Is It True Love or Trauma Bonding? How to Know the Difference

Understanding Love and Trauma Bonding

Sometimes what feels like love and passion is actually pain that one adapts to over time. You need to know the difference between genuine love and emotional entrapment.

Love can make you feel a deep and intense emotional connection with someone; but so can trauma bonds. Both love and trauma bond can make you act silly, especially at the early stages of the relationship.

Many people are stuck in toxic relationships because they cannot differentiate true love from trauma bonding. Such individuals confuse emotional fluctuations like temporary highs and lows for love chemistry. This is the reason they stick to toxic and abusive relationships, yet cannot leave even when they are hurt, beaten, exploited, or humiliated. If you are have such experience, this article is for you.

Firstly, let us express the key differences between love and trauma bonding, and how to recognize what you’re really experiencing.

What Is Trauma Bonding?

Trauma bonding is a strong emotional attachment that forms in abusive and toxic relationships, fueled by cycles of pain, manipulation, and intermittent reward. People who experience trauma bonding often feel deeply connected and addicted to someone who repeatedly beat, hurt, manipulate, exploit, or rough handle them. Such bonds become stronger the more they are mistreated, and mostly rewarded with short burst of affection, apology or romance.

Trauma bonding is a cycle of abuse that creates illusion of love, but it is not love. Most individuals in such abusive relationship have what keep them blind to the reality. In cases where the relationship ends, they always live with that mark even to the next relationship, and may not keep anyone who does not treat them in a similar way. Some can also live with bitterness and regrets which may result in hatred against a certain gender or a group of people or mental health challenge.

What Is Healthy Love?

Love is the feeling of deep affection and emotional connection toward someone, and it is often characterized by a sense of safety, respect, sincerely, and emotional stability. People who truly love themselves promote the growth of one another, honor boundaries, and commit to themselves through a consistent process of bonding. True love will not make you feel worthless, and will not make the relationship chaotic. True love builds strong and healthy relationship.

The Role of Oxytocin and Cortisol in Love and Trauma Bonding: Why Trauma Bonds Feel So Powerful

Trauma bond is enforced by our biochemical system just like love. During trauma bonding, the emotional highs release dopamine and oxytocin.

Oxytocin is also known as the love hormone, bonding hormone, or feel-good hormone. It is released during positive social interactions, such as hugging, touching, and sexual activity, and during childbirth or breastfeeding. During pregnancy and gestation, it helps to stimulate labor contractions and milk ejection. Meanwhile, oxytocin plays a great role in our body by promoting social bonding, trust, empathy, and emotional connection. Beside several of its roles, oxytocin is known to influence stress reduction by lowering the level of cortisol and promoting relaxation. Therefore, oxytocin is the key hormone to form emotional bonds, healthy relationships, and emotional well-being.

Cortisol, on the other hand, also known as the "stress hormone," is often released during moments of pressure, danger, or emotional strain, preparing the body with a surge of energy to respond quickly against the danger or whatever stress one undergoes. It is actually the hormone when people talk about adrenaline. Cortisol acts in the body by regulating vital functions such as metabolism, blood sugar levels, blood pressure, and the body’s natural sleep-wake cycle. A normal level of cortisol is good for the functioning of the body; however, chronic elevation of the hormonal level as a result of stress can disrupt mood, the immune system, heart functioning, weight balance, and other vital body functionalities.

The high and low feelings (or emotional fluctuations) one often experiences during trauma bonding affect and are influenced by both cortisol and oxytocin. The highs trigger oxytocin, while the lows trigger stress hormones like cortisol. This creates an addictive loop that confuses emotional pain with deep love, especially if you have experienced unresolved trauma or attachment wounds in the past. If that is the case, your brain becomes wired to chase “relief” and “quick reward” rather than true connection.

How to Break a Trauma Bond

There following are ways you can break trauma bond and begin seeking and building true love:

• Acknowledge that you are in trauma bond by studying this article to identify the signs of trauma bonding.
• Create physical and emotional distance to disconnect and limit your contact with the person you are traumatically bond with.
• You may need to meet a therapist or a coach to help you heal from your emotional wounds.
• Build self-esteem, and confidence, and know that you can be yourself and do not need to necessary suffer pain for temporary gain.
• Learn how love should feel like to understand how to truly love or identify someone who truly loves you.
• Do not allow your trauma to affect who you are or influence your sanctity, begin to imagine you without that person.
• Your response to trauma bond should be healing  and escape, not revenge. You can’t recover from trauma by creating another one.

Conclusion

If loving someone feels painful, stressful, and confusing, calm down and reflect if it is truly love, emotional affair or trauma bond. Do not mistake the intensity of a relationship for a healthy one. You can bond with someone because of shared pain and emotional traumatic experience. Love should feel like being at peace and feeling at home, not like a battlefield. Meanwhile, if you are the manipulator, it's time to heal because you too can be mentally influenced if you treat others negatively.