roughly the order I hear them.
Feeling unable to leave, while wanting to. This is the central one. Not ambivalence about whether to leave, which is ordinary. The specific experience of having decided, clearly, and finding yourself unable to carry it out. People describe it as being held.
Defending or excusing the other person. Often with real sophistication. He is under enormous pressure at work. She had a terrible childhood. He is not like this with anyone else, which means it must be something about us. The explanations are frequently true, and they are being used to make the unbearable manageable.
Mistaking intensity for love, and jealousy for love. Possessiveness read as devotion. Surveillance read as caring. The volatility itself taken as evidence that the feelings run deep.
Isolation. Sometimes imposed, often not. People drift from the friends who have started asking questions, because the questions are harder to field than the relationship is to endure. By the time someone reaches me they are often describing a very small world.
Loss of your own outline. Not knowing what you think about something until you know what they think. Tastes, opinions, plans and friendships quietly replaced. Many people name this as the thing they most want back, more than the relationship ending.
The sense of being addicted to a person. Patients use that word themselves, unprompted, and I have learned to take it seriously when they do. It is usually the most accurate thing said in the first session.
Why leaving is a withdrawal
If this is a dependency, then separation is not simply relief, and people who expect relief are badly ambushed when it does not arrive.
What tends to happen in the first weeks is intrusive thinking and craving for contact, physical restlessness, broken sleep, and an emptiness that can be severe. The urge to make contact typically peaks rather than fades early on. People interpret this as proof that they have made a mistake, that the bond was love after all, and they go back. Not because they were wrong to leave. Because nobody told them what leaving would feel like.
Being told in advance changes the outcome considerably. It converts an apparent sign of error into an expected stage with an end.
What the work involves
Recognising the pattern comes first. It is not possible to work on something that is still being understood as love. The naming is not a technicality; it is most of the first phase, and it often produces grief rather than relief, because what is lost in the naming is the story the relationship was supposed to be.
Then the boundary. No contact where that is possible. Where it is not, because of children, family or work, the strongest boundaries the situation safely allows. This is a practical conversation, not a principled one.
Then getting through the withdrawal with support. Not alone, and not on willpower.
And then the older pattern, where there is one, which is the part that determines whether this happens again.
The framework is trauma-informed throughout. EMDR has a clear place where there is discrete traumatic material that is still live, and I have used it for more than twenty years. Elements of CBT are useful for the immediate business of the first weeks: the thinking patterns, the contact urges, the practical structure. And the psychodynamic and analytic work is what addresses the repetition, by making the childhood pattern visible as a pattern rather than as a fact about how relationships are. In my experience the last of those is what makes the difference between leaving one relationship and not entering the same one again.
Where the other person’s behaviour fits a recognisable pattern of manipulation, narcissistic abuse covers that ground, and the free book The Hold treats it at length. Where the preoccupation is obsessive but the other person is not cruel, what you may be describing is limerence, which works differently and needs a different response. On the wider pattern, see the toxic relationship and codependency.
If this is happening now
This article is about understanding a pattern. If you are frightened, understanding comes second.
Where there is violence, threats, or fear for your safety or your children’s, leaving is not improvised: the point of separation is statistically the most dangerous, and it is planned with a specialist service alongside any therapy. In the UK the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free and answered at any hour. For men, the Men’s Advice Line is 0808 8010 327. In immediate danger, call 999. Coercive control is a criminal offence in itself in the UK, with no physical violence required.
If you need to speak to somebody tonight, Samaritans answer at any hour on 116 123.
Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist and Jungian analyst with more than 25 years in practice, over twenty of them using EMDR, and nine years working within private residential addiction treatment. He offers trauma therapy in London and online by secure video, in English and French.
This article is educational. It does not constitute an individual assessment and does not replace psychotherapy, medical advice or urgent support.
If what you have read describes your life rather than an idea, and particularly if you have left this relationship before and returned, an initial consultation is a place to start working out what would actually help.
