Trauma Bonding
Why You Kept Going Back and What It Actually Means
By Dr. Gregory Harmeling

Edge of Humanity Magazine

6 hours ago

You told yourself this was the last time. You meant it. And then the apology came, or the good version of him or her showed back up, or the silence got unbearable, and you went back anyway. If you’re a man who has lived through a relationship with a narcissistic partner, you already know this pattern from the inside. What you may not have is a name for it, or an explanation that doesn’t just amount to “you were weak” or “you should have known better.”

You weren’t weak, and you didn’t miss something obvious. What you experienced has a name, a documented mechanism, and decades of research behind it: trauma bonding. Understanding how it works won’t undo what happened, but it can replace the shame with something more useful: clarity.

It Isn’t Love, and It Isn’t Weakness. It’s Conditioning.

The term trauma bond comes from research on abusive relationships conducted by psychologist Donald Dutton and his colleague Susan Painter. Their work identified two conditions that, together, reliably produce a powerful and durable emotional attachment between a victim and the person harming them: a marked imbalance of power, and abuse that arrives on an unpredictable schedule rather than constantly (Dutton & Painter, 1993).

That second condition is the one people underestimate. If the relationship were cruel all the time, leaving would be easy. It’s the alternating pattern, cold and then warm, contempt and then affection, that does the damage. Your nervous system doesn’t get to relax into either state long enough to fully trust it. Instead, it stays fixed on the one thing that seems to predict relief: staying close to the person causing the pain, in the hope of getting back to the good version of them.

This is not a character flaw. It’s how attachment systems respond to unpredictable reward, in humans and in nearly every mammal studied. The uncertainty itself, not just the good moments, is part of what makes the bond so hard to walk away from.

Why Your Mind Protected the Relationship Instead of You

There’s a second piece to this that most people never hear, and it explains something that trauma bonding alone doesn’t: why so many men describe not fully registering how bad things were until well after the relationship ended.

Psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s research on betrayal offers an answer. Her work found that the more a person depends on someone, the more powerful the incentive to stay unaware of that person’s harmful behavior, because full awareness would threaten a relationship the nervous system has coded as necessary for survival (Martin et al., 2013). In a marriage, a long-term partnership, or a relationship where finances, children, or an entire social world are entangled, that dependence is real. Your mind wasn’t failing to see the abuse. In a very literal sense, part of it was working to protect the attachment you needed, even while another part of you was being hurt by it.

That’s why the clarity so often arrives late, sometimes weeks or months after no contact, when a memory resurfaces and suddenly makes sense in a way it never did while you were living inside it. That delayed recognition isn’t a sign you’re slow to catch on. It’s the predictable order in which this kind of harm becomes visible.

Why This Is Harder to Name When You’re a Man

Everything above applies regardless of gender. But men face an added layer that makes trauma bonds even harder to identify and disclose. Research on male victims of intimate partner violence has consistently found that men underreport their experiences and delay seeking help far longer than women do, driven by fear of not being believed, concern about appearing weak, and a near-total absence of language and support systems built with men in mind (Taylor et al., 2022).

A 2024 systematic review of studies on men who experienced abuse from female partners identified a recurring theme the researchers called being “stuck in a loop,” a cycle of recognizing something was wrong, doubting that recognition, and returning to the relationship, often multiple times before the pattern finally broke (Kim et al., 2024). If that sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same mechanism described above, compounded by a culture that gives men almost no permission to say any of this out loud.

This is why so many men who lived through a relationship like this never talk about it, not with friends, not with family, and sometimes not even with a therapist until years later. Not because it didn’t happen, and not because it didn’t matter. Because nothing in how men are raised prepares them to describe themselves as someone who was bonded to a person who hurt them.

What Actually Breaks the Cycle

Understanding the mechanism is the first real intervention. Once you know that going back was a predictable response to intermittent reinforcement and not a personal failure, the shame that keeps so many men silent starts to lose its grip. From there, a few things reliably help:

Full no contact, sustained long enough for the nervous system to stop expecting the next unpredictable reward. Even brief contact can reset the cycle, which is why partial no contact rarely works as well as people hope.

Naming the pattern out loud, to a therapist, a support group, or even in writing to yourself. Betrayal blindness loses power the moment it’s put into words.

Working with a therapist who understands both narcissistic abuse dynamics and the specific barriers men face in seeking this kind of support, rather than one who will need the basics explained before the real work can start.

None of this happens instantly, and it isn’t supposed to. A bond built over months or years through intermittent reinforcement doesn’t dissolve in a week. But it does dissolve. The men who get through this consistently describe the same turning point: the moment the pattern got a name, and the shame that had been running the show quietly lost its grip.

About the Author

Gregory Harmeling, Psy.D., LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in men’s sexual health, narcissistic abuse recovery, and travel therapy. He works with men who are done being confused about why they feel the way they do — and are ready to do something about it. Learn more at fenixtherapeuticservices.com.

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References

Dutton, D. G., & Painter, S. (1993). Emotional attachments in abusive relationships: A test of traumatic bonding theory. Violence and Victims, 8(2), 105–120. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8193053/

Kim, E. Y. Y., Nelson, L. E., Pereira, T. L.-B., & Shorey, S. (2024). Barriers to and facilitators of help-seeking among men who are victims of domestic violence: A mixed-studies systematic review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(3), 2189–2203. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380231209435

Martin, C. G., Cromer, L. D., DePrince, A. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2013). The role of cumulative trauma, betrayal, and appraisals in understanding trauma symptomatology. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 5(2), 110–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025686

Taylor, J. C., Bates, E. A., Colosi, A., & Creer, A. J. (2022). Barriers to men’s help seeking for intimate partner violence. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37(19–20), NP18417–NP18444. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605211035870

Text © Gregory Harmeling