Traumatic Attachment Bonds:
Healing From Toxic Relationship Dynamics
by Glynis Sherwood, MEd – Psychotherapist & Coach
Article At A Glance:
- Healthy Attachment Bonds and Their Importance: Healthy attachment bonds, formed early in life with parental figures, are crucial for a child’s survival, emotional development, and self-worth. Positive parental mirroring helps children internalize a sense of being loved, wanted, and worthy, which shapes their self-identity by the age of 4 or 5.
- Attachment Hunger and Emotional Deprivation: When children experience insecure attachment due to neglect, abuse, or trauma, they develop “attachment hunger” — a deep longing for the nurturing that was absent. This leads to struggles with self-worth, emotional regulation, and trust in relationships throughout life.
- Trauma Bonding and Unhealthy Relationships: The absence of secure attachment often results in trauma bonding, where individuals get caught in toxic, high-intensity relationships. These relationships, driven by manipulation, intermittent reinforcement, and emotional highs and lows, can be addictive and destructive, preventing individuals from breaking free and healing.
- Healing from Trauma Bonds: Recovery involves recognizing harmful relationship patterns, developing self-direction, challenging negative beliefs, and reparenting one’s inner wounded child. Overcoming trauma bonding requires time, consistent effort, and, often, professional support to rebuild a healthy self-identity and form secure, nurturing relationships.
Anxiety and Fear can be misinterpreted as excitement by traumatized people in relationships. This state of high stimulation can become the glue that binds people together in unhealthy relationship bonds, as intensity is mistaken for intimacy.
~ Glynis Sherwood, MEd
The Function of Healthy Attachment Bonds – Early Relationships
Attachment bonds are fundamental to the experience of being human. We are biologically wired for closeness and parental figures provide our first crucial attachment bonds, which are not only necessary for our survival, but also act as vital mirrors to our developing selves. If ‘enough’ positive mirroring by parents occurs in early childhood, then kids internalize that response, affirming that they are good, loveable, worthy and wanted. It is through affirmative parental mirroring, guidance and support – aka healthy, secure attachment bonds – that a positive sense of ‘self’ develops.
By the age of 4 or 5 our basic identities are formed. Children tend to see things as black or white. So at the heart of this childhood identity is the sense that they are either good or bad, loveable or unlovable, depending on the ‘health’ of the attachment bonds formed with parents.
When Attachment Bonds Go Wrong: Attachment Hunger – Child to Adult
Attachment hunger is driven by a deep longing for the secure bonding that did not occur with parental figures in early childhood. In essence, attachment hunger is fueled by unmet, but essential, primary developmental needs for love, safety, security, belonging and guidance.
All humans are born with an innate bio-psychological need to receive consistent nurturing and support, a feeling that they matter, and a sense of protection by their parents. In early childhood, dependable nurturance both quells survival fears and builds familial bonds, creating emotional and physical safety for the developing child. The quality of nurturing a young child receives will determine how secure they feel throughout their lifetime.
The stable presence of parental empathy, nurturance and love are primary for a developing child’s psychological well being. If essential nurturance needs are thwarted through neglect, abuse or traumatic losses (e.g. loss of a parent through death, divorce, estrangement, etc.), young children are susceptible to feeling unsure of themselves, especially their sense of self worth and lovability. Yet they still yearn for closeness with the very parents who are not available to meet their needs. So these ‘insecurely attached’ children cling to parents who simultaneously telegraph to their kids that they are not important, setting the child up to feel both fearful of abandonment, and self blaming when s/he does not receive this nurturing.
As they grow older these emotionally deprived children may become more withdrawn and avoidant, or rebellious and act out. In essence the withdrawn child is saying ‘I will never get what I need, and can’t trust you, therefore I retreat or shut down’. The rebellious, more demanding child is communicating ‘Please hear and validate me or I will break apart’. In both scenarios, the child experiences feelings of false shame, as they confuse lack of care with personal inadequacy and unlovability.
The problems created by insecure attachment are often unconscious, and shame can be viewed as a ‘fact’ rather than the product of internalized emotional deprivation and abuse. This is exacerbated if the child is being raised by personality disordered parent(s), who lack empathy, mental stability, insight, the ability to learn from experience, and consistent healthy parenting skills. With personality disordered parents, especially Cluster B (narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, antisocial), the attention these parents bestow on their child is contingent on what the child does for them.
Narcissistic, borderline and histrionic parents are needy, and look to their child for validation of their own unmet emotional and relationship needs. The antisocial parent looks to use their child to further their exploitative goals. If a child is unable or unwilling to fulfill this role reversal, aka ‘parentification’, then positive attention is withheld, and disapproval, scapegoating i.e. shunning or bullying, may ensue. This rejection has the insidious effect of causing the child to believe they are defective and unlovable, leading to internalized scapegoating.
Positive Projection – imagining the best in a parent who is negatively projecting onto the child – is an unconscious strategy the child employs that bonds them to their abuser, at the price of adopting a false shame based identity. ‘Owning’ the negative parental projection prevents the child from descending into abandonment terror, hoping that if they can ‘fix’ their ‘defective’ selves, then the parent will come to love them.
This overwhelming dilemma generally results in one of two attachment strategies by the young child: 1/ People pleasing Fawning1 behavior, in a desperate attempt to obtain the validation and security they need from their parent and, later in life, close friends or an intimate partner. Children and adults who embrace this strategy tend to develop an Anxious, dependent attachment style. 2/ Withdrawn, counter-dependent behavior, focused on maintaining a ‘safe’ distance from unloving parent(s), and romantic partners in adulthood. Expecting that their needs will be ignored at best and punished at worst, these children develop an Avoidant attachment style. In both cases the ongoing thwarting of essential attachment needs leads to an intensification of a false shame based identity, and an ongoing Freeze (dissociative numbing) threat response.
The absence of secure attachment bonds, combined with a shame based identity usually results in problematic relationships across a lifetime, through a process known as repetition compulsion or trauma bonding. This may involve obsessive, conflictual, ‘on and off’ relationships with other personality disordered or emotionally unavailable people, in a futile attempt to validate an absent sense of self worth, or to bolster avoidance of intimacy, due to fear of rejection. Such relationships lack healthy boundaries or authentic love connections as they are based on unmet childhood needs and narcissistic injuries.
Trauma Bonding involves intense connection, both psychologically and physically. It is forged by the unconscious acting out of attachment hunger, positive projection and addiction to intermittent reinforcement, a combination of positive and negative behaviors used to manipulate and control another person. The highs feel so good, they become addictive, and eclipse the abuse that’s at the epicenter of this dynamic. People stay for the elation and minimize the harm. It’s the hook of this emotionally charged ‘perk’ that is addictive. However, after a few rounds of these extreme highs and lows, targets often start changing their behavior to try to avoid the punishment – to keep things from getting worse. By this point, the target is in survival mode, and starts settling for crumbs. This is a quicksand-like trap, where the victim can’t see a way out, and stays for the ‘rewards’ of the intermittent high, while becoming buried deeper in demoralization, loss of self, brainwashing and disconnecting from reality. Targets may fall under the revived spell of the original traumatic conditioning, where they hope that, as with abusive parents, their abuser will become a loving person, once they ‘fix’ themselves.
Signs of Traumatic Attachment in Relationships
High Intensity Bonding aka Choosing the ‘Devil You Know’ – Enticingly familiar but toxic relationship dynamics that can feel magnetic, but are fundamentally destructive. You may feel hooked, but can’t identify what you truly love or like about this person, such as respect, kindness, shared interests and values, intelligence, sensitivity, depth, etc. This state of high arousal, which comes from fear and danger, can be an important component of trauma bonding.
Traumatic Cognitive Dissonance2 – Verbal manipulation that causes psychological disorientation. When a person is subjected to conflicting beliefs, attitudes, values, or behaviors, this leads to confusion and self doubt.
Traumatic Emotional Dissonance – Lingering confusion from being manipulated emotionally, so you don’t know how to feel about your partner, don’t feel good, but are controlled by the high of emotional intensity. TED is a by-product of both intermittent reinforcement and cognitive dissonance.
Prioritizing and Submitting to Pathological Partner’s Demands and Erasing One’s Own Needs – This occurs over time, due to long standing covert manipulation patterns such as false guilt, leading to Stockholm syndrome (siding with the oppressor), or accommodating the abuser’s coercive agenda, aka ‘traumatic accommodation’. May involve ‘coercive control’ (limiting freedom) and other punishments, such as threatening to break up, that are employed if the partner does not comply.
Relationship Addiction – Choosing high intensity dependent relationships (as in the ‘Devil You Know’) in order to feel complete, valuable, boost self esteem, to have a purpose, etc. You fall apart when your person of addiction (POA) discards you, due to an external locus of control regarding self worth, identity and false shame.
Codependency – Your life revolves around ‘fixing’ the disordered partner or friend – an unachievable goal. This leads to resentment, feeling superior and avoiding oneself emotionally.
Fear of intimate partner or friend, combined with fear of loss or abandonment – Walking on eggshells to avoid conflict. Feeling intimidated. Living on the edge of your seat – never knowing when the next hurt, betrayal or threat is heading your way.
Insecurity – Not knowing where you stand with your partner from one day to the next, causing high anxiety and upset. Feeling defensive and misunderstood, and blamed for that.
Idealization, devaluation (contempt, criticism) and discard cycles by Cluster B partner or friend
Lack of Relationship Repair – Conflicts are not addressed or fixed, and may be swept under the rug, minimized, denied or reframed to blame you, by a partner or friend.
Manipulation Tactics in Traumatically Bonded Relationships:
Coercive Control – Abusers engage in efforts to control their intimate partner’s time, money, activities, and relationships. May involve sexual coercion. Partner feels increasingly oppressed, restricted, monitored, yet dependent at the same time as their world shrinks to the size of the manipulative partner. Victim feels off balance and worn down psychologically.
Abusive Attunement – Abuser seems highly empathic, but is only interested in attuning to emotional experiences that are aligned with their goals.
Blame Shifting – Target is accused of abuser’s behavior, and causing all the problems in the relationship. Over Responsibility – Conversely, the target feels responsible for the dysfunction in the relationship.
Lack of Reality Based Relationship Dynamics – Partner seems to live in a fantasy world, expecting unconditional adulation, regardless of distant, irresponsible, lazy, cold, entitled, or disrespectful behavior.
Unhealthy Boundaries – Partner or friend objects to healthy boundaries. Attempts are made to violate and dismantle healthy boundaries that are falsely reframed as rigid or unreasonable blocks to closeness. In truth, the abusive partner or friend wants to coerce target into meeting their demands.
Gaslighting – Gaslighting is a manipulative tactic where an abuser with antisocial traits systematically causes the target to question their own memories, thoughts, feelings, and judgments, leading to confusion and disorientation. The goal of gaslighting is to undermine the target’s sense of reality, eventually destabilizing their emotions and self-confidence. Insidiously, this can result in an increased dependency on the manipulative, unreliable abuser.
Escalating ‘Tests’ of Abuse, to See What Partner or Friend Can Get Away With – Tear downs of your character, personality, vulnerabilities. Sucker punches and ‘Gotchas’ – sudden attempts to hurt you, as punishment for ‘hurting’ your abuser. Growing insecurity leads to self doubt and loss of confidence in the target, making it harder to trust their perceptions and leave.
Intermittent Reinforcement – Abuser acts caring one moment or day; hostile or passive aggressive the next. Perpetrator engages in splitting (black and white thinking) towards their partner, seeing them as all good or all bad. Perpetrator is likely paranoid.
Red Flags – Mild to moderate warning signs / gut feelings are ignored or minimized by the target, leading to normalization of abusive behaviors.
Healing From Trauma Bonds
Recovery from traumatic relationship bonding requires sustained efforts to overcome deeply ingrained negative programming, often rooted in early childhood. This process can be challenging but is largely achievable.
New, healthier psychological associations must be built through repeated exposure to affirming, realistic beliefs and experiences about oneself and relationships, even if these connections initially feel unnatural.
To avoid falling back into toxic relationship dynamics, survivors must actively step away from harmful relationships and form new, healthy bonds. Key steps include:
- Developing Self Direction and Authority: Survivors need to recognize their unconscious tendencies to being drawn into trauma bonds, and take charge of their healing. This involves taking deliberate steps to overcome harmful beliefs, dismantle negative conditioning, develop confidence, process childhood and estrangement grief, transcend the Inner Critic, and detach from harmful relationships. Professional support, such as Psychotherapy, may be needed during this transition.
- Overcoming Undermining Beliefs, Triggers, and Mood Swings: Survivors must confront deeply ingrained but false negative beliefs about themselves, challenging the internalized notion of being unworthy of love. This requires deprogramming and rejecting false shame, particularly when facing family members who reinforce a fictitious hostile and undermining narrative. Survivors also need to manage emotional triggers and projections, learning to self soothe and separate feelings from facts.
- Reparenting the Wounded Child Within: Our self identity, forged in early childhood, remains a significant part of who we are. Traumatic experiences distort our sense of self worth and the development of a healthy identity. Survivors must empathize with their inner ‘wounded’ child, who carries unmet needs into adulthood, and support healing by providing nurturing and emotional self-management. The Wise Adult self can help guide and support the Wounded Child, leading to greater self-worth and emotional resilience.
- Time and Rehearsal: Healing takes time, as secure attachment patterns are learned, not innate. Survivors must practice new behaviors and beliefs, gradually learning to trust their intuition, emotions and other people, while gaining strength and resilience. This process can be challenging, but will lead to greater peace of mind and healthier relationships with oneself and others over time.
Patience and perseverance are crucial as survivors work through these steps toward healing from attachment trauma bonds.
Photo: Susan Wilkinson, Unsplash
Notes
1. Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, 2013, Azure Coyote Books
2. Peter Salerno, PsyD, Traumatic Cognitve Dissonance, 2025
Need help healing from narcissistic, borderline, histrionic or antisocial personality disorder abuse? Check out my Family Scapegoat Counseling & Coaching page
Counseling and Therapeutic Coaching is available by Video around the world.
Glynis Sherwood – MEd Counseling Psychology, specializes in recovery from Family Scapegoating, Narcissistic and Cluster B Abuse, False Shame and Guilt, Traumatic Stress, Estrangement Grief and Relationship Challenges.