Trauma Bond or Just Garden-Variety Attachment Issues?
Monday, April 11, 2025.
Monday, April 14, 2025.
Let’s begin where all modern love stories do: somewhere between a clinical manual and a TikTok comment thread. “Trauma bond” used to be a serious term.
It was born in the work of Patrick Carnes (1997), who studied the deep psychological tethers between victims and abusers—often in cycles of intermittent reinforcement, power imbalance, and dependency so intense it overrides logic.
📖 What Did Carnes Mean by “Trauma Bond”?
Carnes defined a trauma bond as a strong emotional attachment that forms between a victim and their abuser, typically in a relationship marked by intermittent reinforcement (i.e., cycles of abuse followed by reconciliation).
The psychological paradox is that the person causing the trauma becomes, in some twisted way, the source of comfort from that very trauma.
In Carnes’s model, trauma bonds form through patterns that include:
Power imbalance
Cycles of abuse and apology
Denial and minimization by the victim
Isolation from outside perspectives
Shared secrecy and dependency
He framed this as a neurochemical loop—a cocktail of cortisol, adrenaline, and oxytocin that binds the victim to the abuser in a kind of psychophysiological limbo.
🧠 Roots in Earlier Psychology
Although Carnes coined the term, the core dynamics of trauma bonding trace back to earlier psychological theories and phenomena:
Stockholm Syndrome (1973): Named after a hostage situation in Sweden where captives defended their captors, this concept describes victims forming emotional ties with those who harm them. Trauma bonding shares this element of paradoxical loyalty.
Attachment Theory (Bowlby, 1969): Insecure attachment styles, especially anxious-preoccupied and disorganized types, are prone to trauma bonding because the need for connection overrides the instinct for safety.
Learned Helplessness (Seligman, 1975): Victims in trauma-bonded relationships often feel powerless to escape, mirroring Seligman’s work on animals exposed to unavoidable stress.
🧪 Later Research and Expansion
Though originally applied to abusive romantic relationships, the trauma bond concept has expanded to:
Childhood abuse and neglect
Sex trafficking and exploitation
Religious or ideological cults
Workplace abuse
Family systems with covert narcissism or manipulation
Recent empirical studies (e.g., Reid et al., 2013) have explored trauma bonding in sex trafficking survivors, confirming that intense emotional ties can form even in objectively dangerous or degrading relationships.
🧨 Why It Went Viral
The term exploded in popularity in the 2010s thanks to:
Pop psychology and social media therapy language
TikTok and Instagram Reels from trauma-informed coaches
Survivor communities online reclaiming the language to explain their past
Its sticky power lies in its explanatory elegance: it makes emotional confusion feel comprehensible. That love, fear, and captivity could coexist—it suddenly makes sense when you say “trauma bond.”
Now? It’s shorthand for, "I dated a guy who texted me three times in a row and then didn’t answer my meme." We’ve gone from psychological rigor to pop-psych poetry.
But here’s the messy truth: most of what people are calling trauma bonding is actually some variation of Anxious Attachment, and the confusion is doing real cultural damage.
Attachment Theory, birthed from the work of John Bowlby (1988) and later elaborated by Mikulincer & Shaver (2016), doesn’t need TikTok rebranding—it needs a rescue operation.
Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment is not inherently toxic.
It’s not a red flag.
It’s a pattern—one shaped by inconsistent early caregiving and intensified by algorithmic dating environments.
What’s Driving This Trend?
We live in a time of hyper-self-monitoring and performative diagnosis. Everyone’s an empath. Everyone’s ex was a narcissist. Everyone has a podcast, (Okay, I have one too).
Why? Because trauma language offers a moral certainty that Attachment Theory doesn’t.
If I’m trauma bonded, then I am a victim, full stop.
If I’m anxiously attached, then I might have some work to do, and frankly, who has the emotional bandwidth for that after 7pm?
What the Research Really Says
Attachment research (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016) shows that Anxious Attachment styles can shift toward security through responsive relationships, emotional attunement, and, yes, therapy.
But trauma bonds, as studied by Carnes, often require a completely different intervention—focused on safety, boundary repair, and deep therapeutic reprocessing.
Conflating the two erases vital distinctions.
And it matters because those distinctions change how we heal.
Fox & Moreland (2015) found that ambiguous or misaligned digital disclosures (think: vague Instagram captions during a breakup) increased distress and confusion in romantic contexts.
In other words: language matters. Labels matter.
Cultural Narcissism and the DIY Diagnostician
Christopher Lasch warned us about this in The Culture of Narcissism (1979).
When a society becomes obsessed with self-image over shared meaning, therapy turns into brand management.
And trauma, in this world, becomes a calling card—proof of your depth. But it’s the difference between meaningful and meaningless suffering.
But real healing doesn’t require more labels. It requires more accuracy.
Not every failed relationship is a deeply traumatic experience. Sometimes it's just a messy chapter in a book you’re still writing. Or are you just writing a messy book anyway?
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.