What is 'Trauma-Bonding'? Abusive Relationships 101
abuseandrelationships.orgBonding is a biological and emotional process that makes people more important to each other over time. Unlike love, trust, or attraction, bonding is not something that can be lost. It is cumulative and only gets greater, never smaller. Bonding grows with spending time together, living together, eating together, making love together, having children together, and being together during stress or difficulty. Bad times bond people as strongly as good times, perhaps more so.
Bonding is in part why it is harder to leave an abusive relationship the longer it continues. Bonding makes it hard to enforce boundaries, because it is much harder to keep away from people to whom we have bonded. In leaving a long relationship, it is not always useful to judge the correctness of the decision by how hard it is, because it will always be hard.
Moreover, experiencing together extreme situations and extreme feelings tends to bond people in a special way..
Trauma bonding, a term developed by Patrick Carnes, is the misuse of fear, excitement, sexual feelings, and sexual physiology to entangle another person. Many primary aggressors tend toward extreme behavior and risk taking, and trauma bonding is a factor in their relationships.
Strangely, growing up in an unsafe home makes later unsafe situations have more holding power. This has a biological basis beyond any cognitive learning. It is neither rational nor irrational. If survivors can come to see that part of the attraction is, while very unwanted, a natural process, they may be able to understand those feelings and manage the situation more intentionally.
Intense relationships tend to hijack all of a survivor’s relating capacity. It is like a state of being burnt out. First, while it is very easy to become attached to a very chaotic and inconsistent person, it is simply not possible to form a consistent internal object representation (feeling memory) about them. When separated from the intense partner, the urge to make contact is usually intense because it is a stable feeling memory (or internal object) that makes separation from an important other person tolerable in any circumstance.
Second. the survivor can come to find that it can be almost impossible to relate to anyone, even family or old friends, except superficially. There is a biological craving for intensity that no normal relationship will satisfy. This provides a feeling of being totally alone, and totally empty. At first, only going back to the primary aggressor can overcome it. It would be normal in this state to believe that something is horribly wrong with leaving (even if it seems equally true that something is horribly wrong with staying. If it can be understood that abstinence from unnatural intensity will eventually restore normal relating capacity, the period of distress can be better endured.
SasuSaku Prompt with Team 7 bonding: Sakura uses fake tears and guilt to get her boys to do whatever she wants.
Naruto, Sasuke and Sai weren’t quite sure what to do. They had walked into Sakura’s office, expecting to quickly brisk her off to lunch for ramen, (Naruto refused to eat anything else) and instead they were met with the sight of Sakura biting off the heads of the female nurses in training.
“…AND IF I HEAR ANOTHER COMPLAINT ABOUT GROPING FROM THE HYUGA FAMILY I WILL PERSONALLY MAKE SURE THAT YOU WILL NEVER WORK IN THIS FIELD, DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
The frightened nurses nodded vehemently and scurried off, practically running out of the angry medic’s office.
Naruto scratched the back of his head sheepishly, “Uh, Sakura-chan, you okay?”
Sasuke and Sai knew that was a very dumb question. Sakura clenched her eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of her nose, “No, I a hate stupid people.”
Naruto nodded in an understanding fashion, “Yes, me to Sakura-chan, but you see, its impolite to talk badly about Sai and Teme when they’re right here. Whisper.” He put his finger up to his mouth in a shooshing motion.
Sasuke glared at him, “If anyone is stupid dobe, it’s you.”
Sai nodded, “I must agree with Traitor-kun. You do lack a certain amount of intelligence, perhaps if you spent more time reading then you do trying to make your penis bigger-
Sakura cut him off while Sasuke snorted, “Can you not Sai? Just no. I don’t want to hear about Naruto’s penis.”
“Or lack there of one.” Sasuke muttered.
Naruto, who was quickly turning redder and redder by the second, put his hands on his hip, “Excuse me, if we’re done talking about my LARGE PENIS, I would like to get some food, I haven’t eaten in an hour. Sakura-chan, please get you’re medic-y stuff and gloves because you need those right and whatever else you need and lets go.”
Sakura’s eye twitched and she pointed a finger at him, “No! I can’t! This hospital is in chaos, the nurses are stupid, I refuse to have one more bowl of ramen,” she spit the word out like a curse, “and I need help.”
Sensing where this was going Naruto laughed sheepishly, “Ah yes, you seem a little stress, me and the teme’s will just leave you be…” He faltered at Sakura’s murderous glare.
Sakura turned to her boyfriend, “Sasuke-kun, tell Naruto that you guys are going to help me.”
Sasuke stared at her, “…”
Sakura’s eyebrow twitched, “Sasuke-kun…” She growled out, her tone warning.
Sai coughed, “Ugly, as much as it pains me to see you gain anymore stress lines, they make you even more uglier, our intention in coming here was to offer you to join us for lunch, since you refused we must take our leave.”
”Yeah Sakura-chan! I wish we could help, I definitley would but you see…ah…I’m like…really…like hungry…and Sasuke doesn’t like helping and…we’d just be getting in the way…” Naruto’s eyes widened when he heard sniffling coming from the pinkette.
Sasuke glared at him and walked towards her, patting her shoulder hesitantly in what he hoped was a consoling manner.
“Uh…stop crying.”
The tears turned to wails, “I’m so stressed, Naruto hates me even though I healed him back in the war and Sai thinks I’m a hideous monster even though I remember saving him many times and…and…SASUKE-KUN LEFT ME ON A BENCH AND WON’T HELP ME.”
Naruto, who was quickly becoming alarmed, responded with “No, No Sakura-chan! We’ll help! I promise on my life…just stop crying!”
Sai walked up to Sakura and patted her head, “Yes please stop, you’re even uglier when you cry.”
Sakura peeked out of her hands at her boys and sniffed, “You’ll help me? Really?” She glanced at Sasuke who was staring at her in slight concern.
Probably about her mental health.
“…Ah…”
Sakura perked up, “Great so here’s what you need to do, the bedpans need to be changed in rooms 23, 24, and 25, Sai you can do that, and the childrens center needs to be picked up Naruto and Sasuke you can help me in the elderly ward and after that…”
Sakura kept going on and on.
And on, and on.
But they couldn’t leave. No her boys couldn’t leave.
Team 7 was really there for each other when the going got rough.
“…and then I believe I have a woman who is due for childbirth, you guys will love that.”
It certainly was rough.
—long, but I hope you like it anon!
'Bonding' || Chatt
Charlie had never expected to be on her way to Matt Prescott’s place on a boring weekday night. The pair never saw eye to eye and only ever talked simply for the sake of Ryan. She had nothing personal against the guy, he just wasn’t her usual company, nor was she his. But on this strange occasion, Ryan had somehow persuaded the cute blonde to give some bonding a try. She knew that if she ever stood a chance of ever marrying Ryan, she would need to at least get on with his best friend…
The drive to Matt’s was odd. For once she felt anxious about a night out, usually adopting the feeling of excitement when with Ryan or her own friends. Matt had never seemed like a typical party-goer nor did he appear to be a big drinker, so the night would surely be ‘fun’ in many ways. Charlie hoped that by some kind of miracle, the pair could get along better than on previous occasions, though she remained uncertain of this. Ryan would undoubtedly ask both of them about their night out the following day, and Charlie hated lying to him. The only way to avoid that would be to genuinely have fun; easier said than done!
The female’s knuckles collided with the door suddenly as she waited for an answer. “Matt it’s Charlie…” she yelled, hoping it wouldn’t put him off opening the door. Matt was a gentlemanly-type guy, and although he didn’t seem to like Charlie, she believed he didn’t have it in him to particularly hate her either; just a dislike of her. “Hurry up!” she grilled impatiently, frustrated about having to wait in the bitter chill of the wind…
Bonding []Closed Roleplay with Temari the Kunoichi[]
In all fairness, he hadn’t meant to stay in the office all night. In fact, Gaara had glanced at the clock at the (entirely reasonable, in his opinion) hour of one in the morning and decided that he should wrap up what he was working on (a treaty draft with Amegakure) so that he could get home.
But under the treaty had been an extension reform on the educational system for both shinobi and civilians that was more of an overhaul, really, and he’d ended up settling back to read that as well. All sixty-seven pages. It actually came as a (very mild) surprise when sunlight spilled into the room, casting bright gold stripes over everything.
“…ah.” It was dawn. Actually, past dawn, for the rays to have come over the walls. His siblings were going to kill him for staying in his office all night, again.
