What Trauma Bonding Looks Like.

It was a dark & stormy night. True story. Late February 2017. My now ex-husband, our 7 month old daughter & I were returning from a trip to visit family in Chicago. During that trip, I’d confronted him about how painful our marriage had become for me. At the time, he’d been stonewalling me for moths, but I wanted to fight for him to come back to me. I felt very much in love and despite learning of his multiple lapses in judgement with other women, I still wanted our marriage to work.

Despite my efforts to be gentle if not desperate in my pleas for his love, he became incensed. On the 2.5 hr. drive home, he unleashed the most vitriolic & tyrannical round of verbal berating I have ever experienced in my life.

I sobbed and hollered in agony, begging him to stop, but he continued unrelenting in the particularly cruel things he said. To this day, I can’t remember all of it, it was one of the most, if not the single most traumatic event of my entire life. If you’ve ever felt “scared to death” for over an hour straight you know what I’m talking about.

I scrounged up in a ball & leaned as far away from him as I could, my head pressing on the cold passenger side window. My knees drawn into my chest, my hands over my head because I feared escalating violence. He was still going strong an hour into the drive. My eye sockets ached from crying so hard, my whole face raw & red. I asked him if “we” could please stop “talking” and he yelled at me so loud I yelped out in pain.

Verbal trauma & physical trauma have the safe effect on the brain. Your brain can’t distinguish from someone beating the living daylights out of you or verbally berating the living soul out of you. My brain had the same flight, fight or fawn response as if I were being physically assaulted. My body felt as if it were being assaulted. I understand this is hard for people who’ve never experienced to believe. Trust me.

The mental assault was taking its toll. I saw no end in sight. I would have done anything to make it stop. I unlocked the door and grabbed the door handle and prepared myself to jump.

If I jumped out, I’d roll onto an icy expressway in dark, snowy, 20 degree weather. I imagined the car behind us would roll over me eventually creating a deadly pile up. I wanted to end the abuse, not necessarily die. And I didn’t want to hurt other people in the process.

I thought of my daughter, sleeping through this whole fiasco. I imagined her waking up, looking to breastfeed but being met with the horrible reality that her mother jumped out of a moving vehicle to escape her tyrannical, abusive father who would then call me “crazy,” , “unhinged” & suicidal. He would tell everyone he had no idea why I did that. He would say we were just having a little argument. I couldn’t bare that thought.

The idea railed in my soul and I decided to live for her and my two sons. Not myself. This was a choice for them. At that point, the abuse had left me a shell of a human… I didn’t feel alive anymore anyway.

But at that moment, the idea of killing myself seemed like a better option than being trapped in a car with a man who I loved more than life itself ripping my entire personhood to shreds. The cognitive dissonance and the pain was so intense I can barely describe it. It seems like an exaggeration but it felt like he was killing me, not just harming me, but killing me. This is the exact type of environment needed for trauma bonds to form: extreme trauma followed by intermittent reinforcement of love or goodness.

When we got home, I put the baby to bed, dried my tears, took a deep breath and came out to sit by him on the floor. He was in front of the TV fussing with the Playstation.

I sat down in front of him, grabbed his hands, looked him in his eyes and told him, “I love you so much. I know I made you angry and I’m sorry. But I need you to know how much I love you. And I’m okay now. We’re okay now. Everything will be okay. Okay? Because I need it be okay? Okay? I love you. Okay? Do you still love me? I hope so. Because I can’t do this without you. Okay? I love you so much!” I asked him if we could have sex. He was annoyed, but gave in. The sex was the ‘reset button’ for me.

That is an example of a woman firmly gripped by a trauma bond.

I meant every word that I told him. If I couldn’t deescalate him, if I couldn’t get us back to point of pretending everything was okay, then I was not okay. If I was not okay it meant anxiety so consuming I couldn’t function.

That’s the point at which a trauma bond is completely out of control. If you need help recovering from a trauma bond let’s talk.