"what is it? how does it originate? how do you break it?"

the traumatic bond takes its origin and strength in fear, confusion and emotional ambiguity; which is what leads us to pray for a little love from the person who is abusing us in order to feel relief, recognition, attention, tenderness. it is what leads us to beg for crumbs of love in order to feel somehow "alive", to be able to exist, to give us back some dignity.


this small and false gesture of love gives us back our false identity and gives us a certain inner peace because we have already begun to believe that we are a horrible person, because we have been receiving the message for a long time that we are nothing, that we are nobody, that we are the worst, that we are disgusting, and in the end we end up believing it. this mental programming of the narcissistic person has permeated us and then when that person suddenly shows us love, it comforts us, because we don't feel so trashy. the traumatic bond is not a healthy bond of love, it does not go from the inside out but from the outside in, and this may seem silly but it is not. it is a bond that takes its roots in the imbalance of power, in the intermittent reinforcement, in that expression "of love" and constant devaluation, in the fears, and in the emotional dependence.


the traumatic bond is the glue that keeps you from walking away from the person who is abusing you. you're probably asking yourself, "but if they hurt me, why is it so hard for me to walk away from that person?" — a person who has grown up with a narcissistic parent has a hard time breaking that bond with that person even though they know they are hurting them and don't understand why, that tortures them even more, and they blame themselves for it by reinforcing the traumatic bond in that endless toxic cycle. when we are born we automatically bond through the segregation of oxytocin with the person who cares for us, we bond with that person through mere survival mechanisms. that person is the one who feeds us, that person is the one who offers us warmth, tenderness, that person is the one who is saving us from death in a good way. that bond with the caregiver, not only of love but of survival. "so what happens when our mother or father is a perverse narcissist?" — well, that's your reality, and you grow up believing that the bond of love you feel for that caregiver is a normal bond; but at 10 or 12 years old, you begin to realize that something strange is happening, that your friends' relationship with their parents is different from yours. you need to get, to beg for your parents' love or approval, and they get it unconditionally, but you don't. from a very young age you have learned to blame yourself for your parents' narcissistic reactions, you have learned to blame yourself for the indifference and rejection of that mother or father. you tell yourself that maybe if you were taller, smarter, less selfish, or better looking, you would get more love from your parents; and the danger here is that we are growing up with the belief that the problem is us, that we are deficient children, but in reality we are broken children.

the level of hypervigilance haunts us from a very young age because emotional uncertainty is the nutritional basis of the upbringing we have received, because you did not know when that parent would go from indifference to displays of affection or narcissistic anger. you grow up with the idea that self-sacrifice is the key to receiving love and approval from others. you grow up with the unconscious pattern of depending on the love of others to make you feel loved, and since you have spent your entire childhood trying to please those parents to get a little love and attention, somehow that pattern repeats itself in your adult phase. when the opinion of others is more important to you than your own opinion, the one you have about yourself, then you are not respecting yourself. when we have grown up being prisoners of our childhood, we grow up being prisoners of our life many times over. we have normalized external situations, we have grown up surrounded by physical, emotional, sexual and psychological abuse, mixed with occasional signs of tenderness, love and affection, and this is precisely where the traumatic bond originates. when you have lived and grown up in a perverse environment where you have been exposed to signs of love followed by contempt and devaluation, in that continuous intermittent reinforcement where there is a cyclical pattern of abuse, then you grow up normalizing on the one hand the mental confusion and cognitive dissonance, and on the other hand the abuse itself. this cyclical reinforcement also happens with addictive substances, the traumatic bond becomes a kind of drug, and many people are hooked on grief, guilt, pain; because when we feel dead inside, even bad feelings make us feel alive. in that intermittent reinforcement you are given affection, then you generate large amounts of oxytocin, which is the hormone of happiness and emotional bonding, and so far so good, a healthy bond begins like this, when two people generate oxytocin after a show of affection, after skin-to-skin contact, but then comes the silence, the contempt, the insult, the discard, the distancing, the rejection, the mistreatment; and that is no longer healthy. then the person begins to generate high levels of cortisol, because of the anxiety they feel to recover that person. in fact, you can feel as if you are dying inside, as if a part of your soul is torn inside, is broken in half, and needs to feel the other person, receive their love and attention to feel good, to stop this existential discomfort.


this is what happens with the withdrawal syndrome just when we are hooked on a substance; and of course, if we have grown up thinking that this is love, in our adult phase we will analyze just that bond, it is more likely that that person will get bored in a normal relationship, a relationship based on understanding, on a healthy bond, because they are used to that emotional roller coaster to feel there, in life. and the stable as it does not make much sense to them, therefore unconsciously, they will feel some attraction to people who are linked in this way, as did that evil parent. but you don't have to have grown up in an environment of invisible abuse to fall into the traumatic bond, you can fall in having had a "normalised childhood", although it is more difficult.

"how?" - first, they catch you with false love and affection, where everything is like a dream; the expectations for the future are fabulous and you truly believe you have found the person of your life, your better half. then comes a phase of devaluation, where you really feel very bad, you think you're dying, you feel very confused because you do not understand what is happening.

"but how can that amazing person do this to me now? am i to blame? have i done something wrong? why are they triangulating? why are they punishing me? why are they upset when they see me happy?" — and here the confusion begins, here the calvary begins, here you begin to disappear little by little, to dissociate yourself so as not to suffer. the victim begins to isolate themselves from everyone, but perhaps part of that anger, of that silence, comes after some comment, like for example, "you go a lot with your friends", "you are always with your mother or your family"; and the perverse narcissist begins to isolate you little by little with their punishment, and they can also put negative ideas in your head about your friends or even your family, so that you think badly of them. they will play with love triangulations, even with your friends, so that jealousy forces you to stop seeing those people. sometime you will go to see some person, some friend, but you will feel so guilty and so bad about it, that you will decide not to go anymore because you don't enjoy it anymore, and because afterwards for sure the perverse narcissist will punish you in some way.

and because you suddenly find yourself isolated, they will offer you a token of affection to reinforce that isolation that you have decided to undertake for yourself. here we have the essence of the reinforcement of the traumatic bond. we have negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement, negative punishment, and positive punishment. let's see how all this works so you can understand it better.


when you are with your friends, the perverse narcissist changes for the worse, this is part of the negative punishment, because they take away your love, and positive punishment because they offer you their indifference or anger in some way, and you in a good way feel guilty for being there, fear, you punish yourself for being there. then you isolate yourself and they reinforce you negatively; they stop being angry and they reinforce you positively because they offer you their love afterwards, because you have isolated yourself. notice that it is pure operative conditioning, but the victim doesn't care, because they only want the affection of that person, to recover that principle of relationship, to live again the "dream" that they were longing for.


there is one final factor in that creation of the traumatic bond, and that is the extreme perception that you cannot escape that person, that they have you so controlled, so bound, so threatened, so extorted, that any attempt at escape would be the worst decision. the perverse narcissist will have taken it upon themselves to leave you at their mercy to depend on them on all levels, and there you begin to feel the learned helplessness, which is that feeling that there is nothing you can do to get out of it. the perverse narcissists are usually exemplary people in front of the gallery and you tell yourself that nobody is going to believe you, that nobody is going to believe your version of the facts, because even you are confused. it can also happen that you think you are the abuser, but you are not. a very important aspect of the traumatic bond is the continuous accumulation of trauma, progressive micro traumas; that dramatic accumulation has a similar impact to what you might experience with a major traumatic event, and the symptoms, the physical and psychological consequences are very similar to post-traumatic stress. flashbacks, anxiety, mental confusion, cognitive dissonance, anhedonia, memory problems, nightmares, insomnia, relationship problems, irritability, negative thoughts, low self-esteem and you are always on alert.

after being with the perverse narcissist for a few years, the victim has lost their personal identity, and reinventing themselves from scratch is overwhelming, because they don't feel strong, because they are confused, and because they don't have anything clear in their head. that's why it's easier for them to let go of the traumatic bond and return to the relationship with the narcissistic pervert to end that agony. that's why people who are there keep coming back to that bond all the time; uf you've had a few weeks of zero contact, even a few months; receiving a whatsapp text, an email from that person, it's like being pushed off a cliff and doing a brutal regression, because you go back there all of a sudden and that whole process that you've done is kind of going away, it's like going back to zero.


the most important thing of all at the beginning is to walk away from that person, apply zero contact to start becoming aware and accept that that person has abused you, in all areas of your life. when you become aware of the invisible abuse, automatically go and find a place where you can feel safe, where you can heal your wounds, gain credibility with emotionally healthy people who love, respect and above all, believe you. by gaining credibility you will be gaining more internal strength, you will be coming out of the helplessness you learned with the healthy feedback of people who are emotionally healthy, in order to break the unpolluted image of that person; aspect that will break your cognitive dissonance as well. sharing it with others at that level, whether it is a support group, a therapist, a friend or family member, is a very important aspect of personal recovery, and here you will begin to feel the clarity return to your life. you will recover the mental quality that will make you start to connect with your body, to connect with your emotional center, here begins the phase of putting words to the abuse, to label it. you will begin to research in internet to put words to what you have experienced and you will realize that you are not alone in this. at this point you will have come out of cognitive dissonance, you will have come out of the state of denial, where you denied that the person was so bad because you will be facing that from the acceptance of what has happened. you will start a puzzle that you will end up building and everything will make sense because you will have come out of that mental amnesia that your mind set in motion so that you could endure and tolerate all that abuse without dying in the attempt; this is when you will enter into that heroic process where you will go from being a victim, to being a survivor, to being your own hero of the film, you will begin to identify your skills and competencies, something that you had not done for a long time because you thought you were a nobody, and your self-esteem will improve. at that moment you will begin to magnetize your internal compass again and you will feel your intuition again, discovering that it has always been there, but that you were as if silenced by your mind. you will feel your level of self-control increase, all self-confidence begins to recover, you will begin to feel free again, and to be responsible for 100% of your life.

in this phase you can stay quite long because it is very pleasant, until you decide to make a very important decision for your recovery and healing; to confront the emotional wounds of childhood that you have been carrying without looking since birth, wounds that you have never recognized in you, but that the narcissistic abuse has given voice and now they have to be recognized. you will look at where this pattern comes from that haunts you and makes you fall into the hands of toxic profiles, and you will begin to give love and understanding to these emotional wounds so that they feel accepted and loved, which is exactly what they need, to be seen, to feel seen. to do this you must change the internal discourse. you must begin to speak with kindness to yourself to stop speaking from denial. you will recover your self-confidence and you will start working on your self-care, your self-esteem; you will have overcome the discomfort of loneliness, you will no longer see it as the monster you thought it was, but you will have understood that it was in fact your greatest ally, and there in that loneliness, you will suddenly find yourself, your true essence. an essence that will allow you to be aware of a great truth, your truth.



and in that wonderful dance with our truth, which pushes us towards the highest, suddenly we will decide to face our greatest fears; because we have just realized that it is fear that has always anchored us in the traumatic bond. when we are not afraid to be ourselves because we have accepted all parts of ourselves, then perhaps we will decide to leave behind all those people who have hurt us so much.

so, don't hesitate. don't give up, and go for it. we're in this together.