Sticking It Out
Trauma Bonding for the Revolution
Lily Scherlis
People are always being told to leave their romantic partners, then not leaving. A friend told me a story about a period of his life when he was adjuncting in Boston. He had bought a sailboat on Craigslist for $200 and leased a spot at the harbor—a charming gimmick to lower the cost of living. When the semester ended, he found it impossible either to sell or give away the boat and thereby get out of his harbor lease and move away. Eventually someone told him that the only thing to do was to take the boat out into international waters and quietly, methodically sink it.
Some relationships seem to need a similarly schematic approach. In our pop cultural archetype of these relationships, a person has become disappointed. They visit the oracles of the modern world: old friends, advice columnists, Twitter-active readers of their viral personal essay, all of whom tell them to leave their partner. Faced with the advice they have more or less been expecting, the person dithers. The oracles become exasperated. The person’s paralysis becomes difficult for everyone involved to understand.
In this modern myth, the protagonist is supposed to undergo character development by learning a kind of autonomy in the face of their attachment. Emotional maturity means becoming capable of severing your emotional bonds at will. Popular literature of the 2020s holds many stories of the person who struggles to leave, as if severing ties has recently become more difficult.
If this sounds like you, the internet offers a buffet of vocabulary you can use to make sense of your own behavior: you might learn to identify as codependent or anxiously attached—a member of a damned psychological underclass, prone to relationships with avoidant partners who will never scratch your gnawing itch to feel wholly held.
One such story you can tell is that you are “trauma-bonded.” I remember first noticing the phrase in 2020, and then suddenly it was everywhere. Social life was divvied up into pods and couples, each pulled together by trauma bonds like the nuclei of atoms held together by a mysterious strong force. Relationships got very serious very quickly and often fared poorly when the world returned to its old routines, but people seemed to find it difficult to end them, as if their ids had put Gorilla Glue on the bottoms of their shoes. Trying and failing to leave, they grabbed for language to explain what had gone wrong: they were trauma-bonded.
What they meant was that a situation, whether a single cataclysmic event or an evil boss or the slow wear-and-tear of their lot in life, had made two or more people feel helpless. They found an oasis of security in each other, and then they got used to standing side by side in the face of acute threat. Later, they couldn’t let go—they found they had been stitched together by fear, a CatDog of the heart.
Trauma bonding, as many of us have been using it, describes how events that take place outside a relationship affect its dynamic. We are technically using it incorrectly: the phrase describes a relationship in which one partner is inflicting trauma on another. It originally referred to the counterintuitive way in which an abused person gets more and more attached to the person who abuses them. The theory of traumatic bonding was formalized in a 1981 paper by psychologists Donald G. Dutton and Susan Painter; it explains how a relay of harm and comfort, both emanating from the same source, binds a person more tightly to that source. Under the influence of this alternating current, you might begin to act in puzzling ways. Dutton and Painter called this “traumatic bonding”—later shortened to “trauma bonding”—and argue that it’s just as strong whether or not the abused partner is economically dependent on their abuser.
In that first 1981 definition, when abuse leaves a person wounded and vulnerable, they look around for a raft of safety, an attachment figure strong enough to ensure security. One’s brain confuses the powerful source of harm for a potentially powerful source of protection from harm. This results in a feedback loop: the abused partner lives in an attachment cycle like an “elastic band which stretches away from the abuser with time” and “snaps back” when the abuser provides warmth or care. As the abuse happens again and again, intermittent reinforcement kicks in: repeating something is the easiest way to etch it into your mind. To bond a piece of clay to another, you run a knife over its surface in a grid pattern, roughing it up so it sticks. People, they suggested, work the same way.
In 1973, eight years before the “traumatic bonding” article was published, a Swedish criminologist coined the term “Stockholm syndrome” to describe the baffling behavior of six bank robbery hostages, who subsequently raised money for the legal defense of the robber. Back in 1938, Anna Freud had defined identifying with the aggressor as a normal part of developing a superego; Stockholm syndrome made a pathological spectacle out of a similar paradox. It was the post-1968 “war on drugs” era: laypeople and researchers alike were panicked about brainwashing and determined to pin down how good liberal subjects could be manipulated into irrational behavior by chemicals or governments or criminals or cults (or, worst of all, leftist political groups). Popular beliefs on the topic held a tricky contradiction: if you get brainwashed, your behavior is not your fault; but if you’re susceptible to brainwashing, it’s because you’re morally frail.
“They found an oasis of security in each other, and then they got used to standing side by side in the face of acute threat. Later, they couldn’t let go—they found they had been stitched together by fear, a CatDog of the heart.”
This is also how many people continue to talk about addiction. In 1997, the sex addiction therapist Patrick Carnes popularized “trauma bonding” in The Betrayal Bond, a self-help book for domestic violence victims, shortening the term but keeping the original meaning. Carnes views trauma bonding as a form of addiction, an analogy that also colors this colloquial, less violent meaning.“Despite the consequences [addicts] continue high-risk behavior,” writes Carnes. “They become so obsessed with the behavior that all their life priorities—children, work, values, family, hobbies, friends—are sacrificed for the behavior . . . Now reread the previous paragraph and substitute the word relationship for the word behavior.” The abuser’s attention is a kind of substance, with chemically binding effects. Fear secretes all kinds of chemical substances— adrenaline, phenylethylamine, and so on—which means that “the relationship itself is mood altering.”
In the 2020s, people use the term “trauma bonding” much more casually—“bonding over shared trauma” rather than “bonding because one person is inflicting trauma.” Some of the events that cause these colloquial trauma bonds are genuinely traumatic; others are just plain old hardship. On TikTok, someone described working at Starbucks as “lowkey just trauma bonding”; a group of Dancing with the Stars contestants called themselves trauma-bonded; a group of The Bachelor contestants posted a video with the caption “We are trauma bonded for life.” They sound almost pleased, as if a trauma bond is a welcome consolation prize, or at least a helpful shortcut to a close friendship at a time when trust is scarce. In popular use, the term feels almost cheeky—a way to make light of the toughness of a situation which may or may not have bordered on trauma. The casual use doesn’t seem to extend to the most acutely traumatic circumstances; it is hard to imagine calling people in Gaza trauma-bonded.
People who have experiences with domestic violence understandably can’t stand the appropriation. “You’re Misusing the Term ‘Trauma Bonded,’” reads a Salon headline. “Can we PLEASE stop saying katniss and peeta are trauma bonded!!” wrote one user on the Hunger Games subreddit. “I am on my knees begging people to stop misusing the term,” another redditor complained elsewhere. When a technical term like “trauma” gets batted around, critics complain, its definition gets fuzzy, and the people who need the specialized word lose access to its specificity, like a screw getting stripped of its thread. There’s a sick irony to the timing here: domestic violence rose sharply during the pandemic.
At this point, fighting the slippage feels like fighting a wildfire with a spray bottle. Maybe it’s more helpful to try to understand why we have stolen the term without knowing it—why so many of us, including me, unconsciously conflate shared hardship with domestic violence. Maybe casually reaching for a hard-hitting clinical term is understandable at a time when, for instance, a rabidly racist pseudo-military force is disappearing people in your neighborhood while a management consultancy that hired my college acquaintances designs massacre sites disguised as food distribution centers while an official State of Israel Twitter account posts that “Gaza City’s culinary scene was thriving this July.” You might reasonably feel you need a heavy-duty name for what merely bearing witness to this does to your relationships.
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I am personally guilty of using the term casually. I heard myself saying it to close friends while trying to account for how unexpectedly committed I felt to a particular person, for the seemingly simple reason that years ago we had crouched next to one another Windexing cardboard oatmeal canisters, briefly convinced that public health denialism would cause systems collapse. That spring I spent every day alone in my half-furnished apartment in an unfamiliar city, the only roommate who had stayed in town, waiting for the clock to read 6:30 pm, when my new partner ended their workday, so I could walk over to their warm nest of a studio apartment, which, miraculously, contained a person with a body and also a dog. Eighteen months later we were spending a lot of time in silence stroking our respective phones, occasionally fighting about things like yogurt brands. I started deploying a long list of doomed tactics to try to get myself to want to stop dating them.
Trauma bonding let me attribute this inertia to something that had happened to both of us together in the external world, rather than a permanent defect embossed in my own individual psyche. I wasn’t sure there had been capital-t Trauma, but we had been solid ground for one another through a public health crisis, family deaths, a major car crash and ensuing chronic injury, and so on—war buddies of the struggle against normal but awful pain. Like Pavlov’s salivating dogs waiting for the bell, our ids projected that this trend of personal crises would continue. We were somewhat precariously employed cultural workers facing down the wreckage of the planet and global fascism. We could not separate: we might need each other.
Unfortunately, we had become unhappy together. The details are familiar and banal. Suffice it to say that life had started to feel small, like a two-atom molecule suspended in a vacuum. They liked to remind me how Lacan said there is no sexual relation; I liked to pretend that there was one, until I didn’t. Two years in, we broke up. Then we got back together, telling each other we had used the few months in between to relearn how to relate to each other like adult humans at an appropriate distance. I had a quiet, sinking suspicion that some secret machine beyond our control was dragging us back together, but I was also happy.
“We were somewhat precariously employed cultural workers facing down the wreckage of the planet and global fascism. We could not separate: we might need each other.”
Six months later we were both confused about why we were so angry all the time, repeating the phrase “it’s not your fault” at each other like a spell to ward off resentment. None of the many reasonable reasons quite covered it. Really, I felt affixed to my partner by some cosmic adhesive and begrudged them for it. I saw us both as kind people capable of healthy love, and yet we kept hurting each other, all the while allergic to the phrase “break up.”
Everyone around us knew the relationship should end and was flummoxed by my failure to execute this change. They promised me good amnesia. “You’ll feel like a different person,” they coaxed. “You won’t remember why you stayed.” “Who will I feel like?” I wanted to ask, as if breaking up was like unwrapping the Mystery Dum Dum of my new self.
I, too, was confused. I heard myself calling us trauma-bonded, deploying the term at first as a chipper shorthand for my relationship paralysis, a self-mocking jab at the too-long period in which I kind of knew it should end but didn’t go. As that period grew longer, it became an excuse, a plea to keep appearing reasonable in the eyes of my friends. Calling sticky attachments “shared traumatization”—even if we all knew I was using the word “trauma” with a grain of salt—suggested that they were more brawny than standard-issue bonds, that my friends would not be able to simply karate-chop through them, either.
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What seems so impossible about ending something that isn’t working? Obviously, there’s the urge to avoid pain, a primordial feeling beyond narration, the adult echo of the almost fatal ache of infant separation that Winnicott described as “falling for ever, dying and dying and dying.” Sometimes it’s about losing the ad hoc material stability you’ve managed to cobble together. “You can’t simply lose your object if it’s providing a foundational world infrastructure for you,” writes the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant in their last book, which was published just as Google searches for “trauma bonding” spiked.
Sometimes you stay to hold onto the past, gripping tightly to the sole person capable of drawing out the version of yourself you had been during a hard time—the partner as archive and institutional memory. Trauma bonds, as we casually use the term, are made of the contradictory desire both to forget and preserve: to store an awful event in someone else so that you don’t have to bear the weight of it alone but also have proof that it was real and mattered.
Other times, as Berlant has written, you stay in order to cling to a fantasy of the future that the other person makes possible: you imagine rescuing someone from themselves, raising a child who doesn’t exist yet, cycling through a shared daily routine in perpetuity, ascending a linear career path into economic stability, aging and dying of relatively natural causes.
For some reason, I wanted to reduce my paralysis to a biological trap. While trying to make sense of my own behavior, my mind filled with vivid metaphors borrowed from middle-school science: I imagined human bodies rapidly forming bonds under pressure, like hot molecules that more readily shed and swallow atoms. I am normally a big believer in the idea that the psyche and political economy and the body all come together to create the stuckness one experiences. But when I try to understand situations in which I’ve felt inexplicably trapped, I can’t help but conjure a diluted version of Carnes’s addiction theory of abuse for my own abuse-free experiences. I can only hold biology in mind: it is paradoxically comforting to imagine a big, futile feedback loop of care and pain like an electrical circuit, turning my body into an oxytocin factory working overtime.
The most influential theories of both types of trauma bonding likewise take solace in this approach. They draw on the ideas of John Bowlby, whose work led to a body of research aptly called attachment theory. In Bowlby’s model, infants select and glom onto particular individuals as beacons of security, typically their mothers. In the face of a threat, these known sources of protection come into play like electric magnets: the child runs back to the caregiver; Mario cries “Mamma Mia!” The early traumatic bonding research combined this insight with the behavioral theories of Stockholm syndrome.
For Bowlby, attachment is a kind of crude biological imperative, a compulsion that precedes meaning: stimuli and response, like the double contractions of the heart. He calls it an instinctual system, a calibrated feedback loop that compels you to seek proximity to certain figures in certain circumstances, like the systems that deploy the cravings that incentivize you to eat or sleep or fight or flee. In their article on traumatic bonding, Dutton and Painter write that Bowlby believed the attachment system was so crucial to survival that it “rivaled feeding and mating in importance.”
Take rabbits. For rabbits, supposedly all bonding is kind of trauma bonding. They are more likely to kill each other than to befriend each other, unless they experience conditions of utter terror alongside one another. My friends who got a second rabbit had to put the two of them together in a dark box and stick the box on top of a hot, quaking clothes dryer. Rabbits don’t have a superego, ego, and id that collaborate to produce desire or aversion based on an unconscious hunch about what another rabbit is like (or if they do, we don’t know it). If a rabbit needs a comrade, they instinctively attach to the nearest rabbit and then stay attached.
In many schools of thought, we have something in common with rabbits. Much of the research into romantic pairs—and Dutton and Painter’s work on traumatic bonding—relies on Bowlby’s suggestion that when people grow up, romantic partners replace parents as attachment objects. Unidirectional care is replaced with all the complexity of mutuality, where two people need and are needed at the same time. Twenty-first-century scholarship has turned to fMRI research, which seems to suggest that a romantic partner is a literal painkiller: in 2006 some psychologists ran an oddly gendered study in which women received an electrical shock while hooked up to an fMRI. Some women held their spouses’ hands; others held hands with an “anonymous male experimenter.” The brains of the women who held their spouses’ hands reacted less to electrocution. The more satisfied the women reported being in their marriage, the less their neurons panicked.
Trauma bonding, in the colloquial sense, describes this phenomenon in the extreme. Your “inner child,” if you will, learns to rely on someone and then can’t stop relying on them. The model implies a seductive kind of futility: my attachment is out of my hands. Losing your attachment object is a form of starvation, and even if you muster all your willpower to try to sever the bond, eventually something primal will take over.
Attachment theory became common sense. In 1978, psychologist Mary Ainsworth developed Bowl - by’s ideas into a typology of “attachment styles”: anxiously attached, avoidantly attached, and, for the lucky ones among us, securely attached. Ainsworth worked only with infants and mothers, but others extended the attachment style paradigm to characterize relationships between adults. Although some researchers dispute the significance of the typology in adults, recent self-help books like Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment (2012) and Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Nonmonogamy (2020) have popularized these styles as identities, like star signs or Myers-Briggs Types: anchors for a story you tell yourself to make sense of your romantic behavior. These books advocate a “just do it,” manual-override approach: see the bad object is bad; muster all your willpower; leave. Go no-contact.
Attachment theory, in its casual usage, is a nice alternative to popular culture’s shameful labels. It implies that being trapped in a relationship is a matter of the transactions between intimacy and global disaster—your life caught in the crosshairs. Biology and external events, maybe even world-historical ones, have together conspired against you. It is motored by the fantasy that you will always have someone there to insulate you from the emotional difficulty of whatever might happen. In the year 536, a giant cloud cast a shadow over Europe; summer never came, and for years no crops grew. In 541, when the Emperor of Rome sent the usual ships to faraway colonies for grain, the ships came back carrying rats infected with the plague. This time, the imperial center is manufacturing the many new plagues, no ships needed, but when they arrive to my door I want someone to be there to hold me.
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Can we learn about what people are like from rabbits? Around Bowlby’s time, psychology was taking a turn; scientists were deciding that instead of looking at the architecture of someone’s psyche, you need to look at their behavior, which reflects their deep animal instincts. Researchers believed that people’s thoughts or feelings or fantasies were inferior data. Meanwhile, many psychoanalysts worried that mainstream science was turning its back on studying mental representations, uninterested in how we would perceive our loved ones or narrate our relationships. Although himself a psychoanalyst, Bowlby largely sided with the experimental psychologists; his colleagues turned on him, feeling he had jettisoned the psyche to focus on observable activities and animal experiments. His work bordered on reducing the internal constructions that determine our behavior into irrelevant side effects of hard-coded instinct. This reduction might come as a relief for those of us who do not want to believe that the ensnarements we call trauma bonds are our fault.
“This time, the imperial center is manufacturing the many new plagues, no ships needed, but when they arrive to my door I want someone to be there to hold me.”
But fantasy can trap you, too, and just as badly. In 1993, comparing their framework of the cycle of trauma bonding to cult indoctrination, Dutton and Painter described perceptual distortions: “power imbalances magnify so that each person’s sense of power or powerlessness feeds on itself.” Feeling powerless, they argue, is just as strong a tether as material dependence. The powerless-feeling person develops a gnawing need for security and becomes, in their phrasing, “welded together” with the powerful person in the process of trying to fulfill their needs. Over time the abused partner slides into perceptual distortions about the abuser, dividing them into two separate powerful characters: a perpetrator and a savior. This second false idealized image holds them in place, hovering like a North Star.
A more psychoanalytic approach would call this splitting: an inability to hold what’s good and bad in an object in the same frame. In part, splitting is a way to bind yourself to a fucked up object so you don’t have to face losing it. You get to feel aggression toward the object while preserving some other piece of it. It’s a fantasy that you can destroy the bad in it without losing the good, make the abuser stop hurting you but keep comforting you. This way of seeing is particularly extreme in situations of abuse, but its minor, banal forms—e.g., low-grade black-and-white thinking—haunt most relationships gone bad.
Reality can also split in half. In Reality #1, your partner is good and you are bad; you tell yourself you’ll work things out, calming your psyche like smoothing down a small animal’s fur with two fingers. In Reality #2, you are good and your partner is bad; you will imminently get up the nerve to cut ties. Your exasperated friends likely all live in Reality #2. For some people, splitting is how their unconscious tries to get them to want to leave: see only the bad and set aside the good; make the object repulsive so that it repels you.
For the colloquially trauma-bonded, this kind of thinking might be how they got stuck in the first place. When something scary is taking place, you might find yourself managing it by dividing all the bad in the world from the good in the world, and protecting all of the good in here, at home, while projecting the bad out there.
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In the middle of the story of my relationship, Israel started bombing Gaza, and five months later, I set up a tent at a solidarity encampment. For eight days, many of us barely left the perimeter. The world outside—places that were not our encampment, other encampments, or Palestine—seemed to disappear; anyone who was not onsite did not seem to exist. There was no need to leave, except for plumbing: we had hot food and medics and ponchos and a trash disposal system and a care team and a defense plan. To make it possible to protest, we turned a patch of grass into a place we could meet almost all our needs.
Threat, in particular, brought us together. Right-wing Twitch streamers and angry local Zionists randomly appeared like wild Pokémon in tall grass; we routinely faced down lines of riot cops; after negotiations ended, we stayed awake every night, mobilized against a possible raid. In these moments, we became pillars of security for one another: you could look to whoever was next to you for support. People described this as trauma bonding, too. In this case, our trauma bonds had clear utility: they made risk tolerable and made the danger seem smaller. I like to think that if you took one of us into a psychology laboratory and administered an electrical shock, any of several hundred hands would have been as neurologically soothing as a spouse’s.
For those of us who weren’t college-aged, this way of relating to others was a departure from business as usual. For many people, the whole Jenga tower of their emotional wellbeing does seem to rest on the structural integrity of a single block—a romantic partner. Need can feel so abject, so many of us choose to expose it only to a single individual. Moreover, there’s the romance of cost-sharing: the institutional logics of housing, healthcare, labor, and childcare conspire to split communities into dyads, and people’s feelings tend to follow the form. A friend grimly observed that in the face of the special combo of partial state collapse and overt totalitarian repression, it can feel like the only way to make sure someone is really looking out for you seriously is to date them, a perception I found disturbing. Over time, most people’s solidarity seems to dwindle to a local of two. I did not want to live this way.
In the encampment we were bound together by a common idea of Palestinian liberation, in the same way some groups might be held together by a leader. Freud argues in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego that people in groups form bonds of identification with one another because they share a relationship to some kind of transcendent person or idea. Sharing this commitment, you can become nearly interchangeable under pressure, taking turns slotting into the role of secure base—attachment in the round. Sartre described this phenomenon in the context of the storming of the Bastille. He argues that the action’s complex choreography was possible because everyone “became incapable of distinguishing his own safety from that of the others.” This is how you learn to trust. “They will fight my fight, with my determination,” he writes. All this can leave you feeling viscerally closer to people you’ve known for a week than to your partner of four years, who is reading volume after volume of Dune on the couch half a mile away.
After the police raided the encampment, throwing furniture at sleepy, frightened students, we planned other actions. I found myself unable to stop checking Signal long enough to have a real conversation over dinner or sleep through the night. At 5 a.m. my partner would sleepily grumble that the phone glow was keeping them up.
“I don’t think you want to be in this relationship,” they said over breakfast one morning—kindly, as if suggesting I was poorly dressed for the weather. To disagree, I realized, would be lying. Somehow it now felt possible to say words aloud that would set in motion a chain of events that would pull our lives onto different tracks; a few weeks prior, doing such a thing might have totally destroyed me. It felt like a land bridge emerged from the Bering Strait, allowing two humans to start the long journey to the other side.
Three weeks later, I couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like to be unable to leave. How was it possible to go from needing so much to not needing at all? I felt like someone had snuck into my mind and rearranged all the furniture.
I was also bothered by a suspicion that my now-ex-partner had a secret story about how I’d moved on enough to leave—that they suspected me of using the encampment as a crowbar out of our life together, of using it as a substitute object. In my fantasy of their perspective, I had bundled up all my hurt and anger about the relationship and delivered it to the movement, rather than working through those feelings together.
This fantasy version of my ex scolded me in the same way that centrists scold the Left for having emotions about the world, as if feeling a way about things as basic and necessary as housing or not getting killed by a cop or not shipping weapons to a fascist state is always secretly cover for one’s daddy issues or heartbreak. In this view, which Berlant calls sentimentality, real life only ever takes place in the home, and public wellbeing is merely sublimation (as if romance isn’t often sublimation, too). They speak as if our politics and our personal lives are playing poker for chips of libido and politics only ever wins by sleight of hand—as if they simply sent the whole Left to therapy, there would no longer be a Left.
But my ex is not a reactionary; they have meticulously refined left political beliefs. In my imagination, they were judging me personally for conflating these two realms. I imagined them wagging their finger at me, accusing me of unconsciously believing that the encampment’s purpose was to rescue me personally from a bad relationship by offering replacement trauma bonds. In my fantasy, they were chiding me in the hopes that, by revealing my alleged self-deception, the trauma-bond bait-and-switch taking place in the basement of my mind, they could make me come back.
“They speak as if our politics and our personal lives are playing poker for chips of libido and politics only ever wins by sleight of hand—as if they simply sent the whole Left to therapy, there would no longer be a Left.”
Is it even possible to simply swap out your object, like Frogger jumping from one log to the next? Pop culture can make it sound like we seek out other people because we need to extract this impersonal substance called “care” from them: care is a form of food that other people make in their hearts, and we need to harvest it. Stretched to its logical conclusion, this way of thinking implies that attachment to a particular person (or politics) is like attachment to a particular brand of cigarettes: your brain simply associates a certain flavor profile with the generic nicotine it deeply craves. If you switch to nicotine gum, your brain will eventually stop missing cigarettes, recognizing the new vehicle of the molecule it desires. Your love is basically anonymous, a Pavlovian association to a behavioral fix. When the fix takes the shape of a particular person, it wants to stay in that shape, even if it hurts. In the addiction metaphor, the shape is a mere illusion: if your love is bad, you’ll need to break through this resistance.
As with any other addiction, if you fail to kick the habit of someone’s bad love, people may accuse you of lacking willpower. The term “traumatic bonding” was coined to combat this kind of victim blaming; Dutton and Painter wanted to offer a corrective to the criminal justice system’s dearth of sympathy for domestic violence victims who returned to their abusers; Carnes likewise used the language of addiction to help victims make sense of their own behavior without hating themselves. But when “trauma bonding” slips to encompass all forms of bonding over trauma, the widespread tendency to reach for the addiction metaphor starts to make a little too much sense. We live in a society that hates addicts, that cannot decide if addiction is a pathology or a character flaw. In a world obsessed with mobility and adaptability and flexibility, every form of stickiness is pathological. If you’re supposed to keep moving and advancing always, it is irrational to be unable to swap things out when they are not working, to be unable to kick a bad habit.
These days it feels unreasonable to ask people simply to sever their attachments through the sheer force of will. I know whose hand I want to hold when they tell me they’re going to start administering the shocks. Even if you guarantee I won’t be alone, I do not want a Hypothetical Replacement Partner in the passenger seat while I drive the getaway car, some undifferentiated sim with their hand on my leg while we try to outrun the National Guard or a natural disaster. I want this very, very particular person, and I will not let go of them just because you tell me I’ll feel that way about someone “better.” We reach for terms like trauma bonding to narrate the gap between how we think we should ideally behave and what we can actually do.
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We are coaxed to imagine the psyche as something that compresses the incompressible into a single picture plane of emotional experience, like a person in the foreground pretends to squash a person in the background of a photograph between their fingers and the camera. The object of your love is defined by the exchange value of their affection, subject to the cost-benefit analysis of potential replacement. Those who oppose militant politics also imagine the psyche as a great equivocator because it lets them avoid any threat to their beliefs; it allows them to ignore social movements by reducing them to an incidental emotional outlet for unruly youths and adult agitators.
When I set up a tent, it did not feel like replacing my partner with politics. That may be because I already had my politics. But it would be dishonest to refuse to consider the possibility that the encampment may have given me a push. Unfortunately, we humans are invariably semi-opaque to ourselves; leaving a relationship is not like calculating the amount of rocket fuel you will need in order to exert enough of a skyward force to exit the atmosphere. If the encampment did help me say the words “break up,” it could be because it showed me that when, say, staring down cops, my ex-partner was not really the person I wanted beside me. It also gave me enough emotional distance to stop deliriously believing they would become that person.
Traumatic bonding and “trauma bonding” are more related than we think. In the 2020s, being dependent on something that is hurting you is the background radiation of emotional life—pick almost any institution. Crises near and far arrive in rapid succession like waves running perpendicular, cutting each other off and scattering our attention so that a cogent emotional response feels impossible. It is hard to tell what’s traumatic and what’s merely overwhelm styled as trauma, whether in ourselves or in others or between us. No wonder so many of us are misusing the term to describe a characteristic of almost all of our close relationships: sharing in hardship. The misuse feels like an unconscious nod to the fact that many of us are paradoxically attached to harmful systems we cannot see or touch and sometimes cannot name, like rabbits whose human makes them live on top of a dryer forever.
The protest movements trying to get this box of rabbits off the dryer are continually accused of splitting: being incapable of holding both sides of an issue, incapable of balanced, pragmatic thinking. Usually it’s those who most loudly accuse protesters of lacking nuance who are actually splitting the hardest, who have trauma-bonded to the status quo. Without really knowing it, these people have projected their own rage and shame at the world onto protestors in order to preserve their belief in a pure fantasy universe called “normality,” to which someday, they imagine, they will find their way home. As Berlant famously argues, the why can’t I leave my partner question has the same logic as another question: why aren’t more of us in revolt against a society that is hurting more or less everyone? While some people held down encampments, others clung to their emotional-support institutions, responding to social collapse with something closer to the original, abuse-oriented concept of traumatic bonding, finding themselves more and more attached to their distorted image of a crumbling status quo. This is the kind of trauma bonding we need to be worried about.