No one intentionally enters a relationship with someone who will make them feel low and miserable. It’s often the case that such individuals are manipulative and crafty, presenting a very different image of themselves at the beginning. They may initially seem charming, kind, and caring, only to reveal their true colors gradually.
If your spouse had shown you their nasty traits the first time you met them, you wouldn’t be in this position now – you’d have run a mile. You entered what you thought had the potential of a healthy relationship that could go places. If you knew, you’d have said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ and removed yourself from the threat of an abusive partnership.
However, this isn’t how it works with any toxic person, particularly a person with narcissistic personality disorder. You didn’t enter the relationship and suddenly become trauma-bonded with a narcissistic partner.
Like anything with the narcissist, it’s carefully planned and executed, and there is a process to developing a trauma bond and becoming emotionally dependent on a toxic person.
Recommended Reading: Am I In A Toxic RelationshipHow do you know if you have a trauma bond with a narcissist?
You’ve likely been in a relationship for a while. Initially, everything seemed normal, mirroring the healthy relationships you’ve observed around you. However, as time passed, you found yourself entangled in an abusive relationship that you yearned to break free from but didn’t know how.
This is often the result of trauma bonding, which typically unfolds in about seven stages. Each stage is a calculated step in a toxic progression designed to keep you trapped in the narcissist’s grasp through a potent trauma bond.
These stages are not random but meticulously planned to ensure your entanglement. The ultimate goal in abusive relationships is total control, and a trauma bond offers exactly that. It’s an insidious tool that binds you to an abusive partner, making it incredibly challenging to break free.
But remember, understanding this process is the first step towards liberation.
Recommended Reading: How To Break Free From A Toxic RelationshipWhat are the 7 stages of trauma bonding?
Stage 1 of Trauma Bonding: Love Bombing – The Narcissist Showers You With Love, Affection, Attention, and Validation.
Love bombing is a strategy narcissists employ to trap you in their web of control. Initially, they often appear flawless, creating an almost magical aura around the relationship where you feel profoundly cherished and nurtured. The outpouring of love and affection you experience in this initial phase is unprecedented, making it seem like you’ve stepped into an enchanting love story.
Based on personal experience, the love-bombing phase is not your average ‘honeymoon period in a healthy dating scenario. While most people gradually express affection and reveal their vulnerabilities over time, narcissists do the opposite. They tend to shower you with affection and open up almost immediately, creating an intense and often overwhelming beginning to the relationship.
Most people will hold back a little to protect themselves and ensure they are dating the right kind of person and refrain from scaring their potential partner away. Not a narcissist. They declare their love, obsession, and affection early in romantic relationships.
Narcissists often pick their prey based on their characteristics; an empathetic, kind, and trusting individual is like gold dust to them. An emotionally open, empathetic, and trusting person won’t question someone’s motives when they declare their adoration and love.
Recommended Reading: Why You Picked Mr. WrongStage 2 of Trauma Bonding: Trust and Dependency – You Believe They Will Love You Unconditionally, Always. You Now Start To Depend On Them For Validation.
Excessive love-bombing is designed to earn your trust, leading to a form of dependency that the narcissist is well aware of. While a certain level of love and dependency are intrinsic to any nurturing relationship, the dependency fostered by the narcissist is unhealthy and manipulative.
You start to trust them to such an extent that their viewpoint becomes your primary source of validation. This trust sets the stage for the next phase of their manipulation.
Recommended Reading: See If You're In An Emotionally Safe RelationshipStage 3 of Trauma Bonding: The Criticism Begins – The Narcissist Gradually Reduces The Care & Validation They Once Gave You.
This is the point at which the abusive behavior begins. They initiate criticism and blame you for matters beyond your control. Their controlling nature becomes glaringly apparent. During this phase, the level of abuse escalates to a point that is hurtful, degrading, and belittling.
Before this toxic relationship, the narcissist was a sturdy source of support and comfort, and now they’re pulling away from you emotionally. This makes you feel like you’re going insane; losing them is beyond gut-wrenching. What makes this even more painful is the criticism, nasty comments, and blame that they begin to heap upon you, all of which is psychological abuse.
Given their past behaviors, this is entirely unexpected. After all, your partner has previously been so ‘kind’ to you. Hence, you start to believe their harsh words as absolute truth. While it may be hard to comprehend at the time, the narcissist relies on your acceptance of their hurtful remarks. After all, they need to erode your self-love and self-respect to start the abuse cycle.
Stage 4 of Trauma Bonding: Gaslighting – The Narcissistic Abuse Escalates With Them Telling You Their Unhappiness Is All Your Fault.
If you could solely adhere to their commands, they could restore the love they once held for you. Their goal, often successfully achieved, is to instill doubt in your understanding of reality, persuading you to accept their skewed interpretation instead. The act of gaslighting is a vile, toxic, and manipulative tactic that can easily fill an entire book with its complexities. From personal experience, I could pen not one but two volumes on this subject.
Gaslighting, at its poisonous core, is the way the narcissist uses psychological manipulation to make their victim doubt their own sanity. Someone with narcissistic personality disorder will say that you’ve said and done things that you know deep down didn’t happen, but when you’re being consistently gaslighted, you begin to believe the narcissist’s version of events over your own sanity.
It sounds almost unbelievable that someone else can hold this type of mental control over you, but it’s entirely possible, and it’s a poisonous form of abuse.
Stage 5 of Trauma Bonding: Control is Set – You Think Your Only Chance Of Getting Back To The Happy Feelings of Stage 1 To Do What Your Narcissistic Partner Says.
You yearn to return to the initial phase, to be cherished, loved, nurtured, and reassured of your uniqueness and perfection. You crave to feel significant once more.
Your narcissistic partner is well aware of this. They understand that you’ll comply with their demands, clinging to the faint hope of them reverting to their former, affectionate self. They will tantalize you with this prospect, ensuring they extract what they desire from you in exchange for that elusive glimmer of hope that they’ll resume showering you with adoration.
Stage 6 of Trauma Bonding: Loss of Self – Things Get Worse – You Resign Yourself To Being In An Abusive Relationship.
The thing about narcissism trauma bonding is that should you fight back, your narcissistic partner will intensify their abusive behavior. Stage 6 is when you are entirely confused and miserable, and your self-esteem is at an all-time low.
This is the most heartbreaking of all the stages because this is the point where you become a shell of a being; you’re alive and breathing, but you’re an emotional corpse, feeling dead inside.
Compare the person you are at stage 6 to the person you were before you met your abuser – it’s like night and day. Dreams, hopes, goals, and desires become mute at this point. You no longer have any.
You want the abuse to stop, and you’ll do anything for that to happen, even if it means doing things you don’t want to do (at the narcissist’s request). Stage 6 is a dangerous place where most victims contemplate suicide.
It’s here where you’ve already endured so much emotional pain, torment, and physical abuse that you don’t see any other way out, and it’s such a pitiful and painful place to be.
Recommended Reading: Rebuilding Your Self Esteem Stage 7 of Trauma Bonding: Like A Drug Addiction – Your Family and Friends are Undeniably Concerned About Your Welfare.
You feel terrible about this situation but cannot leave because you do not have an unhealthy attachment; your abuser is everything to you. All you can think about is winning their affection and validation.
At this point, you’re probably cut off from your family and friends, but that doesn’t stop you from feeling awful about not seeing them. Even if you chose to cut them off, the narcissistic abuse was likely the driving force behind that.
You may miss your support system and the life you left behind for your abuser, and the guilt and shame you feel about that can often be all-consuming.
The narcissist has strived for this all along – your addiction to them. This means they have the power and control they strived for all along, know pretty much nothing, and nobody can take you away from your psychological addiction to them.
No matter the physical abuse, the cheating, the lying, etc., you’ll still stick around and endure it. This is the end goal achieved by the narcissist.
You may be asking yourself, much like I did, how it’s possible that this can happen to you.
A sane, logical, and intelligent person like you?
The answer to this question is the same for all who’ve endured an abusive relationship. It comes from understanding the core dynamics of how humans react to the combination of dependency and abuse coupled with intermittent reinforcement.
Intermittent Reinforcement
To help piece together how intermittent reinforcement keeps us in the clutches of a trauma bond, I’ll mention a study that proves intermittent reinforcement’s power.
The study aimed to get healthy lab rats to keep pressing a bar in the hope that they would keep on getting pellets of food. This study aimed to keep the rats working for the food rewards long after they had stopped receiving any. They chose lab rats because they react similarly to humans in this kind of situation. The researchers tried various patterns of rewards and found the following:
Pattern #1 of Trauma Bonding – Reward the rats every time they press the bar
This turned out to be the least effective reward pattern. The rats soon expected to be rewarded every time they touched the bar. When the food rewards eventually stopped, the rats may press the bar one or two more times just to try their luck and see if any new food pellets appeared.
However, after a short while, all of the rats quickly wandered away and no longer paid any attention to the bar.
Pattern #2 of Trauma Bonding—The rats get rewarded for every 10th press of the bar
For pattern number 2, the researchers got the rats accustomed to pressing the bar a total of 10 times before any food was given to them. Most of the rats tried at least one more round of bar touches and did another set of 10.
However, it didn’t take too long for all the rats to realize there would be no more food as a reward for their efforts, and they stopped working and went to look elsewhere for food.
Pattern #3 of Trauma Bonding – Food would be rewarded every 10 minutes
For this pattern, the rats learned that they would only get their food pellets on a set time schedule. Once they understood that they would always get rewarded 10 minutes after a bar press, they became very frugal with their presses.
They tended to press the bar once or twice toward the end of the 10-minute waiting period, then wait for some pellets. After the rewards completely stopped, it didn’t take long for the rats to stop expecting the food and move on. The learning from this pattern was that having a predictable pattern of rewards for pressing the bar saw fewer bar presses once the food had stopped being given.
Pattern #4 of Trauma Bonding- Intermittent reinforcement
This is the pattern that saw the researchers outwit the hungry rats by completely scrapping any predictable or logical pattern of reward. They randomized the times between rewards and moved the goalposts as to how many bar presses would be needed to get food pellets in exchange for their work.
In short, the rats didn’t know if they were coming or going. They were just hoping more food would arrive. What’s fascinating about this test is that the rats kept pressing at the reward bar, even though they were never rewarded for doing so again.
This was a reward schedule called intermittent reinforcement. The rats continued to work in anticipation that, eventually, they would once again be rewarded.
Much like the hopeful rats in this study, we will continue to try to please our abuser in the hope that this will be recognized and we will be rewarded with their love. And, much like the researchers in this study, the narcissist knows that randomizing their attention and moving their goalposts will make you strive harder for their breadcrumbs of affection.
Not only that, but you won’t give up or lose interest because intermittent reinforcement leaves you hoping the next reward is just around the corner – even if it isn’t.
Conclusion
Our goal with this blog is to help you see that the abuser utilizes their manipulative mind games to get you where they want you – I want to help rationalize any shame or guilt you may feel about getting involved in an abusive relationship.
I know the pitiful feelings of embarrassment and humiliation when people say things like:
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Why don’t you just leave if your relationship is bad?
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Why did you stay in an abusive relationship for so long?
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I’d have left at the first sign of trouble if that was me.
After hearing such ignorant and blameful questions and statements, most of us go away and mull over their probing to attempt to answer their hurtful questions in our heads.
Of course, the only resolution to come up with is that you are weak, stupid, and must have deserved such horrific abuse. However, that is the effect of the abuse.
Once I began researching the abuse I’d endured, it came as a weight lifted off my shoulders when I learned about the biological reasoning for trauma bonding. Couple this with the seven stages of entrapment the abuser utilizes and intermittent reinforcement by the narcissist, and you have a recipe for complete control.
While it’s hard to accept that someone would want to hurt you and cause you pain so intentionally, it’s a burden lifted once you realize that you’re not to blame for the abuse, nor are you to blame for sticking by your abuser.
