The trauma bond can be one of the most difficult “bonds” to break. If you find yourself obsessively attached to someone who hurts you, please read this article. Your sense of self-worth and emotional well-being might depend on it.

Have you ever thought fondly about a relationship you know is toxic for you? Are you doing it right now?

Trauma bonding happens when you become emotionally connected to someone in a way that feels almost like an addiction. It’s an attachment to a person causing you pain. And when you’re trauma-bonded, no matter how much they hurt you, you will keep going back for more.

This is one of the most challenging relationship dynamics to overcome.

“How Did I Become Trauma-Bonded?”

Here’s how trauma-bonding typically starts:

At the beginning of the relationship, everything feels almost perfect. The person you’re with seems to fulfill all your needs. They make you feel worthy, loved, important, and seen in ways you may have never experienced before. You feel like you finally found someone who gets you, someone who makes you feel complete.

This initial phase creates a powerful attachment. You’re not just casually dating someone you like. You’re experiencing feelings that fill voids you didn’t even know you had. Maybe you grew up not feeling important to your parents, or you never felt truly seen or heard. Suddenly, this person comes along and gives you everything you’ve been missing your entire life.

That’s the hook. That’s typically the foundation for a trauma bond.

When someone fulfills these deep needs, especially early on in the relationship, it makes you become incredibly tolerant and forgiving of their behavior later on, after you’ve invested so much emotionally, and you’ve experienced such highs with them.

Then, after that initial period of strong attachment, when their bad behavior starts, you’re more willing to overlook it. You tell yourself it’s just a phase, or that the good times will come back, or maybe that you can fix whatever’s wrong. And that’s the initial beginnings of a true trauma bond.

What happens next is a cycle that looks a lot like addiction. You experience emotional highs when the person treats you well, followed by devastating lows when they hurt you, ignore you, or abuse you. Then, just when you’re at your lowest point, they give you a little bit of affection again, showing you a glimpse of that person you fell in love with, which suddenly puts you back in the high place.

This is how addiction works. Think about someone who drinks or uses drugs. They feel bad, so they drink or use, and then they feel good. But that good feeling doesn’t last forever. Eventually, they’re back in that low place, feeling terrible again.

So what do they do? They take the drug again. They drink again. It’s an up-and-down cycle that never ends.

In a trauma bond, the person you’re attached to is like that drug. When you’re feeling low, rejected, or hurt by them, you desperately want that high again. You want to feel worthy, loved, and important. And the only way you know how to get that feeling is to get it from them. So you stay. You try harder. You chase those moments of affection.

The problem is that the bad times start to outweigh the good times. You might get one good day followed by six bad days. Or one good week followed by six bad months. But as long as those good moments keep coming, even infrequently, the addiction continues. You keep hoping that the next time will be different, that the person you fell in love with will come back and stay.

Consumed by Obsessive Thoughts

One of the most telling signs of a trauma bond is obsession. You can’t stop thinking about this person. Even when they’re hurting you, even when you know the relationship is toxic, you’re consumed with thoughts of them. You check their social media constantly. You replay conversations in your head. You analyze every little interaction, looking for signs that they still care about you.

This obsessive behavior is one of the hardest things to break. I know this from personal experience. In my twenties, I was obsessive in my relationships. I was actually the emotionally abusive one, and my obsessive behaviors led to a lot of my abusive actions. I was always worrying about what my partner was doing, always trying to control situations, always seeking reassurance.

The only way I was able to break my obsessive behaviors was, really, to go cold turkey. Trying to slowly reduce obsessive behavior didn’t work for me because any little bit of obsessive action led to more obsessive action. It’s like telling yourself you’ll just check their social media once. That one time turns into hours of scrolling and analyzing every post and picture.

If you’re in this pattern, you might need to take drastic steps. Block them on social media. Delete their number. Remove every reminder of them from your environment. I know that sounds extreme, and I know it’s incredibly hard to do when you’re obsessed with someone. But sometimes extreme measures are necessary to break the hold they have on you.

People in trauma bonds often describe their experience as following breadcrumbs of affection. The person who hurts them drops little bits of kindness, attention, or love along the way. These breadcrumbs lead to temporary moments of happiness, but they’re surrounded by so much suffering.

You convince yourself that these fleeting moments justify staying. You tell yourself that if they can be nice sometimes, that means the relationship can work. You focus on those breadcrumbs and ignore the fact that you’re starving for real, consistent love and respect.

I’ve seen this pattern in so many relationships. Someone will say their partner is terrible to them ninety percent of the time, but that ten percent when they’re nice makes it all worth it. That math doesn’t add up. You deserve better than living for those small moments while enduring constant pain the rest of the time.

The breadcrumbs also create a situation where you’re always chasing something. You’re never satisfied because you’re never getting enough. You’re always hoping the next breadcrumb is around the corner, always believing that if you just try a little harder or wait a little longer, you’ll finally get what you need.

Where Did You Go?

One of the most devastating effects of a trauma bond is what it does to your sense of self. Over time, you can become a shell of who you used to be. You might not even recognize yourself anymore. Your entire identity becomes wrapped up in this relationship and in trying to get this person to love you the way you need to be loved.

This happens because you’re in a constant state of seeking validation from someone who rarely gives it to you. When you don’t get that validation, you start to believe you’re not worthy of it. You start to think that maybe if you were smarter, more attractive, more successful, or just better in some way, they would treat you well.

You’re degrading yourself emotionally, bit by bit. Every time they reject you or hurt you, and you go back for more, you’re teaching yourself that you don’t deserve better. You’re reinforcing the belief that this is the best you can get, or that love is supposed to hurt.

I want you to understand something important: The person who makes you feel unworthy is the same person you’re seeking worthiness from. That’s the trap. They put you in a lowered state, and then you seek to feel better by getting validation from them. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps you stuck.

This is why emotionally abusive behavior continues in relationships. The victim of emotional abuse seeks their sense of worth and sometimes their entire identity from the person who’s abusing them. As long as you’re looking to them for your value, you’ll never find it. They’re the ones taking it away from you in the first place.

If you want to break free from a trauma bond, you need to accept a hard truth. The relationship will never change. The cycle will never stop. I know that’s difficult to hear, especially if you’re holding onto hope that things will get better. But I’m going to tell you straight: it won’t change.

Now, I could be wrong. Maybe your situation is the exception. But accepting that I’m right helps you accept that the relationship you’re obsessing over is toxic. And that acceptance forces you to focus on yourself and what you need to do to heal.

When you finally accept that the cycle won’t end, you can start to see the situation clearly. You can recognize that all those good moments were just part of the pattern. They weren’t signs that things were getting better. They were breadcrumbs keeping you hooked.

This acceptance is painful. It means letting go of the hope you’ve been clinging to. It means admitting that the person you fell in love with either never really existed or isn’t coming back. It means facing the reality that you’ve invested time, energy, and emotion into something that was hurting you.

But this acceptance is also freeing. Once you stop waiting for them to change, you can start changing yourself. You can start healing. You can start building a life that doesn’t revolve around someone else’s unpredictable behavior.

How Do You Break a Trauma Bond?

Breaking a trauma bond isn’t about getting the other person to change. It’s about changing yourself and healing whatever inside you made you vulnerable to this dynamic in the first place.

For most people in trauma bonds, there’s something from their past that set them up for this. Maybe you grew up not feeling important to your parents. Maybe you were neglected or abused as a child. Maybe you learned early on that love is conditional and that you have to work hard to earn it.

These early experiences create what I call imprints. They shape how you see yourself and what you expect from relationships. If you grew up feeling unworthy, you might be drawn to partners who reinforce that feeling. If you grew up having to chase love and approval, you might be attracted to people who withhold affection.

The healing process involves understanding these patterns and working to change them. You need to recognize that your sense of worth shouldn’t depend on anyone else. You need to learn that you can be happy and fulfilled without this person in your life.

This is hard work. It requires you to sit with uncomfortable feelings. It means facing the pain you’ve been trying to avoid by staying in the relationship. It means being alone with yourself and learning who you are outside of this toxic dynamic.

I went through this myself after my marriage ended years ago. I was trauma-bonded to all my previous partners. Not only that, I was also emotionally abusive (stemming from the fear of being alone and a fear of abandonment). It was a perfect storm of toxic behavior and dysfunction.

Because of these issues, which I only realized at the end of my marriage, I knew I had a lot of healing to do. I knew if I didn’t address these things inside me, I would always be unhappy.

The first thing I did was actually make a choice to stay single, something I’d never done in my life. I didn’t like that choice because I was always afraid to be single, or more accurately, unloved and alone. I believed being single meant being unhappy.

But I knew I had to do something different. I had to figure out who I was without depending on another person to be my only source of happiness. I needed to understand what I thought about when I was alone, and what I wanted when no one else was in my life.

That time as a voluntary single person changed my life. I finally realized I could survive being alone and that I could be happy without someone else. And realizing that gave me choices. I could choose to be happy and alone, or I could choose to be happy with someone else. But either way, I’d be okay.

That’s what I want for you. I want you to know you have choices. I want you to understand that you don’t have to be stuck with someone who hurts you. You’re not limited to believing that the only way to be happy is to get validation from the person who takes your happiness away.

The First Step Toward Breaking the Trauma Bond

The path forward starts with awareness and acceptance. The person in a trauma bond needs to accept that the cycle won’t end on its own. They need to recognize that they deserve better than breadcrumbs of affection surrounded by abuse. They need to understand that their worth doesn’t come from this person. They need to know that they can be happy without the abuser in their life.

If you are experiencing a trauma bond, start focusing on yourself, as if you are the only person in your life right now. Act as if you have to accept that you will be alone for the time being and ask yourself:

What do I need?
What do I value?
What are my boundaries?

You might want to say, “I need that person in my life!” But I encourage you to look deeper. What feelings do you like when that person makes you feel good? What do you need inside yourself, whether that person is there or not?

When you start answering these questions and questions like this for yourself instead of looking to someone else for the answers, or expecting someone else to bring to you what you’re missing, you begin to reclaim your power.

This is a hard process. It can be really hard to be grieving the relationship while also asking yourself what you need at a deeper level that the relationship normally gives you.

When I started healing from my own trauma bond, I needed to learn who I was as an individual, not an individual-with-someone-else. In other words, I wanted to get to know myself as if I never met him before. I needed to basically interview myself, as if I were learning about myself for the first time.

I’m not saying you’ll heal and feel better instantly. This took me a few months. You may even need professional help. Trauma bonds can be as difficult to break as any addiction, and sometimes you need support to get through it. A therapist who understands trauma and abusive relationships can help you process what you’ve been through and develop healthier patterns.

You Deserve Nothing But Respect and Kindness

It’s true. You deserve better. You deserve to be in relationships where you feel safe, respected, and valued. You deserve to be with someone who treats you well consistently, not just in scattered moments between abuse.

And remember, everything about you is perfect as it is. Even your imperfections are perfect. You don’t need to chase someone’s approval to be worthy. You are enough exactly as you are.

Breaking free from trauma bonds is hard. But staying stuck in toxic patterns is even harder. It’s harder on your mental health and your self-esteem.

You have more power than you think. You have choices, even when it doesn’t feel like it. You can choose to focus on your own healing. You can choose to set boundaries. You can choose to leave a situation that’s hurting you. You can choose to get help and change your behavior.

I know it’s scary. I know it feels impossible sometimes. But I also know it’s possible because I’ve seen it happen over and over again. I’ve seen people break free from the most entrenched trauma bonds. I’ve seen people completely transform their lives because they decided enough was enough, and toxic people were no longer going to take up real estate in their brain.

You can do this. You can heal. You can break free. And on the other side of that hard work is a life that’s so much better than what you’re experiencing right now.

You are not alone. You are not going crazy. And you are absolutely worth the effort it takes to heal.