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She found her identity in pleasing others, and since she had no boundaries in place to protect her, she became so in service to others, that she lost all connection with her authentic Self.

Susan, who fit the inner child archetype of the caretaker, always tried to appease her mother. She took on the maternal role in life, offering all others the patience and boundless love that had not been present in her own mother/child dynamic.

Conscious relationships aren’t fairy tales. There’s no “You complete me.” There’s no smile and poof!—living happily ever after. Like everything else you have encountered so far, authentic love requires work. The path forward is to become aware of the role of self-betrayal in your trauma bonds and the role that you can play in honoring your own needs.

doesn’t have the charge of excitement born of fear of abandonment or withdrawal of love and support. It is a grounded state. You do not need to perform in a certain way or hide parts of yourself to receive love. You will still feel bored or unsettled. You will still find yourself attracted to other people and may even mourn the loss of the single life.

Authentic love feels safe. It’s rooted in the awareness that the other person is not property, not something to be owned, and that your partner is not your parent-figure, not someone who can fix or heal you.

This is the essence of authentic love, when two people allow each other the freedom and support to be fully seen, heard, and Self expressed. Authentic love doesn’t feel like an emotional roller coaster; it feels like peace and an inner knowing that you are both choosing to show up from a place of mutual respect and admiration.

When she hears him express himself, she gets the connection she craves, allowing her to then feel just safe enough to practice giving him the space he needs emotionally.

learned to express himself when he starts to emotionally detach, beginning to tell his wife “I’m feeling myself pull away” or “I’m feeling overwhelmed by this situation.” might not sound like a lot to an outsider, just hearing her partner verbalize the experience of his inner world helped her feel more emotionally connected, deactivating her nervous system from the understandable threat of abandonment.

learned ways to compassionately cope with her understandable emotional reactivity and engaging in breathwork and meditation to try to separate herself from her instinctual urges to react.

Trauma bonds are teachers, outlining the relationship patterns we’ve always carried and the areas that we can begin to work on changing. once you are aware of them, the process of change can begin.

as he withholds his love, she feels abandoned and understandably deeply hurt, and begins to move closer to him in order to regain her own felt emotional safety. The closer she comes, the more he pulls away, the greater her anxiety grows. Neither partner’s needs are being met, and each partner grows upset with the other. trauma bond dynamic. When needs are consistently unmet, resentment follows.relationship killer.

He was unemotional, keeping himself at a distance during times of stress and conflict, which opened up Shira’s abandonment wounds, making her feel desperate, fearful, and needy. When Joshua came home after a hard day, feeling depleted, he would detach and shut down. Sensing a lack of connection, Shira would act out. The chase for affection would begin. Then it would grow into accusations

when we are preoccupied with a relationship, we don’t have to ask ourselves if something deeper is making us unhappy.

you’ll still feel as though the relationship is missing something essential. There will be no connection because you’re still trapped in the trauma bond state and no amount of good sense can knock you out of it.

When we are engaged in trauma bonding, we are not reacting from our rational mind; we are pulled in by the subconscious wounds of our past, living in autopilot patterns that are rooted in the familiar. As long as you are unaware of these conditioned patterns, even if you do find the “perfect” (whatever that means for you) partner with zero red flags,

The shame emerges from the feeling that we should know better—and yet our illogical and ever powerful subconscious keeps us from taking the “better,” more rational path.

If there was peace in my relationships, if there wasn’t some impending crisis, I’d feel irritated and restless, and I’d make sure to initiate some stress. Addicted to my past, I made it my future. Then I’d feel ashamed for making the same mistakes over and over again.

are always subconsciously seeking to relive our past because we are creatures of comfort, who love to be able to predict the future, even if that future is certain to be painful, miserable, or even terrifying. It’s safer than the unknown.

feeling we get from the release of stress hormones and our nervous system response can become addictive if we were conditioned to associate them with the experience of “love.”

may not seem as we’re getting our needs met, tho we’re receiving attention and being seen, core needs in childhood. Our childhood attempts to have our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs met by our parent-figures (however incomplete, impersonal, or even self-betraying) form the basis of how we meet those same needs in our adult relationships. We gravitate toward familiar dynamics regardless of the outcome.

In childhood, this can look like a parent-figure who was inconsistent in expressing love, showing attention at one moment and complete lack of interest at another. We crave love, so our child brains learn how to adapt. If our parent-figures gave us attention when we misbehaved (even negative attention) we may have purposefully acted out in order to receive more attention.

Eventually, we develop an emotional addiction to this heightened state that keeps us stuck in cycles in which we end up in the same relationship dynamics as always—with the same or different partners. This traumatic bonding is an addiction, as real and consuming as any other addiction, that takes us on a similar biochemical roller coaster.

For people who have experienced trauma, it’s easy to confuse the feeling of mental and physical activation for authentic connection. When stress responses are identified as our homeostatic “home” by the subconscious, we may confuse signals of threat and stress for sexual attraction and chemistry.

often engaging in acts of self-betrayal in order to receive love. It is the same betrayal we learned in childhood when we were told that certain parts of us were “bad” or unworthy of love, so we repressed or ignored those aspects of our authentic Self. The goal is always to receive love, because bonds equal survival. Love equals life.

Ego protection stories were early-life adaptive measures to soothe difficult emotions and cope with trauma. Those coping strategies helped us survive issues with our primary attachment figures, so we held on to them tightly as we entered adulthood and faced perceived “threats” in other bonds. We use them to maintain an armor of self-protection so that our inner child wounds can never be opened again.

As a result of a lifetime of unmet needs, you may consistently feel resentful, unfulfilled, or needy.

trauma bond is a relationship pattern that keeps you stuck in dynamics that do not support the expression of your authentic Self. Trauma bonds are often learned and conditioned in childhood, and then repeated in adult relationships (peer, familial, romantic, professional). They are relationship patterns that are based on our earliest, often unmet, needs.

One can be only as connected to others as they are to themselves.

I could never really know where I stood with her, and that discomfort felt exciting (and familiar to my dysregulated nervous system).

Even in the most peaceful moments, my mind would nag: Something is wrong. Maybe I’m not really attracted to this person. Maybe I’m over this relationship. I needed that stress response to feel. Without it, I felt numb—bored!—and eventually I’d end up pushing the other person away or leaving, confirming my belief that I will always be alone.