So, you may have heard through viral vines such as Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook the terms “trauma bonding, trauma dumping, enmeshment, attached, and Stockholm syndrome” being thrown around as it means that everyone has figured out what these mean and how they work but you. That getting stuck in cycles is somehow the survivor’s fault; that talking about your trauma is the end of the flashbacks, the hypervigilance, the nightmares, the dissociation…That since it has been ten years since the traumatic event happened then you ‘must have moved on…’ all these narratives are harmful, and yet for some reason we say it so confidently over coffee.
So, let us dive in… Here is the story, two people meet, discover they both grew up with an alcoholic parent, and stay up until 2 a.m. talking. Online, they would call that “trauma bonding.” Clinically, it is not… Trauma bonding describes something far heavier is an attachment that forms to the person or system causing the harm, held in place by fear and by unpredictable moments of kindness.
Dr. Judith Herman (1992/2015) describes this dynamic as a traumatic attachment in captivity, but to be clear she did not coin “trauma bonding.” The distinction matters!!! When a clinical term becomes a hashtag, it loses its power to name real danger. A survivor of intimate partner violence who cannot leave is told she is “trauma bonded” in the same breath that two coworkers are said to have “trauma bonded” over a bad supervisor. One describes captivity and the other one describes connection. Trauma bonding is a strong emotional attachment between a person and the one who abuses or controls them. Canadian psychologists Donald Dutton and Susan Painter introduced the term in 1981 to explain why women who have been abused often returned to violent partners.
I write this article blog as a cisgender bisexual woman born and raised in Puerto Rico, who happens to be a clinical psychologist studying the tradition of liberation psychology of Ignacio Martín Baró, 1994. That lens asks a question most trauma literature often skips; what happens when the abuser is not only a partner or a parent, but a colonial system that also feeds, employs, and governs you? This post hopes to define trauma bonding with the research that exists… To discuss retired and old labels and to try and separate talking about trauma from actually processing it.
Let’s start with trauma bonding… As discussed above, this is a strong emotional attachment between a person and the one who abuses or controls them. Dutton and Painter named two conditions: the first is a power imbalance, where one person dominates and the other comes to feel dependent and less capable over time, and the second is intermittent abuse, where harm alternates with warmth, apology, or relief (Dutton & Painter,1981; Dutton & Painter,1993). Learning research developed by B.F. Skinner in 1938 has long shown that rewards delivered unpredictably produce the most persistent behavior, and Dutton and Painter argued that the same principle binds people to abusers. In their 1993 follow up study titled “Emotional Attachments in Abusive Relationships: A Test of Traumatic Bonding Theory,” both factors predicted how attached women still felt to former partners six months after leaving… However, attachment research offers a second explanation. Fear activates our need to seek closeness to an attachment figure. When that same figure is the source of fear, the person is caught in what Mary Main and Erik Hesse called “fright without solution” (Hesse & Main, 1999). Meaning the only available shelter is the danger itself.
So, when two people bond because they recognize each other’s traumatic history, there is no captor, no power imbalance, and no cycle of harm and relief…. Therefore, no trauma bonding or a traumatic attachment… There are better words for this that increases sense of belonging and connectedness: social support, peer support, solidarity, or in Latin American psychology term… acompañamiento. These kinds of connections are some of the protective factors we know of. Two large meta-analyses-Brewin, et al., 2000 and Ozer, et al., 2003-found that lack of social support after trauma was among the strongest predictors of who develops PTSD, stronger than many features of the traumatic event itself.
Now, I do want to acknowledge that not all shared talk heals! It would be too easy to say, “shared experience is always good; trauma bonding is always bad.” This binary is what is harmful in this rhetoric… The evidence is messier. Amanda Rose’s research on co-rumination, meaning repeatedly discussing problems and dwelling on negative feelings with a friend, found that it deepens friendship closeness while also predicting increases in depressive and anxious symptoms over time (Rose, 2002; Rose, et al., 2007). Two people who connect only through retelling their wounds can become closer and more stuck at the same time… This can feel powerful and deeply retraumatizing.
So, the honest distinction is not “good bond versus bad bond.” It is this: a trauma bond is attachment to the source of harm; a shared experience bond is attachment between people who were harmed. The second can be healing or can become a loop. What decides it is whether the connection moves you toward meaning, action, and other relationships, or keeps you circling the same story.
Now, shifting gears towards colonialism…Processing that also accuses. Through the liberation psychology lens, it adds a dimension Western models miss in this dynamic. In Pinochet’s Chile, psychologists Elizabeth Lira and Eugenia Weinstein- writing under a pseudonym due to persecution as Cienfuegos and Monelli, 1983- they developed terapia del testimonio or in English testimony therapy. This therapy was about survivors of torture recording their stories in detail, and the document could be used to denounce the regime. The telling transformed private shame into public evidence. Martín-Baró called the recovery of historical memory a central task of liberation psychology. Here talking becomes processing because it changes the meaning of the suffering from personal failure to political injustice. The trial evidence for testimonial therapy is still small, so this is an area that needs more efficacy and effectiveness research.
Now, I want you to imagine systematic power, how this impacts human needs, human expression, human connection, and human perception of trauma. Recall the two conditions of a trauma bond described earlier in this long blog: a power imbalance and intermittent cycles of harm and relief. Now think about a country that is a colony. One side holds political, economic, and military power. The other depends on it for food imports, jobs, and disaster relief, while being periodically neglected, extracted from, or punished. The structural resemblance is hard to miss.
Puerto Rico has been a United States colony since 1898. Its residents are ‘citizens’ but cannot vote for president, and since 2016 a federally appointed fiscal oversight board under PROMESA has controlled much of the island’s budget. After Hurricane María in 2017, a George Washington University study commissioned by the government estimated 2,975 deaths, far above the initial official count of 64. Relief arrived slowly and unevenly, then was framed publicly through the news as generosity. Many Puerto Ricans described a familiar mix that has been had since the Spanish Inquisition…Dependence, resentment, gratitude, and shame is too familiar with Puerto Ricans when we speak about our island, about our pride, about our status, about our citizens, and about our complexity. A liberation lens names that mix as a response to a system structure, not a flaw in the people. Therefore, applying the term “trauma bonding” carelessly repeats the exact error of the term Stockholm syndrome… It describes colonized people as psychologically captured, when much of what looks like loyalty is rational survival under material constraint, or quiet resistance to its abuser.
I challenge you, dear reader, that when you go out to coffee with your friend, to talk politics, discuss family dynamics, to embrace each other’s stories… to shift the question from “why do they stay attached?” to “what does the system do to make attachment necessary?” That is Martín-Baró’s question, and it belongs at the center of any honest conversation about trauma. If you connected with someone over a shared wound, you did not “trauma bond.” You found a witness… Protect that connection by letting it move you forward.
References:
Brewin, C. R., Andrews, B., & Valentine, J. D. (2000). Meta analysis of risk factors for PTSD. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 68(5), 748-766.
Cienfuegos, A. J., & Monelli, C. (1983). The testimony of political repression as a therapeutic instrument. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 53(1), 43-51.
Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. L. (1981). Traumatic bonding. Victimology, 6, 139-155.
Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. (1993). Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: A test of traumatic bonding theory. Violence and Victims, 8(2), 105-120.
Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Fuhr, D. C., Salisbury, T. T., De Silva, M. J., Atif, N., van Ginneken, N., Rahman, A., & Patel, V. (2014). Effectiveness of peer-delivered interventions for severe mental illness and depression on clinical and psychosocial outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 49(11), 1691-1702.
Herman, J. L. (1992/2015). Trauma and recovery. Basic Books. Herman, J. L. (2023). Truth and repair. Basic Books.
Hesse, E., & Main, M. (1999). Second-generation effects of trauma in nonclinical samples: Attachment, disorganized problems, and dissociative states. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 19(4), 484-527.
Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990). Parents’ unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized attachment status: Is frightened and/or frightening parental behavior the linking mechanism? In M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the preschool years: Theory, research, and intervention (pp. 161–182). University of Chicago Press.
Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology (A. Aron & S. Corne, Eds.). Harvard University Press.
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Namnyak, M., Tufton, N., Szekely, R., Toal, M., Worboys, S., & Sampson, E. L. (2008). ‘Stockholm syndrome’: Psychiatric diagnosis or urban myth? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 117(1), 4–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0447.2007.01112.x
Ozer, E. J., Best, S. R., Lipsey, T. L., & Weiss, D. S. (2003). Predictors of posttraumatic stress disorder and symptoms in adults: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 129(1), 52-73
Rose, A. J. (2002). Co-rumination in the friendships of girls and boys. Child Development, 73(6), 1830-1843.
Rose, A. J., Carlson, W., & Waller, E. M. (2007). Prospective associations of co-rumination with friendship and emotional adjustment: Considering the socioemotional trade-offs of co-rumination. Developmental Psychology, 43(4), 1019–1031. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.43.4.1019
Rose, S., Bisson, J., Churchill, R., & Wessely, S. (2002). Psychological debriefing for preventing PTSD. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
Skinner, B. F. (1938). Behavior of organisms. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
