Trauma Bonding
Getting there!!
Thread Starter
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 5,750
Trauma Bonding
Originally posted by NytePassion.
The Case for Traumatic Bonding: The Betrayal Bond
by Dr. Patrick Carnes
About Trauma Bonding:
These people are all struggling with traumatic bonds. Those standing outside see the obvious. All these relationships are about some insane loyalty or attachment. They share exploitation, fear, and danger. They also have elements of kindness, nobility and righteousness. These are all people who stay involved or wish to stay involved with people who betray them. Emotional pain, severe consequences and even the prospect of death do not stop their caring or commitment. Clinicians call this “traumatic bonding.” This means that the victims have a certain dysfunctional attachment that occurs in the presence of danger, shame, or exploitation. There often is seduction, deception or betrayal. There is always some form of danger or risk.
Some relationships are traumatic. Take, for example, the conflictual ties in movies like The War of the Roses orFatal Attraction. What Lucy does to Charlie Brown (in the comic strip, Peanuts) every year when she holds the football for him to kick is a betrayal we have grown to expect. Abuse cycles such as those found in domestic violence are built around trauma bonds. So are the misplaced loyalties found in exploitive cults, incest families, or hostage and kidnapping situations. Codependents who live with alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, or sex addicts, and who will not leave no matter what their partners do, may have suffered enough to have a traumatic bond.
Here are the signs that trauma bonds exist in your life:
When you obsess about people who have hurt you though they are long gone from your life (To obsess means to be preoccupied, fantasize about, and wonder about something/someone even though you do not want to.)
When you continue to seek contact with people whom you know will cause you further pain.
When you go “overboard” to help people who have been destructive to you.
When you continue to be a “team” member when obviously things are becoming destructive.
When you continue attempts to get people who are clearly using you to like you.
When you again and again trust people who have proved to be unreliable.
When you are unable to distance yourself from unhealthy relationships.
When you want to be understood by those who clearly do not care.
When you choose to stay in conflict with others when it would cost you nothing to walk away.
When you persist in trying to convince people that there is a problem and they are not willing to listen.
When you are loyal to people who have betrayed you.
When you are attached to untrustworthy people.
When you keep damaging secrets about exploitation or abuse.
When you continue contact with an abuser who acknowledges no responsibility.
About co-dependency:
“Parallels do exist between trauma bonding and codependency because to live with an active addict is often traumatic. For the most part, the addiction field has not incorporated all the trauma research that documents how people grow closer to their abusers in the face of trauma. Yet it is clear that many codependents are also trauma-bonded. The converse is also true. The trauma field has not really addressed issues surrounding addiction, let alone codependency. Yet addiction in its many forms is one of the principal solutions used by survivors to cope with their lives. And most trauma-bonded persons, whether as children or adults, are involved with an abuser who has one or more addictions.”
About shame:
An injury to one’s sense of self forges some bonds. The self-injury becomes part of the fabric of the relationship and further disrupts the natural unfolding of the self. When this involves terror of any sort, an emptiness forms at the core of the person and the self becomes inconsolable. No addiction can fill in. No denial of self will restore it. No single gesture will be believable. Only a profound sense of the human community caring for the self can seal up this hole. We call this wound shame.
The Case for Traumatic Bonding: The Betrayal Bond
by Dr. Patrick Carnes
About Trauma Bonding:
These people are all struggling with traumatic bonds. Those standing outside see the obvious. All these relationships are about some insane loyalty or attachment. They share exploitation, fear, and danger. They also have elements of kindness, nobility and righteousness. These are all people who stay involved or wish to stay involved with people who betray them. Emotional pain, severe consequences and even the prospect of death do not stop their caring or commitment. Clinicians call this “traumatic bonding.” This means that the victims have a certain dysfunctional attachment that occurs in the presence of danger, shame, or exploitation. There often is seduction, deception or betrayal. There is always some form of danger or risk.
Some relationships are traumatic. Take, for example, the conflictual ties in movies like The War of the Roses orFatal Attraction. What Lucy does to Charlie Brown (in the comic strip, Peanuts) every year when she holds the football for him to kick is a betrayal we have grown to expect. Abuse cycles such as those found in domestic violence are built around trauma bonds. So are the misplaced loyalties found in exploitive cults, incest families, or hostage and kidnapping situations. Codependents who live with alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, or sex addicts, and who will not leave no matter what their partners do, may have suffered enough to have a traumatic bond.
Here are the signs that trauma bonds exist in your life:
When you obsess about people who have hurt you though they are long gone from your life (To obsess means to be preoccupied, fantasize about, and wonder about something/someone even though you do not want to.)
When you continue to seek contact with people whom you know will cause you further pain.
When you go “overboard” to help people who have been destructive to you.
When you continue to be a “team” member when obviously things are becoming destructive.
When you continue attempts to get people who are clearly using you to like you.
When you again and again trust people who have proved to be unreliable.
When you are unable to distance yourself from unhealthy relationships.
When you want to be understood by those who clearly do not care.
When you choose to stay in conflict with others when it would cost you nothing to walk away.
When you persist in trying to convince people that there is a problem and they are not willing to listen.
When you are loyal to people who have betrayed you.
When you are attached to untrustworthy people.
When you keep damaging secrets about exploitation or abuse.
When you continue contact with an abuser who acknowledges no responsibility.
About co-dependency:
“Parallels do exist between trauma bonding and codependency because to live with an active addict is often traumatic. For the most part, the addiction field has not incorporated all the trauma research that documents how people grow closer to their abusers in the face of trauma. Yet it is clear that many codependents are also trauma-bonded. The converse is also true. The trauma field has not really addressed issues surrounding addiction, let alone codependency. Yet addiction in its many forms is one of the principal solutions used by survivors to cope with their lives. And most trauma-bonded persons, whether as children or adults, are involved with an abuser who has one or more addictions.”
About shame:
An injury to one’s sense of self forges some bonds. The self-injury becomes part of the fabric of the relationship and further disrupts the natural unfolding of the self. When this involves terror of any sort, an emptiness forms at the core of the person and the self becomes inconsolable. No addiction can fill in. No denial of self will restore it. No single gesture will be believable. Only a profound sense of the human community caring for the self can seal up this hole. We call this wound shame.
Getting there!!
Thread Starter
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 5,750
Can’t Let Go of a Bad Relationship?
by Susan Anderson
Do you know someone who stays in a bad relationship? What hooks them? The standard answer is that they don’t feel good enough about themselves. They don’t feel they deserve better. Their have a low sense of entitlement.
While self esteem is certainly a factor, many of these people started out feeling much better about themselves than they do now.
Being constantly criticized, rejected, neglected, or abused eventually pays its toll. The low self-worth you see is not always the CAUSE of their being unable to leave, but the RESULT of having been treated this way. Once they feel low about themselves, they lose the strength to get out.
But there is more to it. They have become traumatically bonded.
A traumatic bond is created when pain is inflicted into the attachment. This bond is stronger (just like epoxy glue is stronger than rubber cement) than a non-traumatic bond. The more traumatic the bond, the harder to get out.
There are examples of this everywhere in nature and science. Researches found that when training a duck to “imprint” them, when they accidentally “stepped on the duck’s toe,” the duck imprinted them more than before. Science has conducted myriad experiments that demonstrate the power of “pain” to strengthen the bond. It’s the principle fraternities use in hazing where they humiliate or hurt their pledges to instill greater loyalty in them.
But there is still another factor which really cements people to the abuser. They get hooked by the “intermittent reinforcement.” The abuser, every once in a while, will give them what they need, i.e. “a pat on the arm” or saying “love you” or “bringing home a paycheck.” It’s intermittent.
If you ever studied classical conditioning (Pavlov’s dog and all of that), you may remember that if you want to “train” a rat to respond a certain way, rather than giving a steady reward (i.e. sugar pellet), give it only intermittently. Intermittent reinforcement is more powerful than steady reinforcement.
This explains the paradox of relationships. If your partner mistreats you in all kinds of emotional or physical ways, you run the risk of getting deeply hooked in.
You’d think it would work the other way – that if your partner made you feel secure, safe, and comfortable, you’d have a hard time leaving. But the irony is that many people feel freer to leave someone who has made them feel secure. Ever hear “nice guys finish last?”
But if they are made to feel chronically insecure, heart-sick, anxious, or hurt, they can get caught up in the drama of the abuse and locked into the dynamics of the relationship– especially if every once in a while, their partner gives them a little crumb of love – intermittent reinforcement.
If you are in a traumatic bond, you not only suffer from your partner’s criticism, blame, betrayal, unreliability, or neglect, but you suffer from beating yourself up for allowing it to happen.
You feel guilty for not being able to leave. Your friends may get fed up with you for being so stuck. Even your therapist loses patience. You feel judged. You feel weak. You feel ashamed of yourself.
"Why did you STAY?" comes the invariable question.
"Because I loved him," comes the equally invariable response.
Abuser tells Abused, "I love you," and these women continue to sell themselves out to hear the occasional utterance of three hollow words, meaning nothing to the abuser.
The more infrequently the “crumbs of love” are offered, the more hooked you are. You become conditioned, like a rat in a cage.
by Susan Anderson
Do you know someone who stays in a bad relationship? What hooks them? The standard answer is that they don’t feel good enough about themselves. They don’t feel they deserve better. Their have a low sense of entitlement.
While self esteem is certainly a factor, many of these people started out feeling much better about themselves than they do now.
Being constantly criticized, rejected, neglected, or abused eventually pays its toll. The low self-worth you see is not always the CAUSE of their being unable to leave, but the RESULT of having been treated this way. Once they feel low about themselves, they lose the strength to get out.
But there is more to it. They have become traumatically bonded.
A traumatic bond is created when pain is inflicted into the attachment. This bond is stronger (just like epoxy glue is stronger than rubber cement) than a non-traumatic bond. The more traumatic the bond, the harder to get out.
There are examples of this everywhere in nature and science. Researches found that when training a duck to “imprint” them, when they accidentally “stepped on the duck’s toe,” the duck imprinted them more than before. Science has conducted myriad experiments that demonstrate the power of “pain” to strengthen the bond. It’s the principle fraternities use in hazing where they humiliate or hurt their pledges to instill greater loyalty in them.
But there is still another factor which really cements people to the abuser. They get hooked by the “intermittent reinforcement.” The abuser, every once in a while, will give them what they need, i.e. “a pat on the arm” or saying “love you” or “bringing home a paycheck.” It’s intermittent.
If you ever studied classical conditioning (Pavlov’s dog and all of that), you may remember that if you want to “train” a rat to respond a certain way, rather than giving a steady reward (i.e. sugar pellet), give it only intermittently. Intermittent reinforcement is more powerful than steady reinforcement.
This explains the paradox of relationships. If your partner mistreats you in all kinds of emotional or physical ways, you run the risk of getting deeply hooked in.
You’d think it would work the other way – that if your partner made you feel secure, safe, and comfortable, you’d have a hard time leaving. But the irony is that many people feel freer to leave someone who has made them feel secure. Ever hear “nice guys finish last?”
But if they are made to feel chronically insecure, heart-sick, anxious, or hurt, they can get caught up in the drama of the abuse and locked into the dynamics of the relationship– especially if every once in a while, their partner gives them a little crumb of love – intermittent reinforcement.
If you are in a traumatic bond, you not only suffer from your partner’s criticism, blame, betrayal, unreliability, or neglect, but you suffer from beating yourself up for allowing it to happen.
You feel guilty for not being able to leave. Your friends may get fed up with you for being so stuck. Even your therapist loses patience. You feel judged. You feel weak. You feel ashamed of yourself.
"Why did you STAY?" comes the invariable question.
"Because I loved him," comes the equally invariable response.
Abuser tells Abused, "I love you," and these women continue to sell themselves out to hear the occasional utterance of three hollow words, meaning nothing to the abuser.
The more infrequently the “crumbs of love” are offered, the more hooked you are. You become conditioned, like a rat in a cage.
Member
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: right here, right now
Posts: 6,516
Sounds like Stockholm Syndrome?
Stockholm Syndrome: The Psychological Mystery of Loving an Abuser, Page 1
It's a very long article, but it's incredibly insightful.
Stockholm Syndrome: The Psychological Mystery of Loving an Abuser, Page 1
It's a very long article, but it's incredibly insightful.
Member
Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: Bristol TN/VA
Posts: 12,431
Thank you! Very important and informative. It is the only explanation why I stayed in my destructive relationship when prior I would have ended the dating for a minor reason of something I did not like, but hooked into the most destructive relationship and period of my life.
Member
Join Date: Mar 2014
Posts: 85
Thanks for these posts. I saw so many truths I googled trauma bonds and found a few more articles. Open to read and realizing I am in deeper than I thought.
All pulled together girl has been covering over a lot...and not just for the AH.
All pulled together girl has been covering over a lot...and not just for the AH.
And Presents For Pretty Girls
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 319
I was going to post this on another thread but will add it here. Great place to put a bunch of different resources and articles. 
OBSESSED WITH A BORDERLINE
A Matter of Attraction and Revulsion
By Shari Schreiber, M.A.
A Life Strategist: ShariSchreiber.com for Resolution, Empowerment, Success, Transformation
Whether you're presently involved with a borderline disordered individual or you've finally stepped away from one, you've been struggling with wanting someone who has caused you great harm. It seems that regardless of what they've put you through, you just can't get them out of your head or move completely beyond the longing you still feel, which triggers fantasies about having them back! Don't worry, you're not going crazy--you're just hurting, and needing it to stop.
You may be obsessing about what he or she's feeling or doing, whom they're dating/sleeping with, and wondering if they're thinking at all about you. Your feelings of shame and emptiness are so unbearable, that it's easier to divert your focus to him/her, rather than sitting with the painful emotions you have to feel in their absence. What's happened is, you're busy living inside their life instead of yours--and as much as you need them to return, you could be fearing it as well.
It's not unusual for folks to resuscitate these conflictual relationships over and over again, anticipating that "this time, it'll be different." You've given a great deal of thought to both sides of this rupture--and you're fairly sure you'll be successful, if they give you just one more shot at making it right. But regardless of how well you've prepared yourself for this, it never turns out the way you've wanted it to--and in fact, it typically leaves you in more torment and shame. You might chastise yourself for going back, which only compounds your depression--and inevitably makes this vicious cycle repeat.
There are lots of little movies that play in your head about chance meetings, finding him/her on your doorstep when you return home from work, getting a furtive call in the middle of the night after they've dropped you on your head and moved on to someone new--and even though you know they're toxic for you, you've kept wishing and hoping they'll want you again.
Yearning for someone who's made you feel bad about yourself confuses and confounds your rational mind, so let's begin understanding how and why you could want somebody who's brought so much pain and destruction into your world. Confusion feeds chaos. You're just looking for a way out of it.
Whether you've loved a Borderline or not, it's human nature to try and figure out troubling/perplexing issues associated with someone's weird or aberrant behaviors--or nobody'd be making those chilling/creepy movies about Charles Manson, or anybody else who's displayed psychotic or sociopathic traits! The fact that we can't relate to these folks makes them fascinating puzzles that we keep wanting to understand, because they don't fit with our definition of "normal."
Several clients have said that their "most recent" Borderline wasn't someone they necessarily found the most beautiful or brilliant in their dating history, yet their obsession with this one, has them trapped in maddening confusion. This is our clue about childhood experiences which created an early template of sorts, that's uncannily being duplicated within this present-day dynamic.
Every child is in love with their parents. They see the parent as a god, who's entrusted with their care and protection. When this 'god' is rejecting, critical or abusive, it's frightening and confusing to a small child, which forces him to split off the dangerous, injurious parts of his mother or father in order to remain attached. You acquired this survival tool during infancy.
A child does not automatically stop loving his/her parent, when they're crazy or cruel. What he/she does instead, is compartmentalize or box-up those bad behaviors and divorce them from the parent, so they can remain in-love with Mom or Dad. This is exactly what you've done with your Borderline, and it's made you deny/invalidate some very important perceptions and feelings.
The opposite of Love, is not Hate . . . it's Indifference.
Love and hate are similar emotions. They both trigger passionate responses in us, which force us to feel. Every person who's involved with a Borderline has learned to discard or shut-down painful emotions since early childhood, and this has left them unable to distinguish between healthy endeavors and harmful ones.
People who've become adept at getting rid of difficult or dangerous emotions since they were very young, have no inner compass to guide their decisions. Their extra-sensory aspects (instinct and intuition) cannot function properly and alert them to impending danger, because when some feelings get shut- down, all feelings become impaired. Hence, if we've gotten skilled at staving off sadness, frustration, rage, etc., it's impossible to feel joy and glee.
Instinct and intuition are our built-in survival guides, which are with us from the time we're born--but if we've grown up in an environment that's chaotic or conflictual, or we've survived criticism and abuse from a parent, we had to start managing excruciating emotions about all that, by locking them away. Discarding certain feelings early in life, leaves us with inner emptiness and deadness. We crave a sense of aliveness, but we're unable to access it for ourselves, which is why roller-coaster relationships are so darned appealing!
The Borderline reawakens intensely positive and negative emotions--but one thing we're certain of, is that we're Feeling~ and dead people don't feel.
When you've adored a Borderline, you've loved the good times and the bad. Even when their interactions have felt diminishing and damaging, you've felt unusually alive within that struggle. Just striving for their affection and care has been an activating challenge. Whether you've felt attraction or revulsion for a Borderline, you've been flooded with passionate feelings which catalyze heightened/intense sensations that are enlivening! Without them, you could feel a sense of nothingness, which has you trying to escape this feeling with someone who predictably triggers your anguish. This is the vicious cycle you learned how to accommodate as a child, when you sought affection and care from your parent--and found neglect or abuse instead.
When this repeatedly happened with your ex, you had the feeling that you couldn't live without him or her, but your inner conflict was very primitive. It paralleled old ego wounds from childhood that have remained, and predicted all your romantic choices.
Borderlines are initially captivating, enchanting and irresistible. Even if we think that he/she is out of our league, they relentlessly pursue us to where we begin to accept that they find us worthy of their attention/affection, and start trusting that it'll be safe for us to let down our guard, and love them. I hate to say this, but that's precisely when your troubling experiences begin.
Borderlines are intoxicated by The Chase--not the capture. The moment they sense you're hopelessly hooked, they lose interest, and their distancing and acting-out behaviors begin. By now, you're emotionally invested, and you're in far too deep to walk away. Even if their positive traits are overshadowed by hurtful negative ones, you keep fantasizing that if you try a little harder, things will work out--but they won't. You feel toxic shame when you fail with them, which makes you feverishly attempt to redeem yourself in their eyes, but this is a useless exercise that keeps you tortured (albeit stimulated).
When your relationship with a Borderline ends, it's incredibly painful because you haven't just lost him or her, you've lost yourself. When the chaos/drama of that affair stops, so does your ability to self-activate and feel alive. When you feel nothingness, you're spiritually bankrupt and disconnected from your Self. The despair you've wrestled with during your dance is excruciating--but the pain of it helps you feel something other than deadness, so you hang onto it with all you've got, which is key to your obsession with this person.
The Borderline did not author these horrible feelings in you--he/she just reinvigorated them.
Your persistent need to become close with this individual once again, is your natural response to the awful shame you could feel from being emotionally exiled. This might drudge up childhood memories with a parent who ignored you, shut you out emotionally, or withdrew affection and attention when you did something that disappointed or upset them. The problem is, they didn't treat your behavior as bad, they made you bad--and you suffered for hours, days or weeks until you apologized for crimes you hadn't committed, just so Mom or Dad would speak with you again! When the Borderline rejects you, those early shame wounds are reactivated.
When you're apart, you feel adrift, guilty, empty and unable to focus. Even if you're the one who's walked away, you doubt your decision, because it feels so lousy being separated from him/her! You may have grown up presuming that 'right' choices brought favorable feelings, but this is a false belief. Right choices are usually the hardest to make, because they force us to adhere to our true convictions, which develops character and integrity. This isn't about doing the easy stuff--if it were, everybody'd be doing it.
With emotional development, comes moral development. Both are attended by adult capacity for reasoning, empathy, impulse control and the ability to accept/tolerate delayed gratification. This requires big-picture principles, and a reasonable threshold for frustration. Borderlines are still infantile, in that their capacity to manage difficult emotions and self-soothe is non-existent. Their need for instant gratification is profound--and just like a small child, if you're not immediately responsive to their demands, they throw a tantrum, cut-off from you or triangulate the relationship.
Given that we're attracted to people who match our own level of emotional development, the inability to self-soothe during these episodes can have far reaching implications for non-borderlines as well. Your compelling drive to remain in relationship with a Borderline doesn't just happen in a vacuum--in other words, it's neither accidental nor incidental. When adult interactions are intensely painful and frustrating, they're replicating a relational blueprint you struggled with as a child.
Both Borderlines and the people attracted to them, incurred similar types of wounds to their developing sense of Self, and isn't it simply natural to be drawn to someone with whom you have things in common, or who echoes personality aspects in yourself? Well, this coupling is a lot like that--it feels as if you've found your 'soul mate.' There's a similar vibration/frequency you two share, due to childhood abandonment issues. While the nature of those early difficulties were alike, they've played out in different ways for each of you--but the scars from that time remain.
This hurts as horribly as it does, because you have been here before. You've become adept at putting your childhood agony behind you, and presuming it would stay buried. The BPD lover simply excavates all that ancient trauma to your sense of Self, but now is your opportunity to finally Heal.
OBSESSED WITH A BORDERLINE
A Matter of Attraction and Revulsion
By Shari Schreiber, M.A.
A Life Strategist: ShariSchreiber.com for Resolution, Empowerment, Success, Transformation
Whether you're presently involved with a borderline disordered individual or you've finally stepped away from one, you've been struggling with wanting someone who has caused you great harm. It seems that regardless of what they've put you through, you just can't get them out of your head or move completely beyond the longing you still feel, which triggers fantasies about having them back! Don't worry, you're not going crazy--you're just hurting, and needing it to stop.
You may be obsessing about what he or she's feeling or doing, whom they're dating/sleeping with, and wondering if they're thinking at all about you. Your feelings of shame and emptiness are so unbearable, that it's easier to divert your focus to him/her, rather than sitting with the painful emotions you have to feel in their absence. What's happened is, you're busy living inside their life instead of yours--and as much as you need them to return, you could be fearing it as well.
It's not unusual for folks to resuscitate these conflictual relationships over and over again, anticipating that "this time, it'll be different." You've given a great deal of thought to both sides of this rupture--and you're fairly sure you'll be successful, if they give you just one more shot at making it right. But regardless of how well you've prepared yourself for this, it never turns out the way you've wanted it to--and in fact, it typically leaves you in more torment and shame. You might chastise yourself for going back, which only compounds your depression--and inevitably makes this vicious cycle repeat.
There are lots of little movies that play in your head about chance meetings, finding him/her on your doorstep when you return home from work, getting a furtive call in the middle of the night after they've dropped you on your head and moved on to someone new--and even though you know they're toxic for you, you've kept wishing and hoping they'll want you again.
Yearning for someone who's made you feel bad about yourself confuses and confounds your rational mind, so let's begin understanding how and why you could want somebody who's brought so much pain and destruction into your world. Confusion feeds chaos. You're just looking for a way out of it.
Whether you've loved a Borderline or not, it's human nature to try and figure out troubling/perplexing issues associated with someone's weird or aberrant behaviors--or nobody'd be making those chilling/creepy movies about Charles Manson, or anybody else who's displayed psychotic or sociopathic traits! The fact that we can't relate to these folks makes them fascinating puzzles that we keep wanting to understand, because they don't fit with our definition of "normal."
Several clients have said that their "most recent" Borderline wasn't someone they necessarily found the most beautiful or brilliant in their dating history, yet their obsession with this one, has them trapped in maddening confusion. This is our clue about childhood experiences which created an early template of sorts, that's uncannily being duplicated within this present-day dynamic.
Every child is in love with their parents. They see the parent as a god, who's entrusted with their care and protection. When this 'god' is rejecting, critical or abusive, it's frightening and confusing to a small child, which forces him to split off the dangerous, injurious parts of his mother or father in order to remain attached. You acquired this survival tool during infancy.
A child does not automatically stop loving his/her parent, when they're crazy or cruel. What he/she does instead, is compartmentalize or box-up those bad behaviors and divorce them from the parent, so they can remain in-love with Mom or Dad. This is exactly what you've done with your Borderline, and it's made you deny/invalidate some very important perceptions and feelings.
The opposite of Love, is not Hate . . . it's Indifference.
Love and hate are similar emotions. They both trigger passionate responses in us, which force us to feel. Every person who's involved with a Borderline has learned to discard or shut-down painful emotions since early childhood, and this has left them unable to distinguish between healthy endeavors and harmful ones.
People who've become adept at getting rid of difficult or dangerous emotions since they were very young, have no inner compass to guide their decisions. Their extra-sensory aspects (instinct and intuition) cannot function properly and alert them to impending danger, because when some feelings get shut- down, all feelings become impaired. Hence, if we've gotten skilled at staving off sadness, frustration, rage, etc., it's impossible to feel joy and glee.
Instinct and intuition are our built-in survival guides, which are with us from the time we're born--but if we've grown up in an environment that's chaotic or conflictual, or we've survived criticism and abuse from a parent, we had to start managing excruciating emotions about all that, by locking them away. Discarding certain feelings early in life, leaves us with inner emptiness and deadness. We crave a sense of aliveness, but we're unable to access it for ourselves, which is why roller-coaster relationships are so darned appealing!
The Borderline reawakens intensely positive and negative emotions--but one thing we're certain of, is that we're Feeling~ and dead people don't feel.
When you've adored a Borderline, you've loved the good times and the bad. Even when their interactions have felt diminishing and damaging, you've felt unusually alive within that struggle. Just striving for their affection and care has been an activating challenge. Whether you've felt attraction or revulsion for a Borderline, you've been flooded with passionate feelings which catalyze heightened/intense sensations that are enlivening! Without them, you could feel a sense of nothingness, which has you trying to escape this feeling with someone who predictably triggers your anguish. This is the vicious cycle you learned how to accommodate as a child, when you sought affection and care from your parent--and found neglect or abuse instead.
When this repeatedly happened with your ex, you had the feeling that you couldn't live without him or her, but your inner conflict was very primitive. It paralleled old ego wounds from childhood that have remained, and predicted all your romantic choices.
Borderlines are initially captivating, enchanting and irresistible. Even if we think that he/she is out of our league, they relentlessly pursue us to where we begin to accept that they find us worthy of their attention/affection, and start trusting that it'll be safe for us to let down our guard, and love them. I hate to say this, but that's precisely when your troubling experiences begin.
Borderlines are intoxicated by The Chase--not the capture. The moment they sense you're hopelessly hooked, they lose interest, and their distancing and acting-out behaviors begin. By now, you're emotionally invested, and you're in far too deep to walk away. Even if their positive traits are overshadowed by hurtful negative ones, you keep fantasizing that if you try a little harder, things will work out--but they won't. You feel toxic shame when you fail with them, which makes you feverishly attempt to redeem yourself in their eyes, but this is a useless exercise that keeps you tortured (albeit stimulated).
When your relationship with a Borderline ends, it's incredibly painful because you haven't just lost him or her, you've lost yourself. When the chaos/drama of that affair stops, so does your ability to self-activate and feel alive. When you feel nothingness, you're spiritually bankrupt and disconnected from your Self. The despair you've wrestled with during your dance is excruciating--but the pain of it helps you feel something other than deadness, so you hang onto it with all you've got, which is key to your obsession with this person.
The Borderline did not author these horrible feelings in you--he/she just reinvigorated them.
Your persistent need to become close with this individual once again, is your natural response to the awful shame you could feel from being emotionally exiled. This might drudge up childhood memories with a parent who ignored you, shut you out emotionally, or withdrew affection and attention when you did something that disappointed or upset them. The problem is, they didn't treat your behavior as bad, they made you bad--and you suffered for hours, days or weeks until you apologized for crimes you hadn't committed, just so Mom or Dad would speak with you again! When the Borderline rejects you, those early shame wounds are reactivated.
When you're apart, you feel adrift, guilty, empty and unable to focus. Even if you're the one who's walked away, you doubt your decision, because it feels so lousy being separated from him/her! You may have grown up presuming that 'right' choices brought favorable feelings, but this is a false belief. Right choices are usually the hardest to make, because they force us to adhere to our true convictions, which develops character and integrity. This isn't about doing the easy stuff--if it were, everybody'd be doing it.
With emotional development, comes moral development. Both are attended by adult capacity for reasoning, empathy, impulse control and the ability to accept/tolerate delayed gratification. This requires big-picture principles, and a reasonable threshold for frustration. Borderlines are still infantile, in that their capacity to manage difficult emotions and self-soothe is non-existent. Their need for instant gratification is profound--and just like a small child, if you're not immediately responsive to their demands, they throw a tantrum, cut-off from you or triangulate the relationship.
Given that we're attracted to people who match our own level of emotional development, the inability to self-soothe during these episodes can have far reaching implications for non-borderlines as well. Your compelling drive to remain in relationship with a Borderline doesn't just happen in a vacuum--in other words, it's neither accidental nor incidental. When adult interactions are intensely painful and frustrating, they're replicating a relational blueprint you struggled with as a child.
Both Borderlines and the people attracted to them, incurred similar types of wounds to their developing sense of Self, and isn't it simply natural to be drawn to someone with whom you have things in common, or who echoes personality aspects in yourself? Well, this coupling is a lot like that--it feels as if you've found your 'soul mate.' There's a similar vibration/frequency you two share, due to childhood abandonment issues. While the nature of those early difficulties were alike, they've played out in different ways for each of you--but the scars from that time remain.
This hurts as horribly as it does, because you have been here before. You've become adept at putting your childhood agony behind you, and presuming it would stay buried. The BPD lover simply excavates all that ancient trauma to your sense of Self, but now is your opportunity to finally Heal.
And Presents For Pretty Girls
Join Date: Mar 2012
Posts: 319
This whole website is pretty awesome...and a lot to read and digest it all...but, she really goes in-depth. Not trauma-bonding related, but it all seems to intermingle together.
By Shari Schreiber, M.A.
ENMESHMENT MEANS, "WHERE DO YOU END, AND I BEGIN?"
Caregivers can't allow others to experience difficult feelings, because they're unable to honor and hang out with their own. When a friend is sad, caregiver personalities feel an irrepressible need to micro-manage/mitigate the other's emotions, because permitting their own has always been too painful. When you learn to tolerate your uncomfortable feelings, you'll start letting others have theirs.
The Caregiver/Pleaser has developed an idealized notion of how he must be perceived in order to be loved--so each giving gesture literally provides a self-image payoff. While this emotional 'reward' may be satisfying on some level, the compulsion to take care of others, consistently overrides personal needs and underdeveloped feelings, and perpetuates an issue of "Giving 'till it hurts," because sensations of guilt are experienced when he doesn't.
If you haven't come to fully accept yourself with both light and dark facets and feelings, how can you possibly like and respect yourself? This issue sets you up for having to buy another's love with gifts, gestures and behaviors that consistently place another's desires and needs before your own. These actions are always automatic/reflexive, because yours have never mattered, and you haven't learned to discern--much less, sanction them.
The Pleaser so hungrily seeks approval, he'll happily work longer hours, take on extra tasks that aren't part of his job description, never take vacations, never ask for a raise in salary, etc. He secretly wants his contributions to be noticed and rewarded--but fear keeps him from asking for any compensation. He would literally prefer that his employer intuit his needs/desires and grant what's never spoken of or requested--as deep down, he doesn't feel worthy of receiving. This entitlement issue generally begins during infancy, due to the lack of adequate emotional bonding with our birth mother, and having no ability to build a sense of trust that our basic needs can be met.
Unmet needs spawn painful, frustrating sensations. It's natural for a child to decide that it's easier not to have needs, than to keep feeling anguish from not having his needs responded to and honored. This difficulty gives rise to a sort of emotional autism, and reinforces the non-needing, codependent self.
When we've grown up making ourselves wrong for having needs (one of the core tenets of codependency), it's easy to feel like it's our fault, when we feel bad in a relationship because we're not getting our needs responded to. This drives the reflex to bury those needs, and make allowances/excuses for others. It motivates the need to keep trying, in the face of any/all obstacles and odds. This impulse comes from archaic sensations of shame which are cemented by a parent's distorted confirmation that we're defective/unlovable. Our subconscious mind presumes that if we were truly lovable, we would get far more affection/attention, and be happy and content: It never takes into account the other's inability to love him/herself, or anyone else!
Lurking underneath the surface of every Caregiver's attachments is often the question; "when's it gonna be my turn?" They erroneously presume that the more they give, the more they'll (eventually/some day) get back--but that cannot happen, due to the type of person they've chosen to love. Reciprocal relationships literally feel uncomfortable, and are summarily avoided.
I once dated a guy who was the quintessential codependent. I'm certain our relationship would have fizzled rapidly, had I not been forced to move out of my home just two weeks into our dance. I felt some depression about it, but he was 'Johnny on the spot' working overtime, to keep me in his life against my better judgment (I kept stating this wasn't a great time for me to get involved). He was very helpful during those months, but the instant I found a new abode and settled-in, he started acting-out his abandonment fears by retreating sexually. So I was (finally) feeling much lighter, and wanting him more than ever~ and he rejected me (as he assumed I would him, once I'd rebalanced, and he wasn't 'needed'). Poor baby.
By Shari Schreiber, M.A.
ENMESHMENT MEANS, "WHERE DO YOU END, AND I BEGIN?"
Caregivers can't allow others to experience difficult feelings, because they're unable to honor and hang out with their own. When a friend is sad, caregiver personalities feel an irrepressible need to micro-manage/mitigate the other's emotions, because permitting their own has always been too painful. When you learn to tolerate your uncomfortable feelings, you'll start letting others have theirs.
The Caregiver/Pleaser has developed an idealized notion of how he must be perceived in order to be loved--so each giving gesture literally provides a self-image payoff. While this emotional 'reward' may be satisfying on some level, the compulsion to take care of others, consistently overrides personal needs and underdeveloped feelings, and perpetuates an issue of "Giving 'till it hurts," because sensations of guilt are experienced when he doesn't.
If you haven't come to fully accept yourself with both light and dark facets and feelings, how can you possibly like and respect yourself? This issue sets you up for having to buy another's love with gifts, gestures and behaviors that consistently place another's desires and needs before your own. These actions are always automatic/reflexive, because yours have never mattered, and you haven't learned to discern--much less, sanction them.
The Pleaser so hungrily seeks approval, he'll happily work longer hours, take on extra tasks that aren't part of his job description, never take vacations, never ask for a raise in salary, etc. He secretly wants his contributions to be noticed and rewarded--but fear keeps him from asking for any compensation. He would literally prefer that his employer intuit his needs/desires and grant what's never spoken of or requested--as deep down, he doesn't feel worthy of receiving. This entitlement issue generally begins during infancy, due to the lack of adequate emotional bonding with our birth mother, and having no ability to build a sense of trust that our basic needs can be met.
Unmet needs spawn painful, frustrating sensations. It's natural for a child to decide that it's easier not to have needs, than to keep feeling anguish from not having his needs responded to and honored. This difficulty gives rise to a sort of emotional autism, and reinforces the non-needing, codependent self.
When we've grown up making ourselves wrong for having needs (one of the core tenets of codependency), it's easy to feel like it's our fault, when we feel bad in a relationship because we're not getting our needs responded to. This drives the reflex to bury those needs, and make allowances/excuses for others. It motivates the need to keep trying, in the face of any/all obstacles and odds. This impulse comes from archaic sensations of shame which are cemented by a parent's distorted confirmation that we're defective/unlovable. Our subconscious mind presumes that if we were truly lovable, we would get far more affection/attention, and be happy and content: It never takes into account the other's inability to love him/herself, or anyone else!
Lurking underneath the surface of every Caregiver's attachments is often the question; "when's it gonna be my turn?" They erroneously presume that the more they give, the more they'll (eventually/some day) get back--but that cannot happen, due to the type of person they've chosen to love. Reciprocal relationships literally feel uncomfortable, and are summarily avoided.
I once dated a guy who was the quintessential codependent. I'm certain our relationship would have fizzled rapidly, had I not been forced to move out of my home just two weeks into our dance. I felt some depression about it, but he was 'Johnny on the spot' working overtime, to keep me in his life against my better judgment (I kept stating this wasn't a great time for me to get involved). He was very helpful during those months, but the instant I found a new abode and settled-in, he started acting-out his abandonment fears by retreating sexually. So I was (finally) feeling much lighter, and wanting him more than ever~ and he rejected me (as he assumed I would him, once I'd rebalanced, and he wasn't 'needed'). Poor baby.
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