23. Trauma Bond or True Love? How to Tell the Difference

Trauma Bond or True Love? How to Tell the Difference

Ever mistaken chaos for chemistry? You’re not alone. In this week’s episode, we dive deep into attachment styles, trauma bonds, and why so many of us confuse emotional intensity with real love. I break down how anxious and avoidant dynamics create addictive highs and lows, why your brain literally craves the person who hurts you, and what secure love actually feels like — calm, consistent, and safe.

Whether you’re healing from a toxic connection or learning to spot the red flags earlier, this episode will help you stop outsourcing your peace and start attracting partners who regulate your nervous system instead of wrecking it.

In this episode, we talk about:
✨ The difference between trauma bonding and genuine connection
✨ How anxious and avoidant attachment styles feed off each other
✨ Why “spark” isn’t always chemistry — it’s often dysregulation
✨ What secure love feels like (and why it might feel “boring” at first)
✨ How to stop confusing chaos for passion and start choosing peace

“You’re not missing passion — you’re detoxing from instability.”

Mentioned in this episode:

• The book Attached by Amir Levine & Rachel Heller
• Healing your attachment style through self-regulation and secure partners
• How nervous system regulation changes who you’re attracted to
• The real “glow up” — when you stop craving chaos and start craving peace

Listen if you’re ready to:
💫 Break cycles of anxious or avoidant relationships
🌿 Learn what secure, healthy love actually feels like
❤️ Reclaim your peace, your power, and your glow

Dive deeper into the energy of Becoming Sunshine

Explore my digital guides, journals, and masterclasses designed to help you heal, realign, and step into your highest self. 

[shop the Becoming Sunshine collection on Payhip]

https://payhip.com/BecomingSunshine

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Transcript

Madeline: 0:00

Welcome to Becoming Sunshine. For those of you that know me, you know that Sunshine has been an alias of mine for almost a decade now, and sunshine also is me becoming my highest self, and that's what this podcast is about. I'm here to help you understand yourself better and maybe learn some more about myself along the way. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm excited.

0:27

Hi friends. Welcome back to Becoming Sunshine. I feel like I've talked about this on previous episodes, but I really do feel like taking this year basically to not date and be celibate, and now I'm finally putting myself back out there. I feel like the way I am operating and the way I am moving when it comes to dating is completely different. I've learned so much about my relationship patterns and why I used to be stuck in these loops or date the same kind of people or be in the same types of dynamics. I've learned a lot about attachment styles and trauma bonds, and I feel like they really go hand in hand. Once you realize this, I feel like it's so easy to spot. I know everyone was watching Love Is Blind, the most recent season on Netflix and I've watched it before. I watched older seasons. I don't know if it's just this particular season or if I've just grown and now I recognize these dynamics more, but I literally had to turn it off. I was getting the ick so bad because I feel like it is a social experiment, but it's not about finding love or if love is blind, it's literally a social experiment about attachment styles and I think you have to be anxious to be cast for the show. I don't think they want secure, healthy people on the show because that's not gonna make good tv. I digress anyways, if you have ever fallen into the pattern of the push pull, emotional rollercoaster or felt that a relationship was boring, if there wasn't the chaos and the drama. Chaos is not to be confused with attraction and chemistry. It's just a dysregulated nervous system and it's not just about childhood dynamics, it's life experience too. It's not just something we developed when we were young and we're just doomed. And also too, even if you do have an insecure attachment style, if you're avoidant or if you're anxious, or you could be a combination too, disorganized. You can become secure, but you do have to work at it. Also, being with a secure partner can help you become secure. Let's get into attachment styles, so secure attachment is you're able to self-regulate, you don't outsource your peace to someone else. Insecure attachment style is either anxious, avoidant or disorganized, which is a combination of the two. An avoidant attachment style is they value independence, but it's a hyper independence. They don't feel like they can rely on other people, so they just wanna do everything themselves, in a toxic way, and they pull away when things get emotionally intense. They have intimacy issues and they go into the same things that an anxious person does physiologically, but they don't outwardly express that. They shove it down, and that can manifest in the body as a lot of inflammation, it's definitely not good. The anxious person tends to crave closeness and fears rejection and abandonment. Unfortunately these people usually end up attracting each other because secure people usually don't wanna be with anxious or avoidant people. Also too secure people tend to stay in relationships more often. They're just not in the dating pool as often, unfortunately. So there's just more anxious and avoidant people running around. When these two get together, the anxious chaser and the avoidant distancer, that's when a trauma bond is easily ignited. The anxious person's nervous system goes into panic when the avoidant withdraws and the avoidant feels suffocated by the anxious person's intensity, and so they pull back more. This creates the highs and lows, which releases dopamine. That's why you get so addicted to these really toxic cycles and why you get stuck in these relationship patterns. It's literally a chemical imbalance in your brain, it's like you're withdrawing a drug. So even if you're miserable, you're desperate for that hit of dopamine to feel secure again, and for your attachment object, usually the avoidant person, to give you that feeling of secure and safety. It's really outsourcing your peace to someone else and not being able to emotionally regulate. You're dependent on their response and how they communicate with you and how they show up for you, it's not a good situation. A lot of times people confuse that for love and passion, when really it's just nervous system dysregulation. I've definitely been there for sure. For me it looked like being constantly anxious, trying to fix, trying to please, trying to make the relationship feel safe when it never was. I just kept thinking if I communicated better, or if I loved him more, or I loved harder it would change everything, but all it really did was keep my body in fight or flight, which is so toxic. Especially for me, my cortisol levels all over the place is literally one of my root causes for my autoimmune disease. I look back at pictures of myself when I was in this really toxic relationship and you could just see it in my face. The life was drained outta my face, I just looked like my light was stolen. I literally was with this energy vampire, and I just looked drained and hollow and yeah depleted. Depleted is the right word. I was at work and I hadn't been to this particular club in nine months or so, and I saw this girl I hadn't seen in a while and she was like, oh my God, you look so different. And I hadn't done anything. I hadn't gotten any procedures. I hadn't gained or lost a bunch of weight or anything. I literally just was healing. And she was like, you just look so different, like in a good way. You get your glow back. I feel like we've seen that trend on TikTok and social media where it's like a picture of the girl before and a girl after, or a person before or after a really toxic relationship, and the text overlay is like, what do you mean they drained the life outta you? it just shows how these toxic relationships literally drain the life out of you and you just look like a shell of who you used to be. And then I also love too when girls get their glow back and yeah, it's just amazing. The glow up that happens when people get out of toxic relationships. It's really an internal glow and then it just radiates out of you and you just look like, yeah, it's just crazy. It's crazy what cortisol can do, and also just with stress and constantly being in fight or flight can do, literally causes disease, inflammation and it makes you ugly. That man, that mid man is making you ugly. No, let him go. If you've ever thought, why am I so drawn to this person, even though I know it's not healthy, it's probably attachment chemistry at play. A lot of the people listening to this podcast probably lean a little bit more anxious. I'm an anxious girl myself. I've definitely done a lot of work and I can feel and see in real time now that I'm dating again how I'm moving differently or if I'm triggered, or old patterns starting to come up. Anything that pulls you outta character, it's gotta go. I am not this insecure person. I don't compete with other women. I don't feel jealous. if a man is making you feel like you have to worry about another girl or making you feel insecure or making you question everything, and rethinking what you did or what you said and if you had done this differently or that or whatever, it's like no, no, no, no, no. At the end of the day, the man that is for you and the man that is right for you, there's nothing that you're gonna do or say differently that's gonna make him like you or not like you more or less. So if you're ruminating or being anxious or worrying about these things, that's probably not a healthy dynamic. Think of the version of you in this relationship. You don't wanna be this anxious person. You don't wanna be second guessing things that you did or said or hyper fixating on things that don't matter. You wanna just be able to live in peace and anything that pulls you outta character and makes you this version of yourself that you don't wanna be, It's gotta go. That's not just for dating, that's anything in general, like friendships, jobs, anything that pulls you outta character. Anything that makes you a version of yourself that is not aligned, isn't who you really are, isn't who you wanna be. Nah gotta go. Nothing that's meant for you is ever gonna pull you outta character. So what does secure love feel like? Now that I'm attracting secure partners, I can see the difference so clearly. For example I recently was seeing this guy and it was just so refreshing and nice to be around him because he just felt like such a safe space. He had daddy energy because I felt like I was able to be my softest, most submissive self. I just felt so safe and cared for and not anxious at all. I remember one of the first times we were hanging out, I fell asleep and I feel like I wouldn't just fall asleep when I'm with a guy, and it's my nervous system felt so safe I was able to rest and relax. If you feel like you're able to just be like jello, just soft and ushy gushy, I feel like that's a good sign. Not ever feeling jealous or insecure or questioning how they feel about you. They're affectionate, they're not withholding. You feel comforted and safe and that was so attractive to me because it was just so different from my previous relationship. I was just like, wow, this guy is totally comfortable with intimacy, affection, isn't pulling away when I get close to him. It was just so nice and refreshing. If you do lean anxious, you can heal your attachment style by being with a secure partner. If someone is secure and they're not triggering these tendencies, you're able to heal your patterning. Doing your own work is important too, but I think you really can heal and grow a lot in partnership. When it comes to dating, I feel like now when I'm thinking of attraction, it's not so much am I attracted to this person? It's are they good for my nervous system? Are they compatible with my attachment style? If someone has avoidant tendencies, like they're inconsistent, they are withdrawing or whatever. I don't find that attractive. That gives me the ick. I think before, if someone was maybe more avoidant, that would trigger these anxious tendencies in me and it would make me try harder and almost like chase that affection, and now I just am like, ew, I'm bored. You should be bored. That's when you know you're healing and you're starting to be able to regulate your own emotions and regulate your own nervous system. You're not outsourcing that to someone else and you're not giving up your power to someone else. How someone behaves isn't gonna dictate how you feel. A lot of the work I've done has been about being a grounded, peaceful place for myself to come home to. Never giving that away to someone else is just good in general. You never wanna be in a position where your peace is dependent on someone else and how they behave. Secure love feels calm, it feels honest, and it feels stable. There's no guessing, no playing roles, no walking on eggshells. It's not this constant rollercoaster of emotion. It's actually quiet, but in the best way. It just feels peaceful. If you're not used to this, you might feel bored or there's not that spark, but it's not supposed to feel like butterflies, it's supposed to feel like calming energy, like a warm, safe hug. Being around this guy's energy just felt so comforting. I literally was able to just fall asleep. I was just like, wow, I'm safe. I'm at peace. Love this. This is amazing. And also too, as a woman, whether you want kids or not, you have to think about it in this way. If you have an avoidant partner and he's avoidant with you, he's gonna be avoidant with your kids. If he can't text you back or he is inconsistent with you, he's gonna be inconsistent with your kids. My attraction towards partners now and the selection process is just completely different now. Completely different. I love how much I've grown. I can see it in real time by the partners that I'm choosing and how they move and how they carry themselves and how I feel around them. Honestly, the first sign of inconsistency or avoidant tendencies and I'm like, I'm good. I'm good on this. You're obviously not my husband next. Sometimes you just need to say ew and just be like they move funny or they're weird for that and move on. No. If you're not used to being in a secure relationship or with a secure person, it might feel uncomfortable if you're used to chaos, but once your nervous system learns to trust it, it definitely starts to feel like home. The energy is just so different. As a woman you're able to be in your feminine energy, you're able to be your softest self, and that's where we like to be, and that's where men are the most attracted to us. It's really a win-win, honestly. That's the real glow up, when your nervous system finally stops craving chaos and starts craving peace. Be your own peace, of course, but if anyone is disrupting my peace, next. If you're in that in between phase where you're learning to unhook from old patterns where you haven't fully stepped into this new one yet, give yourself grace because it does take time. I'm not saying you have to take a break from dating or you have to be celibate, but honestly, I feel like celibacy is a glow up in itself. You're not constantly taking on energies of other people and you're able to fully just focus on yourself, especially as being a woman. Men are literally transferring their energy to you when you're intimate, and so if you are dysregulated and you don't have a great handle on yourself and your boundaries and you're still outsourcing your peace, it just makes it that much harder. Don't make it harder for yourself. I definitely would recommend, and I'm not saying you need to be celibate forever, but I really do think that it really helped me level up in dating and I feel like I am so much more confident and so much more secure than I was before. When you are ready to put yourself back out there, you're gonna be a way better version of yourself. When you are healing, if you're dating, you're not gonna attract the partner that you want. Trust me. When I was in probably one of the lowest places, the partner I attracted at the time, terrible. Learned a lot of lessons for sure, but now that I'm in this healed, elevated, place more secure place, I definitely am attracting a much higher caliber of partner. They're definitely more secure. They're honestly all around so much better, and I love that I am cultivating way better connections now. It just shows me how much I've grown and it's just exciting to see that the more that I heal, the more and more secure that I become, the better connections, the better partners I'm going to attract. Instead of outsourcing or looking for someone to regulate you, be that person for you and ground yourself. Be that peace in yourself, show up for yourself first, heal and become secure in yourself and then you're gonna attract someone you couldn't even imagined. If you are going through this, just know that you're not broken for missing the highs. You're healing from mistaking instability for passion. The more you self-regulate, the more you'll start attracting people who feel safe, calm, and consistent, because that's the energy you're anchored in now. It's gonna be so worth it and so nice when you're not even attracted to the chaos anymore. You will start to clock it when someone is out of pocket or triggering old patterns. You'll see it coming and you'll just get the ick. You'll be like, Ugh. You won't even find that attractive. You'll just be like, Ew. Absolutely not. If you wanna dive deeper into this and start healing from the inside out, I actually made a little workbook for you guys. And honestly, whenever I am struggling with something, these are the kind of things that help me, and there's little journal prompts in it, and there's a lot of information. I also love the book Attached. If you haven't read it, it explains attachment styles on a deeper level and helps you understand the dynamics and the physiology at play. It really helps you give yourself grace for patterns or loops that you've been stuck in because it's really not a conscious thing. This is a subconscious thing that until you're aware of it, you're really controlled by it, unfortunately, in a lot of cases. It talks about how when you're with a partner physiologically, you two start to sync up. Your nervous systems literally sync up. Being close to your partner literally regulates your blood pressure and vice versa, and so when people say oh, you're codependent, you physiologically become codependent on each other. Understanding these attachment styles is so important because there is a physiological component, but understanding how to be secure can help you regulate and find that peace in yourself so that you're able to have more autonomy over your relationships, over your patterns, over dynamics at play, so that you're not just stuck in these subconscious loops and patterns and you're able to find secure, healthy love. The more I've learned about this, the more I feel validated, and I feel a lot of love and compassion for who I used to be. I didn't know these things and I was just aimlessly, repeating patterns and unhealthy dynamics and I just couldn't understand the issue. It wasn't something that I was doing, it was just me and that person are just never gonna be compatible. When it comes to anxious and avoidant dynamics, at the end of the day, I'm not saying that if you're with an avoidant person and you tend to be anxious, or even if you're secure that you shouldn't be with that person or you shouldn't try to work it out, but you as the anxious person or the secure person, you will always be making concessions for the other partner. Think about if that's the dynamic you want for the rest of your life, honestly. For me personally, no. I'm not gonna be the one that always has to compromise in order to make the relationship work. I'd rather just be with a partner that's secure. You'll just have a way better understanding of your own patterning and how to be in a healthy relationship and how to be happier and more fulfilled in your relationships, and if you haven't been, maybe this will shed some light on why that is. If this resonated for you share it with a friend who's struggling with something similar or a friend that it might help. You're not crazy for wanting love to feel peaceful. You're learning what real love feels like because chaos is not chemistry and doing all the emotional labor in a relationship in order to make it work is never going to have you feeling fulfilled or appreciated. I hope this episode was helpful. I definitely wanna talk more about this topic and make some more tools for you guys, for the people that wanna dive deeper. And I will talk to you guys next time. Bye. Love you.