Trauma Bonding and the Illusion of Control
When relief after suffering is mistaken for love
After spending an entire day in shoes that are too tight, finally taking them off can produce a surprisingly pleasant sensation. We do not merely feel the disappearance of pain: for a few moments, we experience genuine well-being.
The same thing can happen when we release the abdomen from trousers that have compressed us for hours and prevented us from breathing freely. The body expands, the breath moves downward, the pressure decreases, and what should be a normal condition - not being in pain and being able to breathe - is experienced as a small pleasure.
But that pleasure was not contained in the shoes or in the trousers. It was not produced by the restriction. It arose from its ending.
Research on pain uses the term pain-offset relief: the relief produced when a painful stimulus ends. The cessation of pain is not necessarily processed by the brain as a simple return to zero. It can acquire a positive emotional value and produce a subjective sensation of pleasure. Neurobiological systems involved in reward and endogenous opioids also appear to contribute to this experience.[1]
This bodily mechanism provides a powerful metaphor for understanding some relationships based on an alternation between suffering and reconciliation.
The metaphor, however, must not be turned into an exaggerated neuroscientific claim. It has not been demonstrated that taking off a tight shoe and developing a trauma bond are the same neurological process. Research on relief allows us instead to understand a more general principle:
The end of a negative state can be experienced as a positive reward.
When a person humiliates us, ignores us, threatens to leave, withdraws affection, or keeps us in uncertainty, their return may produce enormous relief. The body relaxes, anxiety decreases, rumination stops, and for a few hours we can breathe again.
That relief may be called love.
But the pleasure of a person’s return does not necessarily demonstrate the quality of the relationship. Sometimes it demonstrates above all how painful the absence created by that same relationship had become.
A healthy relationship does not repeatedly save us from itself
The difference can be expressed through a simple formulation, provided that it is not interpreted as an absolute rule.
In a healthy relationship, I may say:
I feel reasonably well on my own. With you, I feel even better.
If you leave, I will suffer the loss, but I will not completely lose myself.
Healthy love does not eliminate the pain of separation. A person may suffer deeply after the end of a secure relationship. The difference is that the relationship has not become the only possible regulator of safety, self-worth, and the ability to exist.
In trauma bonding, by contrast, the experience may take this form:
I feel bad on my own. When you move away, I feel even worse.
When you return, I experience such intense relief that I call it love.
The partner is no longer only the person who is desired. They become both the source of pain and the main source of its temporary suspension.
First, they create or intensify the alarm. Then they offer the reassurance that interrupts it.
The person does not necessarily return because the relationship makes them feel consistently well, but because reunion temporarily ends a state that has become unbearable.
It is as though someone gave us wider shoes every evening after forcing us to wear shoes that were too tight throughout the day. We might begin to perceive that person as the only one capable of freeing us, forgetting that they are also the person who decides how tightly the shoes must fit.
What trauma bonding really means
The concept of traumatic bonding was proposed by psychologists Donald Dutton and Susan Painter to describe the development of strong emotional attachments within relationships characterised by intermittent mistreatment.[2]
The term does not refer to two people bonding by telling each other about their trauma. It does not automatically describe an intense, conflictual, or incompatible relationship. Nor does it mean that a traumatised person is inevitably attracted to violent people.
In the original theory, two conditions were particularly important:
a significant imbalance of power and an alternation between negative and positive treatment.
One person progressively acquires greater control, while the other loses autonomy, security, resources, or confidence in their own perceptions.
At the same time, abuse, devaluation, or threat is interrupted by periods of tenderness, remorse, intense sexuality, promises, and apparent transformation.
The bond is therefore not produced by suffering alone. It is maintained by the combination of suffering, fear, hope, and temporary liberation.
Subsequent studies have found associations between persistent attachment, intermittent treatment, power imbalance, attachment insecurity, childhood maltreatment, and post-traumatic symptoms.[3]
Instruments have also been developed to measure experiences commonly associated with trauma bonding. This makes the phenomenon more researchable, but it does not mean that we already possess a definitive causal theory.[4]
Trauma bonding is not currently an independent diagnosis in the main international diagnostic systems. It is a descriptive and theoretical construct.
The evidence supports the existence of persistent attachments to abusive people and makes the roles of intermittency and power imbalance plausible. It remains insufficient, however, to establish universal diagnostic criteria, one single neurobiological mechanism, or one specific treatment that is valid for everyone.[5]
When the person who frightens us also becomes the person who calms us
The attachment system becomes particularly active when we perceive danger, separation, or unavailability.
In a sufficiently secure relationship, an important person can function as a secure base. We seek closeness, receive a sufficiently predictable response, and can then return to exploring the world and regulating ourselves with increasing autonomy.
In abusive or strongly intermittent relationships, something paradoxical can happen: the same person may be experienced at once as a source of protection and a source of threat.
When the partner withdraws, threatens the relationship, or suddenly removes affection, the attachment system enters a state of alarm. Repetitive thoughts, checking messages, fear of loss, fantasies of reconciliation, and a continuous search for signals may emerge.
When the partner returns, the activation decreases. Their return therefore becomes associated not only with the person, but also with the ending of fear.
Anxious attachment may intensify this process through strategies described as hyperactivation: increased vigilance, difficulty shifting attention away from the relationship, amplification of signs of separation, and an urgent search for reassurance.[6]
Attachment insecurity is a vulnerability, not a sentence. Not everyone with attachment trauma develops a trauma bond, and not everyone involved in an abusive relationship has a history of insecure attachment.
Uncertainty can also temporarily increase attraction and the amount of thought directed towards another person. Some experiments have shown that not knowing how much someone likes us can increase their mental salience and the attraction we report.[7]
This does not prove trauma bonding. It does, however, show that uncertainty can be mistaken for romantic intensity.
Thinking continuously about someone does not necessarily prove that the person is especially compatible with us. It may also mean that our brain cannot predict what will happen next.
Fixation can be mistaken for falling in love
In strongly intermittent relationships, the other person may become the centre of attention not only because they are loved, but because they represent an unresolved question.
The mind continues asking:
Do they want me or not?
Will they return, or will they leave me?
What did I do wrong?
What must I change to recover the good phase?
The relationship becomes highly salient. Every message is analysed, every silence interpreted, and every ambiguous signal transformed into either hope or threat.
This fixation may be experienced as evidence of the depth of love:
If I think about this person all the time, it must mean that I love them deeply.
But recurrent thought and love are not synonyms. Rumination can also be produced by uncertainty, fear of abandonment, the need for repair, or the attempt to solve an unpredictable situation cognitively.
Falling in love may include temporary idealisation, increased energy, desire, and a strong mental presence of the other person.
In trauma bonding, however, a substantial part of the intensity may be maintained by the alternation between activation and relief.
The person does not only desire the encounter. They desire the ending of the waiting.
They do not only desire love. They desire the reassurance that interrupts fear.
They do not only desire the real partner. They may desire the return of the idealised and loving version that appears mainly after a crisis.
The illusion of control
An unpredictable relationship produces an obsessive question:
What must I do to make the loving version of this person return?
The person may begin studying the partner, anticipating their mood, and continuously modifying their own behaviour.
They try to be more understanding, less needy, more attractive, more sexually available, less confrontational, or more capable of enduring distress.
Every short-lived improvement seems to confirm that the strategy has worked.
An illusion of control is created:
If I find the right behaviour, I can prevent the pain and bring love back.
This illusion may feel psychologically preferable to helplessness. Thinking ‘it depends on me’ produces shame and guilt, but it also preserves a small hope of controlling the situation.
Recognising that the other person’s behaviour does not depend on us may be more realistic, but at first it can also be more painful.
From a Bodymind perspective, trauma bonding can become an attempt to recover agency without leaving the relationship.
The person cannot control the partner, so they try to control themselves in order to obtain the partner’s good phase.
They cannot generate safety autonomously and therefore try to generate the return of the person who temporarily gives it back to them.
This interpretation is clinically plausible, but it must not be presented as the only scientifically demonstrated mechanism.
Abusive relationships also frequently involve fear, isolation, financial dependence, threats, children, coercive control, erosion of self-esteem, shame, hope, genuine love, and a concrete risk of violence.
Remaining in the relationship does not automatically prove that a trauma bond exists, and it does not mean that the person wants to be mistreated.
Seven ways to recognise and avoid it
1. Evaluate the relationship by its average, not by its peaks
The first mistake is judging the relationship during its best moments: reconciliation, sex after conflict, promises, the perfect weekend, or tenderness after days of silence.
A relationship should be evaluated through its overall pattern.
How do we feel on average over the course of a week or a month?
Can we sleep, work, breathe, and remain spontaneous?
Or do we spend most of our time waiting for a short moment of well-being to return?
Trauma bonding can be sustained by intense peaks that conceal a painful relational baseline.
To prevent it, it is useful to observe continuity early on: not only how good someone can make us feel, but how rarely they force us to recover from what they have done.
2. Ask what happened before the pleasure
When the partner returns and we feel enormous pleasure, we can ask ourselves:
Am I feeling the joy of meeting this person, or the relief that the anguish produced by their absence has finally ended?
The two experiences can coexist. The question is not intended to deny the feeling, but to understand what it is made of.
The bodily sequence can provide an important signal.
Before contact, were there:
heart palpitations,
chest constriction,
nausea,
insomnia,
rumination,
an inability to concentrate
After the message or reunion, does the tension suddenly collapse?
In that case, a substantial part of the pleasure may derive from the regulation of alarm.
Prevention means not entrusting one’s entire regulatory system to a single person.
Reliable relationships, sleep, movement, safe bodily contact, psychotherapy, meaningful activities, and the capacity to calm oneself without immediately contacting the partner can reduce dependence on their return as the only medicine.
3. Check whether “no” is truly possible
Relational safety is not measured only by what happens when we say yes. It is seen most clearly in what happens when we say no.
Can we refuse sex, touch, money, availability, living together, or a meeting without being punished?
Can we express disagreement without receiving hostile silence, humiliation, threats, blackmail, or sudden withdrawal of love?
Can we maintain friendships, privacy, financial autonomy, and personal time?
A power imbalance does not require physical violence. It can develop through financial control, surveillance, isolation, threats, systematic devaluation, sexual pressure, or the monopolisation of time.
Research on intimate partner violence indicates that violence embedded in coercive control is associated with more severe consequences than isolated incidents that are not part of the same pattern of domination.[8]
Avoiding a traumatic bond requires protecting the material conditions of autonomy from the beginning: external relationships, access to money, personal spaces, freedom of movement, and the right to change one’s mind.
4. Trust patterns more than promises
Remorse can be genuine as an emotion and ineffective as change.
A person may feel shame, despair, or fear of losing us and still continue repeating the same behaviour.
Change is not measured by the intensity of reconciliation. It is measured through observable behaviour maintained over time:
taking responsibility without excuses
ending intimidation
respecting boundaries
independently seeking help
tolerating the consequences of one’s actions.
Trauma bonding is strengthened when every promise is interpreted as a transformation that has already taken place.
To avoid this, we need to slow down: not immediately restore trust because the other person appears desperate, but observe whether continuity actually replaces intermittency.
5. Protect shared reality
Coercive relationships often tend to become closed systems.
Friends are progressively pushed away, family members are described as enemies, therapy is devalued, and anyone who asks questions is accused of failing to understand the depth of the relationship.
Isolation reduces points of comparison. If only the couple’s narrative exists, distinguishing love, fear, and control becomes increasingly difficult.
Maintaining outside relationships does not mean allowing other people to decide our life. It means preserving a reality that does not depend entirely on the partner.
It can be useful to write down concrete episodes, especially when we tend to minimise them after reconciliation. The purpose is not necessarily to collect evidence against someone, but to protect the continuity of our own memory.
The central question is:
Can I still speak honestly about what is happening, or must I hide part of the relationship in order to defend it?
6. Do not make decisions during hyperactivation
When the attachment system is alarmed, restoring contact becomes the priority.
In that state, we may promise things we do not want, erase boundaries that we have just established, or return to situations we had decided to leave.
Postponing a decision does not mean suppressing emotions. It means recognising that the urgent need for relief can narrow our ability to evaluate the future.
Before sending a message, meeting the person, or cancelling a separation, it may be necessary to restore minimum conditions of regulation:
sleeping
eating
moving the body
speaking with a trustworthy person
allowing activation to decrease
This is not because the body is irrational, but because a terrified body is oriented towards the immediate ending of pain, not necessarily towards long-term safety.
Research on attachment strategies shows that attachment anxiety can maintain attention, rumination, and proximity seeking precisely when the relationship is perceived as threatened.[6]
Learning to recognise this state allows us to listen to the emotion without immediately transforming it into action.
7. Leave the cycle safely and rebuild the ability to be with yourself
When violence, threats, stalking, sexual coercion, or severe control are present, leaving should not be treated as a simple test of willpower.
Separation can be a delicate phase and may require individual safety planning, protection of documents, digital security, financial support, and the involvement of specialised services.
It is not always safe to confront the abusive person directly, reveal every plan in advance, or abruptly end all contact without assessing the risk.
Advocacy and safety-planning interventions may improve access to resources, safety, and some aspects of well-being, although their effects vary across people and contexts.[9]
Strong attraction may remain after leaving. This does not demonstrate that leaving was the wrong decision.
The attachment system may continue seeking the same person from whom it learned to receive relief.
Recovery therefore does not consist only of rationally understanding that the relationship was harmful.
It means slowly rebuilding experiences in which it is possible to be with oneself without collapsing, to receive closeness without paying for it with fear, and to recognise safety even when it initially feels less exciting than uncertainty.
Psychological therapies for people who have experienced intimate partner violence can reduce depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic symptoms. There is not yet, however, one universally validated treatment specifically for trauma bonding as an independent clinical construct.[10]
It is not masochism
Defining trauma bonding as an unconscious desire to suffer means confusing the effect with the cause.
The person does not necessarily desire pain. They desire the ending of pain, the good phase, the return, the promise, and the person who at times appeared to be truly present.
The problem is that relief and suffering come from the same relationship and become difficult to separate.
People do not remain because they love suffering.
They may remain because they love someone who hurts them, because they fear what would happen if they left, because they have been isolated, because they are materially dependent, because they continue to hope, or because their nervous system has learned that reconciliation is the fastest way to interrupt alarm.
Attributing everything to a pathology of the victim also conceals the behaviour of the person who alternates control and affection.
Trauma bonding should not become another label used to blame people who are unable to separate quickly enough.
From temporary liberation to safety
Taking off a shoe that is too tight is pleasant, but the solution is not to become better at tolerating it throughout the day.
Nor is the solution to become dependent on someone who allows us to remove it every evening.
The solution is to recognise that the shoe is not suitable for our body.
Similarly, the task is not to become better at enduring a relationship that repeatedly produces fear so that we can enjoy reconciliation more intensely.
It is to develop a form of safety that does not need to be preceded by suffering.
In body psychotherapy ,this work can move through several levels.
The body learns to distinguish activation, relief, and safety.
The emotional world recognises fear, desire, love, shame, and hope without confusing them.
The mind observes the continuity of behaviour, not only the intensity of promises.
The adult part recovers boundaries, resources, outside relationships, and the capacity to decide.
The transformation can be summarised in this way:
Before, I felt bad on my own and needed you to return in order to feel temporarily better.
Now I can suffer, desire you, and miss you without handing you control over my safety.
Love is not a person who periodically allows us to breathe after taking away the air.
Love is a relationship in which we can continue to breathe.
Scientific notes
Leknes, S., Lee, M., Berna, C., Andersson, J., and Tracey, I. (2011), ‘Relief as a Reward: Hedonic and Neural Responses to Safety from Pain.’ Experimental studies on pain-offset relief indicate that the ending of expected pain can be experienced as a positive reward. Further research has observed the involvement of reward-related areas and a possible contribution of endogenous opioids.
Dutton, D. G., and Painter, S. L. (1981), ‘Traumatic Bonding: The Development of Emotional Attachments in Battered Women and Other Relationships of Intermittent Abuse,’ Victimology, 6, 139-155. The paper introduced the concept of traumatic bonding and proposed power imbalance and the alternation between negative and positive treatment as central conditions.
Dutton, D. G., and Painter, S. L. (1993), ‘Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships: A Test of Traumatic Bonding Theory,’ Violence and Victims, 8, 105-120. The longitudinal study included 75 women who had recently left abusive relationships and a follow-up six months later. Perceived alternation between positive and negative treatment showed high correlations with persistent attachment; together with power imbalance and abuse severity, it explained a substantial proportion of later attachment variability. The observational design and relatively small sample do not permit definitive causal conclusions.
More recent studies have linked trauma bonding with childhood maltreatment, attachment insecurity, victimisation, and post-traumatic symptoms. The Trauma Bonding Scale for Adults was initially developed in a United States sample of 619 young adults and subsequently studied in a Kenyan sample of 538 people. Good psychometric validity indicates that a set of experiences can be measured consistently, but does not by itself establish an autonomous clinical syndrome.
Trauma bonding is not recognised as an independent diagnosis in ICD-11 or DSM-5-TR. Available reviews emphasise the absence of universal criteria, reliable prevalence estimates, and sufficient evidence to fully distinguish the construct from anxious attachment, fear, emotional dependence, coercive control, PTSD, and the material difficulty of leaving a relationship.
Mikulincer, M., and Shaver, P. R., in their reviews of adult attachment and emotion regulation, describe hyperactivating strategies associated with attachment anxiety: vigilance for rejection, rumination, intensified proximity seeking, and difficulty reducing activation when the attachment figure appears unavailable.
Whitchurch, E. R., Wilson, T. D., and Gilbert, D. T. (2011), ‘He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not…: Uncertainty Can Increase Romantic Attraction.’ In the experiment, uncertainty about the interest of potential partners increased both thoughts directed towards them and reported attraction. The study does not directly investigate trauma bonding, but supports the idea that uncertainty can increase romantic salience.
Nevala, S. (2017), ‘Coercive Control and Its Impact on Intimate Partner Violence Through the Lens of an EU-Wide Survey on Violence Against Women.’ The analysis of European data indicates that violence embedded in a pattern of coercive control is associated with more severe forms and broader consequences than incidents not organised within the same system of domination.
Rivas, C., and colleagues (2015), Cochrane review of advocacy interventions for people experiencing intimate partner violence. Interventions can improve access to resources, safety, and some psychological outcomes, although results depend on intensity, context, and the quality of available support.
Reviews of psychological interventions for survivors of intimate partner violence indicate benefits particularly for depressive symptoms and, in some studies, anxiety and post-traumatic symptoms. Sample sizes, methodological quality, and findings are heterogeneous. There is not yet a treatment specifically validated for trauma bonding as an autonomous diagnosis or syndrome.
