What Causes a Trauma Bond? The REAL Answer!

why do you think people attract someone that can be abusive and then stay in that type of relationship once they have been abused yeah what where does that wound come from I mean it's almost it's almost harder to leave once there's been abuse because when we look at the brain and this is just the science aspect of it is the brain changes when there's abuse and it's sort of like these highs and lows that create deeper bonding so the more ups and downs we have with somebody the deeper we bond which is like the trauma bond that we all hear about and like this toxic relationship which is why so many people are like oh well you know the sex is so good or we're just so passionate together but everything is chaos and the deeper we go the harder it is to get out of that and on top of it a lot of us who have experienced abuse have sort of normalized chaos and dysfunction I grew up witnessing abuse I grew up witnessing domestic violence you know in homes that I was in in you know or around me because I didn't grow up in safe areas and so for me I knew that it wasn't a good thing but it also wasn't that different from what I had known it was familiar it was and that was a nervous system pattern that I was working with Wow and so a lot of the work that I've done has been to reclaim my own inner mother and father and to heal my nervous system to actually be able to feel happy and comfortable in safe secure situations rather than actually unconsciously craving the chaos and dysfunction that I was so used to yeah I think I was very used to that as well and I don't I wasn't looking for chaos but I somehow always attracted it yeah and I don't know what it why why that was the way why I kept repeating that cycle until I really said okay this do not work like when I meet someone I shouldn't have these crazy emotions or these crazy butterflies anymore I should have a feeling but not some crazy feeling yeah and it should be more of a conscious approach to getting to know someone and seeing their total Behavior like how their their words meet their actions meet their behaviors and how the whole package and um as opposed to going into something super fast and explosive yeah like go slow and conscious yeah falling into relationship versus consciously choosing it yeah exactly something that I really never did until I met husband really yeah I never did either yeah so how when did you finally wake up and say okay I've been attracting these types of men that are chaotic or maybe somewhere abusive or they have abusive Tendencies or explosive and when did you finally wake up and say okay I need to do things differently I was in my mid 20s and I ended up actually marrying somebody uh from another country who was American and we didn't want to get married it's just that we were together for many years and in order to try to make the relationship work we needed to both be in the same country and so we got married and quickly right after that things just turned for the worse it wasn't good already wasn't an abusive situation we were both in our mid 20s were're very immature both had very deep mother wounds and deep father wounds neither of us had a father so you want to talk about projections we were just projecting all of our parental wounds onto each other I don't know if we knew each other at all truly and uh in that relationship I was deeply betrayed there was a lot of betrayal and it was as if the rug was ripped from underneath me at the time I lost all of my money I my my cat my soul cat ran away uh he left with another woman and I gained like 20bs in a month my hormones stopped producing because I had experienced so much stress from my aband wound being triggered I went and tested my hormones and I all I had was cortisol I was physically sick my body physically just stopped everything stopped and I remember a moment where he had come he had been back and forth very sporadically not in communication we had shared home obviously we were married and he came to get some things and instead of being vulnerable because of course I don't know how to do that I just yelled at him and chased him out into the rad without my shoes on and said you no don't ever come back I never want to see you again which was not true at the time and uh as he drove away with his new girlfriend I remember feeling like I was 3 years old and all of a sudden I had this flash of when I had been dropped off the first time at a foster home when I was three and I saw my mom's headlights pulling away and I remember screaming and crying and all of a sudden this relief washed over me and it was just like this is not about him is not about them this is about you and your mother wound and this is what you need to heal this is about your own inner stuff and even though it was so painful in that moment I was so grateful because I knew that I could get through it because the pain was so deep that if it had been about him I might not have survived it in my mind but because it was about me and my inner work I felt empowered and so I just dove in and that's kind of what kick started my healing Journey yeah cuz you've been essentially abandoned or betrayed by your father who was never there you've been betrayed by your mother you've been betrayed by friends and you know Foster individuals and boyfriends in the past and then now your husband you're being betrayed by but it sounds like you realize you were betraying yourself as well yeah I was just repeating by making unconscious decisions based on wounds as opposed to based on a vision of what you wanted a healthy vision and there's no you know I'm not I'm blaming you that's something I did most of my life too yeah um and it's really cool that you've that that you got that awareness then because a lot of us myself included repeat these patterns over and over again until the pain is so deep until it's like ah I just feel like I've ripped open everything in my body I have nothing left exactly then hopefully you can wake up and have some clarity what happened for me and it sounds like it's what happened for you what was the next step after that so that you could get to a place of conscious healthy relationship most of us hit that wall in crisis and that's the opportunity we can go down the path of bitterness or we can be like okay you know this sucks and I never want to experience this again so let's feel all of the feelings that I've never felt before and that's probably what you experienced I know it's what I experienced all of a sudden this hardened Ultra independent Survivor mask was just ripped off and all of a sudden I had feelings that I had to feel and vulnerability that needed to be expressed and I had no idea how overwhelming that was going to be and at one point I just laid face down on my bed and closed my eyes and I felt like I was on a psychedelic Journey just from the pain you know I would go to bed at night and think I might die in my sleep tonight because this hurts too much that's how deep the abandonment mood had been ripped open and so I started doing deep mother work I started doing a lot of transpersonal therapy you know kind of yion style I did a lot of medicine work a lot of medicine ceremonies uh over and over and over again uh I spent all day in nature I did breath work every week and I just worked through it and it was hard and so painful but that was my only option it was like the thing that I had to hold on to was this belief that eventually the pain would go away wow and I remember writing a date on my calendar and telling my friend like I'm going to be done grieving by this date good luck good luck and I kept having to move the date and eventually I stopped setting a date you know healing is a journey yeah it it's not like this destination like it's going to happen by now I've I've said the same thing myself myself in the past I'm like I'm going to make a decision by this I'm going to be fine by this time it just keeps getting pushed right and I think it comes to you when you're ready for it when you're ready and willing to fully receive all the lessons and you're willing to surrender you're willing to drop your ego and feel all the emotions and keep making consistent daily good decisions that are based on a conscious vision of what you want as opposed to a past pain think of all the amazing things in life that are expressions of just you for instance the song You Stream over and over again while you're in your 13th Hour of gaming at 4:00 a.m. in the morning with all the lights off trying not to wake up your roommates or the recommendations that you share with your friends on the top six comedy podcasts that are the best to listen to on your way to the gym and back or even your new haircuts which may or may not be an epic bull cut from the '90s and hopefully is everything that makes you you makes all the difference State Farm believes Insurance should work the same way your plan your coverage they need to be personalized to you and the ability to choose the plan you want by picking the options that fit you like building your home and auto policies is exactly what the State Farm personal price plan is all about getting the coverage you want at an affordable price just for you so are you ready to make things personal call or go to statefarm.com today to create your State Farm personal price plan prices vary by state options selected by customer availability and eligibility may vary and and so how long did it take until you said oh I'm starting to feel some relief of all this deep healing work of all this stuff were you doing it alone or were you doing it with therapists and guides and coaches I was doing it in a combo I was seeing therapists I was seeing Shaman I was doing medicine work with myself and in community and then I was creating a lot of processes for myself because I was just 24/7 in my feelings I was not have getting breaks because I hadn't felt any of my childhood so people would always say how are you so normal right now like how are you not just living homeless and addicted to drugs with everything you've been through and I would say I'm just fine like I'm fine you were numbing it I didn't know that but yeah I was I just completely denied that I had any pain around it you know and so all of that I had to feel all of it and that was a lot and so I started creating processes for myself to get through the long nights when I couldn't sleep you know what's a process look like one of them was I created a little meditation for myself to listen to over and over another one is I wrote a letter to my myself from my inner mother telling me that I was going to be okay and just saying like I know that you're in pain right now everything's going to be okay I promise it's not going to feel like this forever just loving myself and I actually put it on my wall taped to my wall so that when I would look in the morning over at my wall I would see it and because I needed it I needed that anchor uh and there's many other things like writing about the vision of who I wanted to be in partnership with how I wanted it to look but also it was really about deep accountability for how I had shown up in all of those relationships which was not good not blaming but also taking responsibility yeah I mean there's a difference because blame is more about judgment and taking responsibility is about action yes so for me I had to take responsibility for the reality that I had never been vulnerable in my Partnerships I wasn't showing up authentically I wasn't being very loving and I wasn't really being open so anyone who entered my field had no clue who I was underneath at all and I have certainly didn't know who they were because I wasn't vulnerable right and so we have to take a look at those things if we want to get to the conscious partnership and that part is hard too because it's easy to go down the blame train and be like oh gosh I did this all it's all my fault or they did this all to me exactly but you don't get anywhere that way that way that to that lane if you get into the blame Lane that means you have to go back and start over in another relationship that's going to repeat the pattern until you keep hitting the wall and then you're like okay I actually have something to do with this right the other way is I'm going to take responsibility for my role yes the how they showed up is about them but how I show up also matters and it's about me and if I want to create something different where do I need to grow yeah and how we respond to people that maybe are doing things out of Integrity to us that we don't want how we react or you know why we stayed as opposed to saying hey this doesn't work for me anymore this cannot happen otherwise we're not going to be together anymore creating boundaries so or even entering the relationship to first place yeah if it's not a conscious entering then why are we doing it yeah I remember the guy that I entered the relationship with when I was 19 I was very young not a conscious person but I've always had intuitive hits and Visions like I I do know when something is right or not or if there's something going to happen and I sat on his couch and I got a message and it said this guy is going to be abusive oh my gosh and we weren't even living together yet and you know I just moved in with him right and so why do you think you moved in with them well because I was you knew that because there wasn't a part of me yet that felt integrated in her inner woman inner mother I was just a kid you know I was this immature wounded kid starving for love and I was addicted to the chaos and we had very much a passionate strong sexual connection and I wanted that feeling right I wanted to experience that rush and so we often do this where we just choose the thing that feels good over the thing that's actually going to get us where we want to be