Are You Looking For Love In All The Wrong Places?

The Love Addict enters into the relationship feeling an unbearable sense of inadequacy. Her relationship with the Love Avoidant is as doomed as it is inevitable. Having been neglected and abandoned by her own parents, she has learned that all attempts at intimacy will be painfully unsuccessful. When she seeks a love mate she will, therefore, find someone familiarly not intimate, but someone who will be good at mimicking intimacy. She deludes herself into believing that the mimicry is the real thing by creating her lover in accordance to a fantasy of her own making. The Love Avoidant becomes her knight in shining armor- “armor” being the operative psychological irony- shiny, but impervious to intimate contact. The Love Avoidant, on the other hand, enters the relationship not because he is seeking confirmation of his own worth but out of a sense of duty. In his childhood, his parents taught him that it is his job to care for people who cannot care for themselves. As an adult, the Love Avoidant, while feeling superior or pity for the neediness of his Love Addicted partner, thrives on the power it gives him over her. Eventually, he grows resentful of all the work it takes to be a caretaker. He begins to feel suffocated and lifeless. The suffocating Love Avoidant begins to distance himself from the Love Addict, who after several bouts of hysterically trying to get him back, eventually becomes exhausted with the pursuit of the Love Avoidant and turns to someone else with whom to be helplessly Love Addicted or to some other addiction to cover her pain of inadequacy. The substitute addiction could be food, alcohol, sex, work, spending or exercise- any addictive activity. At this point in the Co-Addicted Tango, the Love Avoidant, who is no longer the object of the Love Addict’s desire, feels the pain of no longer being needed. Without someone whose weakness cries out for his strength, his sense of superiority wavers. What value does he have if he cannot care for the needy? This triggers deep, underlying abandonment fears- sardonically the same kind of abandonment fears that lie at the heart of the Love Addict’s emotional dysfunction. Love Addicts, never having been unconditionally loved by their neglectful and/or abandoning parents, look for a knight in shining armor to provide them with the self-esteem with which they never had mirrored for them by their own parents. Love Avoidants, on the other hand, almost never got a chance to feel their inherent worth, because in childhood they were empowered to care for their own parents. While not having received love from the parents, their caretaking gives them a sense of grandiosity, while masking the haunting truth that they have never been intimately loved. This false empowerment very effectively hides the crucial truth that they, like the Love Addict, were starved of intimacy. The contempt they feel for the neediness of the Love Addict, is the masked contempt they feel for themselves at not having been worthy of their parents’ love. Contempt is shame turned outward on anyone whose weaknesses reminds us of the intolerable shame of our inadequacy. Deprived of the caretaking role by the withdrawal of the Love Addict, the Love Avoidant finally feels the jolt of the carried shame of abandonment; and the Love Avoidant, who once feared being smothered by the Love Addict, now turns around to get close to the Love Addict again, using all of his powers of seduction to get back into control of the relationship. One is running and the other is chasing all the time. When the one who is chasing finally gets close to the one running away, they both erupt into intensity, either a romantic interlude or a terrific fight. As the lyrics to the classic song say, “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” This behavior is what most people call “normal”; and if it isn’t “normal,” it certainly is “familiar”. This cycle will repeat itself over and over again. Robyn treats both love addiction and love avoidance.

Trauma Bonds Traumatic bonding and trauma bonds occurs as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change. Trauma bonding is essentially a loyalty between two or more people which is often formed due to a specific set of, often negative circumstance, which binds them together due to a shared experience. While the idea of bonding tends to bring up ideas of something good and beneficial, trauma bonds are often unhealthy. Signs that you may be experiencing a trauma bond in a relationship: There is a continuous pattern of things in a relationship not working, yet you continue to believe promises to the contrary. Both or one person wants to leave the relationship but every time they try, there is a feeling or sense of extreme anxiety and unimaginable fear. You have a belief that somehow you can change the other person or make them different. You keep having the same fight over and over with no solution. You are either overreacting or under reacting and extremely triggered by this person. The situation necessary to create a trauma bond involves inconsistencies, false promises, high intensity, and are very complex. Betrayal bonds or trauma bonds: Betrayal bonds or trauma bonds are deeply rooted in a person’s childhood trauma. Bowlby’s Evolutionary Theory of Attachment suggest that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others because this will help them survive. On of the main points of his theory was that a child has an innate need to attach to at least one caregiver. This child should receive the continuous care of the single most important attachment figure for approximately the first two years of life. The long-term consequences of parental deprivation might include the following: delinquency reduced intelligence increased aggression depression avoidant attachment Bowlby and his partner believed and proved that long term even, and sometimes short-term separation from an attached figure leads to distress. After much research they looked at four different types of attachments with the baby’s mother. Four styles of attachment: These styles produced four styles of attachment which have been identified in adults. One was a secure attachment, another was the mother was there but preoccupied. Another style was avoidant, and lastly was a mother who was anxious and avoidant. These roughly correspond to infant classifications, secure, insecure ambivalent, insecure avoidant, and disorganized avoidant. The babies who had strong attachments with their mother’s overtime had healthy bonds with partners. The anxious ambivalent mothers had babies who turned into adults that had more dependent or needy relationships like Love Addiction. The avoidant attachment mothers had babies who typically developed love avoidant issues in their adult relationships. When the love addict adult and the love avoidant adult get together they don’t have secure attachment from early on so together they form a trauma bond. Very complex issues: Betrayal bonds, and trauma bonds are very complex issues because they root deeply in childhood attachment. There are specific therapies such as Post Induction Therapy, Eye Movement Rapid Desensitization, Bio Feedback, and Somatic Experiencing. The most effective is Post Induction Therapy which can reprogram the unconscious brain in both individuals, helping them to start form healthy attachments. Even with therapists who master the skills associated with Post Induction Therapy, it is still a very complicated treatment that takes a great degree of ongoing experience and expertise. This work is essential before moving on to any other relationship or the same cycle can continue. Difficult to treat and difficult to identify: Again, trauma bonding can be difficult to treat in traditional therapy because it is often difficult to identify, and the roots of the trauma can go very deep. I found the client becomes obsessive with the relationship. Often, a bond can form with another person that is outside of the relationship. This bond form tends to be more about survival and often contains a betrayal component that a person has difficulty controlling. The focus is all about the other person. This can often lead to affairs and infidelity. The most difficult part about trauma bonding is that to some people it feels like love. Because in childhood there was no nurturing, love, and affirmation to form healthy bonds, this often seeps into adulthood. Shared trauma: Formed between two people who have experienced a traumatic experience a trauma bond can be present within a relationship. An example would be two siblings that have been brought up in an alcoholic family. One may feel obligated to take care of the other like a parent would take care of a child. They will feel too much responsibility not only for their sibling, but they project that onto other people. Extreme examples of trauma bonding would be in fraternity hazing, military training, kidnapping, child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, political torture, cults, prisoners of war, criminal hostage situations, terrorism, and concentration camps. More commonly they exist in every day relationships. Even though the trauma bond may have formed from far less dramatic events, the effect it can have on a relationship can be just as severe.  Recognizing that you are in a trauma bond is the first step.