What is a Trauma Bond?

Hello, and welcome back! I’m Dr. Michelle Border and in today’s episode I’m going to talk about Trauma Bond. Trauma Bond is what happens in our brains when narcissists manipulate us and change the biochemical pathways in our brains. I recently learned about this concept and wanted to share this new information with you. I’m going to explain what trauma bond is, how it happens, and what we can do about it. So, let’s get started talking about all of that right now. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back. I'm Dr. Michelle Border, and in today's episode I'm going to talk about trauma bond. Trauma bond is what happens in our brains when narcissists manipulate us and change the biochemical pathways in our brains. I recently learned about this concept and wanted to share this new information with you. I'm going to explain what trauma bond is, how it happens, and what we can do about it. So let's get started talking about all of that right now. Danish has a platform called Thrive where he assists trauma survivors in their healing journey. I've listened to several of Danish's videos on Instagram and have learned more about narcissists and the trauma they cause. I decided to purchase one of his seminars about trauma bonds to learn more about it. And I discovered some new things about what happens to our brains when living with a narcissist and their abuse. I want to share some of that knowledge with you today. First, I want to talk about how our brains process situations. Humans have a fundamental desire for rewards. This means we like to experience positive situations. Think of rewards as anything you desire or need. In general, we want the rewards of being happy and having things our way. This drive is controlled by brain networks called the reward system. The system regulates our behaviors and acts as the driver for motivation, learning, and survival. It pushes us to find ways to get the reward. The processing of rewards in the human brain is divided into three psychological components wanting, liking, and learning. Wanting means getting what we want as a reward. This is driven heavily by dopamine, a pleasure chemical in the brain, and provides the motivational drive, craving, or anticipation to seek out a reward. It is a force that propels us to achieve goals. Liking means enjoying the reward. It's what we like to have happen. This is the actual conscious experience of pleasure or satisfaction when the reward is received. Learning means that our brain remembers how much we like the reward and what we did to obtain it. The brain continually adjusts its responses and expectations based on whether a reward was better, worse, or exactly as predicted, helping us learn which behaviors to repeat. An interesting note about the reward system is that the wanting and liking parts are separate pathways in the brain, meaning you can have a strong craving for something without necessarily experiencing pleasure from it. This is a common cause of addictions. Our brains have been wired this way for evolutionary survival. The reward system controls our desire to seek out resources necessary for our survival. Here's a couple examples of how this works. Think about being hungry. Your brain recognizes the want for something to stop the hunger, this of course being food. Your brain then motivates you to go get something to eat. When choosing something to eat, you will choose something you like to eat. No one chooses foods they don't like, right? After eating the food, your brain recognizes that the hunger pangs are gone and learns that when that feeling comes again to send the motivational signal to get food and to choose the food you like. If you try a different type of food or maybe a different brand of that food, and it wasn't as good as a previous time, then your brain will learn not to do that again and suggest the other type that brought more pleasure. You were hungry and were rewarded with food to end that unpleasant feeling. Another example is in the social aspect. Think about someone you like to spend time with. Why do you like being around that person? Probably because they are kind to you, make you feel happy, and probably good about yourself. Being around people that offer positive environments trigger our reward system by producing dopamine in the brain. When we are hit with a dopamine fix, our brain remembers that and wants more of it. Dopamine connects pleasurable feelings with the behavior that causes them. Think about the people you like to be with, the activities you like to do, and the things you like to have around you. Why are those the things you want? Because they bring you pleasure and set off your reward system in your brain, giving you a dopamine hit. Now on the other hand, think about the people, things, or activities you don't like. Why don't you like those things? Because they don't bring you pleasure. When I get hungry, I don't go after a bowl of broccoli. I prefer cookies. When I want to hang out with someone, I choose my best friend, not my annoying coworker. When I want to go do something, I don't choose to run a marathon, I go lay on the beach. It's normal human behavior to want what brings us pleasure. The problem is when we are stuck in life situations that do not bring us pleasure. I'm going to look at this now from the point of view of a childhood trauma survivor. My learning about this has been based on narcissistic abuse, but I think this process pertains to any kind of childhood abuse. As children, our brains are developing and learning everything. I've used the example before of it being like getting a new computer or a laptop. It comes with some things programmed in, but you have to add on the information you want your computer to have, what you want it to do for you, and the work you want it to be able to produce. Children's brains have some brain functions at birth, but a lot of development and learning has to take place as the child grows so they learn how to function in life. The information has to be put in by their parents. The reward system is part of that growth. When a child is being raised in an abusive home, they have a lot of negative experiences and negativity towards their being. Now it's not always negative. Occasionally there are some good times. The behaviors of the abuser are cycles of abuse with brief periods of affection and acceptance. This is especially true if the parent is a narcissist. All narcissists work on that cycle of behaviors. They begin with love bombing, meaning they offer a lot of kindness, emotional support, and compliments to make the victim feel comfortable and pulled into the relationship. Then they begin the abuse once the victim feels loved and accepted, leaving the victim confused and wanting more of the good times from the beginning. Narcissistic parents don't start exactly this way with love bombing, but they do show the same type of behavior. Parents show care for the child and offer brief periods of happy experiences, similar to love bombing. Our reward system thrives on the love-balming kind of behavior. We all enjoy being around someone who loves us, supports who we are, and encourages us to continue being our wonderful selves. But abusive people withdraw the positive behavior and become very negative. Our brain becomes confused and starts craving the positive behavior experienced before. This is the beginning of a trauma bond. A trauma bond can happen in all types of relationships. But for this episode, I will focus on the narcissistic relationship. Children grow up wanting the love and approval of their parents. This is a natural ingrained desire for all humans. That, paired with the reward system in the brain, can lead to children in abusive situations longing for and craving positive situations with their parents. Abusive parents do have moments when they are not horrible. They may provide for the child's physical needs, there may be some activities where the parent is supportive and kind, or the parent may brag about the child's qualities. There were a few times when my mother was nice to me. She took me shopping and we connected through conversations about clothes. She sometimes bragged to others about my accomplishments, and a few times got involved in some of my school projects. I now know that these were just her ways of making herself look good, trying to portray a good mother so that others did not know what was really happening at home. Those good times didn't last long, rarely happened, and were only for her benefit. But they triggered my reward system and made me crave more of those times. The depth of my mother's abuse, while inconsistently providing positivity, caused my reward system to become unstable and hyperactive to craving more positive experiences. In the brief times my mother was nice to me, my dopamine levels soared, causing an even deeper craving for that reward that my mother could provide. These levels are similar to those of drug addicts. Due to the desire to have more reward feelings from my mother, I began trying to figure out how to make more of those times happen. This is where I began having hypervigilance, perfectionism, anxiety, and OCD tendencies. I searched for what I had done during those times to make her happy with me, so I could do them again. I tried to figure out what I did wrong each time she was angry with me, so I could bring back the happy times, so I could get my dopamine fix. This was what normal felt like to me. And I learned that love was conditional on my performance, that it could be withheld at any point, and I had to figure out how to work for it, how to be the person someone else would love so they were happy with me. I became a fixer, someone who wanted to fix things for everyone else so they were happy. And to do that, I would have to sacrifice everything I wanted to make the other person happy so they would love me. Trauma bonding created borders in my mind about how relationships work, what true love is, and the kind of person I am. I carried those beliefs into adulthood, and it affected many relationships for me. I continued the same patterns, being a fixer, craving acceptance and love, and thinking I had to tolerate abuse to earn love. It also had an impact on my nervous system. Our nervous system is the messenger for the brain. Our brain creates the thought, sends the message to the nervous system, and then the body reacts to the message. With trauma, our brain says we are in danger. This message is sent to the nervous system, which tells our fight or flight system to be on alert. It tells our heart and lungs to work harder, our digestive system to shut down, and to increase our stress hormones. Because the trauma continues through childhood, our nervous system doesn't know to stop the fight or flight response, so it's stuck on all the time. This can lead to severe physical and mental exhaustion, weak immune function, digestive issues, cardiovascular strain, and heightened anxiety or depression as physical symptoms. But it also impacts our emotional health. We don't know of any other way to function in society, so we repeat the patterns we learned from our parents, like repeating trauma bonding with other relationships, believing the borders in our minds from what our parents told us, and struggling to find true happiness. The trauma bond becomes addictive behavior. We get stuck craving the love and acceptance from the abuser to the point of not wanting to leave them, because we've been shown that there are rewards, that they can be different, more positive to us. If only we figure out the right way to behave. This is not a healthy situation. So the big question is, how do we break the trauma bond? How do we stop our minds from being tricked into pleasing others to get our dopamine fix? Thanish gave five steps to do this. I'm going to tell you about his five steps, then add some of my own thoughts after. Step one is to go no contact. Completely remove the abuser from your life, and do not talk to them ever again. You do not heal from a behavior that is still happening. An abuser is not going to stop a behavior that feeds their dopamine fix. Step two is to regulate your nervous system. You cannot heal until you stop feeling like you're in a dangerous situation. Even though you may not be anymore, your body has been trained to believe it is. Breathing techniques, calming techniques, or getting professional advice can help with this. Step three is seeing the reality of the situation. You have to recognize and accept what the abuser is doing to you. Understand that they are manipulating you to feed their own needs and get their dopamine fix while you get none. Step four is grieving. The loss of this relationship and what you thought it could be deserves the process of grief. In a sense, that person is dead to you now, along with the hopes and dreams you had for that relationship. And step five is to rebuild yourself. You have to find new relationships that are not tied to a trauma bond. Discover what it's like to have healthy relationships, as well as breaking down the borders created in your mind from the abuse. I understand and mostly agree with all of Dinesh's steps, but there's a few things I would like to add. I recognize that going no contact is a very difficult thing to do, and in some situations, not something that can be done, at least not immediately. A family member, a spouse, or someone you live or work with is not easy to walk away from. It takes time to make arrangements to remove a person from your life in these types of situations. During that time, the abuse is likely to continue, delaying the healing and strengthening that trauma bond. When I went no contact with my mother, it was hard to ignore her calls and requests to see me. It was even harder to figure out how to get out of my marriage. It took a lot of planning and time to separate from him. All the while, he had intensified his abuse to the point that I didn't know if I would make it out. Several times the trauma bond played on me so much that I wanted to give in and let him have his way so the abuse would stop. Fortunately for me, I had worked with the counselor to understand what he was doing to me, to know that it had to stop to become healthier and happier, and to have the tools to keep myself calm and strong until I could get away. While those were the two hardest decisions I ever had to make, they were also the best decisions I ever made. It was the first step to my healing journey. The other point I would like to make is about rebuilding yourself. Again, I totally agree that this has to happen to obtain emotional health, but when growing up without examples and guidance of how to be your best self, it is not easy to accomplish on our own. I highly recommend you seek professional counseling or self-help books or online sources to get started. I needed some guidance in how to break down the borders my mother had created that had become my normal way of life and that I carried into adulthood. I've used an example of if I ask you what color the sky is and you say blue, but then I say, actually it's not, it's really orange. This concept would be so foreign to you, to what you have come to believe all your life, and disrupt the comfort of what you know to be true in your mind. This is similar to how I have felt while rebuilding myself. My mother made me believe I was a bad person, a burden and worthless. Some of my adult relationships supported that idea, and I had solid borders built with heavy stones in my mind that this was the truth. Now I had a counselor, a professional outsider, looking at me and saying none of that was true. And I had to adjust my brain, the beliefs I had held for 40 years, to the opposite of what I was told. Nearly 15 years later, I have broken down many of the stone blocks that make my borders. I don't think I could have made this progress if not for the knowledge, support, and encouragement from my counselor, family, and friends that truly cared for me and not just what I could do for them. Now I'm definitely not trying to deter you from getting away from a narcissistic or abusive relationship, but I want to be honest with you about what I have experienced in doing that. It's not an easy or quick process, but definitely one worth making for your own mental health and true happiness. I look at it this way: abuse is like being on a sailboat in a storm. The boat is tossed and rocked, and you never know when lightning will strike. Going no contact and starting the healing journey is like navigating that boat out of the storm. While there's going to be stormy weather for a while, and the storm may actually increase at times, there are sunny skies and a rainbow beyond the storm. Do you want to stay in the storm, battling the waves and lightning every day? Or do you want to work your way past the storm to the better weather, the sunshine, and the rainbows? I'm going to put a journal prompt on my website, breakingarborders.com, that will help you think about the relationship that is abusive and work through steps on how you can end it or stop the effects of the abuse. Please know that I understand the feelings happening through a situation like this, and I commend anyone who decides to make the choice for a happier and healthier life. You can also find suggested reading on the healing journey on my website, and some videos on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that can help you with this process as well. You can hear other episodes of this podcast about childhood trauma, narcissism, and the healing journey on your favorite podcast provider or my YouTube channel. Feel free to contact me at breaking our borders at gmail.com to share your experiences or to ask questions. Thanks for listening today.