Trauma can affect the brain in many ways, leading to secondary mental health disorders and struggles, including trauma bonds. At Sequoia Detox Centers, we can help you or a loved one safely navigate the complex interpersonal dynamics of a trauma bond, establishing boundaries and finding highly structured, emotionally safe forms of treatment with our trauma-informed team.
What is a Trauma Bond?
A trauma bond is a psychological attachment that people develop with an abuser. This happens when there is a structured cycle of intense abuse combined with positive reinforcements or affection. Such complicated dichotomies can manipulate the reward system and the survival mechanism in the brain making it difficult to break a trauma bond as a victim with an abuser.
Navigating a Trauma Bond
At our facility we work hard to offer unique clinical frameworks that do more than just give advice but instead help to dismantle that bond and rebuild individual autonomy. Our specialists use multiple methods to achieve this goal.
Resolving Cognitive Dissonance
The first goal of navigating a trauma bond is helping clients understand the conflicting realities they live under, deconstructing that illusion in a gentle way, and encouraging clients to relearn how to view things more objectively.
With individual and group therapy, clients can use things like fact logs or journaling techniques to look at their relationship objectively and overcome things like gas lighting.
Regulating the Nervous System and Neurochemical Withdrawal
As part of our inpatient and outpatient treatment options, we help clients not only understand the way a trauma bond mimics chemical dependency, but we support clients as they go through neurochemical withdrawal.
This physical and emotional withdrawal can be managed through somatic techniques, helping to manage spikes and adrenaline or cortisol as well as safety techniques that retrain the nervous system. Things like mindfulness and meditation as well as yoga and other physical exercises can be a useful part of treatment for this reason.
Rebuilding Self-Worth and Autonomy
Abusive dynamics that result in trauma bonds usually strip away individual autonomy including decision-making and intuition. We aim to reinforce our client’s ability to recognize their gut feelings, their intuition, the things that they personally value, who they are, and their right to have individual feelings. All of these processes help individuals identify their core values and stop second-guessing themselves.
Boundaries and Safety Planning
As part of an individual treatment plan, our team can prioritize safety by helping clients understand their emotional processes, how to set up things like no contact boundaries and resist being pulled back in. We can also collaborate on physical safety strategies as well.
Getting Trauma-Informed Care with Us
At Sequoia Detox Centers, our trauma-informed specialists go beyond standard talk therapy and use modalities in our inpatient or outpatient programs including things like internal family systems and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
EMDR allows the brain to reprocess traumatic memory so they no longer trigger fight or flight responses without the burden of talking through difficult experiences while things like individual therapy can help people understand the part of them that wants to return to their abuser, recognizing how that is deeply tied to a survival mechanism and need for safety.
If you are someone you love is looking for trauma-informed help with our mental health specialists to break a trauma bond, our dual diagnosis programs can offer inpatient and outpatient support. Call today at 1-866-824-0709.
FAQ
What is a Trauma Bond?
Drama bonds are psychological attachments that develop between an abuser and the person they are abusing. These bonds result from manipulation of the brain’s survival mechanisms and the reward systems alternating between intense cycles of affection and abuse.
How Does a Trauma Bond Differ From Healthy Attachment?
Healthy attachments are built on mutual respect, safety, communication, and trust whereas trauma bonds are rooted specifically in an unbalanced power dynamic with a lot of emotional volatility and unpredictability.
What Psychological Cycle Creates a Trauma Bond?
Trauma bonds are formed through recurring cycles where abusers show an individual affection, sometimes called love bombing followed by devaluation and intense relief. During the first phase, abusers provide overwhelming praise, gifts, or affection but in the second phase they shift to withholding that same affection, offering criticism, cruelty, or even gaslighting. In the final phase, there’s usually an abusive outburst followed by intense affection, apologies, and comfort.
How Do Psychological Cycles of Trauma Bonds Differ From a Regular Relationship?
The cycles of a trauma bond focus on tension, abuse and devaluation, love bombing, and rescuing or calm in the final phase but a healthy, regular relationship will start with conflict followed by communication, accountability, and finally, resolution. The behavioral differences have to do with regular affection throughout the relationship for a healthy relationship but intense and fleeting affection in a trauma bond. Similarly healthy relationships use things like conflict resolution, active listening and compromise but trauma bonds focus more on punishment and blame. A healthy relationship is safe and emotionally stable, one that encourages personal Independence whereas trauma bonds aim to isolate the individual and are often volatile and confusing.
Are There Chemical Differences with Trauma Bonds?
Yes, just as there are different psychological cycles with healthy versus trauma bonds, there are different chemical reactions that happen as well. In a regular relationship, the brain primarily relies on oxytocin and serotonin, chemicals that promote long-term bonding and emotional safety. In a trauma bond, the main chemicals are cortisol and adrenaline spikes, mimicking an addiction-like cycle with dopamine flooding the brain during a rescue phase and cortisol and adrenaline flooding during an abusive phase, mimicking the neurochemistry of addiction.
Can Trauma Bonds Occur Outside of Romantic Relationships?
Yes, a trauma Bond typically happens in a romantic partnership but it can happen in any relationship where there is an intense power imbalance like kidnappers and hostages, toxic managers and employees, human traffickers and their victims, cult leaders and followers, or even parents and children.
What Are the Primary Signs of a Trauma Bond?
Some of the primary science of a trauma bond include constantly defending the abusers actions to friends and family, fixating on early phases when there didn’t seem to be any problems in the relationship, feeling unsafe and unhappy in a relationship but unable to leave, and changing things like social circles, core values, and hobbies to avoid triggering or upsetting and abuser.
