When Love and Hurt Become Entangled

Understanding Trauma Bonds

Over my years as a psychologist, I have sat with many people who stay in relationships that are hurting them. What’s struck me is how much insight they often have. They may be able to describe the problems clearly: manipulation, criticism, betrayal, withdrawal, volatility, or repeated promises that never result in change. They may have left several times and promised themselves they would not go back. Yet they do go back, or they stay away and find themselves constantly thinking about the other person. Insight alone doesn't necessarily loosen the attachment.

This can be confusing to friends and family, but it is often even more confusing to the person experiencing it. Why would I want someone who has hurt me? Why can't I let go when I know this relationship isn't good for me?

Sometimes the answer involves what we call a trauma bond. A trauma bond is a powerful attachment that can develop when a relationship repeatedly moves between hurt and connection. Sometimes the pattern echoes dynamics that were familiar in childhood. In other situations, one partner may remind the other of someone they loved as a child, but who also hurt them. What makes trauma bonds so complicated is that hurt and love can coexist, sometimes in equal measure.

Another reason that it’s often confusing is that the person who causes distress may also be the person who provides comfort, affection or reassurance. These experiences become intertwined, making the relationship very difficult to leave.

Why It's So Hard to Leave

One misconception about trauma bonding is that the relationship must be terrible all the time.

Usually, it isn't. There may be long stretches that feel genuinely good, with affection, laughter, intimacy, shared experiences, and moments of feeling deeply understood. This is important because people sometimes believe that recognizing a relationship as harmful means they have to discount everything that was good about it. They don't.

The difficulty comes from the cycle. A period of closeness may be followed by anger, criticism, withdrawal, controlling behavior, betrayal, or some other rupture. You begin wondering what happened and what you need to do to get things back to where they were. Eventually, the other person reconnects. There may be an apology, affection, vulnerability, or promises that things will change. The relief can be enormous. The person you love seems to have returned, and for a while things may actually be better.

That return is part of what makes the bond so strong. Each reconciliation restores hope that perhaps the painful part is finally over. It becomes easy to see the loving periods as evidence of who the person “really is” and the hurtful periods as something temporary that can eventually be fixed.

When Your Nervous System Becomes Part of the Relationship

Trauma bonding isn't only about thoughts and emotions. The nervous system can become deeply involved. When a relationship is unpredictable, we naturally become more vigilant. You may begin noticing subtle changes in the other person's voice, expression, texting patterns, affection, or emotional availability. A small shift can immediately trigger the feeling that something is wrong.

As the relationship continues, more and more attention can become focused on maintaining connection and preventing the next rupture. You may find yourself adjusting what you say, trying not to upset the other person, explaining their behavior to yourself, or working harder whenever you sense them pulling away. When closeness finally returns, the nervous system settles. The person associated with the distress has also become the source of relief from it.

This helps explain why these relationships can feel so intensely compelling. Sometimes what we experience as extraordinary closeness also contains the enormous relief of moving from fear back into connection. That doesn't mean the love isn't real. It means that love has become mixed with anxiety, vigilance, and relief in ways that can be difficult to separate.

When the Pattern Feels Familiar

My understanding of trauma has changed considerably over the years. Earlier in my career, I thought primarily about what happened to us. I now think just as much about what we learned to do in order to stay connected. We may have learned to become quiet, helpful, vigilant, accommodating, accomplished, or very good at understanding everyone else's needs. These adaptations often make a great deal of sense in childhood, but they can remain with us long after childhood is over.

This has become one of the questions I return to in trauma work: What did you have to learn to do to stay connected to the people you needed? The answer often tells us a great deal about what happens later in intimate relationships.

Not everyone who becomes caught in a trauma bond had a difficult childhood, but earlier attachment experiences can play a role. If love was inconsistent, unpredictable, emotionally unavailable, or frightening when we were young, we may have learned to work especially hard to preserve connection. Some children become very good at reading a parent's mood. Others learn not to ask for much. What begins as a way of maintaining closeness can later become a familiar way of relating to a partner.

Instead of asking whether a relationship is meeting our needs, we may focus almost entirely on how to preserve it. We become good at understanding why the other person behaves as they do.

We make allowances for their history, their fears, their trauma, or their difficulty with intimacy.

Sometimes there is also an older longing underneath the relationship: the hope that this time an unavailable person will finally become available, that this time we will be chosen, or that this time love will become secure. We are not consciously choosing to recreate childhood pain. More often, we are drawn toward something familiar while hoping, perhaps without realizing it, for a different ending.

Loving Someone Who Hurts You

One of the hardest parts of understanding trauma bonding is accepting that love and harm can coexist. People sometimes believe they need to convince themselves that they never really loved the person or that the entire relationship was false before they can leave. I don't think that is necessary or particularly helpful. There may have been real love, genuine tenderness, and experiences that will always matter.

I value compassion enormously, both personally and in my work. But I have also come to believe that compassion without boundaries can sometimes keep us in painful places. We can understand someone's trauma, abandonment fears, attachment wounds, or painful history and still decide that the way they are treating us is not something we can continue to live with. Understanding someone's pain does not require us to continue being hurt by it.

I have seen people become so focused on understanding and caring for the person they love that they gradually lose sight of their own experience. At some point, it becomes important to turn some of that compassion back toward ourselves. Are you able to express what you need? Can you disagree without becoming frightened that the relationship will end? Have you become more yourself within the relationship, or have parts of you gradually disappeared? How much of your emotional energy is spent enjoying the relationship, and how much is spent anticipating problems, repairing ruptures, or recovering from them? Perhaps most importantly, are you staying because of what the relationship consistently is, or because of what you continue to hope it might become?

Why Leaving Can Hurt So Much

Leaving a trauma-bonded relationship doesn't always feel like freedom. Often there is considerable grief, anxiety, and even a strong physical sense of longing. People may find themselves remembering the wonderful moments while minimizing the painful ones. They question whether things were really as bad as they thought or whether they should give the relationship one more chance. Contact from the other person can bring immediate relief.

I have seen people become frustrated with themselves at this stage. They believe that because they miss the person, still love them, or want to reach out, they must not be making progress. I often see it differently. Missing someone is not the same as needing to return to them. Sometimes being able to experience that longing without immediately acting on it is part of the healing.

The mind and body have become accustomed to looking to this person for connection and reassurance. Separation means losing the painful parts of the relationship, but it also means losing the person who repeatedly provided relief after those painful experiences. There is a genuine attachment to grieve, and simply telling someone to “move on” ignores how complicated that process can be.

Healing often begins with learning to hold the entire relationship in view at the same time. Not only the terrible fight and not only the beautiful weekend afterward, but both. It can be helpful to look carefully at the pattern over time: what tends to happen before a rupture, what happens afterward, what promises are made, what actually changes, and how long those changes last.

Trauma bonds often thrive on hope and immediacy; stepping back and looking at the larger pattern can bring a different kind of clarity.

Coming Back to Yourself

Healing from a trauma bond is less about forcing yourself to stop loving someone and more about learning not to abandon yourself in order to remain connected to them. This may involve rebuilding friendships, rediscovering interests, paying attention to your own preferences, and noticing how often you have learned to silence yourself. It may also mean learning that you can miss someone without returning to them, understand someone's history without taking responsibility for it, and remember beautiful experiences without allowing them to erase painful ones.

There is grief in this process, and sometimes the deepest grief is not only for the person or the relationship that existed. It is for the relationship you kept hoping would eventually emerge. You may have spent years believing that if one thing changed, if the other person finally understood, or if you could somehow return to the closeness you once had, everything would be different.

Letting go can mean grieving that hoped-for future as well.

After many years of doing trauma work, I have come to believe that healing can change our understanding of love itself. We begin to recognize that love does not have to keep us vigilant, wondering, or continually working to restore connection. There can be disagreement without the threat of abandonment and room for our needs, our voice, and our boundaries alongside those of another person.

For someone accustomed to intensity, that kind of steadiness can initially feel unfamiliar, perhaps even a little flat. But over time, it can begin to feel like something much deeper: the experience of loving another person without having to lose ourselves in the process.

A Reflection: Seeing the Whole Relationship

Trauma bonds can make it difficult to hold the whole relationship in view at once. When we are hurting, the pain can feel overwhelming; when connection returns, it can be easy to forget just how painful things became. Take some time with these questions without pressuring yourself to make any immediate decisions.

• When I look at this relationship over time, what patterns keep repeating?

• What happens inside me when I sense distance, anger, or withdrawal? What do I typically do to restore connection?

• After a rupture, what brings us back together? What do I notice in myself when closeness returns?

• What have I learned to tolerate, minimize, explain away, or keep to myself in order to preserve the relationship?

• Am I responding to the relationship as it consistently exists, or am I holding on to what I believe it could become?

• What would it feel like to be in a relationship where I could remain fully myself?

One final exercise can be revealing. Write for a few minutes under two headings: “The relationship I have actually experienced” and “The relationship I have been hoping for.” Then read them together and notice where they overlap and where they don't. The goal isn't to convince yourself to stay or to leave. It is to give yourself the opportunity to see the relationship, and yourself within it, more clearly.

Heidi J. Dalzell, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in trauma, eating disorders, body image, and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. An EMDR Consultant and author of Midlife Eating Disorders: Body Image, Trauma, and Recovery, she integrates evidence-based trauma treatment with attention to attachment, relationships, and the deeper emotional and spiritual dimensions of healing. Dr. Dalzell works with clients virtually in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and in person in the Sedona, Arizona area.