You and I live in the golden age of recovery. Neuroscience has finally caught up with the recovery community and agrees that the brain can change. The toughest addictions can heal. Trauma can rewire into strength. The pattern of abusive relationships can end.

Trauma bonding is the neurological phenomenon of becoming attached to abusive relationships.  Look back at your life, family, coworkers…do you see a history of falling in love with abusive people?

During periods of trauma, the pituitary gland transfers neuropeptides, specifically oxytocin and vasopressin. These chemicals react to create the warm feelings of bonding. Your puppy cries, you pick it up and caress…the touch releases oxytocin and vasopressin to soothe pain.  The neuropeptides are the primary chemicals in the body to down regulate anxiety.

 

 

Grow up with caregivers who hurt you. The brain shapes to attach to them. Your body needs the down regulation from anxiety they provide. By the age of four the brain has shaped to how your caregivers soothed you.  If their touch came with anger, violence, or threat…you now have the potential to attach to abuse for the rest of your life…until you attend to the trauma bond.

So, you had great caregivers? You attach well to others, you feel secure?  These same neurological processes in Trauma Bonding can work whenever we experience trauma. The soldier who survives war becomes a mercenary. The survivor of sexual assault chooses the sex trade, the partner of an alcoholic remarries another alcoholic…and so on. The Trauma Bond is neuroscience 101 for any painful event.

Below I am listing the Twelve Steps for Trauma Bonding, 12TB.  I have worked these in my own life and with my clients for years. I would love your input.

Let’s work on step one today.  How do you feel about your relationships? Healthy? Unhealthy?  The trauma bond touches the earliest years of brain development before we have memory to recall.  Can you make a timeline of your relationships? Do you see patterns of hurt and violence?

The first step is bringing trauma bonds to conscious awarness so we can attend to them.

This is the hardest part for me…admitting that I am a magnet to attract abusive relationships and permit them to hurt me.

Hope is near. Admit. Pray. Give your trauma to God. He is near and can relieve you of the shame and pain. If not, get another Higher Power who can do this healing work.

Twelve Steps for Trauma Bonding (12TB)

1. We admitted we were powerless over our attachment to perpetrators – that our lives had become unmanageable by shame driven abusive relationships.

2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore our traumatic bonding to wholeness and sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the compassion of God as we understood God.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our shame based unhealthy relationships.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our shame based relationships.

6. Were entirely ready to have God transform our shame based trauma bonding to perpetrators.

7. Humbly asked God to remove our attachment to unhealthy people.

8. Made a list of all persons including ourselves we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people including ourselves wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory of our relationships and when unhealthy we  promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others with trauma bonds, and to practice personal contentment in all our relationships.